Orbitsville o-1

by Bob Shaw

  “Nobody has to apologize for the operation of simple logic.”

  “But that leaves you only two aircraft, and it isn’t enough.”

  “It’s all right.” Garamond wondered how long he could go on with the role of martyr before telling Denise he had already come to terms with himself.

  She caught his hand. “I know how disappointed you must be.”

  “You’re making it easy to take,” he said. Denise released his hand on the instant and he knew he had said something wrong. He waited impassively.

  “Has Cliff not told you I’m having a baby?” Denise’s eyes were intent on his. “His baby?”

  Garamond forced himself to compose a suitable reply. “He didn’t need to.” “You mean he hasn’t? Just wait till I get my hands on the big…”

  “I’m not completely blind, Denise.” Garamond produced a smile for her. “I knew as soon as I saw both of you together this morning. I just haven’t got around to congratulating him yet.”

  “Thanks, Vance. Out here we’ll need all the godfathers we can get.”

  “Can’t help you there, I’m afraid — I’ll be a few million kilometres east of here by that time.”

  “Oh!” Denise looked away from him. “I thought…”

  “That I was quitting? Not until I’m forced — and you know better than I do that the computers didn’t say two aircraft couldn’t reach Beachhead City. It’s just a question of odds, isn’t it?”

  “So is Russian Roulette.”

  “I’ll see you around, Denise.” Garamond turned away, but she caught his arm.

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

  “Please forget it.” He squeezed her hand before removing it from his arm. “I really am glad that you and Cliff have got something good. Now, please excuse me — I have a lot of work to do.”

  * * *

  Garamond had been occupied for several hours on the load distribution plans for his two remaining aircraft when darkness came. He switched on the fuselage interior lights and continued working with cold concentration, ignoring the sounds of revelry which drifted into the cabin on the evening breeze. His fingers moved continually over the calculator keyboard as he laboured through dozens of load permutations, striving to decide the best uses for his payload capability. The brief penumbral twilight had fled when he felt vibrations which told him someone was coming on board. He looked up and saw O’Hagan squeezing his way towards the small chart-covered table.

  “I’ve just discovered how much I used to rely on computers,” Garamond said.

  O’Hagan shook his head impatiently. “I’ve just spent the most fantastic day of my life, and I need a drink to get over it. Where’s the supply?” He sat quietly while Garamond found a plastic bottle and handed it to him, then he took a short careful swallow. “This stuff hasn’t been aged much.”

  “The man who made it has.”

  “Like the rest of us.” O’Hagan took another drink and apparently decided he had devoted too much time to preamble. “We haven’t got a hope in hell of getting the bearings we need from these people. Know why?”

  “Because they’ve no machine tools?”

  “Because they make everything by hand. You knew?”

  “I guessed. They’ve got some airplanes, but no airplane factory or airport. They’ve got some cars, but no car factory or roads.” “Good work, Vance — you were way ahead on that one.” O’Hagan drummed his fingers on the table, the sound filling the narrow confines of the cabin, and his voice lost some of its usual incisiveness. “They picked an entirely different road to ours. No specialization of labour, no mass production, no standardization. Anybody who wants a car or a cake-mixer builds it from scratch, if he has the time and the talent. You noticed their planes and cars were all different?”

  “Yes. I noticed them counting our ships, too.”

  “So did I, but I didn’t know what was going on in their minds. They must have been astonished at seeing seven identical models.”

  “Not astonished,” Garamond said. “Mildly surprised, perhaps. I’ve a feeling these people haven’t much curiosity in their make-up. If you allow only one alien per house that city out there must have a population of twenty thousand or more, but I doubt if as many as two hundred came out to look at us today — and practically all those who came had their own transport.”

  “You mean we got the lunatic fringe.”

  “Gadgeteers anyway — probably more interested in our aircraft than in us. They could be a frustrating bunch to have as next door neighbours.”

  O’Hagan stared significantly at the paperwork scattered on the table. “So you intend to press on?”

  “Yes.” Garamond decided to let the single word do the work of the hundreds he might have used.

  “Have you got a crew?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  O’Hagan sighed heavily. “I’m sick to death of flying, Vance. It’s killing me. But I’d go crazy if I had to live beside somebody who kept inventing the steam engine every couple of years. I’ll fly with you.”

  “Thanks, Dennis.” Garamond felt a warm prickling in his eyes. “I…”

  “Never mind the gratitude,” O’Hagan said briskly. “Let’s see what sort of mess you’ve been making of these load distributions.”

  * * *

  Against Garamond’s expectations, he was able to raise two crews of four to continue the flight. Again making use of the extra lift to be gained from cold air, the two machines took off at dawn and, without circling or giving any aerial signal of goodbye, they flew quietly into the east.

  eighteen

  Day 193. Estimated range: 2,160,000 kilometres

  This may be my last journal entry. Words seem to be losing their meaning, the act of writing them is losing all significance, and I notice that we have virtually stopped speaking to each other. The silence does not imply or induce separateness — the eight of us have compacted into one. It is simply that there is something embarrassing about watching a man go through the whole pointless performance of shaping his lips and activating his tongue in order to push sound vibrations out on the air. It is peculiar, too, how a spoken word resolves itself into meaningless syllables, and how a single syllable can hang resonating in the air, in your mind, long after the speaker has turned away.

  I fancy, sometimes, that the same phenomenon takes place with images. We have steered our ships above a thousand seas, ten thousand mountain ranges, all of which have promised to be different — but which are all becoming the same. A distinctive peak or river bend, a curious group of islands, the coloration of a wooded valley — geographical features appear before us with the promise of something new and, having cheated us, fall behind. Were it not for the certainty of the inertial guidance system I might imagine we were flying in circles. No, that isn’t correct, for we have learned to steer a constant course against the stripings of the sky. We seem to exist, embedded, in a huge crystal paperweight and one of the advantages, perhaps the only one, is that we can tell where we are going by reference to its millefiori design. If I hold the milk-blue curvatures in a certain precise relationship, crossing windshield and prow just so, I can fly for as long as thirty minutes before the black box chimes and edges me to left or right. The other black box, the portable delton detector, remains inert even after all this time. (Dennis was right when he said we were lucky to find that first particle so soon.) The up-curving horizon provides a constant reference for level flying. It occurred to me recently that Orbitsville is so big that we should not be able to detect any upward curvature in the horizon. As usual, Dennis was able to explain that it was an optical illusion — the horizon is straight but, through a trick of perception, appears to sag in the middle. He told me that the ancient Greeks compensated for this when building their temples.

  The two aircraft are behaving as well as can be expected within their design limits. Each is carrying a reserve power-plant which takes up a high proportion of its payload, but this is unavoidable. A
gyromagnetic engine is little more than a block of metal in which most of the atoms have been orchestrated to resonate in tune. It is without doubt one of the best general-purpose medium-sized power-plants ever conceived, but it has a fault in that — without warning and for no apparent reason — the orchestra can fall into discord and the power output drops to zero. When that happens there is no option than to install a new engine, so we can afford it to happen only twice. We have also had minor mechanical troubles. As yet there has been nothing serious enough to cause an unscheduled landing, but the potential is always there and grows daily.

  The biggest cause for concern, however, is the biological machinery on board — our own bodies. Everybodys except for young Braunek, is subject to headaches, constipation, dizziness and nausea. Many of the symptoms are probably due to prolonged stress but, with increasingly unreliable aircraft to fly, we dare not resort to tranquillizers. Dennis, in particular, is causing me alarm and an equal amount of guilt over having brought him along. He gets greyer and more tired every day, and less and less able to do his stint at the controls. The protein and yeast cakes on which we live are not appetizing at the best of times, but Dennis is finding it almost impossible to keep them down and his weight is decreasing rapidly.

  I am reaching the conclusion that the mission should be abandoned, and this time there are no emotional undertones in my thinking. I know it is not worth the expenditure of human lives.

  A short time ago I could not have made such an admission — but that was before we had fully begun to pay for our mistake of challenging the Big O. The journey we attempted was perhaps only a hundredth of O’s circumference, and of that tiny fraction we have completed only a fraction. My personal punishment for this presumption is that O has scoured out my soul. I can think of my dead wife and child; I can think of Denise Serra; I can think of Elizabeth Lindstrom… and nothing happens.

  I feel nothing.

  This is my last diary entry.

  There is nothing more to write.

  There is nothing more to say.

  * * *

  Kneeling on the thrumming floor beside O’Hagan’s bunk, Garamond said, “It’s summertime down there, Dennis. We’ve flown right into summer.”

  “I don’t care.” Beneath its covering of sheets, the scientist’s body seemed as frail and fleshless as that of a mummified woman.

  “I’m positive we could find fruit trees.”

  O’Hagan gave a skeletal grin. “You know what you can do with your fruit trees.”

  “But if you could eat something you’d be all right.”

  “I’m just fine — all I need is a rest.” O’Hagan caught Garamond’s wrist. “Vance, you’re not going to call off the flight on my account. Promise me that.”

  “I promise.” Garamond disengaged the white, too-clean fingers one by one and stood up. The decision, now that it had come, was strangely easy to make. “I’m calling it off on my own account.”

  He ignored the other man’s protests and went forward along the narrow aisle to the blinding arena of the cockpit. Braunke was at the controls and Sammy Yamoto was beside him in the second pilot’s seat. He had removed a cover from the delton detector and was probing inside it. Garamond tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Why aren’t you asleep, Sammy? You were on duty most of the night.”

  Yamoto adjusted his dark glasses. “I’m going to kip down in a minute — as soon as I put my mind at rest about this pile of junk.”

  “Junk?”

  “Yes. I don’t think it’s working.”

  Garamond glanced at the detector’s control panel. “According to the operating light it’s working.”

  “I know, but look at this.” Yamoto clicked the switch of the main power supply to the detector box up and down several times in succession. The orange letters which spelled, SYSTEM FUNCTIONING, continued to glow steadily in their dark recess.

  “What a botch,” Yamoto said bitterly. “You know, I might never have caught on if a generator hadn’t cut itself out during the night. I was sitting here about two hours later when, all of a sudden, it hit me — the lights on the detector panel hadn’t blinked with all the others.”

  “Does that prove it isn’t working?”

  “Not necessarily — but it makes me doubt the quality of the whole assembly. Litman deserves to be shot.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Garamond lowered himself into the supernumerary seat. “Not at this stage anyway — we have to call off the flight.”

  “Dennis?”

  “Yes. It’s killing him.”

  “I don’t want to seem callous, but…” Yamoto paused to force a multi-connector into place, “…don’t you think he could die anyway?”

  “I can’t take that chance.”

  “Now I have to sound callous. There are seven other men on this -” Yamoto stopped speaking as the delton detector emitted a sharp tap, like a steel ball dropped on to a metal plate. He instinctively jerked his hand away from the exposed wiring.

  Garamond raised his eyebrows. “What have you done to it?”

  “All I’ve done is fix it.” Yamoto gave a quivering, triumphant grin as two more tapping sounds were heard almost simultaneously.

  “Then what are those noises?”

  “Those, my friend, are delta particles going through our screen.” The astronomer’s words were punctuated by further noises from the machine. “And their frequency indicates that we are close to their source.”

  “Close? How close?” Yamoto took out a calculator and his fingers flickered over it. “I’d say about twenty or thirty thousand kilometres.”

  A cool breeze from nowhere played on Garamond’s forehead. “You don’t mean from Beachhead City.”

  “Beachhead City is the only source we know. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “But…” A fresh staccato outburst came from the detector as Garamond, knowing he should have been excited, looked out through the front windshield of the aircraft at a range of low mountains perhaps an hour’s flying time ahead. They seemed no more and no less familiar than all the others he had seen.

  “Is this possible?” he said. “Could we have overestimated the flight time by two years?”

  Yamoto turned an adjusting screw on the delton detector, decreasing the sound level of its irregular tattoo. “Anything is possible on Orbitsville.”

  * * *

  It was late on the following day when the two stiff-winged, ungainly birds began to gain altitude to cross the final green ridges. All crew members, including a fever-eyed O’Hagan, were gathered to watch as the mountain crests began to sink in submission to their combined wills. Changing parallaxes made the high ground below them appear to shift like sand.

  Yamoto switched off the detector’s incessant roar with a flourish. “The instrument is no longer of any use to us. Astronomically speaking, we have reached our destination.”

  “How far would you say it is, Sammy?”

  “A hundred kilometres. Perhaps less.”

  Joe Braunek squirmed in his seat, but his hands and feet were steady on the flying controls. “Then we have to see Beachhead City as soon as we clear this range.”

  Garamond felt the conviction which had been growing in him achieve a leaden solidity. “It won’t be there,” he announced. “I don’t remember seeing a mountain range this close to the city.”

  “It’s a pretty low range,” Yamoto said uncertainly. “You wouldn’t have noticed it unless you had a specific…”

  His voice faded as the ground tilted and sloped away beneath them to reveal one of Orbitsville’s mind-stilling prairies. In the hard clean light of the sun they could see to the edges of infinity, across oceans of grass and scrub, and there was no sign of Beachhead City.

  “What do we do now?” Braunek spoke with a curious timidity as he looked back at the other three men. The resilience which all the months of flight had not been able to sap now seemed to have left him. “Do we just fly on?”

  Garamond,
unable to feel shock or disappointment, turned to Yamoto. “Switch the detector on again.”

  “Right.” The astronomer reactivated the black box and the cabin immediately filled with its roar. “But we can’t change what it says — we’re right on target.”

  “Is it directional?”

  “Yes.” Yamoto glanced at O’Hagan, who nodded tiredly in confirmation.

  “Swing to the left,” Garamond told Braunek. “Not too quickly.” The plane banked slowly to the north and, as it did so, the sound from the delton detector steadily decreased until it faded out altogether.

  “Hold it there! We’re now flying at right angles to the precise source of the particle bombardment. Right, Sammy?”

  Yamoto raised the binoculars and looked in the direction indicated by the aircraft’s starboard wing. “It’s no use, Vance. There’s nothing there.”

  “There has to be something. We’ve got an hour of daylight left — take a new bearing and we’ll follow it till nightfall.”

  While Yamoto used the lightphone to bring the second crew up to date on what was happening, Joe Braunek steered the aircraft on to its new heading and shed height until they were at cruise altitude. The two machines flew onwards for another hour, occasionally swinging off course to make an up-dated check on their direction. Towards the end of the hour O’Hagan’s strength gave out and he had to be helped back to his bunk.

  “We messed it up,” he said to Garamond, easing himself down.

  Garamond shook his head as he covered the older man’s thin body. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Our basic premise was wrong, and that’s unforgivable.”

  “Forget it, Dennis. Besides, you were the one who warned me we had no right to pick up that first particle so soon. As usual, you were right.”

  “Don’t try to butter me. I’m too…” O’Hagan closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep at once. Garamond made his way back to the cockpit and sat down to weigh up the various factors involved in the ending of the mission. He sensed that the resistance of the other men, which had surprised him earlier, would no longer be a consideration. They had allowed themselves to hope too soon, and Orbitsville had punished them for it. What remained now was the decision on where to make the final landing. His own preference was for the foothills of a mountain chain which would provide them with rivers, variety of vegetation and the psychologically important richness of scenery. It might be best to turn back to the range they had just crossed rather than fly onwards over what seemed to be the greatest plain they had encountered so far. There was the possibility that something could go wrong with one of the aircraft when they were part way across that eternity of grass; and there was the certainty that what they would find on the far side would be no different to what they had left behind. Unless they came to a sea, Garamond reminded himself. A sea would add even more…