by Bob Shaw
He switched off his inspection light and slid to the ground. “Has anything happened, Dennis?”
O’Hagan gave a reluctant nod. “We’ve recorded a delta particle.”
“You’ve recorded a…” Garamond pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and fought to control his elation. “Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do? What’s your worry?”
“We’ve only got about eighty per cent of the original screen rebuilt.”
“So?”
“It’s too soon, Vance. I’ve been through Mike Moncaster’s math a couple of times and I can’t fault him. With two complete screens — which is what we planned for — giving a receiving area of five hundred square metres, we should have had to wait eighty or ninety days even to…”
“We were lucky,” Garamond interrupted, laughing and astonished to realize he still remembered how. “It just shows that the laws of probability are bound to give you a break eventually. Come on, Dennis, admit it.”
O’Hagan shook his head with sombre conviction. “The laws of probability are not bound to give you anything, my friend.”
* * *
The eight aircraft took off at first light, while the air was cool and thick, and climbed steadily against the seriate blue archways of the Orbitsville sky. At the agreed cruising height of five hundred metres the ungainly, stiff-winged birds levelled off, exchanging brief communications through pulses of modulated light. They assumed a V-formation, and circled once around the base camp, their shadows falling vertically on to the remains of the Bissendorf, the metallic egg which had brought about their slow and painful birth. And then, without lingering further, they set course towards the prismatic mists which lay to the east.
sixteen
Day 8. Estimated range: 94,350 kilometres
For a start, I am determined to avoid the abbreviations traditionally used by diarists — their function is that of shortening a necessary task, whereas my aim is to prolong a superfluous one. (The term ‘ship’s log’ might be more appropriate than ‘diary’; but, again, the log is a record of the events of a voyage, whereas the daily entries in my book are likely to be the only pseudo-events in a continuum of pure monotony.) (If I go on splitting hairs like this about the precise meanings of words in the opening sentence, I’ll never get beyond it; but the reference to abbreviations isn’t quite right, either. I intend to use the symbol ‘O’ instead of writing out ‘Orbitsville’ in full each time. O is much shorter than Orbitsville, but that is coincidental — it is also more expressive of the reality.) Cliff Napier was right when he guessed I was glad the job of manufacturing autopilots was beyond our resources. My reasoning was that flying the ship by hand would keep us occupied and help to reduce the boredom. It isn’t working out that way, though. There are five of us on board and we spell each other at the controls on a rota which is arranged so that the two most experienced pilots — Braunek and myself — are in the cockpit at daybreak and nightfall. These are the only times when flying the ship becomes more difficult than driving an automobile. Because day and night are caused by bands of light and darkness sweeping over the land at orbital speed, there is no proper dawn and no proper dusk, and some fairly violent meteorological processes take place.
In the ‘morning’ a sector of cold air which has been sinking steadily for hours suddenly finds itself warming up again and rising, causing anything from clear air turbulence to heavy rain. At nightfall the situation is reversed but can be even more tricky because the air which cools and begins to descend conflicts with currents rising from the still-warm ground.
All it amounts to, however, is that there are two half-hour periods when the control column comes to life. Not enough to occupy us for the next three to four years, I’m afraid, although we in the lead ship are a little luckier than the others in having a little extra work to do. There is the inertial course reference to be monitored, for instance. It is a simple-looking black box, created by O’Hagan and his team, and inside it is a monomaniac electronic brain which thinks of nothing but the bearing they fed into it. Any time we begin to wander off course a digital counter instructs us to go left or right till we’re back on line again, and the rest of the squadron follows suit.
Linked to the black box there is a one-metre-square delton detector which in a year or two, as we get considerably closer to Beachhead City, should begin to pick up other delta particles and provide course confirmation. Sometimes I watch it, just in case, or just to pass the time, but there isn’t really any need. It would feed a fresh bearing into the course reference automatically, and is also fitted with an audio attention-getter. I still watch it, though… and dream about EL. No abbreviations — Elizabeth Lindstrom.
Day 23. Estimated range: 278,050 kilometres
We’ve completed perhaps a fortieth of the journey, having flown a distance roughly equivalent to going round the Earth seven times. Without stopping. Another way to reckon it is that, after 23 days, we’ve gone nearly as far as a ray of light would have travelled in one second, but that’s a depressing thought to anyone who has been accustomed to Arthurian flight at multiples of light-speed. A more positive thought is that we’ve learned quite a lot about O.
Somehow, I’d always thought of it as being composed entirely of featureless prairie, but I was wrong. Perhaps it started off that way, eons ago, and the subsequent action of wind led to the formation of the mountains we’ve seen. None of them was very high, not more than a couple of thousand metres, but with the land area of five billion Earths not yet explored who’s to say what will be found? The mountains are there, anyway, and some of them are capped with snow because our flight is taking us into the winter sector, and there are rivers and small seas. Our formation passes over them in a dead straight line, quietly and steadily, and sometimes the telescopes pick up herds of grazing animals. Perhaps settlers will not have to rely exclusively on vegetable protein, after all.
The unexpected variegation of the terrain is making the journey a little easier to endure, but after a time all seas are the same, all hills look alike…
When I wrote in an earlier entry that the five of us in the lead ship were luckier than the others in having more to do, I was not thinking about the members of the science staff. Sammy Yamoto in No 4 seems to be fully occupied with astronomical readings, including precise measurements of the width of the day and night bands as we cross them, or as they cross us. He now says that, even with improvised equipment, he could probably take a bearing on Beachhead City which would be accurate to within a degree or so. I suspect he is passing up his turn at the flying controls so that he can carry on with his work. I hope this is not the case, because he is one of the least expert pilots and needs the practice. Although five per ship is ample crew strength, this could be cut down, by illness, for example, and I’m making no provision for unscheduled stops. Any ships which have to go down for long periods will be stripped and left behind. With their crews.
Cliff Napier in No 2 is filling in free time by helping Denise Serra in a series of experiments connected with recording radiation and gravity fluctuations.
Sometimes — in fact, quite often — I find myself wishing Denise was on my ship. I could have arranged it at the start, of course, but I wanted to play fair with her. Having turned her down that night, I felt the least I could do was avoid obstructing the field. But now… Now when I dream about Aileen and Chris I dream they are dead, which means I’m beginning to accept it, and with the acceptance my pragmatic, faithless body seems to be nominating Aileen’s successor. I feel ashamed about this, but perhaps it is not as purely physical as I was supposing. Delia Liggett, who was a catering supervisor on the Bissendorf, is on my ship and two of the other men have a good practical relationship with her — but I can’t work up much interest in a hot bunking system. I’m positive this isn’t a ridiculous remnant of a captain-to-crew attitude, a notion that I ought to have her exclusively because I had the most silver braid on my uniform.
Outside the agreed goals of this
mission I have, probably with some assistance from the pervading influence of the Big O, completely discarded the old command structure. I do remember, though, feeling some surprise at the make-up of the thirty-nine volunteers who came with me. My first supposition was that they would all be of executive rank and above, career-oriented men and women who were determined to take the Bissendorf incident in their stride. Instead, I found that over half of the seventy original volunteers were ordinary crewmen. Those who remained, after the selection procedure which cut the number down to the precise requirement, I regard and treat as exact equals.
O makes us equal.
In comparison to it we are reduced to the ultimate, human electrons, too small to admit of any disparity in size.
Day 54. Estimated range: 620,000 kilometres
We have completed our first scheduled landing and are in flight again. After fifty days in the air, the prospect of three days on the ground was exhilarating. We landed in formation on a level plain, the eight fully qualified pilots at the controls, and spent practically all the down-time in gathering grass and loading it into the processing machines. This is what passes for winter on O. The sun is still directly overhead, naturally enough, but with the days being shorter the temperature does not build up as high and has a much longer time to bleed away at night. It results in nothing more than a certain briskness in the air during the day, although the nights are a lot colder. (It makes me wonder why the designers of O bothered to build in a mechanism to provide seasons. If the hostel-for-the-galaxy notion is correct, presumably the designers carried out a survey of intelligent life-forms in their region of space to see what the environmental requirements were. And if that is the case, the majority of life-bearing worlds must closely resemble Earth, even to the extent of having a moderately tilted axis and a procession of seasons. Could this, for some reason I don’t fathom, be a universal pre-requisite for the evolution of intelligence?) It seems that weather isn’t going to be any problem during future stops, but our physical condition might. The simple task of cutting and gathering grass pretty well exhausted a lot of people, and now we are instituting programmes of exercises which can be performed on board ship.
Day 86. Estimated range: 1,038,000 kilometres
With more than a million kilometres behind us, it was beginning to look as though our journey time would be better than predicted, but the first hint of mechanical difficulties has shown up. The starboard propeller bearing on ship No 7 has started to show some wear. This is causing vibration at maximum cruise and we have had to reduce fleet speed by twelve kilometres per hour. The loss of speed is not very significant in itself, because it could be compensated for by extended engine life, but the alarming thing is that the propeller shaft bearings on all the ships are supposed to have been made in Magnelube Alloy Grade E. It is inconceivable that a bearing made to that specification could begin to show wear after only 83 days of continuous running — and the suspicion crosses my mind that Litman may have substituted Magnelube D, or even C. (I do not believe he would have done this out of pure malice, but if there was a shortage of blocks of the top grade metal and I had discovered it I would have ordered a redesign or would have stripped some of the Bissendorf’s main machinery to get the bearings. Either way, Litman would have had a lot of extra work on his hands, and the person he has become would not take kindly to that.) We must now keep a careful watch on all propeller shaft bearings because we carry no stocks of Magnelube Alloy and, in any case, barely retain the ability to machine it to the required tolerances. Like archaeologists burrowing deeper into the past, we are retrogressing through various levels of technical competence.
In the meantime, the flight continues uninterrupted. Over prairies, lakes, mountains, seas, forests — and then over more and more of the same. A million kilometres is an invisible fraction of O’s circumference, and yet seeing it like this has stunned one part of my mind. I was taught at school that a man’s brain is unable to comprehend what is meant by a light-year — now I know we cannot comprehend as much as a light-second. So far in this journey we have, in effect, encircled twenty-five Earths; but my heart and mind are suspended, like netted birds, somewhere above the third or fourth range of mountains. They have run into the comprehension barrier, while my body has travelled onwards, heedless of what penalties may fall due.
Day 93. Estimated range: 1,080,000 kilometres
Like Litman, like the others, I am becoming a different person.
I sometimes go for a whole day without thinking about Elizabeth Lindstrom. And now I can think about Aileen and Chris without experiencing much pain. It is as if they are in a mental jewel box. I can take them out of it, examine them, receive pleasure — then put them back into it and close the lid. The thought has occurred to me that the life of a loved one must be considered algebraically — setting the positive total of happiness and contentment against the negative quantity represented by pain and death. This process, even for a very short life, results in a positive expression. I wish I could discuss this idea with someone who might understand, but Denise is on another ship.
Day 109. Estimated range: 1,207,000 kilometres
We have lost Tayman’s ship, No 6. It happened while we were landing for our second scheduled stop, putting down in formation on an ideal-looking plain. There was a hidden spar of rock which wrecked one of Tayman’s skids, causing the plane to dip a wing. Nobody was hurt, but No 6 had to be written off. (In future we will land in sequence on the lead aircraft’s skid marks to reduce the risk of similar incidents.) Tayman and his crew — which includes two women — took the mishap philosophically and we spent an extra day on the ground getting them set up for a prolonged stay. Among the parts we took from No 6 were the propeller shaft bearings, one of which was immediately installed in No 7’s starboard engine.
I suppose the latter has to be regarded as a kind of bonus — fleet speed is back to maximum cruise — but the loss of Jack Tayman’s steady optimism is hard to accept. Strangely, I find myself missing his aircraft most at night. We have no radio altimeters or equivalents because the conditions on O will not permit electromagnetic transmission, and the environment also makes barometric pressure readings too unreliable, so we use the ancient device of two inclined spotlights on each aircraft, one at each end of the fuselage. The forward laser ray is coloured red, the aft one white, and they intersect at five hundred metres, which means that a machine flying at the chosen height projects a single pink spot. Looking downwards through the darkness we can see our V-formation slipping across the ground, hour after hour, a squadron of silent moons, and the disappearance of one of those luminous followers is all too apparent.
Day 140. Estimated range: 1,597,000 kilometres
Within the space of ten days propeller shaft bearing trouble has developed on five ships, and fleet speed has been reduced by fifty kilometres an hour. Prognosis is that there will be continued deterioration, with progressive cuts in flying speed. Everybody is properly dismayed, but I think I can detect an undercurrent of relief at the possibility of so many aircraft having to drop out at the same time, thus providing for the setting up of a larger and stronger community. I have discussed the situation with Cliff Napier over the lightphone and even he seems to be losing heart.
The only aspect of the matter which looks at all ‘hopeful’ is that the ships which have experienced the trouble are No 3 through to No 8, which reflects the order in which they came off the production line. The first and second ships — mine and Napier’s — are all right, and it may be that Litman had enough Grade E metal available for our propeller bearings. I put the word hopeful in quotes in this context because, on reflection, it simply is not appropriate. Being reduced to two airplanes at this stage of the mission would be disastrous, and it would take fairly comprehensive technical resources to restore us to strength. Resources which are not available.
I am writing this at night, mainly because I can’t sleep, and I find it difficult to fight off a sense of defeat. The Big O is too
…
Garamond set his stylus aside as Joe Braunek, who had been in the cockpit serving as stand-by pilot, appeared in the gangway beside his bunk. The young man’s face was deeply shadowed by the single overhead light tube but his eyes, within their panda-patches of darkness, were showing an abnormal amount of white.
“What is it, Joe?” Garamond closed his diary.
“Well, sir…” “Vance.”
“Sorry, I keep… Do you want to come up front a minute, Vance?”
“This gets us back to square one — is there anything wrong? I’m trying to rest and I don’t want to get up without a good reason.”
“There are some lights we can’t explain.”
“Which panel?”
Braunek shook his head. “Not that sort of light. Outside the ship — near the horizon. It looks like there’s a city of some kind ahead of us.”
seventeen
At first sight, the lights were disappointing. Because the fleet was travelling roughly eastwards, the blue and darker blue bands which represented day and night on other parts of Orbitsville were arcing across the sky from side to side. The lower one looked in the eastern sky the narrower and closer together the bands appeared to grow, until they merged in the opalescent haze above the upcurving black horizon. Even when Braunek had shown him where to look Garamond had to scan the darkness for several seconds before he picked out a thin line of yellowish radiance, like a razor cut just below the edge of a cardboard silhouette.
