Orbitsville: Orbitsville Book 1
Author: Bob Shaw
Date: 1975-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fiction; Space Opera; Science Fiction Fantasy; Fantasy; Hard Science Fiction; 20th Century
Description: Racing from the certain vengeance of Earth's tyrant ruler, space captain Vance Garamond flees the Solar System. And discovers the almost unimaginably vast spherical structure soon to become famous as 'Orbitsville' - a new home for Earth's huddled masses. Behind Garamond comes Earth's space fleet... Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1975
Publisher: Gateway

ORBITSVILLE

Copyright © Bob Shaw 1975
First published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1974, June-August

ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE

Copyright © 1983 by Bob Shaw
First published in September 1983 by Victor Gollancz Ltd

ORBITSVILLE JUDGEMENT

Copyright © 1990 Bob Shaw
First published in September 1990 by Victor Gollancz Ltd

Table of Contents

ORBITSVILLE

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

ORBITSVILLE JUDGEMENT

PART ONE: THE HAMMER RISES

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART TWO: THE HAMMER FALLS

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART THREE: THE SCHEME SHATTERS

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

ORBITSVILLE
by
BOB SHAW

LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
1975

one

The President was called Elizabeth, and it was thought by some that the mere coincidence of name had had a profound influence on her life-style. Certainly, she had – since the death of her father – made Starflight House into something which more resembled an historic royal court than the headquarters of a business enterprise. There was a suggestion of neo-Elizabethan ritual, of palace intrigue, of privilege and precedence about the way she ran her trillion-dollar empire. And the touch of antiquity which annoyed Garamond the most – although probably only because it was the one which affected him most – was her insistence on personal interviews with ship commanders before their exploratory missions.

He leaned on a carved stone balustrade and stared, with noncommittal grey eyes, at the tiers of descending heated gardens which reached to the Atlantic Ocean four kilometres away. Starflight House capped what had once been a moderate-sized Icelandic hill; now the original contours were completely hidden under a frosting of loggias, terraces and pavilions. From the air it reminded Garamond of a gigantic, vulgar cake. He had been waiting almost two hours, time he would have preferred to spend with his wife and child, and there had been nothing to do but sip pale green drinks and fight to control his dangerous impatience with Elizabeth.

As a successful flickerwing captain he had been in her presence several times, and so his distaste for her was personified, physical. It influenced his attitude more pervasively than did his intellectual unease over the fact that she was the richest person who had ever lived, and so far above the law that she had been known to kill out of sheer petulance. Was it, he had often wondered, because she had the mind of a man that she chose to be an unattractive woman in an age when cosmetic surgery could correct all but the most gross physical defects?

Were her splayed, imperfect teeth and pallid skin the insignia of total authority?

And as he watched the coloured fountains glitter in the stepped perspectives below, Garamond remembered his first visit to Starflight House. He had been about to undertake his third mission command and was still young enough to be self-conscious about the theatrical black uniform. The knowledge that he was entering the special relationship reputed to exist between President Lindstrom and her captains had made him taut and apprehensive, keyed up to meet any demand on his resourcefulness. But nobody in Fleet Command, nor in Admincom, had warned him in advance that Elizabeth gave off a sweet, soupy odour which closed the throat when one was most anxious to speak clearly.

None of his advisers on Starflight House protocol had given him a single clue which would have helped a young man, who had never seen anything but perfection in a female, to conceal his natural reaction to the President. Among his confused impressions, the predominant one had been of an abnormally curved spine at the lower end of which was slung a round, puffy abdomen like that of an insect, Garamond, frozen to attention, had avoided her eyes when she nuzzled the satin cushion of gut against his knuckles during her prolonged formal inspection of his appearance.

As he leaned on the artificially weathered balustrade, he could recall emerging from that first interview with a cool resentment towards the older captains who had told him none of the things which really mattered in personal dealings with the President; and yet – when his own turn came – he had allowed other raw Starflight commanders to go unprepared to the same inauguration. It had been easy to justify his inaction when he considered the possible consequences of explaining to a new captain that the coveted special relationship would involve him in exchanging looks of secret appreciation with Liz Lindstrom when – in the middle of a crowded Admincom flight briefing – she handed him a scrap of paper upon which she, the richest and most powerful human being in the universe, had printed a childish dirty joke. If the time for suicide ever came, Garamond decided, he would choose an easier and pleasanter way…

'Captain Garamond,' a man's voice said from close behind him. 'The President sends her compliments.'

Garamond turned and saw the tall, stooped figure of Vice-President Humboldt crossing the terrace towards him. Holding Humboldt's hand was a child of about nine, a sturdy silver-haired boy dressed in pearlized cords. Garamond recognized him as the President's son, Harald, and he nodded silently. The boy nodded in return, his eyes flickering over Garamond's badges and service ribbons.

'I'm sorry you have been kept waiting so long, Captain.' Humboldt cleared his throat delicately to indicate that this was as far as he could go towards expressing views which were not those of Elizabeth. 'Unfortunately, the President cannot disengage from her present commitment for another two hours. She requests you to wait.'

'Then I'll have to wait.' Garamond shrugged and smiled to mask his impatience, even though the tachyonic reports from the weather stations beyond Pluto had predicted that the favourable, ion-rich tide which was sweeping through the Solar System would shortly ebb. He had planned to sail on that tide and boost his ship to lightspeed in the shortest possible time. Now it looked as though he would have to labour up the long gravity slope from Sol with his ship's electromagnetic wings sweeping the vacuum for a meagre harvest of reaction mass.

'Yes. You'll have to wait.'

'Of course, I could always leave – and see the President when I get back.'

Humboldt smiled faintly in appreciation of the joke and glanced down at Harald, making sure the boy's attention was elsewhere before he replied. 'That would never do. I am sure Liz would be so disappointed that she would send a fast ship to bring you back for a special interview.'

'Then I won't put her to that inconvenience,' Garamond said. He knew they had both been referring to a certain Captain Witsch, a headstrong youngster who had grown restless after waiting two days in Starflight House and had taken off quietly at night without Elizabeth's blessing. He had been brought back in a high-speed interceptor, and his interview with the President must have been a very special one, because no trace of his body had ever been found. Garamond had no way of knowing how apocryphal the story might be – the Starflight fleet which siphoned off Earth's excess population was so huge that one captain could never know all the others – but it was illustrative of certain realities.

'There is a compensation for you, Captain.' Humboldt placed one of his pink-scrubbed hands on Harald's silver head. 'Harald has been showing a renewed interest in the flickerwing fleet lately and has been asking questions on subjects which loosely come under the heading of spaceflight theory and practice. Liz wants you to talk to him about it.'

Garamond looked doubtfully at the boy whose attention seemed absorbed by a group of metal statues further along the terrace. 'Has he any flair for mathematics?'

'He isn't expected to qualify for a master's papers this afternoon.' Humboldt laughed drily. 'Simply encourage his interest, Captain. I know admirals who would give their right arms for such a public token of the President's trust. Now I must return to the board-room.'

'You're leaving me alone with him?'

'Yes – Liz has a high regard for you, Captain Garamond. Is it the responsibility…?'

'No. I've looked after children before now.' Garamond thought of his own six-year-old son who had shaken his fist rather than wave goodbye, expressing his sense of loss and resentment over having a father who left him in answer to greater demands. This extra delay the President had announced meant that he had left home four hours too early, time in which he might have been able to heal the boy's tear-bruised eyes. On top of that, there were the reports of the ion wind failing, fading away to the level of spatial background activity, while he stood uselessly on an ornate terrace and played nursemaid to a child who might be as neurosis-ridden as Ms mother. Garamond tried to smile as the Vice-President withdrew, but he had a feeling he had not made a convincing job of it.

'Well, Harald,' he said, turning to the silver-and-pearl boy, 'you want to ride a flickerwing, do you?'

Harald examined him coolly. 'Starflight employees of less than Board status usually address me as Master Lindstrom.'

Garamond raised his eyebrows. 'I'll tell you something about space-flying, Harald. Up there the most minor technician is more important than all your Admincom executives put together. Do you understand that, Harald? Harry?' I'm more of a child than he is, he thought in amazement.

Unexpectedly, Harald smiled. 'I'm not interested in space-flying.'

'But I thought…'

'I told them that because they wanted to hear it, but I don't have to pretend with you, do I?'

'No, you don't have to pretend with me, son. What are we going to do for the next two hours, though?'

'I'd like to run,' Harald said with a sudden eagerness which – in Garamond's mind – restored him to full membership of the brotherhood of small boys.

'You want to run?' Garamond managed a genuine smile. 'That's a modest ambition.'

'I'm not allowed to run or climb in case I hurt myself. My mother has forbidden it, and everybody else around here is so afraid of her that they hardly let me blink, but…' Harald looked up at Garamond, triumphantly ingenuous, '…you're a flickerwing commander.'

Garamond realized belatedly that the boy had been manoeuvring him into a corner from the second they met, but he felt no annoyance. 'That's right – I am. Now let's see how quickly you can make it from here to those statues and back.'

'Right!'

'Well, don't stand around. Go!' Garamond watched with a mixture of amusement and concern as Harald set off in a lopsided, clopping run, elbows pumping rapidly. He rounded the bronze statues and returned to Garamond at the same pace, with his eyes shining like lamps.

'Again?'

'As many times as you want.' As Harald resumed his inefficient expenditure of energy Garamond went back to the stone balustrade of the terrace and stared down across the gardens. In spite of the late afternoon sunshine, the Atlantic was charcoal grey and tendrils of mist from it were wreathing the belvederes and waterfalls in sadness. A lone gull twinkled like a star in its distant flight.

I don't want to go, he thought. It's as simple as that.

In the early days he had been sustained by the conviction that he, Vance Garamond, would be the one who would find the third world. But interstellar flight was almost a century old now and Man's empire still included only one habitable planet apart from Earth, and all of Garamond's enthusiasm and certitude had achieved nothing. If he could accept that he would never reach a habitable new planet then he would be far better to do as Aileen wanted, to take a commission on the shuttle run and be sure of some time at home every month. Ferrying shiploads of colonists to Terranova would be dull, but safe and convenient. The ion winds were fairly predictable along that route and the well-established chain of weather stations had eliminated any possibility of being becalmed…

'Look at me!'

Garamond turned, for an instant was unable to locate Harald, then saw him perched dangerously high on the shoulders of one of the statues. The boy waved eagerly.

'You'd better come down from there.' Garamond tried to find a diplomatic way to hide his concern over the way in which Harald had increased his demands – emotional blackmailers used the same techniques as ordinary criminals – from permission to run on the terrace to the right to make risky climbs, thus putting Garamond in a difficult position with the President. Difficult? It occurred to Garamond that his career would be ended if Harald were to so much as sprain an ankle.

'But I'm a good climber. Watch.' Harald threw his leg across a patient bronze face as he reached for the statue's upraised arm.

'I know you can climb, but don't go any higher till I get there.' Garamond began to walk towards the statues, moving casually but adding inches to each stride by thrusting from the back foot. His alarm increased. Elizabeth Lindstrom, whose title of President was derived from her inherited ownership of the greatest financial and industrial empire ever known, was the most important person alive. Her son was destined to inherit Starflight from her, to control all construction of starships and all movement between Earth and the one other world available to Man. And he, Vance Garamond, an insignificant flickerwing captain, had put himself in a position where he was almost certain to incur the anger of one or the other.

'Up we go,' Harald called.

'Don't!' Garamond broke into an undisguised run. 'Please, don't.'

He surged forward through maliciously thick air which seemed to congeal around him like resin. Harald laughed delightedly and scrambled towards the upright column of metal which was the statue's arm, but he lost his grip and tilted backwards.

One of his feet lodged momentarily in the sculpted collar, acting as a pivot, turning him upside down. Garamond, trapped in a different continuum, saw the event on a leisurely timescale, like the slow blossoming of a spiral nebula. He saw the first fatal millimetre of daylight open up between Harald's fingers and the metal construction. He saw the boy seemingly hanging in the air, then gathering speed in the fall. He saw and heard the brutal impact with which Harald's head struck the base of the statuary group.

Garamond dropped to his knees beside the small body and knew, on the instant, that Harald was dead. His skull was crushed, driven inwards on the brain.

'You're not a good climber,' Garamond whispered numbly, accusingly, to the immobile face which was still dewed with perspiration. 'You've killed us both. And my family as well.'

He stood up and looked towards the entrance of the main building, preparing to face the officials and domestics who would come running. The terrace remained quiet but for the murmur of its fountains. High in the stratosphere an invisible aircraft drew a slow, silent wake across the sky. Each passing second was a massive hammer-blow on the anvil of Garamond's mind, and he had been standing perfectly still for perhaps a minute before accepting that the accident had not been noticed by others.

Breaking out of the stasis, he gathered up Harald's body, marvelling at its lightness, and carried it to a clump of flowering shrubs. The dark green foliage clattered like metal foil as he lowered the dead child into a place of concealment.

Garamond turned his back on Starflight House, and began to run.

two

He had, if he was very lucky, about one hundred minutes.

The figure was arrived at by assuming the President had been precise when she told Garamond to wait an extra two hours. There was a further proviso – that it had been her intention to leave her son alone with him all that time. With the full span of a hundred minutes at his disposal, Garamond decided, he had a chance; but any one of a dozen personal servants had only to go looking for Harald, any one of a thousand visitors had only to notice a bloodstain…

The numbers in the game of death were trembling and tumbling behind his eyes as he stepped off the outward bound slideway where it reached the main reception area. His official transport was waiting to take him straight to the shuttle terminal at North Field, and – in spite of the risks associated with the driver being in radio contact with Starflight House – that still seemed the quickest and most certain way of reaching his ship. The vast ice-green hall of the concourse was crowded with men and women coming off their afternoon shifts in the surrounding administrative buildings. They seemed relaxed and happy, bemused by the generosity of the lingering sunlight. Garamond swore inwardly as he shouldered through conflicting currents and eddies of people, doing his best to move quickly without attracting attention.

I'm a dead man, he kept thinking in detached wonderment. No matter what I do, no matter how my luck holds out in the next couple of hours … I'm a dead man. And my wife is a dead woman. And my son is a dead child. Even if the ion tide holds strong and fills my wings, we're all dead – because there's no place to hide. There's only one other world, and Elizabeth's ships will be waiting there…

A face turned towards him from the crowd, curiously, and Garamond realized he had made a sound. He smiled – recreating himself in his own image of a successful flickerwing captain, clothed in the black-and-silver which was symbolic of star oceans – and the face slid away, satisfied that it had made a mistake in locating the source of the despairing murmur. Garamond gnawed his lip while he covered the remaining distance to his transport which was stacked in one of the reserved magazines near the concourse. The sharp-eyed middle-aged driver saw him approaching, and had the vehicle brought up to ground level by the time Garamond reached the silo.

'Thanks.' Garamond answered the man's salute, grateful for the small saving in time, and got inside the upholstered shell.

'I thought you'd be in a hurry, sir.' The driver's eyes stared knowingly at him from the rear view mirror.

'Oh?' Garamond controlled a spasm of unreasonable fear – this was not the way his arrest would come about. He eyed the back of the driver's neck which was ruddy, deeply creased and had a number of long-established blackheads.

'Yes, sir. All the Starflight commanders are in a hurry to reach the field today. The weather reports aren't good, I hear.'

Garamond nodded and tried to look at ease as the vehicle surged forward with a barely perceptible whine from its magnetic engines. 'I think I'll catch the tide,' he said evenly. 'At least, I hope so – my family are coming to see me off.'

The driver's narrow face showed some surprise. 'I thought you were going direct…'

'A slight change of plan – we're calling for my wife and son. You remember the address?'

'Yes, sir. I have it here.'

'Good. Get there as quickly as you can.' With a casual movement Garamond broke the audio connection between the vehicle's two compartments and picked up the nearest communicator set. He punched in his home code and held the instrument steady with his knees while he waited for the screen to come to life and show that his call had been accepted. Supposing Aileen and Chris had gone out? The boy had been upset – again Garamond remembered him shaking his fist instead of waving goodbye, expressing in the slight change of gesture all the emotions which racked his small frame – and Aileen could have taken him away for an afternoon of distraction and appeasement. If that were the case…

'Vance!' Aileen's face crystallized in miniature between his hands. 'I was sure you'd gone. Where are you?'

'I'm on my way back to the house, be there in ten minutes.'

'Back here? But…'

'Something has happened, Aileen. I'm bringing you and Chris with me to the field. Is he there?'

'He's out on the patio. But, Vance, you never let us see you off.'

'I…Garamond hesitated, and decided it could be better all round if his wife were to be kept in ignorance at this stage. 'I've changed my mind about some things. Now, get Chris ready to leave the house as soon as I get there.'

Aileen raised her shoulders uncertainly. 'Vance, do you think it's the best thing for him? I mean you've been away from the house for three hours and he's just begun to get over his first reactions – now you're going to put him through it all again.'

'I told you something has come up.' How many pet dogs, Garamond asked himself, did I see around the Presidential suite this afternoon? Five? Six?

'What has come up?'

'I'll explain later.' At what range can a dog scent a corpse? Liz's brood of pets could be the biggest threat of all. 'Please get Chris ready.'

Aileen shook her head slightly. 'I'm sorry, Vance, but I don't…

'Aileen!' Garamond deliberately allowed an edge of panic to show in his voice, using it to penetrate the separate universe of normalcy in which his wife still existed. 'I can't explain it now, but you and Chris must be ready to come to the field with me within the next few minutes. Don't argue any more, just do what I'm asking.'

He broke the connection and forced himself to sit back, wondering if he had already said too much for the benefit of any communications snoops who could be monitoring the public band. The car was travelling west on the main Akranes autolink, surging irregularly as it jockeyed for position in the traffic. It occurred to Garamond that the driver's performance was not as good as it had been on the way out to Starflight House, perhaps through lack of concentration. On an impulse he reconnected the vehicle's intercom.

'…at his home,' the driver was saying. 'Expect to reach North Field in about twenty minutes.'

Garamond cleared his throat. 'What are you doing?'

'Reporting in, sir.'

'Why?'

'Standing orders. All the fleet drivers keep Starflight Centradata informed about their movements.'

'What did you tell them?'

'Sir?'

'What did you say about my movements?'

The driver's shoulders stirred uneasily, causing his Starflight sunburst emblems to blink redly with reflected light. 'I just said you decided to pick up your family on the way to North Field.'

'Don't make any further reports.'

'Sir?'

'As a captain in the Starflight Exploratory Arm I think I can make my way around this part of Iceland without a nursemaid.'

'I'm sorry, but…'

'Just drive the car.' Garamond fought to control the unreasoning anger he felt against the man in front. 'And go faster.'

'Yes, sir.' The creases in the driver's weatherbeaten neck deepened as he hunched over the wheel.

Garamond made himself sit quietly, with closed eyes, motionless except for a slight rubbing of his palms against his knees which failed completely to remove the perspiration. He tried to visualize what was happening back on the hill. Was the routine of Elizabeth's court proceeding as on any other afternoon, with the boards and committees and tribunals deliberating in the pillared halls, and the President moving among them, complacently deflecting and vibrating the webstrands of empire with her very presence? Or had someone begun to notice Harald's absence? And his own?

He opened his eyes and gazed sombrely at the unrolling scenery outside the car. The umbra of commercial buildings which extended for several kilometres around Starflight House was giving way to the first of the company-owned residential developments. As an S.E.A. commander, Garamond had been entitled to one of the 'choice' locations, which in Starflight usage tended to mean closest to Elizabeth's elevated palace. At quiet moments on the bridge of his ship Garamond had often thought about how the sheer massiveness of her power had locally deformed the structure of language in exactly the same way as a giant sun was able to twist space around itself so that captive worlds, though believing themselves to be travelling in straight lines, were held in orbit. In the present instance, however, he was satisfied with the physics of Elizabeth's gravitation because it meant that his home was midway between Starflight House and the North Field, and he was losing the minimum of time in collecting his family.

Even before the vehicle had halted outside the pyramidical block of apartments, Garamond had the door open and was walking quickly to the elevator. He stepped out of it on the third floor, went to his own door and let himself in. The familiar, homely surroundings seemed to crowd in on him for an instant, creating a new sense of shock over the fact that life as he knew it had ended. For a moment he felt like a ghost, visiting scenes to which he was no longer relevant.

'What's the matter, Vance?' Aileen emerged from a bedroom, dressed as always in taut colourful silks. Her plump, brown-skinned face and dark eyes showed concern.

'I'll explain later.' He put his arms around her and held her for a second. 'Where's Chris?'

'Here I am, Daddy!' The boy came running and swarmed up Garamond like a small animal, clinging with all four limbs. 'You came back.'

'Come on, son – we're going to the field.' Garamond held Chris above his head and shook him, imitating a start-of-vacation gesture, then handed the child to his wife. It had been the second time within the hour that he had picked up a light, childish body. 'The car's waiting for us. You take Chris down to it and I'll follow in a second.'

'You still haven't told me what this is all about.'

'Later, later? Garamond decided that if he were stopped before the shuttle got off the ground there might still be a faint chance for Aileen and the boy if she could truthfully swear she had no idea what had been going on. He pushed her out into the corridor, then strode back into the apartment's general storage area which was hidden by a free-floating screen of varicoloured luminosity. It took him only a few seconds to open the box containing his old target pistol and to fill an ammunition clip. The long-barrelled, saw-handled pistol snagged the material of his uniform as he thrust it out of sight in his jacket. Acutely conscious of the weighty bulge under his left arm, he ran back through the living space. On an impulse he snatched an ornament – a solid gold snail with ruby eyes – from a shelf, and went out into the corridor. Aileen was holding the elevator door open with one hand and trying to control Chris with the other.

'Let's go,' Garamond said cheerfully, above the deafening ratchets and escapement of the clock behind his eyes. He closed the elevator door and pressed the 'DOWN' button. At ground level Chris darted ahead through the long entrance hall and scrambled into the waiting vehicle. There were few people about, and none that Garamond could identify as neighbours, but he dared not risk running and the act of walking normally brought a cool sheen to his forehead. The driver gave Aileen a grudging salute and held the car door open while she got in. Garamond sat down opposite his wife in the rear of the vehicle and, when it had moved off, manufactured a smile for her.

She shook her dark head impatiently. 'Now will you tell me what's happening?'

'You're coming to see me off, that's all.' Garamond glanced at Chris, who was kneeling at the rear window, apparently absorbed in the receding view. 'Chris should enjoy it.'

'But you said it was important.'

'It was important for me to spend a little extra time with you and Chris.'

Aileen looked baffled. 'What did you bring from the apartment?'

'Nothing.' Garamond moved his left shoulder slightly to conceal the bulge made by the pistol.

'But I can see it.' She leaned forward, caught his hand and opened his fingers, revealing the gold snail. It was a gift he had bought Aileen on their honeymoon and he realized belatedly that the reason he had snatched it was that the little ornament was the symbolical cornerstone of their home. Aileen's eyes widened briefly and she turned her head away, making an abrupt withdrawal. Garamond closed his eyes, wondering what his wife's intuition had told her, wondering how many minutes he had left.

At that moment, a minor official on the domestic staff of Star-flight House was moving uncertainly through the contrived Italian Renaissance atmosphere of the carved hill. His name was Carlos Pennario and he was holding leads to which were attached two of the President's favourite spaniels.

The doubts which plagued his mind were caused by the curious behaviour of the dogs, coupled with certain facts about his conditions of employment. Both animals, their long ears flapping audibly with excitement, were pulling him towards a section of the shady terrace which ringed the hill just at the executive and Presidential levels. Pennario, who was naturally inquisitive, had never seen the spaniels behave in this way before and he was tempted to give them their heads – but, as a Grade 4 employee, he was not permitted to ascend to the executive levels. In normal circumstances such considerations would not have held him back for long, but only two days earlier he had fallen foul of his immediate boss, a gnome-like Scot called Arthur Kemp, and had been promised demotion next time he put a foot wrong.

Pennario held on to the snuffling, straining dogs while he gazed towards a group of statues which shone like red gold in the dying sunlight. A tall, hard-looking man in the black uniform of a flickerwing captain had been leaning on the stone balustrade near the statues a little earlier in the afternoon. The moody captain seemed to have departed and there was nobody else visible on the terrace, yet the spaniels were going crazy trying to get up there. It was not a world-shaking mystery, but to Pennario it represented an intriguing diversion from the utter boredom of his job.

He hesitated, scanning the slopes above, then allowed the spaniels to pull him up the broad shallow steps to the terrace, their feet scrabbling on the smooth stone. Once on the upper level, the dogs headed straight for the base on which the bronze figures stood, then with low whines burrowed into the shrubbery behind.

Pennario leaned over them, parted the dark green leaves with his free arm, and looked down into the cave-like dimness.

They needed another thirty minutes, Garamond decided. If the discovery of Harald's body did not take place within that time he and his family would be clear of the atmosphere on one of the S.E.A. shuttles, before the alarm could be broadcast. They would not be out of immediate danger but the ship lying in polar orbit, the Bissendorf was his own private territory, a small enclave in which the laws of the Elizabethan universe did not hold full sway. Up there she could still destroy him, and eventually would, but it would be more difficult than on Earth where at a word she could mobilize ten thousand men against him.

'I need to go to the toilet,' Chris announced, turning from the rear window with an apologetic expression on his round face. He pummelled his abdomen as if to punish it for the intervention.

'You can wait till we reach the field.' Aileen pulled him down on to her knee and enclosed him with smooth brown arms.

A sense of unreality stole over Garamond as he watched his wife and son. Both were wearing lightweight indoor clothing and, of course, had no other belongings with them. It was incredible, unthinkable that – dressed as they were and so unprepared-they should be snatched from their natural ambience of sunlight and warm breezes, sheltering walls and quiet gardens, and that they should be projected into the deadliness of the space between the stars. The air in the car seemed to thin down abruptly, forcing Garamond to take deep breaths. He gazed at the diorama of buildings and foliage beyond the car windows, trying to think about his movements for the next vital half-hour, but his mind refused to work constructively. His thoughts lapsed into a fugue, a recycling of images and shocked sensory fragments. He watched for the hundredth time as the fatal millimetres of daylight opened between Harald's silhouette and the uncomprehending metal of the statue. And the boy's body had been so light. Almost as light as Chris. How could a package contain all the bone and blood and muscle and organs necessary to support life, and yet be so light? So insubstantial that a fall of three or four metres …

'Look, Dad!' Chris moved within the organic basketwork of his mother's arms. 'There's the field. Can we go on to your shuttle?'

'I'll try to arrange it.' Garamond stared through the wavering blur of the North Field's perimeter fence, wondering if he would see any signs of unusual activity.

Carlos Pennario allowed, the shrubs to spring together again and, for the first time since his youth, he crossed himself.

He backed away from what he had seen, dragging the frantic dogs with him, and looked around for help. There was nobody in sight. He opened his mouth with the intention of shouting at the top of his voice, of unburdening his dismay on the sleepy air, then several thoughts occurred to him almost at once. Pennario had seen Elizabeth Lindstrom only a few times, and always at a distance, but he had heard many stories told in the night-time quietness of the staff dormitory. He would have given a year's wages rather than be brought before her with the news that he had allowed one of her spaniels to choke on a chicken bone.

Now he was almost in the position of having to face Elizabeth in person and describe his part in the finding of her son's corpse.

Pennario tried to imagine what the President might do to the bringer of such news before she regained whatever slight measure of self-control she was supposed to have…

Then there was the matter of his superior, Arthur Kemp. Pennario had no right to be on the terrace in the first place, and to a man like Kemp that one transgression would be suggestive, would be proof, of others. He had no idea what had happened to the dead boy, but he knew the way Kemp's mind worked. Assuming that Pennario lived long enough to undergo an investigation, Kemp would swear to anything to avoid any association with guilt.

The realization that he was in mortal danger stimulated Pennario into decisive action. He knelt, gathered the spaniels into his arms and walked quickly down the steps to the lower levels. Shocked and afraid though he was, his mind retained those qualities which had lifted him successfully from near-starvation in Mexico to one of the few places in the world where there was enough air for a man to breathe. Locked away in his memory was a comprehensive timetable of Kemp's daily movements in and around Starflight House, and according to that schedule the acidulous little Scot would shortly be making his final inspection tour of the afternoon. The tour usually took him along the circular terrace, past the shrubbery in which Harald's body was hidden – and how much better it would have been if Domestic Supervisor Kemp had made the fearful discovery.

Pennario kept slanting downwards across the hill until he had reached the lowest point from which he could still see a sector of the upper terrace and gauge Kemp's progress along it. He moved into the shade of an ivy-covered loggia, set the dogs on the ground and pretended to be busy adjusting their silver collars. The excited animals fought to get free, but Pennario held them firmly in check.

It was important to him that they did not make their predictable dash to the terrace until Kemp was in exactly the right place to become involved with their discovery. Pennario glanced at his watch.

'Any minute now, my little friends,' he whispered. 'Any minute now.'

In contrast to what Garamond had feared, the field seemed quieter than usual, its broad expanses of ferrocrete mellowed to the semblance of sand by the fleeting sunlight. Low on the western horizon a complexity of small clouds was assembled like a fabulous army, their helmets and crests glowing with fire, and several vaporous banners reached towards the zenith in deepening pink. As the car drew to a halt outside the S.E.A. complex Garamond shielded his eyes, looked towards his assigned take-off point and saw the squat outline of the waiting shuttle. Its door was open and the boarding steps were in place. The sight filled him with a powerful urge to drive to the shuttle, get Aileen and Chris on board, and blast off towards safety. There were certain pre-flight formalities, however, and take off without observing them could lead to the wrong sort of radio message being beamed up to the Bissendorf ahead of him. He pushed a heavy lock of hair away from his forehead and smiled for the benefit of Aileen and the driver.

'Some papers to sign in here, then we'll take the sidewalk out to the shuttle,' he said easily as he opened the car door and got out.

'I thought Chris and I'd be going up to the observation floor/ Aileen replied, not moving from her seat.

'There's no fun in that, is there, Chris?' Garamond lifted the boy off Aileen's knee and set him down on the steps of the S.E.A. building. 'What's the point in having a Dad who's a flickerwing captain if you can't get a few extra privileges? You'd like to look right inside the shuttle, wouldn't you?'

'Yes, Dad.' Chris nodded, but with a curious reserve, as if he had sensed something of Aileen's unease.

'Of course, you would.' Garamond took Aileen's hand, drew her out of the car and slammed the door. 'That's all, driver – we can look after ourselves from here on.' The driver glanced back once, without speaking, and accelerated away towards the transport pool.

Aileen caught Garamond's arm. 'We're alone now, Vance. What's…?'

'Now you two stand right here on these steps and don't move till I come out. This won't take long.' Garamond sprinted up the steps, returned the salutes of the guards at the top, and hurried towards the S.E.A. Preflight Centre. The large square room looked unfamiliar when he entered, as though seen through the eyes of the young Vance Garamond who had been so impressed by it at the beginning of his first exploratory command. He ran to the long desk and slapped down his flight authorization documents.

'You're late, Captain Garamond,' commented a heavily built ex-quartermaster called Herschell, who habitually addressed outgoing captains with a note of rueful challenge which was meant to remind them he had not always held a desk job.

'I know – I couldn't get away from Liz.' Garamond seized a stylus and began scribbling his name on various papers as they were fed to him.

'Like that, was it? She couldn't let you go?'

'That's the way it was.'

'Pity. I'd say you've missed the tide.' Herschell's pink square face was sympathetic.

'Oh?'

'Yeah – look at the map.' Herschell pointed up at the vast solid-image chart of the Solar System and surrounding volume of interstellar space which floated below the domed ceiling. The solar wind, represented by yellow radiance, was as strong as ever and Garamond saw the healthy, bow-shaped shock wave on the sunward side of Earth, where the current impacted on the planet's geomagnetic field. Data on the inner spirals of the solar wind, however, were of interest only to interplanetary travellers – and his concern was with the ion count at the edge of the system and beyond. Garamond searched for the great arc of the shock front near the orbit of Uranus where the solar wind, attenuated by distance from Sol, built up pressure against the magnetic field of the galaxy. For a moment he saw nothing, then his eyes picked out an almost invisible amber halo, so faint that it could have represented nothing more than a tenth of an ion per cubic centimetre. He had rarely seen the front looking so feeble. It appeared that the sun was in a niggardly mood, unwilling to assist his ship far up the long gravity slope to interstellar space.

Garamond shifted his attention to the broad straggling bands of green, blue and red which plotted the galactic tides of fast-moving corpuscles as they swept across the entire region. These vagrant sprays of energetic particles and their movements meant as much to him as wind, wave and tide had to the skipper of a transoceanic sailing ship. All spacecraft built by Starflight – which meant all spacecraft built on Earth – employed intense magnetic fields to sweep up interstellar atomic debris for use as reaction mass. The system made it possible to conduct deep-space voyages in ships weighing as little as ten thousand tons, as against the million tons which would have been the minimum for a vessel which had to transport its own reaction mass.

Flickerwing ships had their own disadvantages in that their efficiency was subject to spatial 'weather'. The ideal mission profile was for a ship to accelerate steadily to the midpoint of its journey and decelerate at the same rate for the remainder of the trip, but where the harvest of charged particles was poor the rate of speed-change fell off. If that occurred in the first half of a voyage it meant that the vessel took longer than planned to reach destination; if it occurred in the second half the ship was deprived of the means to discard velocity and would storm through its target system at unmanageable speed, sometimes not coming to a halt until it had overshot by light-days. It was to minimize such uncertainties that Starflight maintained chains of automatic sensor stations whose reports, transmitted by low-energy tachyon beams, were continuously fed into weather charts.

And, as Garamond immediately saw, the conditions in which he hoped to achieve high-speed flight were freakishly, damnably bad.

More than half the volume of space covered by the map seemed entirely void of corpuscular flux, and such fronts as were visible in the remainder were fleeing away to the galactic south. Only one wisp of useful density – possibly the result of heavy particles entangling themselves in an irregularity in the interplanetary magnetic field – reached as far back as the orbit of Mars, and even that was withdrawing at speed.

'I've got to get out of here,' Garamond said simply.

Herschell handed him the traditional leather briefcase containing the flight authorization documents. 'Why don't you take off out of it, Captain? The Bissendorf is ready to travel, and I can sign the rest of this stuff by proxy.'

'Thanks.' Garamond took the briefcase and ran for the door.

'Don't let that ole bit of dust get away,' Herschell called after him, one flickerwing man to another. 'Scoop it up good.'

Garamond sprinted along the entrance hall, relieved at being able to respond openly to his growing sense of urgency. The sight of ships' commanders running for the slidewalks was quite a common one in the S.E.A. Centre when the weather was breaking. He found Aileen and Chris on the front steps, exactly where he had left them. Aileen was looking tired and worried, and holding the boy close to her side.

'All clear,' he said. He caught Aileen by the upper arm and urged her towards the slideway tunnel. She fell in step with him readily enough but he could sense her mounting unease. 'Let's go!'

'Where to, Vance?' She spoke quietly, but he understood she was asking him the big question, communicating on a treasured personal level which neither of them would ever willingly choose to disrespect. He glanced down at Chris. They were on the slidewalk now, slanting down into the tunnel and the boy seemed fascinated by the softly tremoring ride.

'When I was waiting to see the President this afternoon I was asked to take care of young Harald Lindstrom for an hour… The enormity of what he had to say stilled the words in his throat.

'What happened, Vance?'

'I… I didn't take care of him very well. He fell and killed himself.'

'Oh!' The colour seeped away from beneath the tan of Aileen's face. 'But how did you get away from…?'

'Nobody saw him fall. I hid the body in some bushes.'

'And now we're running?'

'As fast as we can go, sweet.'

Aileen put her hand on Chris's shoulder. 'Do you think Elizabeth would…?'

'Automatically. Instinctively. There'd be no way for her not to do it.'

Aileen's chin puckered as she fought to control the muscles around her mouth. 'Oh, Vance! This is terrible. Chris and I can't go up there.'

'You can, and you're going to.' Garamond put his arm around Aileen and was alarmed when she sagged against him with her full weight. He put his mouth close to her ear. 'I can't do this alone. I need your help to get Chris away from here.'

She straightened with difficulty. 'I'll try. Lots of women go to Terranova, don't they?'

'That's better.' Garamond gave her arm an encouraging squeeze and wondered if she really believed they could go to the one other human-inhabited Starflight-dominated world in the universe. 'Now, we're almost at the end of the tunnel. When we get up the ramp, pick Chris up and walk straight on to the shuttle with him as if it was a school bus. I'll be right behind you blocking the view of anybody who happens to be watching from the tower.'

'What will the other people say?'

'There'll be nobody else on the shuttle apart from the pilots, and I'll talk to them.'

'But won't the pilots object when they see us on board?'

'The pilots won't say a word,' Garamond promised, slipping his hand inside his jacket.

At Starflight House, high on the sculpted hill, the first man had already died.

Domestic Supervisor Arthur Kemp had been planning his evening meal when the two spaniels bounded past him and darted into the shrubbery on the long terrace. He paused, eyed them curiously, then pushed the screen of foliage aside. The light was beginning to fail, and Kemp – who came from the comparatively uncrowded, unpolluted, unravaged north of Scotland – lacked Carlos Pennario's sure instinct concerning matters of violent and premature death. He dragged Harald's body into the open, stared for a long moment at the black deltas of blood which ran from nostrils and ears, and began to scream into his wrist communicator.

Elizabeth Lindstrom was on the terrace within two minutes.

She would not allow anybody to touch her son's remains and, as the staff could not simply walk away, there formed a dense knot of people at the centre of which Elizabeth set up her court of enquiry. Standing over the small body, satin-covered abdomen glowing like a giant pearl, she spoke in a controlled manner at first. Only the Council members who knew her well understood the implications of the steadily rising inflexions in her voice, or of the way she had begun to finger a certain ruby ring on her right hand. These men, obliged by rank to remain close to the President, nevertheless tried to alter their positions subtly so that they were shielded by the bodies of other men, who in turn sensed their peril and acted accordingly. The result was that the circle around Elizabeth grew steadily larger and its surface tension increased.

It was into this arena of fear that Domestic Supervisor Kemp was thrust to give his testimony. He answered several of her questions with something approaching composure, but his voice faltered when-after he too had confirmed Captain Garamond's abrupt departure from the terrace – Elizabeth began pulling out her own hair in slow, methodical handfuls. For an endless minute the soft ripping of her scalp was the only sound on the terrace.

Kemp endured it for as long as was humanly possible, then turned to run. Elizabeth exploded him with the laser burst from her ring, and was twisting blindly to hose the others with its fading energies when her senior physician, risking his own life, fired a cloud of sedative drugs into the distended veins of her neck. The President lost consciousness almost as once, but she had time to utter three words: 'Bring me Garamond…'

three

Garamond crowded on to the stubby shuttlecraft with Aileen and looked forward, The door between the crew and passenger compartments was open, revealing the environment of instrument arrays and controls in which the pilots worked. A shoulder of each man, decorated with the ubiquitous Starflight symbol, was visible on each side of the central aisle, and Garamond could hear the preflight checks being carried out. Neither of the pilots looked back.

'Sit there,' Garamond whispered, pointing at a seat which was screened from the pilots' view by the main bulkhead. He put his fingers to his lips and winked at Chris, making it into a game. The boy nodded tautly, undeceived. Garamond went back to the entrance door and stood in it, waving to imaginary figures in the sidewalk tunnel, then went forward to the crew compartment.

'Take it away, Captain,' he said with the greatest joviality he could muster.

'Yes, sir.' The dark-chinned senior pilot glanced over his shoulder. 'As soon as Mrs Garamond and your son disembark.'

Garamond looked around the flight deck and found a small television screen showing a picture of the passenger compartment, complete with miniature images of Aileen and Chris. He wondered if the pilots had been watching it closely and how much they might have deduced from his actions.

'My wife and son are coming with us,' he said. 'Just for the ride.'

'I'm sorry, sir – their names aren't on my list.'

'This is a special arrangement I've just made with the President.'

'I'll have to check that with the tower.' There was a stubborn set to the pilot's bluish jaw as he reached for the communications switch.

'I assure you it's all right.' Garamond slid the pistol out of his jacket and used its barrel to indicate the runway ahead. 'Now, I want you to get all the normal clearances in a perfectly normal way and then do a maximum-energy ascent to my ship. I'm very familiar with the whole routine and I can fly this bug myself if necessary, so don't do any clever stuff which would make me shoot you.'

'I'm not going to get myself shot.' The senior pilot shrugged and his younger companion nodded vigorously. 'But how far do you think you're going to get, Captain?'

'Far enough – now take us out of here.' Garamond remained standing between the two seats. There was a subdued thud from the passenger door as it sealed itself, and then the shuttle surged forward. While monitoring the cross talk between the pilots and the North Field tower, Garamond studied the computer screen which was displaying flight parameters. The Bissendorf was in Polar Band One, the great stream of Starflight spacecraft – mainly population transfer vessels, but with a sprinkling of Exploratory Arm ships – which girdled the Earth at a height of more than a hundred kilometres. Incoming ships were allocated parking slots in any of the thirty-degree sectors marked by twelve space stations, their exact placing being determined by the amount of maintenance or repair they needed. The Bissendorf had been scheduled for a major refitting lasting three months, and was close in to Station 8, which the computer showed to be swinging up over the Aleutian Islands. A maximum-energy rendezvous could be accomplished in about eleven minutes.

'I take it you want to catch the Bissendorf this time round,' the senior pilot said as the shuttle's drive tubes built up thrust and the white runway markers began to flicker under its nose like tracer fire.

Garamond nodded. 'You take it right.'

'It's going to be rough on your wife and boy.' There was an unspoken question in the comment.

'Not as rough as …' Garamond decided to do the pilots a favour by telling them nothing – they too would be caught up in Elizabeth's enquiries.

"There's a metallizer aerosol in the locker beside you,' the co-pilot volunteered, speaking for the first time.

'Thanks.' Garamond found the aerosol container and passed it back to Aileen. 'Spray your clothes with this. Do Chris as well.'

'What's it for?' Aileen was trying to sound unconcerned, but her voice was small and cold.

'It won't do your clothes any harm, but it makes them react against the restraint field inside the ship when you move. It turns them into a kind of safety net and also stops you floating about when you're in free fall.' Garamond had forgotten how little Aileen knew about spaceflight or air travel. She had never even been in an ordinary jetliner, he recalled. The great age of air tourism was long past – if a person was lucky enough to live in an acceptable part of the Earth he tended to stay put.

'You can use it first,' Aileen said.

'I don't need it-all space fliers' uniforms are metallized when they're made.' Garamond smiled encouragingly. The pilot didn't know how right he was, he thought. This is going to be rough on my wife and boy. He returned his attention to the pilots as the shuttle lifted its nose and cleared the ground. As soon as the undercarriage had been retracted and the craft was aero-dynamically clean the drive tubes boosted it skywards on a pink flare of recombining ions. Garamond, standing behind the pilots, was pushed against the bulkhead and held there by the sustained acceleration. Behind him, Chris began to sob.

'Don't worry, son,' Garamond called. 'This won't last long. We'll soon be…'

'North Field to shuttlecraft Sahara Tango 4299,' a voice crackled from the radio. 'This is Fleet Commodore Keegan calling. Come in, please.'

'Don't answer that,' Garamond ordered. The clock behind his eyes had come to an abrupt and sickening halt.

'But that was Keegan himself. Are you mixed up in something big, Captain?'

'Big enough.' Garamond hesitated as the radio repeated its message. 'Tune that out and get me Commander Napier on my bridge.' He gave the pilot a microwave frequency which would by-pass the Bissendorf's main communications room.

'But…'

'Immediately.' He raised the pistol against multiple gravities. 'This is a hair trigger and there's a lot of G-force piling up on my finger.'

'I'm making the call now.' The pilot spun a small vernier on the armrest of his chair and in a few seconds had established contact.

'Commander Napier here.' Garamond felt a surge of relief as he recognized the cautious tones Napier always employed when he did not know who was on the other end of a channel.

'This is an urgent one, Cliff.' Garamond spoke steadily. 'Have you had any communications about me from Starflight House?'

'Ah… no. Was I supposed to?'

'That doesn't matter now. Here's a special instruction which I'm asking you to obey immediately and without question. Do you understand?'

'Okay, Vance.' Napier sounded puzzled, but not suspicious or alarmed.

'I'm on the shuttle and will rendezvous with you in a few minutes, but right now I want you to throw the ultimate master switch on the external communications system. Right now, Cliff!'

There was a slight pause, during which Napier must have been considering the facts that what he had been asked to do was illegal and that under Starflight Regulations he was not obliged to obey such an order – then the channel went dead.

Garamond closed his eyes for a second. He knew that Napier had also thought about their years together on the Bissendorf, all the light-years they had covered, all the alien suns, all the hostile useless planets, all the disappointments which had studded their quest for lebensraum, all the bottles of whisky they had killed while in orbit around lost, lonely points of light both to console themselves and to make the next leg of a mission seem bearable. If he and Aileen and Chris had any chance of life it lay in the fact that a spaceship was an island universe, a tiny enclave in which Elizabeth's power was less than absolute. While in Earth orbit the ship's officers would have been forced to obey any direct order from Starflight Admincom, but he had successfully blocked the communications channels … A warning chime from the shuttle's computer interrupted Garamond's thoughts.

'We have some pretty severe course and speed corrections coming up,' the younger pilot said. 'Do you want to advise your wife?'

Garamond nodded gratefully. The sky in the forward view panels had already turned from deep blue to black as the shuttle's tubes hurled it clear of the atmosphere. In a maximum-energy ballistic-style sortie it was understood that there was no time for niceties – the computer which was controlling the flight profile would subject passengers to as much stress, within programmed limits, as they could stand. Garamond edged backwards until he could see Aileen and Chris.

'Get ready for some rollercoaster stuff,' he told them. 'Don't try to fight the ship or you'll be sick. Just go with it and the restraint field will hold you in place.' They both nodded silently, in unison, eyes fixed on his face, and he felt a crashing sense of responsibility and guilt. He had barely finished speaking when a series of lateral corrections twisted space out of its normal shape, pulling him to the left and then upwards away from the floor. The fierce pressure of the bulkhead against his back prevented him from being thrown around but he guessed that his wife and son must have been lifted out of their seats. An involuntary gasp from Aileen confirmed her distress.

'It won't be long now,' he told her. Stars were shining in the blackness ahead of the shuttle, and superimposed on the random points of light was a strip of larger, brighter motes, most of which had visible irregularities of shape. Polar Band One glittered like a diamond bracelet, at the midpoint of which Sector Station 8 flared with a yellowish brilliance. The two distinct levels of luminosity, separating man-made objects from the background of distant suns, created a three-dimensional effect, an awareness of depth and cosmic scale which Garamond rarely experienced when far into a mission. He remained with the pilots, braced between their seats and the bulkhead, while the shuttle drew closer to the stream of orbiting spaceships and further corrections were applied to match speed and direction. By this time Starflight Admincom would have tried to contact the Bissendorf and would probably be taking other measures to prevent his escape.

'There's your ship,' the senior pilot commented, and the note of satisfaction in his voice put Garamond on his guard. 'It looks like you're a little late, Captain – there's another shuttle already drifting into its navel.'

Garamond, unused to orienting himself with the cluttered traffic of the Polar Band, had to search the sky for several seconds before he located the Bissendorf and was able to pick out the silvered bullet of a shuttle closing in on the big ship's transfer dock. He felt a cool prickling on his forehead. It was impossible for the other shuttle to have made better time on the haul up from Earth, but Admincom must have been able to divert one which was already in orbit and instruct it to block the Bissendorf's single transfer dock.

'What do you want to do, Captain?' The blue-chinned senior pilot had begun to enjoy himself. 'Would you like to hand over that gun now?'

Garamond shook his head. 'The other shuttle's making a normal docking approach. Get in there before him.'

'It's too late.'

Garamond placed the muzzle of the pistol against the pilot's neck. 'Ram your nose into that dock, sonny.'

'You're crazy, but I'll try.' The pilot fixed his eyes on the expanding shape of the Bissendorf, then spun verniers to bring his sighting crosshairs on to the red-limned target of the dock which was already partially obscured by the other shuttle. As he did so the retro tubes began firing computer-controlled bursts which cut their forward speed. 'I told you it was too late.'

'Override the computer,' Garamond snapped. 'Kill those retros.'

'Do you want to commit suicide?'

'Do you?' Garamond pressed the pistol into the other man's spine and watched as he tripped out the autocontrol circuits. The image of the competing shuttle and the docking target expanded in the forward screen with frightening speed.

The pilot instinctively moved backwards in his seat. 'We're going to hit the other shuttle, for Christ's sake!'

'I know,' Garamond said calmly. 'And after we do you'll have about two seconds to get those crosshairs back on target. Now let's see how good you are.'

The other shuttle ballooned ahead of and slightly above them until they were looking right into its main driver tubes, there was a shuddering clang which Garamond felt in his bones, the shuttle vanished, and the vital docking target slewed away to one side. Events began to happen in slow motion for Garamond. He had time to monitor every move the pilot made as he fired emergency corrective jets which wrenched the ship's nose back on to something approximating its original bearing, time to brace himself as retros hammered on the craft's frame, even time to note and be grateful for the discovery that the pilot was good. Then the shuttle speared into the Bissendorf's transfer dock at five times the maximum permitted speed and wedged itself into the interior arrester rings with a shrieking impart which deformed its hull.

Garamond, the only person on the shuttle not protected by a seat, was driven forward but was saved from injury by the restraint field's reaction against any violent movement of his clothing. He felt a surge of induced heat pass through the material, and at the same time became aware of a shrill whistling sound from the rear of the ship. A popping in his ears told him that air was escaping from the shuttle into the vacuum of the Bissendorf's dock. A few seconds later Chris began to sob, quietly and steadily. Garamond went aft, knelt before the boy and tried to soothe him.

'What's happening, Vance?' The brightly-coloured silk of Aileen's dress was utterly incongruous.

'Rough docking, that's all. We're losing some air but they'll be pressurizing the dock and…' He hesitated as a warbling note came from the shuttle's address system. 'They've done it – that's the equalization signal to say we can get out now. There's nothing to worry about.'

'But we're falling.'

'We aren't falling, honey. Well, we are-but not downwards…' It came to Garamond that he had no time at that moment to introduce his wife to celestial mechanics. 'I want you and Chris to sit right here for a few minutes. Okay?'

He stood Up, opened the passenger door and looked out at a group of officers and engineering personnel who had gathered on the docking bay's main platform. Among them was the burly figure of Cliff Napier. Garamond launched himself upwards from the sill and allowed the slight drag of the ship's restraint field to curve his weightless flight downwards on to the steel platform where his boots took a firm grip. Napier caught his arm while the other men were saluting.

'Are you all right, Vance? That was the hairiest docking I ever saw.'

'I'm fine. Explain it all later, Cliff. Get through to the engine deck and tell them I want immediate full power.'

'Immediate?'

"Yes – there's a streamer of nova dust lagging behind the main weather front and we're going to catch it. I presume you've preset the course.'

'But what about the shuttle and its crew?'

'We'll have to take the shuttle with us, Cliff. The shuttle and everybody on it.'

'I see.' Napier raised his wrist communicator to his lips and ordered full power. He was a powerfully built bull-necked man with hands like the scoops of a mechanical digger, but there was a brooding intelligence in his eyes. 'Is this our last mission for Starflight?'

'It's my last, anyway.' Garamond looked around to make sure nobody was within earshot. 'I'm in deep, Cliff – and I've dragged you in with me.'

'It was my decision – I didn't have to pull the plug on the communications boys. Are they coming after you?'

'With every ship that Starflight owns.'

'They won't catch us,' Napier said confidently as the deck began to press up under their feet, signalling that the Bissendorf was accelerating out of orbit. 'We'll ride that wisp of dust up the hill to Uranus, and when we've caught the tide … Well, there's a year's supplies on board.'

'Thanks.' Garamond shook hands with Napier, yet – while comforted by the blunt human contact – he wondered how long it would be before either of them would refer openly to the bitter underlying reality of their situation. They were all dressed up with a superb ship. But a century of exploration by the vast Starflight armada had proved one thing.

There was nowhere to go.

four

They were able to put off the decision for three days.

During that time there was only one direction in which the Bissendorf could logically go – towards the galactic south, in pursuit of the single vagrant wisp of particles which lingered behind the retreating weather fronts. They had caught it, barely, and the vast insubstantial ramjets formed by the ship's magnetic fields had begun to gather power, boosting it towards light-speed and beyond. It was the prototypes of starships such as the Bissendorf which, a century earlier, had all but demolished Einsteinian physics. On the first tentative flights there had been something of the predicted increase in mass, but no time dilation effect, no impenetrable barrier at the speed of light. A new physics had been devised – based mainly on the work of the Canadian mathematician, Arthur Arthur – which took into account the lately observed fact that when a body of appreciable mass and gravitic field reached speeds approaching .20 it entered new frames of reference. Once a ship crossed the threshold velocity it created its own portable universe in which different rules applied, and it appeared that the great universal constant was not the speed of light. It was time itself.

On his earlier missions Garamond had been grateful that Einstein's work had its limitations and that time did not slow down for the space traveller – he would have had no stomach for finding his wife ageing ten years for his one, or having a son who quickly grew older than himself. But on this voyage, his last for Starflight, with Aileen and Christopher aboard, it would have resolved many difficulties had he been able to trace a vast circle across one part of the galaxy and return to Earth to find, as promised by Einstein, that Elizabeth Lindstrom was long dead. Arthurian physics had blocked that notional escape door, however, and he was faced with the question of where to go in his year of stolen time.

His thinking on the matter was influenced by two major considerations. The first was that he had no intention of condemning the 450-strong crew of the Bissendorf to a slow death in an unknown part of the galaxy in a year's time. The ship had to return to Earth and therefore his radius of action was limited to the distance it could cover in six months. Even supposing he travelled in a straight line to one preselected destination, the six-month limitation meant he would not reach far beyond the volume of space already totally explored by Starflight. Chances of this one desperate flight producing a habitable world on which to hide had been microscopic to begin with; when modified by the distance factor they vanished into realms of fantasy.

The other major consideration was a personal one. Garamond already knew where he wanted to go, but was having trouble justifying the decision.

'Cluster 803 is your best bet,' Clifford Napier said. He was leaning back in a simulated leather chair in Garamond's quarters, and in his hand was a glass of liqueur whisky which he had not yet tasted but was holding up to the light to appreciate its colour. His heavy-lidded brown eyes were inscrutable as he continued with his thesis.

'You can make it with time to spare. It's dense – average distance between suns half a light-year – so you'd be able to check a minimum of eight systems before having to pull out. And it's prime exploration territory, Vance. As you know, the S.E.A. Board recommended that 803 should be given high priority when the next wave is being planned.'

Garamond sipped his own whisky, with its warmth of forgotten summers. 'It makes sense, all right.' The two men sat without speaking for a time, listening to the faint hum of the ship's superconducting flux pumps which was always present even in the engineered solitude of the skipper's rooms.

'It makes sense,' Napier said finally, 'but you don't want to go there. Right?'

'Well, maybe it makes too much sense. Admincom could predict that we'd head for 803 and send a hundred ships into the region. A thousand ships.'

'Think they could catch us?'

'There's always that chance,' Garamond said. 'It's been proved that four flickerwings getting just ahead of another and matching velocities can control it better than its own skipper just by deciding how much reaction mass to let slip by.'

There was another silence, then Napier gave a heavy sigh. 'All right, Vance – where's your map?'

'Which map?'

'The one showing Pengelly's Star. That's where you want to go, isn't it?'

Garamond felt a prick of chagrin at having his innermost thoughts divined so accurately by the other man. 'My father actually met Rufus Pengelly once,' he said defensively. 'He told me he'd never known a man less capable of trickery – and if there was one thing my father could do it was judge character just by…' He broke off as Napier began to laugh.

'Vance, you don't need to sell the idea to me. We're not going to find the third world, so it doesn't matter where we go, does it?'

Garamond's chagrin was replaced by a growing sense of relief. He went to his desk, opened a drawer and took out four large photoprints which appeared to be of greyish metallic or stone surfaces on which were arranged a number of darker spots in a manner suggestive of star maps. The fuzziness of the markings and the blotchy texture of the background were due to the fact that the prints were computer reconstructions of star charts which had been destroyed by fire.

A special kind of fire, Garamond thought. The one which robbed us of a neighbour.

Sagania had been discovered early in the exploratory phase. It was less than a hundred light-years from Sol, only a quarter of the separation the best statisticians had computed as the average for technical civilizations throughout the galaxy. Even more remarkable was the coincidence of timescales. In the geological lifespans of Sagania and Earth the period in which intelligent life developed and flourished represented less than a second in the life of a man, yet the fantastic gamble had come off. Saganians and Men had coexisted, against all the odds, within interstellar hailing distance, each able to look into the night sky and see the other's parent sun without optical aid. Both had taken the machine-using philosophy as far as the tapping of nuclear energy. Both had shared the outward urge, planned the building of starships, and – with their sub-beacons trembling in the blackness like candles in far-off windows – it was inevitable that there would have been a union.

Except that one day on Sagania – at a time when the first civilizations were being formed in the Valley of the Two Rivers on Earth – somebody had made a mistake. It may have been a politician who overplayed his hand, or a scientist who dealt the wrong cards, but the result was that Sagania lost its atmosphere, and its life, in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction which surged around the planet like a tidal wave of white fire.

Archaeologists from Earth, arriving seven thousand years later, had been able to discover very little about the final phase of Saganian civilization. Ironically or justly, according to one's point of view, the beings who had represented the peak of the planet's culture were the ones who removed virtually all trace of their existence. It was the older, humbler Saganian culture which, protected by the crust of centuries, had been uncovered by the electronic probes. Among the artifacts turned up were fragments of star maps which excited little comment, even though a few researchers had noticed that some of them showed a star which did not exist.

'This is the earliest fragment,' Garamond said, setting the photoprint on a table beside Napier. He pointed at a blurry speck. 'And that's the sun we've christened Pengelly's Star. Here's another map tentatively dated five hundred years later, and as you see – no Pengelly's Star. One explanation is that at some time between when these two maps were drawn the star vanished.'

'Maybe it got left out by mistake,' Napier prompted, aware that Garamond wanted to go over all the familiar arguments once more.

'That can't be – because we have two later maps, covering the same region but drawn several centuries apart, and they don't record the star either. And a visual check right now shows nothing in that region.'

'Which proves it died.'

'That's the obvious explanation. A quick but unspectacular flareup – then extinction. Now here's the fourth map, the one found by Doctor Pengelly. As you can see, this map shows our star.'

'Which proves it's older than maps two and three.'

'Pengelly claims he excavated it at the highest level of all, that it's the youngest.'

'Which proves he was a liar. This sort of thing has happened before, Vance.' Napier flicked the glossy prints with blunt fingers. 'What about that affair in Crete a few hundred years ago? Archaeologists are always…'

'Trying to win acclaim for themselves. Pengelly had nothing to gain by lying about where he found the fragment. I personally believe it was drawn only a matter of decades before the Big Burn, well into the Saganians space-going era.' Garamond spoke with the flatness of utter conviction. 'You'll notice that on the fourth map the star isn't represented by a simple dot. There are traces of a circle around it.'

Napier shrugged and took the first sip of his whisky. 'It was a map showing the positions of extinct suns.'

'That's a possibility. Possibly even a probability, but I'm betting that Saganian space technology was more advanced than we suspect. I'm betting that Pengelly's Star was important to them in some way we don't understand. They might have found a habitable world there.'

'It wouldn't be habitable now. Not after its sun dying.'

'No – but there might be other maps, underground installations, anything.' Garamond suddenly heard his own words as though they were being spoken by a stranger, and he was appalled at the flimsiness of the logical structure which supported his family's hopes for a future. He glanced instinctively at the door leading to the bedroom where Aileen and Chris were asleep. Napier, perceptive as ever, did not reply and for a while they drank in silence. Blocks of coloured light, created for decorative purposes by the same process which produced solid-image weather maps, drifted through the air of the room in random patterns, mingling and merging. Their changing reflections seemed to animate the gold snail on Garamond's desk.

'We never found any Saganian starships,' Napier said.

'It doesn't mean they didn't have them. You'd find their ships anywhere but in the vicinity of a burnt-out home world.' There was another silence and the light-cubes continued to drift through the room like prisms of insubstantial gelatin.

Napier finished his drink and got up to refill his glass. 'You're almost making some kind of a case, but why did the Exploratory Arm never follow it up?'

'Let's level with each other,' Garamond said. How many years is it since you really believed that Starflight wants to find other worlds?'

'I…'

'They've got Terranova, which they sell off in hectare lots as if it was a Long Island development property in the old days. They've got all the ships, too. Man's destiny is in the stars – just so long as he is prepared to sign half his life away to Starflight for the ride, and the other half for a plot of land. It's a smooth-running system, Cliff, and a few cheap new worlds showing up would spoil it. That's why there are so few ships, comparatively speaking, in the S.E.A.'

'But…'

'They're more subtle than the railroad and mining companies in the States were when they set up their private towns, but the technique's the same. What are you trying to say?'

'I'm trying to agree with you.' Napier punched his fist through a cube of lime-green radiance which floated away unaffected. 'It doesn't matter a damn where we go in this year, so let's hunt down Pengelly's Star. Have you any idea where it ought to be?'

'Some. Have a look at this chart.' As they walked over to the universal machine in the corner Garamond felt a sense of relief that Napier had been so easy to convince – to his own mind it gave the project a semblance of sanity. When he was within voice-acceptance range of the machine he called up the map it had prepared for him. A three-dimensional star chart appeared in the air above the console. One star trailed a curving wake of flowing red dashes in contrast to the solid green lines which represented the galactic drift of the others.

'I had no direct data on how far Pengelly's Star was from Sagania,' Garamond said. 'But the fact that we're interested in it carries the implication that it was a Sol-type sun. This gives an approximate value for its intrinsic luminosity and, as the dot representing it on the earliest Saganian map was about equal in size to other existing stars of first magnitude, I was able to assign a distance from Sagania.'

'There's a lot of assuming and assigning going on there,' Napier said doubtfully.

'Not all that much. Now, the stars throughout the entire region share the same proper motion and speed so, although they've all travelled a long way in seven thousand years, we can locate Pengelly's Star on this line with a fair degree of certainty.'

'Certainty, he says. What's the computed journey time? About four months?'

'Less if there's the right sort of dust blowing around.'

'It'll be there,' Napier said in a neutral voice. 'It's an ill wind…'

Later, when Napier had left to get some sleep, Garamond ordered the universal machine to convert an entire wall of the room into a forward-looking viewscreen. He sat for a long time in a deep chair, his drink untouched, staring at the stars and thinking about Napier's final remark. Part of the invisible galactic winds from which the Bissendorf drew its reaction mass had been very ill winds for somebody, sometime, somewhere. Heavy particles, driven across the galactic wheel by the forces of ancient novae, were the richest and most sought-after harvest of all. An experienced flickerwing man could tell when his engine intakes had begun to feed on such a cloud just by feeling the deck grow more insistent against his feet. But a sun going nova engulfed its planets, converting them and everything on them to incandescent gas, and at each barely perceptible surge of the ship Garamond wondered if his engines were feeding on the ghosts of dawn-time civilizations, obliterating all their dreams, giving the final answer to all their questions.

He fell asleep sitting at the viewscreen, on the dark edge of the abyss.

Aileen Garamond had been ill for almost a week.

Part of the trouble was due to shock and the subsequent stress of being catapulted into a difficult environment, but Garamond was surprised to discover that his wife was far more sensitive than he to minute changes in acceleration caused by the ship crossing weather zones. He explained to her that the Bissendorf relied largely on interstellar hydrogen for reaction mass, ionizing it by continuously firing electron beams ahead of the ship, then sweeping it up with electromagnetic fields which guided it through the engine intakes. As the distribution of hydrogen was constant the ship would have had constant acceleration, and its crew would have enjoyed an unchanging apparent gravity, had there been no other considerations. Space, however, was not the quiescent vacuum described by the old Earth-bound astronomers. Vagrant clouds of charged particles from a dozen different kinds of sources swept through it like winds and tides, heavy and energetic, clashing, deflecting, creating silent storms where they met each other head-on.

"On available hydrogen alone our best acceleration would be half a gravity or less,' Garamond said. 'That's why we value the high-activity regions and, where possible, plot courses which take us through them. And that's why you feel occasional changes in your weight.'

Aileen thought for a moment. 'Couldn't you vary the efficiency of the engines to compensate for those changes?'

'Hey!' Garamond gave a pleased laugh. 'That's the normal practice on a passenger ship. They run at roughly nine tenths of full power and this is automatically stepped up or down as the ship enters poor or rich volumes of space, so that shipboard gravity remains constant. But Exploratory Arm ships normally keep going full blast, and on a trip like this one…Garamond fell silent.

'Go on, Vance.' Aileen sat up in the bed, revealing her familiar tawny torso. 'You can't take it easy when you're being hunted.'

'It isn't so much that we're being hunted, it's just that to make the best use of our time we ought to move as fast as possible.'

Aileen got out of the bed and came towards where he was seated, her nakedness incongruous in the functional surroundings of his quarters. 'There's no point in our going to Terra-nova, is there? Isn't that what you're telling me?'

He leaned his face against the warm cushion of her belly. 'The ship can keep going for about a year. After that…'

'And we won't find a new planet. One we can five on, I mean.'

'There's always the chance.'

'How much of a chance?'

'It has taken the entire fleet a hundred years of searching to find one habitable planet. Work it out for yourself.'

'I see.' Aileen stood with him for a moment, almost abstractedly holding his face against herself, then she turned away with an air of purpose. 'It's about time for that guided tour of the ship you promised Christopher and me.'

'Are you sure you're feeling well enough?'

'I'll get well enough,' she assured him.

Garamond suddenly felt happier than he had expected to be ever again. He nodded and went into the main room where Chris was eating breakfast. As soon as the boy had got over his unfortunate introduction to spaceflight on board the shuttle, he had adapted quickly and easily to his new surroundings. Garamond had eased things as much as possible by putting in very little time in the Bissendorf s control room, allowing Napier and the other senior officers to run the ship. He helped his son to dress and by the time he had finished Aileen had joined them, looking slightly self-conscious in the dove-grey nurse's coverall he had ordered for her from the quartermaster.

'You look fine,' he said before she could ask the age-old question.

Aileen examined herself critically. 'What was wrong with my dress?'

'Nothing, if you're on the recreation deck, but you must wear functional clothing when moving about the other sections of the ship. There aren't any other wives on board, and I don't like to rub it in.'

'But you told me a third of the crew were women.'

'That's right. We have a hundred-and-fifty female crew of varying ages and rank. On a long trip there's always a lot of short-term coupling going on, and occasionally there's a marriage, but no woman is taken on for purely biological reasons. Everybody has a job to do.'

'Don't sound so stuffy, Vance.' Aileen looked down at Christopher, then back at her husband. 'What about Christopher? Does everybody know why we're here?'

'No. I blocked the communications channels while we were on the shuttle. The one other person on board who knows the whole story is Cliff Napier – all the others can only guess I'm in some sort of a jam, but they won't be too concerned about it.' Garamond smiled as he remembered the old flickerwingers' joke. 'It's a kind of relativity effect – the faster and farther you go, the smaller the President gets.'

'Couldn't they have heard about it on the radio since then?'

Garamond shook his head emphatically. 'It's impossible to communicate with a ship when it's under way. No signal can get through the fields. The crew will probably decide I walked out on Elizabeth the way a commander called Witsch once did. If anything, I'll go up in their estimation.'

It took more than an hour to tour the various sections and levels of the Bissendorf, starting with the command deck and moving 'downwards' through the various administrative, technical and workshop levels to the field generating stations, and the pods containing the flux pumps and hydrogen fusion plant. At the end of the tour Garamond realized, with a dull sense of astonishment, that for a while he had managed to forget that he and his family were under sentence of death.

Boosted by the ion-rich tides of space, the ship maintained an average acceleration of 13 metres per second squared. Punishing though this was to the crew, whose weight had apparently increased by one third, it was a rate of speed-increase which would have required several months before the Bissendorf could have reached the speed of light under Einsteinian laws. After only seven weeks, however, the ship had attained a speed of fifty million metres a second – the magical threshold figure above which Arthurian physics held sway – and new phenomena, inexplicable in terms of low-speed systems, were observed. To those on board acceleration remained constant, yet the Bissendorf''s speed increased sharply until, at the mid-point of the voyage, only twelve days later, it was travelling at vast multiples of the speed of light. Retardation produced a mirror image of the distance-against-time graph, and in an elapsed time of four months the ship was in the computed vicinity of Pengelly's Star.

'Sorry, Vance.' Cliff Napier's heavy-boned face was sombre as he spoke. 'There's just no sign of it. Yamoto says that if we were within ten light-years of a black sun his instruments couldn't miss it.'

'Is he positive?'

'He's positive. In fact, according to him there's less spatial background activity than normal.'

I'm not going to let it happen, Garamond thought irrationally. Aloud he said, 'Let's go down to the observatory – I want to talk to Yamoto about this.'

'I'll put him on your viewer now.'

'No, I want to see him in person.' Garamond left the central command console and nodded to Gunther, the second exec, to take over. This was the moment he had been dreading since the Bissendorf's engines had been shut down an hour earlier, making it possible – in the absence of the all-devouring intake fields – to carry out radiation checks of the surrounding space. The reason he was going to the observatory in person was that he had a sudden need to move his arms and legs, to respond to the crushing sense of urgency which had been absent while the ship was in flight and now was back with him again. He wanted some time away from the watchful eyes of the bridge personnel.

'I'm sorry, Vance.' Napier always had trouble adjusting to zero-gravity conditions and his massive figure swayed precariously as he walked in magnetic boots to the elevator shaft.

'You said that before.'

'I know, but I'd begun to believe we were on to something, and somehow I feel guilty over the way it has turned out.'

'That's crazy-we always knew it was a long shot,' Garamond said. You liar, he told himself. You didn't believe it was a long shot at all. You had convinced yourself you'd find a signpost to the third world because you couldn't face the fact that you condemned your wife and son to death.

As the elevator was taking him down he thought back, for perhaps the thousandth time, to that afternoon on the terrace at Starflight House. All he had had to do was keep an eye on Harald Lindstrom, to refuse when asked for permission to run, to do what anybody else would have done in the same circumstances. Instead, he had let the boy trick him into doing his hardened spacefarer bit, then he had allowed himself to be pressured, then he had turned his back and indulged in daydreams while Harald was climbing, then he had been too slow in reaching the statue while the first fatal millimetre of daylight opened up between the boy's fingers and the metal construction and he was falling… and falling… falling.

'Here we are.' Napier opened the elevator door, revealing a tunnel-like corridor at the end of which was the Bissendorf's astronomical observatory.

'Thanks.' Garamond fought to suppress a sense of unreality as he walked out of the elevator. He saw, as in a dream, the white-clad figure of Sammy Yamoto standing at the far end of the corridor waving to him. His brain was trying in a numbed way to deal with the paradox that moments of truth, those instants when reality cannot be avoided, always seem unreal. And the truth was that his wife and child were going to die. Because of him.

'For a man who found nothing,' Napier commented, 'Sammy Yamoto's looking pretty excited.'

Garamond summoned his mind back from grey wanderings.

Yamoto came to meet him, plum-coloured lips trembling slightly. 'We've found something! After I spoke to Mister Napier I became curious over the fact that there was less matter per cubic centimetre than the galactic norm. It was as if the region had been swept by a passing sun, yet there was no sun around.'

'What did you find?'

'I'd already checked out the electro-magnetic spectrum and know there couldn't be a sun nearby, but I got a crazy impulse and checked the gravitic spectrum anyway.' Yamoto was a fifty-year-old man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock. Garamond felt the first stirrings of a powerful elation.

'Go on,' Napier said from behind him.

'I found a gravity source of stellar magnitude less than a tenth of a light-year away, so…'

'I knew it!' Napier's voice was hoarse. 'We've found Pengelly's Star.'

Garamond's eyes were locked on the astronomer's. 'Let Mister Yamoto speak.'

'So I took some tachyonic readings to get an approximation of the object's size and surface composition, and… You aren't going to believe this. Mister Garamond.'

'Try me,' Garamond said.

'As far as I can tell…' Yamoto swallowed painfully. 'As far as I can tell, the object out there… the thing we have discovered is a spaceship over three hundred million kilometres in diameter!'

five

Like everyone else on board the Bissendorf, Garamond spent a lot of time at the forward viewscreens during the long days of the approach to the sphere.

He attended many meetings, accompanied by Yamoto who had become one of the busiest and most sought-after men on the ship. At first the Chief Astronomer had wanted to take advantage of the drive shut-down period to get a tachyonic signal announcing his discovery off to Earth. Garamond discreetly did not point out his own role as prime mover in the find. Instead he made Yamoto aware of the danger of letting fame-hungry professional rivals appear on the scene too early, and at the same time he insured against risks by ordering an immediate engine restart.

Yamoto went back to work, but the curious thing was that even after a full week of concentrated activity he knew little more about the sphere than had been gleaned in his first hurried scan. He confirmed that it had a diameter of some 320,000,000 kilometres, or just over two astronomical units; he confirmed that its surface was smooth to beyond the limits of resolution, certainly the equivalent of finely machined steel; he confirmed that the sphere emitted no radiation other than on the gravitic spectrum, and that analysis of this proved it to be hollow. In that week the only new data he produced were that the object's sphericity was perfect to within the possible margin of error, and that it rotated. On the question of whether it was a natural or an artificial object he would venture no professional opinion.

Garamond turned all these factors over in his mind, trying to gauge their relevance to his own situation. The sphere, whatever its nature, no matter what its origins might be, was a startling find – the fact that it had been indicated on an antique Saganian star chart radically altered the accepted views about the dead race's technological prowess. Possibly the whole science of astronomy would be affected, but not the pathetically short futures of his wife and child. What had he been hoping for? A fading sun which still emitted some life-giving warmth? An Earth-type planet with a vast network of underground caverns leading down into the heat of its core? A race of friendly humanoids who would say, 'Come and live with us and we'll protect your family from the President of Starflight'?

It was in the nature of hope that it could survive on such preposterous fantasies. But only when they were confined to the subconscious, where – as long as they existed at all – the emotions could equate them with genuine prospects of survival, enabling the man on the scaffold steps to retain his belief that something could still turn up to save him. Garamond and his wife and boy were on the scaffold steps, and the fantasies of hope were being dissipated by the awful presence of the sphere.

Garamond found that trying to comprehend its size produced an almost physical pain between his temples. The object was big enough by astronomical standards, so large that with Sol positioned at its centre the Earth's orbit would be within the shell, assuming that the outer surface was a shell. It was so huge that, from distances which would have reduced Sol to nothing more than a bright star, it was clearly visible to the unaided eye as a disc of blackness against the star clouds of the galactic lens. Garamond watched it grow and grow in his screens until it filled the entire field of view with its dark, inconceivable bulk – and yet it was still more than 15,000,000 kilometres away.

Something within him began to cringe from it. In the early stages of the approach he had nursed the idea that, because of the smoothness of its surface, the sphere had to be an artifact. The notion faded when exposed to the mind-punishing reality of the sphere's magnitude, because there was no way to visualize engineering on that scale, to conceive of a technology so far beyond anything mankind could dream of achieving. Then, in the final stages of the approach, the Bissendorf's sensors became aware of a planet orbiting outside the sphere.

There was no optical evidence of the planet's existence, but a study of its gravitic emissions showed that it was of approximately the same diameter and mass as Earth, and that its almost-circular orbit lay some 80,000,000 kilometres outside the sphere's surface. Although the discovery of the planet was of value in itself, the real importance lay in what could now be deduced about the nature of the sphere.

Chief Astronomer Yamoto sent Garamond a report which stated, unequivocally, that it was a thin shell enclosing an otherwise normal sun.

By the time the ship had matched velocities with the hidden star and slipped into an equatorial parking orbit, it was just over two thousand kilometres from the surface of the dark sphere. The range was inconvenient for the rocket-propelled buggy which would carry the exploration party, but the Bissendorf had never been intended for close manoeuvring, and Garamond decided against jockeying in closer with the rarely-used ion tubes. He sat in the central control area and watched the stereo image of the EVA group as they prepared themselves in the muster station. Garamond knew all the men and women of his crew by sight if not by name, but there was one blond fresh-complexioned youngster he was having trouble identifying. He pointed at the screen.

'Cliff, is that one of the shuttle crew we shanghaied?'

'That's right. Joe Braunek. He fitted in well,' Napier said. 'I think you did him a favour.'

'Did Tayman select him for this mission?'

'He volunteered. Tayman referred it back to me and I interviewed Braunek in person.' Napier broke off to contemplate a memory which appeared to amuse him.

'Well?'

'He says he's entitled to log the flying time because you wrecked his shuttle and dumped it near Saturn.'

Garamond nodded his approval. 'What about the other shuttle pilot? The one with the blue chin.'

'Shrapnel? Ah … he didn't fit in so well. In fact, he's pretty resentful. He wouldn't sign on the crew and I've had to keep him under surveillance.'

'Oh? I seem to remember sending him an apology.'

'You did. He's still resentful.'

'I wonder why?'

Napier gave a dry cough. 'He wasn't planning to be separated from his wife for this length of time.'

'I'm a self-centred bastard – is that it, Cliff?'

'Nothing like it.'

'Don't give me that – I recognize that Chopin cough you get every time I go off the rails.' Garamond visualized the shuttle pilot, tried to imagine the man in the context of a family like his own, but found the exercise strangely difficult. 'Shrapnel knows he'll only be away for a year. Why doesn't he try to make the best of it?'

Napier coughed once more. 'The EVA group are about ready to go.'

'Your TB is back again, Cliff. What did I say that time?' Garamond stared hard at his next-in-command.

Napier took a deep breath, altering the slopes of his massive chest and shoulders. 'You don't like Shrapnel, and he doesn't like you, and that amuses me – because you're both the same type. If you were in his shoes you'd be broody and resentful and looking for an opportunity to twist things back the way you wanted them. He even looks a bit like you, yet you sit there telling everybody he's weird.'

Garamond gave a smile he did not feel. Napier and he had long ago discarded all remnants of formal relationship, and he felt no resentment at the other man's words, but he found them disturbing. They had implications he did not want to examine. He selected the EVA group's intercom frequency and listened to the clamorous, overlapping voices of the men as the buggy was sealed and the dock evacuation procedure began. They were complaining in a good-natured way about the discomfort of the space-suits which they normally donned only twice a year in practice drills, or about the difficulty of carrying instruments and tool kits in gloved hands, but Garamond knew they were genuinely excited. Life on board an S.E.A. vessel consisted of routine outward journeys, brief pauses while it was established by long range instruments that the target suns had no planets or no usable planets, and equally dull returns to base. This was the first occasion in the Bissendorf's entire span of service on which it had been necessary for men to leave its protective hull and venture into alien space with the object of making physical contact with something outside humanity's previous experience. It was a big moment for the little exploratory team and Garamond found himself wishing he could take part.

He watched as the outer doors of the dock slid aside to reveal a blackness which was unrelieved by stars. At a distance of two thousand kilometres the sphere not only filled one half of the sky, it was one half of the sky. The observed universe was cut into two hemispheres – one of them glowing with starclouds, the other filled with light-absorbent darkness. There was no sensation of being close to a huge object, rather one of being poised above infinite deeps.

The restraining rings opened and allowed the white-painted buggy to jet out clear of the mother ship. Its boxy, angular outline shrank to invisibility in a few seconds, but its interior and marker lights remained in view for quite a long time as the craft moved 'downwards' from the Bissendorf. Garamond stayed at central control while the buggy descended, watching several screens at once as its cameras sent back different types of information. At a height of three hundred metres the buggy's commander, Kraemer, switched on powerful searchlights and succeeded in creating a greyish patch of illumination on the sphere's surface.

'Instruments show zero gravity at surface,' he reported.

Garamond cut in on the circuit. 'Do you want to go on down?'

'Yes, sir. The surface looks metallic from here – I'd like to try a touchdown with magnetic clamps.'

'Go ahead.'

The indistinct greyness expanded on the screens until the clang of the buggy's landing gear was heard. 'It's no use,' Kraemer said. 'We just bounced off.'

'Are you going to let her float?'

'No, sir. I'm going to go in again and maintain some drive pressure. That should lock the buggy in place against the surface and give us a fixed point to work from.'

'Go ahead, Kraemer.' Garamond looked at Napier and nodded in satisfaction. The two men watched as the buggy was inched into contact with the surface and held there by the thrust of its tubes.

Kraemer's voice was heard again. 'Surface seems to have a reasonable index of friction – we aren't slipping around. I think it's safe to go out for samples.'

'Proceed.'

The buggy's door slid open, spacesuited figures drifted out and formed a small swarm around the splayed-out landing gear. Bracing themselves against the tubular legs, the figures went to work on the vaguely seen surface of the sphere with drills, cutters and chemicals. At the end of thirty minutes, by which time the team operating the valency cutter could have sliced through a house-sized block of chrome steel, nobody had managed even to mark the surface. The result was in accordance with Garamond's premonitions.

'This is a new one on me,' said Harmer, the chemist. 'We can't make a spectroscopic analysis because the stuff refuses to burn. At this stage I can't even say for sure that it's a metal. We're just wasting our time down here.'

'Tell Kraemer to bring them up,' Garamond said to Napier. 'Is there any point in firing the main ionizing gun against it?'

'None at all,' put in Denise Serra, the Chief Physicist. 'If a valency cutter at a range of one centimetre achieved nothing there's no point in hosing energy all over it from this distance.'

Garamond nodded. 'Okay. Let's pool our ideas. We've acquired a little more information, although most of it is negative, and I'd like to have your thoughts on whether the sphere is a natural object or an artifact.'

'It's an artifact,' Denise Serra said immediately, with characteristic firmness. 'Its sphericity is perfect and the surface is smooth to limits of below one micron. Nature doesn't operate that way – at least, not on the astronomical scale.' She glanced a challenge at Yamoto.

'I have to agree.' Yamoto said. 'I've been avoiding the idea, but I can't conceive of any natural mechanism which would produce that thing out there. However, that doesn't mean I can see how it was constructed by intelligent beings. It's just too much.' He shook his head dispiritedly. The haggardness of his face showed that he had been losing a lot of sleep.

O'Hagan, the Chief Science Officer, who was a stickler for protocol, cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. 'Our difficulties arise from the fact that the Bissendorf is an exploration vessel and very little more. The correct procedure now would be to send a tachyon signal back to Earth and get a properly equipped expedition out here.' His severe grey gaze held steadily on Garamond's face.

'That's outside the scope of the present discussion,' Napier said.

Garamond shook his head. 'No, it isn't. Gentlemen, and lady, Mister O'Hagan has put into words something which must have been on all your minds since the beginning of this mission. It can't have been difficult for you to work out for yourselves that I'm in trouble with Starflight House. In fact, it's personal trouble with Elizabeth Lindstrom – and I think you all know what that means. I'm not going to give you any more details, simply because I don't want you to be involved any more than you are at present.

'Perhaps it is enough to say that this has to be my last voyage as a Starflight commander, and I want this year in full.'

O'Hagan looked pained, but he held his ground doggedly. 'I'm sure I'm speaking for all the other section heads when I say that we feel the utmost personal loyalty to Captain Garamond, and that our feelings aren't affected by the circumstances surrounding the start of this voyage. Had it turned out to be a normal, uneventful mission I, for one, wouldn't have considered questioning its legality – but the fact remains that we have made the most important discovery since Terranova and Sagania, and I feel it should be reported to Earth without delay.'

'I disagree,' Napier said coldly. 'Starflight House didn't direct the Bissendorf to this point in space. The sphere was discovered because Captain Garamond acted independently to check out a personally-held theory. We'll hand it over to Starflight, as a bonus they didn't earn, at the end of the mission's scheduled span of one year.'

O'Hagan gave a humourless smile. 'I still feel…'

Napier jumped to his feet. 'What do you mean when you say you feel, Mister O'Hagan? Don't you think with your brain like the rest of us? Does the fact that you feel these things turn them into something for which you have no personal responsibility?'

'That's enough,' Garamond said.

'I just want O'Hagan to stand over his words.'

'I said…'

'Gentlemen, I withdraw my remarks,' O'Hagan interrupted, staring fixedly at his notepad. 'It wasn't my intention to divert the discussion away from the main topic. Now, we seem agreed that the sphere is of artificial origin – so what is its purpose?' He raised his eyes and scanned the assembled officers.

There was a lengthy silence.

'Defence?' Denise Serra's round face mirrored her doubts. 'Is there a planet inside?'

'There might be a planet on the far side of the sun which hasn't shown up much on our gravitic readings.' Yamoto said. 'But if we had the technology to produce that sphere, could there be an enemy so powerful that we would have to cower behind a shield?'

'Supposing it was a case of "Stop the galaxy, I want to get off"? Maybe the builders were pacifists and felt the need to hide. They made a pretty good job of concealing a star.'

'I hope that isn't the answer,' Yamoto said gloomily. 'If they needed to hide …'

'This is getting too speculative,' Garamond put in. 'The immediate practical question is, does it have an entrance? Can we get inside? Let's have your thoughts on that.'

Yamoto stroked his wispy beard. 'If there is an entrance, it ought to be on the equator so that ships could hold their positions over it just by going into a parking orbit the way we did.'

'So you suggest doing a circuit of the sphere in the equatorial plane?'

'Yes – in the opposite direction to its rotation. That way we would get the advantage of its seventy thousand kilometres an hour equatorial rotation and cut down on our own G-forces.'

'That's decided then,' Garamond said. 'We'll turn around as soon as Kraemer and his team are on board. I hope we'll recognize an entrance if we find one.'

Three duty periods later he was asleep beside Aileen when his personal communicator buzzed him into wakefulness.

'Garamond here,' he said quietly, trying not to disturb his wife.

'Sorry to disturb you, Vance,' Napier said, 'but I think we're going to reach an entrance to the sphere in a couple of hours from now.'

'What?' Garamond sat upright, aware of deceleration forces. 'How could you tell?'

'Well, we can't be certain, but it's the most likely explanation for the echoes we're picking up on the long-range radar.'

'What sort of echoes?'

'A lot of them, Vance. There's a fleet of about three thousand ships in parking orbit, dead ahead of us.'

six

The ships were invisible to the naked eye, yet on the detector screens on board the Bissendorf they appeared as a glowing swarm, numerous as stars in a dense cluster. High-resolution radar, aided by other forms of sensory apparatus, revealed them to be of many different sizes and shapes, a vast and variegated armada poised above one point on the enigmatic sphere.

'You could have told me they weren't Starflight ships,' Garamond said, easing himself into his seat in central control, his eyes fixed on the forward screens.

'Sorry, Vance – it didn't occur to me.' Napier handed Garamond a bulb of hot coffee. 'As soon as I saw the lack of standard formations I knew they couldn't be Starflight vessels. The silhouettes and estimated masses produced by the computers confirmed it – none of the ships in that bunch can be identified by type.'

Second Officer Gunther gave a quiet laugh. 'That was a pretty nervy moment up here.'

Garamond smiled in sympathy. 'I guess it was.'

'Then we realized we were looking at a collection of hulks.'

'You're positive?'

'There's no radiation of any kind. Those are dead ships, and they've been that way for a long time.' Napier shook his head. 'This is turning out to be one hell of a trip, Vance. First there was the sphere itself, and now … We always wondered why no Saganian starships had ever been found.'

One hell of a trip, Garamond repeated to himself, his mind trying to deal with the magnitude of the new discovery and at the same time cope with the shocking and unexpected presence of something akin to hope. He had fled from the Earth as an obscure flickerwing commander, but now had the prospect of returning as the most celebrated explorer since Laker had founded Terranova and Molyneaux had found Sagania. It was bound to make things more difficult for Elizabeth.

In practice she was outside the law, but even for the President of Starflight Incorporated there were limits to how far she could go in full view of the mass television audience-and Garamond was going to be a public figure. A rigged trial, with witnesses primed to swear Harald's death had been the result of wilful action, would destroy Garamond. It would, however, focus the world's attention on him even more firmly and help deny Elizabeth the personal revenge she had never been known to forgo. If he and his family were to die it would probably have to appear accidental. And even the most carefully planned accidents could be prevented, if not indefinitely, at least for a reasonable length of time. The future still looked dangerous, but its uncompromising blackness had been alleviated to some extent.

Maintaining its height above the surface of the sphere, the Bissendorf – which had been closing with the immense fleet at a combined speed of almost two hundred thousand kilometres an hour – swung out of the equatorial plane. It described a wide semicircle around the ships and approached them from the opposite direction, carefully matching velocities until it shared approximately the same parking orbit. In the latter stages of the manoeuvre, telescopic observations by Chief Astronomer Yamoto revealed that several of the vessels at the centre of the swarm were shining by reflected light. He deduced that there was a beam of sunlight being emitted from an aperture in the surface of the sphere, and reported to Garamond accordingly. Shortly afterwards the aperture revealed itself in the telescopes as a thin line of faint light which gradually opened to a narrow ellipse as the Bissendorf crept closer.

The big ship's central command gallery took on a crowded appearance as officers who were not on duty found reasons to stay near the curving array of consoles. They were waiting for the first transmissions from the surveillance torpedo which had been dispatched towards the spaceships illuminated by the column of light escaping from Pengelly's Star. There was an atmosphere of tension which made everyone on board the Bissendorf aware of how uneventful all their previous wanderings in the galaxy had been.

'I'm not used to this excitement,' Napier whispered. 'Round about this stage on a trip I'm usually tucked away quietly with a bottle of ninety-proof consolation, and I almost think I liked it better that way.'

'I didn't,' Garamond said firmly. 'This is changing things for all of us.'

'I know – I was kidding. Have you tried to work out what the prize money ought to be if it turns out that all these ships can still be flown?'

'No.' Garamond had finished his third bulb of coffee and was bending over to put it in the disposal chute.

'Forget it,' Napier said, with a new note in his voice. 'Look at that, Vance!'

There was a murmur of shock from the central gallery as Garamond was raising his head to look at the first images coming back from the distant torpedo. They were of a large grey ship which had been ripped open along its length like a gutted fish. Twisted sections of infrastructure were visible inside the wound, like entrails. Lesser scars which had not penetrated the hull criss-crossed the remainder of the great ovoid's sunlit side.

'Something really chopped her up.'

'Not as much as the next one.'

The images were changing rapidly as the surveillance torpedo, unhampered by any considerations of the effects of G-force on human tissue, darted towards a second ship, which proved to be only half a ship. It had been sliced in two, laterally, by some unimaginable weapon, sculpted ripples of metal flowing back from the sheared edges. A small vessel, corresponding in size to a lifeboat, hung in space near the open cross-section, joined to the mother ship by cables.

After the first startled comments a silence fell over the control gallery as the images of destruction were multiplied. An hour passed as the torpedo examined all the ships in the single shaft of sunlight and spiralled outwards into the darkness to scan others by the light of its own flares. It became evident that every vessel in the huge swarm had died violently, cataclysmically. Garamond found that the ships illuminated dimly by the flares were the most hideous – their ruptured hulls, silent, brooding over gashes filled with the black blood of shadow, could have been organic remains, preserved by the chill of space, contorted by ancient agonies.

'A signal has just come up from telemetry,' Napier said. 'There's a malfunctioning developing in the torpedo's flare circuits. Do you want another one sent out?'

'No. I think we've seen enough for the present. Have the torpedo come round and take a look through the aperture. I'm sure Mister Yamoto would like some readings on the sun in there.' Garamond leaned back in his seat and looked at Napier. 'Has it ever struck you as odd that we, as representatives of a warlike race, don't carry any armament?'

'The need has never come up – the Lindstroms wouldn't want their own ships destroyed by each other. Besides, the main ionizing beam would make a pretty effective weapon.'

'Not in that class.' Garamond nodded at the viewscreens. 'We couldn't even aim it without turning the whole ship.'

'You think those hulls prove Serra's theory about the sphere being a defence?'

'Perhaps.' Garamond's voice was thoughtful. 'We won't know for sure until we have a look inside the sphere and see if there was anything worth defending.'

'What makes you think you would see anything?'

'That.' Garamond pointed at the screen which had just begun to show the new images being transmitted back from the torpedo. The aperture in the dark surface of the sphere was circular and almost a kilometre in diameter. A yellow Sol-type sun hung within it, perfectly centred by the torpedo's aiming mechanisms, and the remarkable thing was that the space inside the sphere did not appear black, as the watchers on board the Bissendorf knew it ought to do. It was as blue as the summer skies of Earth.

Two hours later, and against all the regulations concerning the safety of Starflight commanders, Garamond was at the head of a small expedition which entered the sphere. The buggy was positioned almost on the edge of the aperture, held in place against the surface by the thrust of its tubes. Garamond was able to grip the strut of a landing leg with one hand and slide the other over the edge of the aperture. Its hard rim was only a few centimetres thick. There was a spongy resistance to the passage of his hand, which told of a force field spanning the aperture like a diaphragm, then his gloved fingers gripped something which felt like grass. He pulled himself through to the inside of the sphere and stood up.

And there – on the edge of a circular black lake of stars, suited and armoured to withstand the lethal vacuum of interplanetary space – Garamond had his first look at the green and infinite meadows of Orbitsville.

seven

Garamond's sense of dislocation was almost complete.

He received an impression of grasslands and low hills running on for ever – and, although his mind was numbed, his thoughts contained an element of immediate acceptance, as if an event for which he had been preparing all his life had finally occurred. Garamond felt as though he had been born again. In that first moment, when his vision was swamped by the brilliance of the impossible landscape, he was able to look at the circular lake of blackness from which he had emerged and see it through alien eyes. The grass – the tall, lush grass grew right to the rim! – shimmered green and it was difficult to accept that there were stars down in that pool. It was impossible to comprehend that were he to lie at its edge and look downwards he would see sunken ships drifting in the black crystal waters …

Something was emerging from the lake. Something white, groping blindly upwards.

Garamond's identity returned to him abruptly as he recognized the spacesuited figure of Lieutenant Kraemer struggling to an upright position. He moved to help the other man and became aware of yet another 'impossibility' – there was gravity sufficient to give him almost his normal Earth weight. Kraemer and he leaned against each other like drunk men, bemused, stunned, helpless because there were blue skies where there should have been only the hostile blackness of space, because they had stepped through the looking glass into a secret garden. The grass moved gently, reminding Garamond of perhaps the greatest miracle of all, of the presence of an atmosphere. He felt an insane but powerful urge to open his helmet, and was fighting it when his tear-blurred eyes focused on the buildings.

They were visible at several points around the rim of the aperture, ancient buildings, low and ruinous. The reason they had not registered immediately with Garamond was that time had robbed them of the appearance of artifacts, clothing the shattered walls with moss and climbing grasses. As he began to orient himself within the new reality, and the images being transmitted from eyes to brain became capable of interpretation, he saw amid the rains the skeletons of what had once been great machines.

'Look over there,' he said. 'What do you think?'

There was no reply from Kraemer. Garamond glanced at his companion, saw his lips moving silently behind his faceplate and remembered they were still on radio communication. Both men switched to the audio circuits which used small microphones and speakers on the chest panels.

'The suit radios seem to have packed up,' Kraemer said casually, then his professional composure cracked. 'Is it a dream? Is it? Is it a dream?' His voice was hoarse.

'If it is, we're all in it together. What do you think of the ruins over there?'

Kraemer shielded his eyes and studied the buildings, apparently seeing them for the first time. 'They remind me of fortifications.'

'Me too.' Garamond's mind made an intuitive leap. 'It wasn't always possible to stroll in here the way we just did.'

'All those dead ships?'

'I'd say a lot of people once tried to come through that opening, and other people tried to keep them out.'

'But why should they? I mean, if the whole inside of the sphere is like this…' Kraemer gestured at the sea of grass. 'Oh, Christ! If it's all like this there's as much living room as you'd get on a million Earths.'

'More,' Garamond told him. 'I've already done the sums. This sphere has a surface area equivalent to 625,000,000 times the total surface of Earth. If we allow for the fact that only a quarter of the Earth's surface is land and perhaps only half of that is usable, it means the sphere is equivalent to five billion Earths.

'That's one each for every man, woman and child in existence.'

'Provided one thing,'

'What's that?'

'That we can breathe the air.'

'We'll find that out right now.' Garamond felt a momentary dizziness. When he had been playing around with comparisons of the size of Earth and the sphere he had treated it as a purely mathematical exercise, his mind solely on the figures, but Kraemer had gone ahead of him to think in terms of people actually living on the sphere, arriving at the aperture in fleets sent from crowded and worn-out Earth, spreading outward across those prairies which promised to go on for ever. Trying to accommodate the vision along with his other speculations about the origins and purpose of the sphere brought Garamond an almost-physical pain behind his eyes. And superimposed on all his swirling thoughts, overriding every other consideration, a new concept of his personal status was struggling to be born. If he, Vance Garamond, gave humanity five billion Earths … . then he, and not Elizabeth Lindstrom, would be the most important human being alive… then his wife and child would be safe.

'There's an analyser kit in the buggy,' Kraemer said. 'Shall I go for it?'

'Of course.' Garamond was surprised by the lieutenant's question, then with a flash of insight he understood that it had taken only a few minutes of exposure to the unbounded lebensraum of the sphere to alter a relationship which was part of the tight, closed society of the Two Worlds. Kraemer was actually reluctant to leave the secret garden by climbing down into the circular black lake, and-as the potential owner of a super-continent – he saw no reason why Garamond should not go instead. So quickly, Garamond thought. We'll all be changed so quickly.

Aloud he said, 'While you're getting the kit you can break the news to the others – they'll want to see for themselves.'

'Right.' Kraemer looked pleased at the idea of being first with the most sensational story of all time. He went to the edge of the aperture, lay down and lowered his head into the blackness, obviously straining to force the helmet through the membrane field which retained the sphere's atmosphere. After wriggling sideways a little to obtain his grip on the buggy's leg, Kraemer slid out of sight into the darkness.

Garamond again felt a sense of dislocation. The fact that he had weight, that there was a natural-seeming gravity pulling him 'downwards' against the grassy soil created an illusion that he was standing on the surface of a planet. His instincts rebelled against the idea that he was standing on a thin shell of unknown metal, that below him was the hard vacuum of space, that the buggy was close underneath his feet, upside down, clinging to the sphere by the force of its drive.

Garamond moved away from the aperture a short distance, shocked by the incongruity of the heavy spacesuit which shut him off from what surely must be his natural element. He knelt for a closer look at the grass. It grew thickly, in mixed varieties which to his inexperienced eye had stems and laminae very similar to those of Earth. He parted the grass, pushed his gloved fingers into the matted roots and scooped up a handful of brown soil. Small crumbs of it clung to the material of his gloves, making moist smears.

Garamond looked upwards and for the first time noticed the lacy white streamers of cloud. With the small sun positioned vertically overhead it was difficult to study the sky, but beyond the cloud he thought he could distinguish narrow bands of a lighter blue which created a delicate ribbed effect curving from horizon to horizon. He made a mental note to point it out to Chief Science Officer O'Hagan for early investigation, and returned his attention to the soil. Digging down into it a short distance he came to the ubiquitous grey metal of the shell, its surface unmarked by the damp earth. Garamond placed his hand against the metal and tried to imagine the building of the sphere, to visualize the creation of a seamless globe of metal with a circumference of a billion kilometres.

There could be only one source for such an inconceivable quantity of shell material, and that was in the sun itself. Matter is energy, and energy is matter. Every active star hurls the equivalent of millions of tons a day of its own substance into space in the form of light and other radiations. But in the case of Pengelly's Star someone had set up a boundary, turned that energy back on itself, manipulating and modifying it, translating it into matter. With precise control over the most elemental forces of the universe they had created an impervious shell of exactly the sort of material they wanted-harder than diamond, immutable, eternal. When the sphere was complete, grown to the required thickness, they had again dipped their hands into the font of energy and wrought fresh miracles, coating the interior surface of the sphere with soil and water and air. Organic acids, even complete cells and seeds, had been constructed in the same way, because at the ultimate level of reality there is no difference between a blade of grass and one of steel…

'The air is good, sir.' Kraemer's voice came from close behind. Garamond stood up, turned and saw the lieutenant had opened his faceplate.

'What was the reading like?'

'A shade low in oxygen, but everything else is about right.' Kraemer was grinning like a schoolboy. 'You should try some.'

'I will.' Garamond opened his own helmet and took a deep breath. The air was soft and thick and pure. He discovered at that moment that he had never known truly fresh air before. Low shouts came from the direction of the aperture as other spacesuited figures emerged.

'I told the others they could come through,' Kraemer said. 'All except Braunek – he's holding the buggy in place. It's all right, isn't it?'

'It's all right, yes. I'll be setting up a rota system to let everybody on the ship have a look before we go back.' Again Garamond sensed a difference in Kraemer's attitude – before the lieutenant had seen the interior of the sphere he would not have cleared the buggy without obtaining permission.

'Before we go back? But as soon as we signal Earth the traffic's all going to be coming this way. Why go back?'

'No reason, I suppose.' Garamond had been thinking about Aileen's reluctance ever to travel more than a few kilometres from their apartment. He had been planning to return her to the old familiar surroundings as soon as possible, but perhaps there was no need. Standing on the interior surface of the sphere was as close as one could get to being on the infinite plane of the geometer, yet there was nothing in the experience to inspire agoraphobia. The line of sight did not tangent away from the downward curve of a planet and so the uniform density of the air set a limit to the distance a man could see. Garamond studied the horizon. It appeared to curve upwards slightly, in contrast to that of Earth, but it did not seem much further away. There was no sense of peering into immensities.

Kraemer put the toe of one boot down into the small hole Garamond had made and tapped the metal at the bottom. 'Did you find anything?'

'Such as?'

'Circuits. For this synthetic gravity.'

'No. I don't think we'll find any circuits in our sense of the word.'

'What then?'

'Atoms with their interiors rearranged or specially designed to do a job. Perfect machines.'

'It sounds incredible.'

'We've taken the first step in that direction ourselves with our magnetic resonance engines. Anyway, what could be more incredible than all this?' Some instinct prompted Garamond to push the soil back into the hole and tamp it down with his foot, repairing the damage he had done to the grassy surface. In the region close to the aperture the soil was thinly distributed, but there were hills in the distance which looked as though they could have been formed by drifting.

'As soon as your men have got over the shock tell them to gather vegetation and soil samples,' he said.

'I already have,' Kraemer replied carelessly. 'By the way – none of the suit radios is working, though mine was all right again when I went back out through the aperture.'

'There must be a damping effect – that's something else for O'Hagan to investigate when he gets here. Let's have a look at some of those ruins.'

They walked to the nearest of the indistinct mounds. Under the blanket of climbing grasses there was just enough remaining structure to suggest a floor plan of massive walls and simple square rooms. Here and there, close to the black lake of stars, were distorted metallic stumps which had once been parts of machines. They had a sagging, lava-flow appearance as though they had been destroyed by intense heat.

Kraemer gave a low whistle. 'Who do you think won? The people who were trying to get in, or the ones who were trying to keep them out?'

'I'd say the invaders won, Lieutenant. I've been thinking about all those dead ships hanging out there. They can't be in their battle stations because even if they had been stationary during the fight the forces used against them would have kicked them adrift and there would have been nothing for us to find. It looks as though they were rounded up and carefully parked just outside the aperture.'

'Why?'

'For salvage, perhaps. There may be no metals available within the sphere.'

'For beating into ploughshares? It's good farming country, all right – but where are the farmers?'

'Nomads? Perhaps you don't have to till the soil. Maybe you just keep moving for ever, following the seasons, with the grain always ripening just ahead of you.'

Kraemer laughed. 'What seasons? It must always be high summer here – and high noon, too. It can't even get dark with that sun right above your head.'

'But it is getting dark, Lieutenant.' Garamond spoke peacefully, all capacity for surprise exhausted. 'Look over there.'

He pointed at the horizon beyond the black ellipse of the aperture to where the shimmering blue-greens of the distance had begun to deepen. There was an unmistakable gathering of shade.

'That's impossible,' Kraemer protested. He looked up at the sun. 'Oh, no!'

Garamond looked up and saw that the sun was no longer circular. It had one straight side, like a gold coin from which somebody had clipped a generous segment. Shouts from the other men indicated that they had noticed the event. While they watched, the still-brilliant area of the sun's disc grew progressively smaller as though a shutter were being drawn across it. At the same time, keeping pace, the darkness increased on the corresponding horizon and a new phenomenon made itself apparent. The delicate ribbed effect which Garamond had noticed in the sky earlier became clearer, the alternating bands of lighter and darker blue now standing out vividly. In the space of a minute, as the sun began to disappear completely, the slim curving ribs became the dominant feature of the sky, swirling across it from two foci, sharply defined as the striations in polished agate. Near the horizon, where they dipped behind denser levels of air, the bands blurred and dispersed into a prismatic haze. The last searing sliver of sun vanished and Garamond glimpsed a wall of shadow rushing over the landscape towards him at orbital speed, then it was night, beneath a canopy of stratified sapphire.

Garamond stayed beside the lake of stars for an hour before returning to his ship and sending a tachyonic signal to Starflight House.

eight

It was almost exactly four months later that Elizabeth Lindstrom's flagship took up its station outside the sphere's entrance.

Garamond had spent part of the time carrying out investigations into Orbitsville – the name for the sphere had originated with an unknown crew member – but, as it was primarily equipped for locate-and-report missions, the Bissendorf did not carry a large science team, and the studies were necessarily limited. The astronomy section, under Sammy Yamoto, made the most profound discovery of all – that there was yet another sphere surrounding Pengelly's Star.

It was smaller than Orbitsville, non-material in nature yet capable of reflecting or deflecting the sun's outpourings of light and heat. Yamoto described it as a 'globular filigree of force fields', a phrase of which he appeared inordinately proud, judging by the frequency with which it was used in his reports. Of the inner sphere's surface area, precisely half was made up of narrow strips, effectively opaque, curving in a general north-south direction. Their function was to cast great moving bars of shadow on the grasslands of Orbitsville, producing the alternating periods of light and darkness, day and night, without which plant life could not survive. Yamoto was not able to observe the inner sphere directly, but he could chart its structure by studying the bands of light and darkness as they moved across the far side of Orbitsville, 320 million kilometres away in the 'night' sky. And he was able to show that the shadow sphere not only created night and day but was also responsible for a progression of seasons. In one quarter of the sphere, corresponding to winter, the opaque night-producing strips were wider and therefore separated by narrower gaps of light; at the opposite side the strips were reduced in width to engender the shorter nights and longer days of summer.

To facilitate Yamoto's work a small plastic observatory was prefabricated in the Bissendorf s workshops and transferred to a site within Orbitsville. Several more buildings were added as other sections found reason to prolong their work in the interior, and the nucleus of a scientific colony was formed.

A substantial portion of the effort was put into trying to solve the annoying riddle of why no radio communicator would work inside the sphere. At first it was anticipated that a simple solution and practical remedy would be found, but the weeks slipped by without any progress being made. It appeared that the equally inexplicable synthetic gravity field was responsible for damping out all electromagnetic radiation. In an effort to get new data on the possible mechanics of the phenomenon, O'Hagan's team took a photographic torpedo and gave it enough extra thrust to enable it to take off from the inner surface of Orbitsville. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the gravity gradient and to see if the radio guidance and telemetry systems would operate if the signals were travelling at right angles to the surface. After a flawless programmed start, the torpedo began tracing random patterns in the sky and made a programmed automatic landing several kilometres away from the aperture. Pessimists began to predict that the only long-range communication possible on Orbitsville would be by modulation of light beams.

Another discovery was that the utterly inert and incredibly hard shell of the sphere was impervious to all radiation except gravity waves. The latter were able to pass through, otherwise the star system's outer planet would have tangented off towards interstellar space, but not even the most energetic particles entered Orbitsville from the outer universe, except by means of the aperture. Certain peculiarities in the measurements of radiation levels from Pengelly's Star itself led O'Hagan to give Garamond a confidential report in which he suggested that flickerwing ships might not be able to operate within the sphere, due to lack of available reaction mass. The subject was earmarked for priority investigation by the fully equipped teams which would arrive later.

Garamond received an increasing number of requests from crewmen, especially those who were inactive when the main drive was not in use, for permission to stay on Orbitsville under canvas. At first he encouraged the idea, but Napier reported that the remaining personnel were becoming resentful of their relaxed and sunburned colleagues whose eyes held a new kind of contentment and surety when they returned to ship duties. Partly to combat the divisive forces, Garamond took the Bissendorf on a circuit of Orbitsville's equatorial plane and established that no other entrances were visible.

He also set teams of men to work on moving the swarm of dead ships to a position a thousand kilometres down orbit from the aperture. With the ships at their new station, photographic teams went inside as many as was practicable and made records of their findings. They confirmed Garamond's first guess that the hulls had been used as mines and sources of supply. The interiors were gutted, stripped to the bare metal of their hulls, and in some cases it turned out that what had first been thought of as the havoc of battle was actually the work of scavengers. An unfortunate by-product was that virtually nothing was found which would have let researchers deduce the appearance of the aliens who had built and flown the huge fleet. The most significant find was a section of metal staircase and handrailing which hinted that the aliens had been bipeds of about the same size as humans.

Where were they now?

The question came in for more discussion than did speculations on the whereabouts of the beings who had created Orbitsville. It was understood that the sphere-builders had possessed a technology of an entirely different order to that of the race which had produced the ships. The instinctive belief was that the sphere-builders were unknowable, that they had moved on to new adventures or new phases of their existence, because it would be impossible to be near them without their presence being felt. Orbitsville appeared to be and was accepted as a gift from the galactic past.

Garamond brought Aileen and Christopher into the sphere, through the newly constructed L-shaped entrance port, for a strangely peaceful vacation. Aileen was, as he had predicted, able to adjust to Orbitsville's up-curving horizons without any psychological upsets, and Chris took to it like a foal turned loose in spring pastures. In the daytime Garamond watched the boy's skin acquire the gold of the new-found sun, and at nights he sat outside with Aileen beneath the fabulous archways of the sky, their gratification all the more intense because of the period of despair which had preceded it.

Only in dreams, or in the half-world between consciousness and sleep, did Garamond feel any apprehension at the thought of Elizabeth advancing across the light-years which lay between Orbitsville and Earth.

To the unaided vision it would have appeared that her flagship came alone, but in fact it was at the head of a fleet of seventy vessels. An interstellar ramjet on main-drive was surrounded by its intake field, a vast insubstantial maw with an area of up to half a million square kilometres, and for this reason the closest formation ever flown was in the form of a thousand-kilometre grid. The fleet was unwieldy even by Starflight standards. It spent two days in matching velocities with the galactic drift of Pengelly's Star and in deploying its individual units in parking orbit. When each ship had been accurately positioned and its electromagnetic wings furled, the flagship – Starflier IV – advanced slowly on ion drive until it was almost alongside the Bissendorf. Captain Vance Garamond received a formal invitation to go on board.

The very act of donning the black-and-silver dress uniform, for the first time ever in the course of a mission, made him aware that once again he was within Elizabeth's sphere of influence. He was not conscious of any fear – Orbitsville had had too profound an effect on the situation for that – yet he was filled with a vague distaste each time he thought of the forthcoming interview. For the past four months he had been certain of the fact that Elizabeth's consequence had been reduced to normal human dimensions, but her arrival at the head of an armada suggested that the old order was still a reality. For her, the only reality.

The sight of his dress uniform had disturbed Aileen, too. As the doors of the transit dock opened and the little buggy ventured out on to the black ocean of space, Garamond remembered the way his wife had kissed him before he left. She had been abstracted, almost cold, and had turned away quickly. It was as though she were suppressing all emotion, but in his final glimpse of her she had been holding their golden snail against her cheek. He stood behind the pilot of the buggy for the whole of the short trip, watching the flagship expand until it filled the forward screens. When the docking manoeuvre had been completed he stepped watchfully but confidently into the transit bay where a group of Starflight officials were waiting. Behind the officials were a number of men in civilian dress and carrying scene recorders. With a minimum of ceremony Garamond was escorted to the Presidential suite and ushered into the principal stateroom. Elizabeth must have given previous instructions, because his escorts withdrew immediately and in silence.

The President was standing with her back to the door. She was wearing a long close-fitting gown of white satin-her favourite style of dress – and three white spaniels floated drowsily in the air close to her feet. Garamond was shocked to see that Elizabeth had lost most of her hair. The thinning black strands clung to her scalp in patches, making her look old and diseased. She continued to stand with her back to him although she must have been aware of his presence.

'My Lady…Garamond scuffed the floor with his magnetic-soled boots, and the President slowly turned around. The skin of her small-chinned face was pale and glistening.

'Why did you do it, Captain?' Her voice was low. 'Why did you run from me?'

'My Lady, I…' Garamond, unprepared for a direct question, was lost for words.

'Why were you afraid of me?'

'I panicked. What happened to your son was a pure accident – he fell when I wasn't even near him – but I panicked. And I ran.' It occurred to Garamond that Elizabeth might have sound political and tactical reasons for choosing to meet him as a mother who had lost a child rather than as an empress in danger of being usurped, but it did not lessen her advantage.

Incredibly, Elizabeth smiled her asymmetrical, knowing smile. 'You thought I wouldn't understand, that I might lash out at you.'

'It would have been a natural reaction.'

'You shouldn't have been afraid of me, Captain.'

'I… I'm glad.' This is fantastic, Garamond thought numbly. She doesn't believe any of it. I don't believe any of it. So why go on with the charade?

'…suffered, and you've suffered,' Elizabeth was saying. 'I think we always will, but I want you to know that I bear you no grudge.' She came closer to him, still smiling, and her soft satiny abdomen brushed his knuckles. Garamond thought of spiders.

'There isn't any way I can express how sorry I am that the accident occurred.'

'I know.' Elizabeth's voice was gentle, but suddenly the room was filled with her sweet, soupy odour and Garamond knew that, just for an instant, she had thought of killing him.

'My Lady, if this is too much for you…'

Her face hardened instantly. 'What makes you think so?'

'Nothing.'

'Very well, then. We have important business matters to discos, Captain. Did you know that the Council, with my consent, has authorized the payment to you of ten million monits?'

Garamond shook his head. 'Ten million?'

'Yes. Does that seem a lot of money to you?'

'It seems all the money there is.'

Elizabeth laughed and turned away from him, disturbing the spaniels in their airborne slumbers. 'It's nothing, Captain. Nothing! You will, of course, be appointed to the council I'm setting up to advise on the development and exploitation of Lindstromland, and your salary from that alone will be two million monits a year. Then there's…' Elizabeth paused.

'What's the matter, Captain? You look surprised.'

'I am.'

'At the size of your salary? Or the fact that the sphere has been officially named after my family?'

'The name of the sphere is unimportant,' Garamond said stonily, too disturbed by what Elizabeth had said to think about exhibiting the proper degree of deference. 'What is important is that it can't be controlled and exploited. You sounded as if you were planning to parcel up the land and sell it in the same way that Terranova is handled.'

'We don't sell plots on Terranova – they are given freely, through Government-controlled agencies.'

'To anybody who can pay the Starflight transportation charge. It's the same thing.' 'Really?' Elizabeth examined Garamond through narrowed eyes. 'You're an expert on such matters, are you?'

'I don't need to be. The facts are easily understood.' Garamond felt he was rushing towards a dangerous precipice, but he had no desire to hold back.

'In that case you'll make an excellent council member – all the others regard the Starflight operation as being extremely complex.'

'In practice,' Garamond said doggedly. 'But not in principle.'

Elizabeth gave her second unexpected smile of the interview. 'In principle, then, why can't Lindstromland be developed in the normal way?'

'For the same reason that water-sellers can make a living only in the desert.'

'You mean where there's a lot of water freely available nobody will pay for it.'

'No doubt that sounds childishly simple to you. My Lady, but it's what I meant.'

'I'm intrigued by your thought processes, Captain.' Elizabeth was giving no sign of being angered by Garamond's attitude. 'How can you compare selling water and opening up a new world?'

Garamond gave a short laugh. 'Yours are the intriguing thought processes if you're comparing Orbitsville to an ordinary planet.'

'Orbitsville?'

'Lindstromland. It isn't like an ordinary planet.'

'I'm aware of the difference in size.'

'You aren't.'

Elizabeth's tolerance began to fade. 'Be careful about what you say, Captain.'

'With respect, My Lady, you aren't aware of the difference in size. Nobody is, and nobody ever will be. I'm not aware of it, and I've flown right round Orbitsville.'

'Surely the fact that you were able to …'

'I was travelling at a hundred thousand kilometres an hour,' Garamond said in a steady voice. 'At that speed I could have orbited Earth in twenty-five minutes. Do you know how long it took to get round Orbitsville? Forty-two days!'

'I grant you we're dealing with a new order of magnitude.'

'And that's only a linear comparison. Don't you see there's just no way you can handle the amount of living space involved?'

Elizabeth shrugged. 'I've already told you that Starflight doesn't concern itself with the apportionment of land, so the exact area of Lindstromland is of no concern to us. We will, of course, continue to make a fair profit from our transportation services.'

'But that's the whole point,' Garamond said angrily. 'Even if it wasn't a disguised land charge, the transportation fee should be abolished.'

'Why?'

'Because we now have all the land we can use. In those circumstances it is intolerable that there should be any kind of economic brake on the natural and instinctive flow of people towards the new land.'

'You, of all people, should know that there's nothing natural or instinctive about building and sailing a flickerwing ship.' A rare tinge of colour was appearing in Elizabeth's waxy cheeks. 'It can't be done without money.'

Garamond shook his head. 'It can't be done without people. A culture which had never developed the concept of money, or property, could cross space just as well as we do.'

'At last!' Elizabeth took two quick steps towards Garamond, then stopped, swaying in magnetic shoes. 'At last I know you, Captain. If money is so distasteful to you, I take it you are refusing a place on the development council?'

'I am.'

'And your bounty? Ten million monits taken from the pockets of the people of the Two Worlds. You're refusing that, too?'

'I'm refusing that, too.'

'You're too late,' Elizabeth snapped, savouring a triumph which only she understood. 'It has already been credited to your account.'

'I'll return it to you.'

Elizabeth shook her head decisively. 'No, Captain. You're a very famous man back on the Two Worlds – and I must be seen to give you everything you deserve. Now, return to your ship.'

On the way back to the Bissendorf, Garamond's mind was filled with the President's admission that he had become too important to be disposed of like any other human being. And yet, came the disturbing thought, there had been that look of satisfaction in her eyes.

nine

The new house allocated for Garamond's use was a rectangular, single-storey affair. It was one of several dozen built from plastic panels which had been prefabricated in a Starflight workshop on board one of Elizabeth's ships.

The compact structure was situated less than two kilometres from the aperture to the outside universe, where the coating of soil was still thin, and so was held in place by suction pads which gripped the underlying metal of the shell. After a matter of days living in it Garamond found that he could forget about the hard vacuum of space beginning only a few centimetres below his living-room floor. The furnishings were sparse but comfortable, and a full range of colour projectors and entertainment machines – plus an electronic tutor for Christopher – gave it something of the atmosphere of a luxury week-end lodge.

There was an efficient kitchen supplied with provisions from shipboard stores in the early stages, but the expectation was that the colonists would become self-supporting as regards food within a year. It was late summer in that part of Orbitsville and the edible grasses were approaching a tawny ripeness. Even before a systemized agriculture could be established to produce grain harvests, the grass would be fully utilized – part of it synthetically digested to create protein foods, the rest yielding cellulose for the production of a range of acetate plastics.

Garamond was technically still in command of the Bissendorf but he spent much of his time in the house, telling himself he was helping his family to put down roots. In reality he was trying to cope with the sense of having been cut adrift. He acquired the habit of standing at a window which faced the aperture and watching the ever-increasing tempo of activity at the Starflight outpost. Machinery, vehicles, supplies of all kinds came through the L-shaped entry tubes in a continuous stream; new buildings were erected every day amid moraines of displaced soil; a skein of dirt roads wound around and through the complex, with its loose ends straggling off into the grasslands. Earth's beachhead was becoming well established, and as it did so Garamond felt more and more redundant.

'The weirdest thing about it is that I feel possessive,' he said to his wife. 'I keep lecturing people about the inconceivable size of Orbitsville, telling them it couldn't be controlled by a thousand Starflight corporations – yet I have a gut-feeling it's my personal property. I guess that in a way I'm as much out of touch with reality as Liz Lindstrom.'

Aileen shook her head. 'You're angry at the way she's proposing to handle things.'

'Angry at myself.'

'Why?'

'What made me think Starflight House would quietly bow out of existence to make way for a publicly-funded transportation system? From what I hear, Liz's public relations teams are plugging the notion that Starflight already is a semi-governmental concern. That was a hard one to put over when there was just Terranova and the amount of land a settler got was determined by how much he paid for his passage, but now it's different.'

'In what way?' Aileen looked up from the boy's shirt she was hand-stitching. Her deeply tanned face was sympathetic but unconcerned – since arriving on Orbitsville she had developed a peaceful optimism. It seemed that the principal element of his wife's personality, her unremarkable pleasantness, was standing her in good stead in the alien environment.

'There's to be a standard transportation charge and no limitation to the amount of land a settler can occupy. That will make the operation seem pretty altruistic to most people. The trouble is it's easy to see how they would get that impression.'

Since turning down membership of Elizabeth's development council Garamond had found it difficult to keep himself informed of her activities, but he could visualize the approach she was using to sell Orbitsville on overcrowded Earth. The newly-established fact that the volume of space within the sphere was totally free of hydrogen or other matter, ruling out the use of flickerwing ships, could even be turned to Starflight's advantage. It was likely that a very long time would elapse before the unwieldy and inefficient type of ship which carried its own reaction mass could be redeveloped sufficiently to make any impression on the five billion Earth-areas available within the sphere. Orbitsville, then, was truly the ultimate frontier, a place where a man and his family could load up a solar-powered vehicle with supplies, plus an 'iron cow' to convert grass into food, and drive off into a green infinity.

The life offered would be simple, and perhaps hard – in many ways similar to that of a pioneer in the American West – but in the coast-to-coast urbs of Earth there was a great yearning for just that kind of escape. The risk of dying of overwork or simple appendicitis on a lonely farm hundreds of light-years from Earth was infinitely preferable to the prospect of going down in a food riot in Paris or Melbourne. No matter how much Starflight charged for passage to Orbitsville, there would always be more than enough people to fill the big ships.

'Does the President have to be altruistic?' Aileen said, and Garamond knew that she was drawing comparisons between Liz Lindstrom and herself, between a woman who had unexpectedly lost a son and one whose husband and child had been reprieved. 'What's wrong with making a reasonable percentage on services rendered?'

'In this case – everything.' Garamond suppressed a pang of annoyance. 'Don't you see that? Look, Earth has been raped and polluted and choked to death, but right here on Orbitsville there's room for every human being there is to lose himself for ever. We've made all the mistakes and learned all the lessons back on Earth, and now we've been given this chance to start off from scratch again. The whole situation demands an almost complete transfer of population – and it could be done, Aileen. At our level of technology it could be done, but the entire Starflight operation is based on it not being done!

'In order for Elizabeth to go on making her quote reasonable percentage unquote there has to be a potential, a high population pressure on Earth and a low one elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the Lindstroms are behind the failure of all the main population control programmes.'

'That's ridiculous, Vance.' Aileen began to laugh.

'Is it?' Garamond turned away from the window, mollified by his wife's evident happiness. 'Maybe so, but you don't hear them complaining much about the birth rate.'

'Talking about birth rates – our own has been pretty static for a long time.' Aileen caught his hand and held it against her cheek. 'Wouldn't you like to be the father of the first child born on Orbitsville?'

'I'm not sure, but it's impossible anyway. The first shiploads of settlers are on their way, and – from what I've heard about the Terranova run – a lot of the women always arrive pregnant. It's something to do with the lack of recreational facilities on the journey.'

'How about the first one conceived on Orbitsville then?'

'That's more like it.' Garamond knelt beside his wife's chair, took her in his arms and they kissed.

Aileen drew back from him after a few seconds. 'You'll have to do better than that.'

'I'm sorry. I keep thinking about the people, beings or gods – whatever you want to call them – who built Orbitsville.'

'Who doesn't?'

'I don't understand them.'

'Who does?'

'You know, there's enough living space in Orbitsville to support every intelligent being in the galaxy. For all we know, that's why it was created, and yet…'

Garamond allowed his voice to die away. He suspected Aileen would accuse him of paranoia if he speculated aloud about why the sphere-builders had created a hostel for an entire galaxy's homeless – and then played into Elizabeth Lindstrom's hands by providing only one entrance.

Chick Truman was one of a breed of human beings who had come into existence with the development of interstellar travel. He was a frontiersman-technician. His father and grandfather had helped with the opening up of Terranova and with the initial surveying of a dozen other planets which, although unsuitable for colonization, had some commercial or scientific potential. He had received little in the way of formal technical training but, like all other members of the fraternity of gypsy-engineers, seemed to have an inborn knowledge of the entire range of mechanical skills. It was as though the accumulated experience of generations had begun to produce men for whom the analysis of an electrical circuit or the tuning of an engine was a matter of instinct.

One attribute which distinguished Truman from most of his fellows was a strong, if undisciplined, interest in philosophy. And it was this which had fired his mind as he set up camp on the lower slopes of the hills which ringed Orbitsville's single aperture at a distance of about sixty kilometres. He was half of a two-man team which had been sent out to erect a bank of laser reflectors as part of an experimental communications system. They had reached their target minutes before the wall of darkness had come rushing from the east, and now Truman's partner, Peter Krogt, was busy preparing food and laying out their sleeping bags. Truman himself was concerned with less prosaic matters. He had lit a pipe of tobacco, was comfortably seated with his back to the transporter and was staring into the incredible ribbed archways of the sky at night.

'The Assumption of Mediocrity is a useful philosophical weapon,' he was saying, 'but it can backfire on the guy who uses it. I know that some of the greatest advances in human thought were achieved by assuming there's nothing odd or freakish about our own little patch-that's what set Albert Einstein off.'

'Help me open these containers,' Krogt said.

Without moving, Truman released a cloud of aromatic smoke. 'But consider the case of, say, two beetles living at the bottom of a hole on a golf course. These bugs have never been out of that hole, but if they have a philosophical turn of mind they can describe the rest of the universe just by using available evidence. What would their universe be like, Pete?'

'Who cares?'

'Nice attitude, Pete. Their projected universe would be an infinite series of round holes with big white balls dropping into them during daylight hours.'

Krogt had opened the food containers unaided and he handed one to Truman. 'What are you talking about, Chick?'

'I'm telling you what's wrong with the management back at base. Listen … We've been on Orbitsville for months, right?'

'Right.'

'Now take this little jaunt you and I are on right now. These hills are three hundred metres high. Our orders are to set up the reflectors at an elevation of two hundred and fifty metres. We've been told where to set them, where to aim them, what deviation will be acceptable, how long to take with the assignment – but there's one thing we haven't been told to do. And I find it a pretty astonishing omission, Pete.'

'Your yeasteak's getting cold.'

'Why did nobody tell us to climb the extra fifty metres to the top of the hill and have a look at the other side?'

'Because there's no need,' Krogt said heavily. 'There's nothing there but grass and scrub. The whole inside of this ball is nothing but prairie.'

'There you go! The Assumption of Mediocrity.'

'It isn't an assumption.' Krogt gestured with his fork towards the shimmering watered-silk canopy of the sky. 'They've had a look around with telescopes.'

Telescopes!' Truman sneered to cover up the fact that he had forgotten about telescopic examination of the far side of Orbitsville, then his talent for rapid mental calculation came to his aid. 'We're talking about a distance of more than two astronomical units, sonny. If you were standing on Earth, what would one of those spyglasses tell you about life on Mars?'

'More'n I want to know. Are you going to eat this yeasteak or will I?'

'You eat it.'

Truman got to his feet, slightly dismayed at the way in which a discussion on philosophy had led him to renounce his meal, and marched away up the slope. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the rounded summit and paused to re-light his pipe. The yellow flame from the lighter dazzled his eyes and almost a minute had passed before Truman appreciated that, spread out on the plain below him, dim and peaceful, were the lights of an alien civilization.

ten

The arrival of the first wave of ships had surprised Garamond in two ways – by its timing, which could have been achieved only if it had set out within days of Elizabeth's own arrival on Orbitsville; and by its size. There were eighty Type G2 vessels, each of which carried more than four thousand people. A third of a million settlers, who originally must have been destined for the relatively well-prepared territories of Terranova, had been divested to a new destination where there was not even a shed to give them shelter for their first night.

'It beats me,' Cliff Napier said, sipping his first coffee of the day. He was off duty and had spent the night in Garamond's house. 'All right, so Terranova has only one usable continent and it's filling up fast, but the situation isn't that urgent. No matter how you look at it, these people are going to have a rough time at first. They haven't even got proper transportation.'

'You're wondering why they agreed to come?' Garamond asked, finishing his own coffee.

Napier nodded. 'The average colonist is a family man who doesn't want to expose his wife and kids to more unknown risks than necessary. How did Starflight get them to come here?'

'I'll tell you.' Aileen came into the room with a pot of fresh coffee and began refilling the cups. 'Chris and I were down at the store this morning while you two were still in your beds, and I talked to people who saw the first families disembarking before dawn. You know, you don't learn much by lying around snoring.'

'All right, Aileen, we both think you're wonderful. Now, what are you talking about?'

'They were given free passages,' Aileen said, obviously pleased at being able to impart the news.

Garamond shook his head. 'I don't believe it.'

'It's true, Vance. They say Starflight House is giving free travel to anybody who signs on for Lindstromland within the first six months.'

'It's a trick.'

'Oh, Vance!' Aileen's eyes were reproachful. 'Why don't you admit you were wrong about Elizabeth? Besides, what sort of a trick could it be? What could she hope to gain?'

'It's a trick,' Garamond said stubbornly. 'What she's done isn't even legal – the teams from the Government land agencies haven't got here yet.'

'But you always say the law doesn't mean anything to the Lindstroms.'

'Not when they want to take something. This is different.'

'Now you're being childish,' Aileen snapped.

'He isn't,' Napier said. 'Take our word for it, Aileen – Liz Lindstrom never acts out of character.'

Aileen's face had lost some of its natural colour. 'Oh, you know it all, of course. You know all about how it feels for a woman to lose her only…' She stopped speaking abruptly.

'Child,' Garamond finished for her. 'Don't hold anything back for my benefit.'

'I'm sorry. It's just…' Lenses of tears magnified Aileen's eyes as she walked out of the room.

The two men finished their coffee in silence, each dwelling on his own thoughts. Garamond wondered if the sense of pointlessness which was silting through his mind was due to his having to stand by helplessly while the President imposed her will on Orbitsville, or if it sprang from the slow realization that he was out of a job. The entire Stellar Exploration Arm had become superfluous because there was no need for the big ships to search the star fields ever again. Could it be, he wondered, that I existed only for the search?

With an obvious effort at diplomacy, Napier began discussing the work being carried out by the Starflight research teams. Despite the use of more sophisticated and more powerful cutting tools than had been available on board the Bissendorf nobody had even managed to scratch the shell material. At the same time, studies of the inner shell were indicating that its movement was not a simple east-west rotation, but that subtle geometries were involved with the object of producing a normal progression of day and night close to the polar areas.

Another team had been working continuously on the diaphragm field which prevented the atmosphere from rushing into space through the kilometre-wide aperture in the outer shell. No significant progress had been made there, either. The force field employed was unlike anything ever generated by human engineers in that it reacted equally against the passage of metallic and non-metallic objects. Observations of the field showed that it was lenticular in shape, being several metres thick at the centre. Unlike the shell material, it was transparent to cosmic rays and actually appeared to refract them – a discovery which had led to the suggestion that, as well as being a sealing device, it was intended to disperse cosmic rays in such a way as to produce a small degree of mutation in Orbitsville's flora and fauna-if the latter existed. In general, the field seemed more amenable than the shell material to investigation because it had proved possible to cause small local alterations in its structure, and to produce temporary leaks by firing beams of electrons through it,

'Interesting stuff, isn't it?' Napier concluded.

'Fascinating,' Garamond said automatically.

'You don't sound convinced. I'm going to have a look at the new arrivals.'

Garamond smiled. 'Okay, Cliff. We'll see you for lunch.'

He got to his feet and was walking to the door with Napier when the communicator set, which had been connected to the central exchange by a landline pending a solution of the radio transmission problem, chimed to announce an incoming call. Garamond pressed the ACCEPT button and the solid image of a heavy-shouldered and prematurely grey young man appeared at the projection focus. He was wearing civilian clothing and his face was unknown to Garamond.

'Good morning, Captain,' the stranger said in a slightly breathless voice. 'I'm Colbert Mason of the Two Worlds News Agency. Have any other reporters been in touch with you?'

'Other reporters? No.'

'Thank God for that – I'm the first,' Mason said fervently.

'The first? I didn't know Starflight had authorized transportation for newsmen.'

'They haven't.' Mason gave a shaky laugh. 'I had to emigrate to this place with my wife more or less permanently, and I know other reporters have done the same thing. I'm just lucky my ship disembarked first. If you'll give me an interview, that is.'

'Have you been off-world before?'

'No, sir. First time, but I'd have gone right round the galaxy for this chance.'

Garamond recognized the flattery but also found himself genuinely impressed by the young newsman. 'What did you want to talk to me about?'

'What did I…?' Mason spread his hands helplessly. 'The lot! Anything and everything. Do you know, sir, that back on Earth you're regarded as the most famous man ever? Even if you'd answered the tachygrams we sent you we'd still have considered it worth while to try for a face-to-face interview.'

'Tachygrams? I got no signals from Earth. Hold on a minute.' Garamond killed the audio channel and turned to Napier. 'Elizabeth?'

Napier's heavy-lidded eyes were alert. 'I'd say so. She didn't like your views on how Orbitsville should be handled. In fact, I'm surprised this reporter got through the net. He must have been very smart, or lucky.'

'Let's make him luckier.' Garamond opened the audio circuit again. 'I've got a good story for you, Mason. Are you prepared to run it exactly as I tell it?'

'Of course.'

'Okay. Come straight out to my place.'

'I can't, sir. I called you because I think I'm being watched, and there may not be much time.'

'All right, then. You can report that in my opinion the potential of Orbitsville is…'

'Orbitsville?'

'The local name for Lindstromland…' Garamond stopped speaking as the image of the reporter broke up into motes of coloured light which swarmed in the air for a second before abruptly vanishing. He waited for the image to reestablish itself but nothing happened.

'I thought it was too good to be true,' Napier commented. "Somebody pulled out the plug on you.'

'I know. Where do you think Mason was speaking from?'

"Must have been from one of the depot stores. Those are the only places where he'd have any access to a communicator set.'

'Let's get down there right now.' Garamond pulled on a lightweight jacket and, without waiting to explain to Aileen, hurried from the house into Orbitsville's changeless noon. Christopher looked up from the solitary game he was playing in the grass but did not speak. Garamond waved to the boy and strode out in the direction of the clustered buildings around the aperture.

'It's bloody hot,' Napier grumbled at his side. 'I'm going to buy a parasol for walking about outdoors.'

Garamond was in no mood to respond to small talk. 'It's getting too much like Earth and Terranova.'

'You won't be able to prove the call was blocked.'

'I'm not even going to try.'

They walked quickly along the brown dirt road which threaded through the scattering of residences and reached the belt of small administrative buildings, research laboratories and windowless storehouses which surrounded the aperture. The black ellipse began to be disjointedly visible through a clutter of docking machinery and L-shaped entry ports. Garamond was no longer able to think of it as a lake of stars – now it was simply a hole in the ground. As they were passing an unusually large anonymous building his attention was caught by sunlight glinting on a moving vehicle – one of the few yet to be seen on Orbitsville. It stopped at the entrance to the building, four men got out and hurried inside. One of them had a youthful build which contrasted with his greying hair.

Napier caught Garamond's arm. 'That looked like our man.'

'We'll see.' They sprinted across a patch of grass and into the dense shade of the foyer, just in time to see an interior door closing. A doorman wearing Starflight emblems came out of a kiosk and tried to bar their way, but Garamond and Napier went by on each side of him and burst through to the inner room. Garamond's first glance confirmed that he had found Colbert Mason. The reporter was between two men who were gripping his arms, and three others – one of whom Garamond identified as Silvio Laker, a member of Elizabeth Lindstrom's personal staff-were standing close by. Mason's face had a dazed, drugged expression.

'Hands off him,' Garamond commanded.

'Out of here,' Laker said. 'You're outside your territory, Captain.'

'I'm taking Mason with me.'

'Like hell you are,' said one of the men holding Mason, stepping forward confidently.

Garamond gave him a bored look. 'I can cripple you ten different ways.' He was lying, never having been interested in even the recreational forms of personal combat, but the man suddenly looked less confident. While he was hesitating, his partner released Mason and tried to snatch something from his pocket, but was dissuaded by Napier who simply moved his three-hundred-pound bulk in a little closer and looked expectant. A ringing silence descended on the sparsely furnished room.

'Are you all right?' Garamond said to Mason.

'My neck,' the reporter said uncertainly, fingering a pink blotch just above his collar. 'They used a hypodermic spray on me.'

'It was probably just a sedative to keep you quiet.' Garamond fixed his gaze on Laker. 'For your sake, I hope that's right.'

'I warned you to stay out of this,' Laker said in a hoarse voice, his short round body quivering with anger. He extended his right fist, on which was a large gold ring set with a ruby.

'Lasers are messy,' Garamond said.

'I don't mind cleaning up.'

'You're getting in over your head, Laker. Have you thought about what Elizabeth would do to you for involving her in my murder?'

'I've an idea she'd like to see you put away.'

'In secret, yes – but not like this.' Garamond nodded to Napier. 'Let's go.' They turned the compliant, stupefied reporter around and walked him towards the door.

'I warn you, Garamond,' Laker whispered. 'I'm prepared to take the chance.'

'Don't be foolish.' Garamond spoke without looking back. The door was only a few paces away now and he could feel an intense tingling between his shoulder blades. He put out his hand to grasp the handle, but in the instant of his touching it the door was flung open and three more men exploded into the room. Garamond tensed to withstand an onslaught but the newcomers, two of whom were wearing field technician uniforms, brushed past with unseeing eyes.

'Mr Laker,' shouted the third man, who was wearing the blue uniform of a Starflight engineering officer. 'You've got to hear this! You'll never…'

Laker's voice was ragged with fury, 'Get out, Gordino. What the hell's the idea of bursting in here like…?'

'But you don't understand! We've made contact with outsiders! Two of my technicians went over the hills to the west of here last night and they found an alien community – one that's still in use!'

Laker's jaw and threatening fist sagged in unison. 'What are you saying, Gordino? What kind of a story is this?'

'These are the two men, Mr Laker. They'll tell you about it themselves.'

'Two of your drunken gypsies.'

'Please.' The taller of the technicians raised his hand and spoke in an incongruous and strangely dignified voice. 'I anticipated a certain degree of scepticism, so instead of returning to base immediately I waited till daylight and took a number of photographs. Here they are.' He produced a sheaf of coloured rectangles and offered them to Laker. Garamond pushed Napier and the still-dazed Mason out through the door and, forgetting all notion of fleeing, strode back to Laker and snatched the photographs. Other hands were going for them as well, but he emerged from the free-for-all with two pictures. The background in each was the limitless prairie of Orbitsville and ranged across the middle distance were pale blue rectangles which could be nothing other than artificial structures. Near the base of some of the buildings were multicoloured specks, so small as to be represented only by pinpricks of pigment beneath the glaze of the photographs.

'These coloured dots,' Garamond said to the tall technician. 'Are they…?'

'All I can say is that they moved. From the distance they look like flowers, but they move around.'

Garamond returned his attention to the pictures, trying to drive his mind down a converging beam at the focus of which were the bright-hued molecules – as if he could reach an atomic level where alien forms would become visible, and beyond it a nuclear level on which he could look into the faces and eyes of the first companions Man had found in all his years of star-searching.

The reaction was a natural one, conditioned by centuries during which the sole prospect of contacting others lay in close examination of marks on photographic plates, but it was swept aside almost at once by forces of instinct. Garamond found himself walking towards the door and was out in the sunlight before understanding that he was heading for the Starflight vehicle parked near the entrance.

The figures of Napier and Mason were visible a short distance along the road, apparently on their way to Garamond's house. He got into the crimson vehicle and examined the controls. The car was brand-new, having been manufactured on board one of the spaceships specifically for use on Orbitsville, and no keys were needed to energize the pulse-magnet engine. Garamond pressed the starter button and accelerated away in a cloud of dust as Laker and the others were coming out of the building.

He ignored their shouts, gunned the engine for the few seconds it took to catch up on Napier, brought his heel down on the single control pedal and skidded the car to a halt. He threw open a door. Napier glanced back at the Starflight men who were now in pursuit and, without needing to be told, bundled Mason into the vehicle and climbed in after him. The engine gave a barely perceptible whine as Garamond switched from heel to toe pressure on the pedal, sending the car snaking along the packed earth of the road as the excess of power forced its drive wheels to slide from side to side.

In less than a minute they had cleared the perimeter of the township and were speeding towards the sunlit hills.

The alien settlement came in view as soon as the car reached the crest of the circular range of hills. It was composed of pale blue rectangles shining in the distance like chips of ceramic. His brief study of the photographs had given Garamond the impression that the buildings were in a single cluster, but in actuality they spanned the entire field of view and extended out across the plain for several kilometres. Garamond realized he Was looking at a substantial city. It was a city which appeared to lack a definite centre – but nevertheless large enough to sustain a population of a million or more, judging by human standards. Garamond eased back on the throttle, slowing the car's descent. He had just picked out the colourful moving specks which he believed were the first contemporaries mankind had ever encountered beyond the biosphere of his birth planet.

'Cliff, didn't I hear something about the Starflight science teams duplicating our experiment with a reconnaissance torpedo?' Garamond frowned as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the – glittering city.

'I think so.'

'I wonder if the cameras were activated?'

'I doubt it. They could hardly have missed seeing this.'

Mason, who had recovered from his shot of sedative, stirred excitedly in the rear seat, panning with his scene recorder. 'What are you going to say to these beings, Captain?'

'It doesn't matter what any of us say – they won't understand it.'

'They mightn't even hear it,' Napier said. 'Maybe they don't have ears.'

Garamond felt his mouth go dry. He had visualized this moment many times, with a strength of yearning which could not be comprehended by anyone who had not looked into the blind orbs of a thousand lifeless worlds, but the prospect of coming face to face with a totally alien life form was upsetting his body chemistry. His heart began a slow, powerful pounding as the pale blue city rose higher beyond the nose of the car. Without conscious bidding, his foot eased further back on the throttle and the hum of the engine became completely inaudible at the lower speed. For a long moment there was no sound but that of the tough grasses of Orbitsville whipping at the vehicle's bodywork.

'What's the trouble, Vance?' Napier's eyes were watchful and sympathetic. 'Arachnid reaction?'

'I guess so.'

'Don't worry – I can feel it too.'

'Arachnid reaction?' Mason leaned forward eagerly. 'What's that?'

'Ask us some other time.'

'No, it's all right,' Garamond said, glad of the opportunity to talk. 'Do you like spiders?'

'I can't stand them,' Mason replied.

'That's fairly universal. The revulsion that most people get when they see spiders – arachnids – is so strong and widespread it has led to the theory that arachnids are not native to Earth. We have a sense of kinship, no matter how slight, with all creatures which originated on our own world, and this makes them acceptable to us even when they're as ugly as sin. But if the arachnid reaction is what some people think it is – loathing for something instinctively identified as of extraterrestrial origin – then we might be in trouble when we make the first contact with an alien race.

'The worry is that they might be intelligent and friendly, even beautiful, and yet might trigger off hate-and-kill reactions in us simply because their shape isn't already registered in a kind of checklist we inherit with our genes.'

'It's just an idea, of course.'

'Just an idea,' Garamond agreed.

'What's the probability of it being right?'

'Virtually zero, in my estimation. I wouldn't…' Garamond stopped speaking as the car lifted over a slight rise and he saw two bright-hued beings only a few hundred paces ahead. The aliens were a long way out from the perimeter of their city, isolated. He brought the car to a gradual halt.

'I guess … I have a feeling we ought to get out and walk the rest of the way.'

Napier nodded and swung open his door. They got out, paused for a moment in the heat of Orbitsville's constant noon, and began walking towards the two man-sized but unearthly figures. Mason followed with his scene recorder.

As the distance between them narrowed, Garamond began to discern the shape of the aliens and was relieved to discover he was not afraid of them in spite of the fact that they were unlike anything he had ever imagined. The creatures seemed, at first, to be humanoids wrapped in garments which were covered with large patches of pink, yellow and brown. At closer range, however, the garments proved to be varicoloured fronds which partly concealed complex, asymmetrical bodies. The aliens did not have clearly defined heads – merely regions of greater complexity at the tops of their blunt, forward-leaning trunks. From a wealth of tendrils, cavities and protuberances, the only organs Garamond was able to identify with any certainty were the eyes, which resembled twin cabochons of green bloodstone.

'What are they like?' Napier whispered.

'I don't know.' Garamond felt a similar need to relate the aliens to something from his past experience. 'Painted shrimps?'

He became aware that the reporter had fallen behind, and that he and Napier were now only a few paces from the aliens. Both men stopped walking and stood facing the fantastic creatures, which had not moved nor given any indication of being aware of their approach. Silence descended over the tableau like liquid glass, solidifying around them. The plain became a sun-filled lens and they were at the centre of it, immobilized and voiceless. Psychic pressures built up and became intolerable, and yet there was nothing to do or say.

Garamond's mind escaped into irrelevancy. It doesn't matter that I wasn't able to think of anything to say for the benefit of posterity – there's no way to communicate. No way.

A minute endured like an age, and then another.

'We've done our bit,' Napier announced finally. 'Let's go, Vance.'

Garamond turned thankfully and they walked towards Mason, who backed away from them, still holo-recording all that was happening. Not until he had reached the car did Garamond look in the direction of the aliens. One of them was moving away towards its city with a complicated ungainly gait; the other was standing exactly where they had left it.

'I'll drive back,' Napier said, climbing into the car first and experimenting with the simplified controls while the others were taking their seats. He got the vehicle moving, swung it round and set off up the hill at an oblique angle. 'We'll go the long way round in case we run into a crowd following our tracks out.'

Garamond nodded, his thoughts still wholly absorbed by the two creatures on the plain. 'There was no arachnid reaction – I suppose that's something we can feel good about – but I felt totally inadequate. There was no point to it at all. I can't see us and them ever relating or interacting.'

'I don't know about relating, Vance, but there's going to be plenty of interacting.' Napier pointed out through the windshield to the left, where the curve of the hill was falling away to reveal new expanses of prairie. The pale blue buildings of the alien city, instead of thinning out, were spread across the fresh vistas of grassland like flowers in a meadow, seemingly going on for ever.

Mason whistled and raised his recorder. 'Do you think it makes a circle outside the hills? Right round our base?'

'It looks that way to me. They must have been here a long time …' Napier allowed his words to tail off, but Garamond knew at once what he was thinking.

Liz Lindstrom had brought a third of a million settlers with her on the very first load, and the big ships would soon be bringing land-hungry humans in batches of a full million or more. Interaction between the two races was bound to take place in the near future, and on a very large scale.

eleven

Rumours of massacre came within a month.

There had been a short-term lull while the shallow circular basin centred on Beachhead City absorbed the first waves of settlers. During this brief respite a handful of External Affairs representatives arrived, aware of their inadequacy, and ruled that no humans were to go within five kilometres of the alien community until negotiations had been completed for a corridor through to the free territory beyond. A number of factors combined against their efficacy, however. The Government men had been late on the scene, no broadcasting media were available to them, and – most important – there was a widespread feeling among the settlers that attempting diplomatic communication with the Clowns, as they had been unofficially named, would be an exercise in futility.

At first the bright-hued aliens had been approached with caution and respect, then it was learned that they possessed no machines beyond the simplest fanning implements. Even their houses were woven from a kind of cellulose rope extruded from their own bodies in roughly the same way that a spider produces its web. When it was further discovered that the Clowns were mute, the assumption of their intelligence was called into question by many of the human settlers. One theory advanced was that they were degenerate descendants of the race which had built the fortifications around the Beachhead City aperture; another that they were little more than domestic animals which had outlived their masters and developed a quasi-culture of their own.

Garamond was disturbed by the attitude implicit in the theories, partly because it was a catalyst for certain changes which were taking place in the Earth settlers. The subtle loosening of discipline he had noticed among his own men within minutes of their setting foot on Orbitsville had its counterpart among the immigrants in the form of a growing disregard for authority. Men whose lives had been closely controlled in the tight, compacted society of Earth now regarded themselves as potential owners of continents and were impatient for their new status. All they had to do to transform themselves from clerks to kings was to load up the vehicles provided by the Starflight workshops and set out on their golden journeys. The only directive was that they should travel far, because it was obvious that the further a man went when fanning out from Beachhead City the more land would be available to him,.

As the mood took hold of the settlers even the earliest arrivals, who had staked out their plots of land within the circular hills, became uneasily aware of the incoming hordes at their heels and decided to move onwards and outwards.

In a normal planetary situation the population pressures would not have been concentrated so fiercely on one point, but Earth technology was geared to the Assumption of Mediocrity. During the development of the total transport system of flickerwing ships and shuttles it had never occurred to anyone to make provision for an environment in which, for example, it would not be possible for a ship to gather its own reaction mass. It would have been completely illogical to do so, in the universe as it was then understood – but in the context of Orbitsville a deadly mistake had been made.

Territories of astronomical dimensions were available, but no means of claiming them quickly enough to satisfy the ambitions of men who had crossed space like gods and then found themselves reduced to wheeled transportation. Given time to build or import fleets of wing-borne aircraft, the difficulties could have been lessened but not removed completely. Each family unit or commune had to become self-supporting in the shortest possible time and, even with advanced farming methods and the use of iron cows, this meant claiming possession of large areas without delay.

It was a situation which, classically, had always resulted in man fighting man. Garamond was not surprised therefore when reports began to reach him that the outermost settlers had forced their way through the Clown city in a number of places and were pouring into the prairie beyond. He did not try to visit any of the trouble spots in person, but had no difficulty in visualizing the course of events at each. Still haunted by the sense of having lost his purpose, he devoted most of his time to his family, making only occasional visits to the Bissendorf in his capacity of chief executive. He deliberately avoided watching the newscasts which were piped into his home along the landlines, but other channels were open.

One morning, while he was sleeping off the effects of a prolonged drinking session, he was awakened by the sound of a child's scream. The sound triggered off a synergistic vision of Harald Lindstrom falling away from the blind face of a statue and, almost in the same instant, came the crushing awareness that he had not been sufficiently on his guard against Elizabeth.

Garamond sat up in bed, gasping for air, and lurched to the living-room. Aileen had got there before him and was kneeling with her arms around Christopher. The boy was now sobbing gently, his face buried in her shoulder.

"What happened?' Garamond's fear was subsiding but his heart was pounding unevenly.

'It was the projector,' Aileen said. 'One of those things appeared on it. I turned it off.'

'What things?' Garamond glanced at the projection area of the solid-image television where the faint ghost of a tutor in one of the educational programmes was still dissolving into the air.

Christopher raised a streaked, solemn face. 'It was a Crown.'

'He means a Clown.' Aileen's eyes were slaty with anger.

'A Clown? But… I told you to keep the images fairly diffuse when Chris is watching so that he won't get confused between what's real and what isn't.'

'The image was diffused. The thing still scared him, that's all.'

Garamond stared helplessly at his wife. 'I don't get it. Why should he be afraid of a Clown?' He turned his attention to Christopher. 'What's the matter, son? Why were you afraid?'

'I thought the Crown was coming to get me too.'

'That was a silly thing to think – they never harmed anybody.'

The boy's gaze was steady and reproachful. 'What about all the people they froze? All the dead people?'

Garamond was taken aback. 'What do you mean?'

'Don't confuse him,' Aileen said quietly. 'You know perfectly well what's been in the newscasts for the last couple of days.'

'But I don't! What did they say?'

'About the outer planet. When they built Lindstromland they shut off all the light and heat to the outer planet and froze it over.'

'They? Who were they?'

'The Clowns, of course.'

'But that's wonderful!' Garamond began to smile. 'The Clowns created Orbitsville!'

'Their ancestors.'

'I see. And there were people on the outer planet? People who got frozen to death?'

'They showed photographs of them.' A stubborn note had crept into Aileen's voice.

'Where did they get these photographs?'

'A Starflight ship must have gone there, of course.'

'But, honey, if the planet is frozen over how could anybody take photographs of its surface or anything on it? Just try thinking it over for a while.'

'I don't know how they did it – I'm only telling you what Chris and I and everybody else have seen.'

Garamond sighed and walked to the communicator and called Cliff Napier on board the Bissendorf. The familiar head appeared almost immediately at the projection focus and nodded a greeting.

'Cliff, I need some information about ship movements within the Pengelly's Star system.' Garamond spoke quickly, without preamble. 'Has there been an expedition to the outer planet?'

'No.'

'You're positive?'

Napier glanced downwards, looking at an information display. 'Absolutely.'

'Thanks, Cliff. That's all.' Garamond broke the connection and Napier's apparently solid features faded into the air just as an expression of puzzlement was appearing on them. 'There you are, Aileen – a direct, clear statement of fact. Now, where are the photographs supposed to have come from?'

'Well, perhaps they weren't actual photographs. They might have been…'

'Artists' impressions? Reconstructions?'

'What difference does it make? They were shown…

What difference?' Garamond gave a shaky laugh as the mental chasm opened between himself and his wife, but he felt no annoyance with her. Their marriage had always been simple and harmonious, and he knew it was based on deeper attachments than could be achieved through mere similarity in interests or outlook. One of the first things he had learned to accept was the certainty of lasting incompleteness on some levels of their relationship, and usually he knew how to accommodate it.

'It makes all the difference in the world,' he said softly, almost as if speaking to a child. 'Don't you see how your attitude towards the Clowns has been affected by what you've seen or think you've seen on the viewers? That's the way people are manipulated. It used to be more difficult, or at least they had to be more subtle when literacy was considered vital to education…' Even to his own ears the words sounded dry and irrelevant, and he stopped speaking as he noticed Aileen's predictable loss of interest. His wife absorbed most of her information semi-instinctively, through images, and he had no picture to show her. Garamond felt an obscure sadness.

'I'm not stupid, Vance.' Aileen touched his hand, her intuition in sure control.

'I know.'

'What did you want to tell me?'

'I just want you to remember the Starflight Corporation is like…' he strove for a suitably vivid image,'… like a snowball rolling down a hill. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it keeps going faster, and it can't slow down. It can't afford to stop, even when somebody gets in the way … and that's why it's going to roll right on over the Clowns.'

'You always seem so certain about things.'

'The signs are all there. The first step is to implant in people's minds the idea that the Clowns ought to be rolled over. Once that's been done the rest is easy.'

'I don't like the Crowns,' Christopher said, breaking a long silence. His grain-gold face was determined.

'I'm not asking you to like them, son. Just don't believe that everything you see on the viewer is real and true. Why, if I went to the outer planet myself I could…' Garamond stopped speaking for a moment as the idea took hold of his mind.

'Why not? After all, that's the sort of work the S.E.A. ships were designed to do,' Elizabeth had said, reasonably, and at that point she had smiled. You're on indefinite leave. Captain, but if you would prefer to return to active service and visit the outer world I have no objections.'

'Thank you, My Lady,' Garamond had replied, concealing his surprise.

Elizabeth's imperfect smile had grown more secretive, more triumphant. 'We will find it very useful to possess some hard data about the planet – in place of all the speculations which are filling the air.'

Garamond reviewed the brief conversation many times during the period in which the Bissendorf was extending its invisible wings and disengaging from fleet formation. It came to him that he had proposed the exploratory flight partly as a challenge to the President, hoping that a duel with her would ease the growing tensions in his mind. Her ready agreement to the mission was the last thing he had expected and, as well as drawing a few pointed comments from Aileen, it had left him feeling both disappointed and uneasy.

He sat in the control gallery for hours, watching the bright images of the other Starflight ships perform the patient manoeuvres which would bring each one in turn to the entrance of Orbitsville where it could discharge its load of human beings or supplies. When the Bissendorf''s own progression had taken it out through the regulated swarm, and nothing but stars lay in front, Garamond remained on station watching the irregular stabs of the main electron gun, the ghostly blade of energy which flickered through space ahead of the ship. The harvest of reaction mass was not plentiful in the immediate vicinity of Pengelly's Star and in the early stages of the flight it was necessary to ionize the cosmic dust to help the intake fields do their work. Gradually, however, as the ship spiralled outwards, the night-black plain of Orbitsville's shell ceased to blank off an entire half of the visible universe. The conditions of space became more normal and speed began to build up. Once again Garamond had difficulty in setting his perceptions to the correct scale. Everything in his past experience conspired to make him think he was in a tiny ship which was painfully struggling to a height of a few hundred kilometres above a normal-sized planet, whereas at a hundred million kilometres out it was still necessary to turn one's head through ninety degrees to take in both edges of Orbitsville's disc.

The size of the sphere was, in a way, painful to Garamond, causing familiar questions to seethe again in his mind. Was the fact that it was large enough to accommodate every intelligent being in the home galaxy a clue to its purpose? Why was there only one entrance to such a huge edifice? Did the physics of the sphere's existence dictate of necessity that neither flicker-wing ship nor radio communicator could operate inside it? Or were those features designed in by the Creators to preserve the sphere's effective size, and to prevent ingenious technicians turning it into a global village with their FTL ships and television networks? And where were the Creators now?

Napier appeared with two bulbs of coffee, one of which he handed to Garamond. 'The weather section reports that the local average density of space is increasing according to their predictions. That means we should be able to pick up enough speed to reach the outer planet in not much more than a hundred hours.'

Garamond nodded his approval. 'The probe torpedo should be fitted out by then.'

'Sammy Yamoto wants to lead a manned descent to the surface.'

'That could be dangerous – we'll have to get a better report on the surface conditions before authorizing anything like that.' Garamond began to sip his coffee, then frowned. 'Why should our Chief Astronomer want to risk his neck out there? I thought he was still wrapped up in his globular filigree of force fields.'

'He is, but he reckons he can deduce a few things about how Orbitsville was built by examining the outer planet.'

'Tell him to keep me posted.' Garamond looked at Napier over the mouthpiece of his coffee bulb and saw an uncharacteristic look of hesitancy on the big man's face. 'Anything else coming to the boil?'

'Shrapnel seems to have gone AWOL.'

'Shrapnel? The shuttle pilot?'

'That's right.'

'So he took off. Isn't that what we expected?'

'I expected him to do it once, but not twice. He disappeared for the best part of a day soon after the Starflight crowd got here. It was during the time he was on ground detachment so I decided he had gone back to Starflight with a hard luck story, and I wrote him off – but he was back on duty again that night.'

"That surprised you?'

'It did, especially as he came back without the chip on his shoulder. His whole attitude seemed to have changed for the better, and since then he's been working like a beaver.'

'Maybe he discovered he didn't like the Starflight HQ staff.'

Napier looked unconvinced. 'He didn't object or try to cry off when orders were posted for this flight, but he isn't on board.'

'I'd just forget about him.'

'I'm trying to.' Napier said, 'but the Bissendorf isn't a sailing ship tied up in a harbour. A man who is able to come and go unofficially must have some organization behind him. It makes me think Shrapnel had contacts in Starflight.'

'Let's have some whisky,' Garamond suggested. 'We're both getting too old for this type of work.'

Even before it was denied the light and heat of its own sun, the outer planet of the Pengelly's Star system had been a bleak, sterile place.

Less than half the size of Earth, and completely devoid of atmosphere, it was a ball of rock and dust which patrolled a lonely orbit so far out that its parent sun appeared as little more than a bright star casting barely perceptible shadows in an inert landscape. And when that sun vanished it made very little difference to the planet. Its surface became a little colder and a little darker, but the cooling stresses were not great enough to cause anything as spectacular as movements of the crust. Nothing stirred in the blackness, except for infrequent puffs of dust from meteor strikes, and the uneventful millennia continued to drag by as they had always done.

Using its radar fans like the feelers of a giant insect, the Bissendorf groped its way into orbit around the invisible sphere which was the dead world.

The ship was in the form of three equal cylinders joined together, with the central one projecting forward from the other two by almost half its length. The command deck, administrative and technical levels, living quarters and workshops were contained in the central cylinder. This exposed position meant the inhabited regions of the vessel could have been subjected to an intense bombardment during high speed flight, when – due to the ship's own velocity – even stationary motes of interstellar dust registered as fantastically energetic particles. The problem had been solved by using the same magnetic deflection techniques which guided the particles into the ramjet's thermonuclear reactors. Both the Bissendorf s flux pumps shaped their magnetic lines of force into the form of a protective shield around which the charged particles flowed harmlessly into the engines.

An inherent disadvantage of the system was that a starship could never coast at high speed – with the flux pumps closed down the crew would quickly have been fried in self-induced radiation. Communications with a ship which was under way were also precluded, and under these conditions even radar sensing could not be employed. The approach to the dark planet had been made at modest interplanetary speeds, however, and the Bissendorf was able to proceed by using its main drive in short bursts, between which it was possible to run position checks. Because it was designed for exploration work in unknown planetary systems, the vessel was further equipped with conventional nuclear thrusters and a limited amount of stored reaction mass which gave it extra capability for close manoeuvring. The task of slipping into stable orbit was therefore accomplished quickly and efficiently, even though the target planet remained invisible to the Bissendorf s crew.

It took only one pass to enable the long-range sensors and recording banks to answer all of Garamond's questions.

'This is pretty disappointing,' Sammy Yamoto said as he examined the glowing numerals and symbols of the preliminary analysis. 'The planet has no atmosphere now and appears never to have had one at any time in its past. Its surface is completely barren. I was hoping for the remains of some kind of plant life which would have told us whether the radiation from the primary was cut off suddenly or over a period of years.'

Chief Science Officer O'Hagan said, 'We can still do a lot with samples of dust and rock from the surface.'

Yamoto nodded without enthusiasm. 'I guess so, but botanical evidence would have been so precise. So nice. With nothing but inorganic evidence we're going to have margins of error of what? A thousand years or more?'

'On an astronomical timescale that's not bad."

'It's not bad, but it's not…'

'Is it the opinion of the group,' Garamond put in, 'that a manned descent is still worth while?'

O'Hagan glanced around the other science officers who were anchored close to the information display, then shook his head. 'At this stage it would be enough to drop a robo-lander and take three or four cores. Somebody can always come back if the cores prove to be of exceptional interest, but I don't hold out much hope.'

'Right – it's decided we send down one probe.' Garamond used his end-of-meeting voice. 'Get it down there and back again as quickly as possible, and include flares and holo-recording gear in the package – I want to be able to present certain people with visible evidence.'

Denise Serra, the physicist, raised her eyebrows. 'I heard the Starflight Information Bureau was propagating some fantasy about a beautiful civilization being snuffed out in its prime, but I didn't believe it. I mean, who would swallow an idea like that?'

'You'd be surprised,' Garamond told her ruefully. 'I've been learning that there are different kinds of naivety. We're subject to one kind – it's an occupational hazard associated with spending half your life cut off from the big scene-but there are others just as dangerous.'

'That may be so, but to believe that the Clowns created Orbitsville!'

'Genuine belief isn't required – the story is only a formula which allows certain manipulations to be carried out. We all know the square root of minus one is an unreal quantity, and yet we've all used it when it suited us to do so. Same thing.'

Denise's eyes twinkled. 'It isn't the same.'

'I know, but my statement was an example of the general class of thing we were talking about.'

'Neat footwork.' Denise laughed outright and, for no reason which was immediately apparent to him, Garamond suddenly became aware of how much he enjoyed simply looking at her. He had accepted the phrase 'easy on the eyes' as pure metaphor but now was surprised to discover that letting his gaze rest on the physicist's pale sensitive face actually produced a soothing sensation in his eyes. The phenomenon entranced and then disturbed him.

When the meeting broke up he went to his own quarters and devoted several hours to his principal spare-time occupation of recording television interviews for Colbert Mason. The reporter, after his initial difficulties on Orbitsville, had established himself in a position of relative strength, and had obtained an office in Beachhead City from which he sent back a prolific stream of news stories for syndication on the Two Worlds. Garamond cooperated with him as much as he could, mainly because in his estimation his personal fame was still his family's best protection against Elizabeth Lindstrom.

There were times when he was almost persuaded by Aileen that he was wrong in his suspicions of the President, but against that there were persistent rumours that she had slain a member of her domestic staff who had found her son's body. Garamond continued to maintain his defences. The system was that Mason supplied him with tridi tapes of recorded questions and when it was convenient Garamond used his own equipment to fill in his answers and comments.

On a number of occasions Mason had confessed that he was making a fortune from the arrangement and had proposed sharing the profits but Garamond had refused to accept any money, stipulating only that Mason obtain for him the widest possible exposure. It appeared that this objective was being achieved because there was a growing clamour for the discoverer of Lindstromland to make a personal return to Earth.

Garamond spent most of the current session giving suitable reasons for not being able to return and in describing, in precise details, what had been learned about the invisible planet. Assuming the material would be safely relayed to the Two Worlds by Mason and broadcast on the planet-wide networks, he had gone a long way towards killing any suggestion that the Clowns or any other beings connected with Orbitsville had obliterated an entire civilization.

He stored the tapes away carefully, again wondering at the great latitude Elizabeth was permitting him, and fastened himself into his bed with the intention of catching up on his sleep.

The slow-drifting cubes of coloured radiance merged and shimmered in the air above him, creating hypnotic patterns. Once more there came the idea that he might be completely wrong about Elizabeth Lindstrom, and he found himself wishing it were possible to discuss the subject emotionlessly and intellectually with his wife. There would be, he decided sleepily, no communications problem with a woman like Denise Serra who shared his background and his interests, and who produced the curiously pleasant sensation in his eyes when he…

Garamond slept.

He awoke two hours later with an unaccountable sense of unease and decided to put a call through to Aileen and Christopher before going out on to the control gallery. The communications room made the necessary connection and in less than a minute Garamond was looking at the image of his wife, but a winking sphere of amber told him he was viewing and hearing a recording. It said:

'I was hoping you would call, Vance. I know you are only making a short trip, but Chris and I have got so used to having you with us lately that we are spoiled and the time is passing very slowly. Something very exciting has happened, though. You'll never guess.' The unreal Aileen paused for a moment, smiling, to demonstrate to Garamond his inability to divine what was coming next.

'I had a personal call from the President – yes, Elizabeth Lindstrom herself – inviting Chris and me to stay with her in the new Lindstrom Centre for a few days…'

'Don't go!' Garamond was unable to restrain the words.

'…knew I'd be feeling lonely while you were away,' the image was saying contentedly, 'but what really decided me was that she said she was the one who would benefit most from the visit. She didn't actually put it into words, but I think she is looking forward to seeing a child about the place again. Anyway, Vance, I must go now – the President's car is calling for us in a few minutes. By the time you hear this I'll be wallowing in luxury and high living at the Octagon, but don't worry – I'll be at home to cook you a meal when you arrive. Love you, darling. Bye.'

The image dissolved into a cloud of fading stars, leaving Garamond cold, shaken, and angry at his wife. 'You silly bitch,' he whispered to the fleeting points of light. 'Why do you never ever, never ever, listen to anything I tell you?'

The last handful of stars vanished in silence.

The probe torpedo worked its way up the gravity hill from the dead planet, carrying its samples of dust and rock, and homed in on the Bissendorf. Although there was a sun only three astronomical units away, its light was screened off and the torpedo was moving through a blackness equivalent to that of deep interstellar space.

In that darkness the mother ship appeared to some of the probe's sensors as a faint cluster of lights, but to other sensors concerned with different sections of the electromagnetic spectrum the ship registered as a brilliant beacon whose radiation embodied many voices commanding, guiding, coaxing it homewards. Responding with greater and greater precision as the electronic voices grew louder, the torpedo approached the ship with the familiarity of a parasite fish flitting about a whale. At last it made physical contact and was taken on board.

During the final manoeuvres Garamond had waited on the Bissendorf s control gallery with growing impatience. As soon as the signal announcing closure of the docking bay was received he gave the order for the main drive to be activated. Initial impetus was given to the ship by the relatively feeble ion thrusters, but that propulsion system was shut down when the ramjet intake field had been fanned out to its maximum area of half a million square kilometres and reaction mass was being scavenged from the surrounding space.

As the scooped-up hydrogen and other matter were fed into the fusion reactors the ship wheeled away sunwards, and the acceleration restored close-to-normal gravity throughout the inhabited levels of the central cylinder.

The feeling of the deck pressing firmly on the underside of his feet helped Garamond to regain his composure. He assured himself that if Elizabeth were to move against his family it would be done anywhere but in the crystal cloisters of her new residence.

Into the bargain, Elizabeth knew that Garamond would be back from the dark planet in only a few days, imbued with an even greater amount – if that were possible – of the power called fame. The hours and the duty periods went by and, as Orbitsville filled the forward view panels with its unrelieved blackness, Garamond was able to satisfy himself that he had panicked for no good reason.

The Bissendorf had accomplished turnover at mid-point on the return journey, and was two days into the retardation phase, when explosions occurred simultaneously in both field generators, robbing the vessel of its means of coming to a halt before it would smash into the impregnable outer shell of Orbitsville.

twelve

'The starboard explosion was the worst,' Commander Napier reported to the emergency meeting of the Bissendorf's executive staff. 'It actually breached the pressure hull in the vicinity of Frame S.203. The pressure-activated doors functioned properly and sealed off the section between Frames S.190 and 210, but there were five technicians in there at the time, and they were killed.'

O'Hagan raised his grey head. 'Blast or decompression?'

'We don't know – the bodies were exhausted into space.'

'I see.' O'Hagan made a note on his pad, speaking aloud at the same time. 'Five missing, presumed dead.'

Napier stared at his old antagonist with open dislike. 'If you know how we can turn the ship to recover the bodies this would be a good time to tell us about it.'

'I merely… .'

'Gentlemen!' Garamond slapped the table as loudly as was possible in conditions of almost zero gravity. 'May I remind you that we are scheduled to be killed in about eight hours? That doesn't leave much time for bickering.'

O'Hagan gave a ghastly smile. 'It gives us eight hours for bickering, Captain – there's nothing else we can do.'

'That's for this meeting to decide.'

'So be it.' Chief Science Officer O'Hagan shrugged and spread his dry knobbly hands in resignation.

Garamond felt a reluctant admiration for the older man who seemed determined to remain egotistical and cantankerous right to the end. O'Hagan also had a habit of being right in everything he said, and in that respect too it seemed he was going to preserve his record. Although reaction mass was not plentiful in the region of Pengelly's Star, the Bissendorf had been aided in its return journey by the pull of the primary and had achieved a mean acceleration of close on one gravity. Modest though the acceleration and distances were, the ship had been travelling at 1,500 kilometres a second at turn-over point and, although it had been slowing down steadily for two days when the explosions occurred, its residual velocity was still above a hundred kilometres in each second. At that speed it was due to impact with Orbitsville in only eight hours, and it appeared to Garamond that there was nothing he or anybody else on board could do about it. The knowledge boomed and pounded beneath all other thoughts, and yet he felt a surprising absence of fear or any related emotion. It was, he decided, a psychological byproduct of having eight hours in hand. The delay created the illusion that something might still be done, that there was a chance to influence the course of events in their favour, and – miraculously – this held good even for an experienced flickerwing man who understood only too well the deadly parameters of his situation.

'I understand that both auxiliary drive systems are still functional,' Administrative Officer Mertz was saying, his round face glowing like pink plastic. 'Surely that makes a difference.'

Napier shook his head. 'The ion tubes are in action right now – which accounts for the very slight weight you can feel – but they were intended only to give the ship a close-manoeuvring capability, and they won't affect our speed very much. I guess the only difference they'll make is that we'll vaporize against Orbitsville a minute or two later than we would otherwise.'

'Well, how about the secondary nuclears? I thought they were for collision avoidance.'

'They are. Maximum endurance twenty minutes. By applying full thrust at right angles to our present course we could easily avoid an object as large as Jupiter – but we're dealing with that.' Napier pointed at the forward view panels, which were uniformly black. Orbitsville was spanning the universe.

'I see.' Mertz's face lost some of its pinkness. 'Thank you,'

The operations room filled with a silence which was broken only by faint irregular clangs transmitted through the ship's structure. Far aft, a repair crew was at work replacing the damaged hull sections. Garamond stared into the darkness ahead and tried to assimilate the idea that it represented a wall across the sky, a wall which was rushing towards him at a hundred kilometres a second, a wall so wide and high that there was no way to avoid hitting it.

Yamoto cleared his throat. 'There's no point in speculating about why the ship was sabotaged, but do we know how the bombs got on board?'

'I personally believe it was done by Pilot Officer Shrapnel,' Napier said. 'There isn't much evidence, but what there is points to him. We gave all the information in our emergency call to Fleet Control.'

'What did they say?'

'They promised he would be investigated.' Napier's voice had a flinty edge of bitterness. 'We are assured that all necessary steps will be taken.'

'That's good to know. Isn't that good to know?' Yamoto pressed the back of a hand to his forehead. 'I had so much work still to do. There was so much to learn about Orbitsville.'

They're going to learn at least one thing as a result of this mission, Garamond thought. They're going to find out how the shell material stands up to the impact of fifteen thousand tons of metal travelling at a hundred kilometres a second. And they won't even have to go far from the aperture to see the big bang… Garamond felt an icy convulsion in his stomach as he half-glimpsed an idea. He sat perfectly still for a moment as the incredible thought began to form, to crystallize to the point at which it could be put into words. His brow grew chill with sweat.

'Has anybody,' Denise Serra asked in a calm, clear voice, 'considered the possibility of adjusting our course in such a way that we would pass through the aperture at Beachhead City?'

Again the room filled with silence. Garamond felt a curious secondary shock on hearing the words he was still formulating being uttered by another person. The silence lasted for perhaps ten seconds, then was broken by a dry laugh from O'Hagan.

'You realize that, at our speed, running into a wall of air would be just like hitting solid rock? I'm afraid your idea doesn't change anything.'

'We don't have to run into a wall of air – not if we turn the ship over again and go in nose first with the electron gun operating at full power.'

'Nonsense,' O'Hagan shouted. He cocked his head to one side as if listening to an inner voice and his fingers moved briefly on the computer terminal before him. 'It isn't nonsense, though.' He corrected himself without embarrassment, nodding his apologies to Denise Serra, and others at the conference table began to address the central computer through their own terminals.

'Overload power on the gun should give us enough voltage for the few seconds we would need it. It should be enough to blast a tunnel through the atmosphere.'

'At this stage we have enough lateral control over our flight path to bring it through the aperture.'

'But remember we haven't got the full area of the aperture as a target. We'd be going in at an angle of about seventy degrees.'

'It's still good enough – as long as no other ships get in the way.'

'There's still time to do some structural strengthening on the longitudinal axis.'

'We'll shed enough kinetic energy…'

'Hold it a minute,' Garamond commanded, raising his voice above the suddenly optimistic clamour, 'We have to look at it from all angles. If we did go through the aperture, what would be the effect on Beachhead City?'

'Severe,' O'Hagan said reflectively. 'Imagine one purple hell of a lightning bolt coming up through the aperture immediately followed by an explosion equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon.'

'There'd be destruction?'

'Undoubtedly. But there's plenty of time to evacuate the area – nobody would have to die.'

'Somebody mentioned colliding with another ship.'

'That's a minor problem, Vance.' O'Hagan looked momentarily surprised at having used Garamond's given name for the first time in his life. 'We can advise Fleet Control of our exact course and they'll just have to make certain the way is clear.'

Garamond tried to weigh the considerations, but he could see only the faces of his wife and child. 'Right! We do it. I want to see a copy of the decision network plan, but start taking action right away. In the meantime I'll talk to Fleet Control.'

The ten science-oriented and engineering officers at the table instantly launched into a polygonal discussion and the noise level in the room shot up as communications channels were opened to other parts of the ship. Within a minute perhaps thirty other men and women were taking part, many of them vicariously present in the form of miniaturized, but nonetheless solid and real-looking, images of their heads, which transformed the long room into a montage of crazy perspectives.

Garamond could almost feel the wavecrest of hope surging through all the levels of the disabled vessel. He told Napier to make an announcement about the situation on the general address system, then went into his private suite and put a call through to Fleet Control. It was taken not by the Fleet Movements Controller, as Garamond had expected, but by a Star-flight admin man. Senior Secretary Lord Nettleton. The Senior Secretary was a handsome silver-haired man who had a reputation for his devotion to the Lindstrom hierarchy. He was of a type that Elizabeth liked to have around, capable of presenting a benign fatherly image, while keeping himself remote from the inner workings of the system.

'I was expecting somebody on the operations side,' Garamond said, dispensing with the standard formal mode of address.

'The President has taken the matter under her personal control. She is very much concerned.'

'I'll bet she is.'

'I beg your pardon?' Nettleton's resonant voice betrayed a degree of puzzlement which was an open challenge to Garamond to speak his mind.

Again Garamond thought about his wife and child. 'The President's concern for the welfare of her employees is well known.'

Nettleton inclined his head graciously. 'I'm. aware of how futile words are under the circumstances. Captain Garamond, but I would like to express my personal sympathy for you and your crew in this…'

'The reason I called is to inform Starflight that the Bissendorf has enough lateral control to enable it to pass through the aperture into the interior of Orbits … Lindstromland, and that is what I intend to do.'

'I don't quite understand.' Nettleton's image underwent several minute but abrupt changes of size which told Garamond other viewers were switching into the circuit. 'I am informed that you are travelling at a hundred kilometres a second and have no means of slowing down.'

That's correct. The Bissendorf is going to hit Beachhead City like a bomb. You will have to evacuate the area around the aperture. My science staff can help with the estimates of how widespread the damage will be, but in any case I strongly recommend that you issue warnings immediately. You have less than eight hours.' Garamond went on to explain the proposed action in detail, while continued perturbations of the image showed that his unseen audience was increasing every second.

'Captain, what happens if your ship misses the aperture and strikes the shell material below the city itself?'

'We are confident of passing through the aperture."

'All you're saying is that the probability is high, but supposing you do miss?'

'It is our opinion that the shell would be undamaged.'

'But the shell is one of the greatest scientific enigmas ever known – on what do you base your predictions about its behaviour under that sort of impact?'

Garamond allowed himself a smile. 'In the last hour or so our instinct about these things has become highly developed.'

'This is hardly a time for jokes.' Nettleton looked away for a moment, nodded to someone off screen, and when he turned back to Garamond his eyes were sombre. 'Captain, have you thought about the possibility that Starflight may not be able to grant you permission to aim for the aperture?'

Garamond considered the question. 'No – but I've thought about the fact that there is absolutely nothing Starflight can do to stop me.'

Nettleton shook his head with regal sadness. 'Captain, I'm going to put you through to the President on a direct connection.'

'I haven't the time to speak to her,' Garamond told him. 'Just send a message to my wife that I'll be back with her as soon as I can.' He broke the connection and returned to the operations room, hoping he had sounded more confident than he felt.

Lindstrom Centre was austere compared to its equivalent on Earth, but it was the largest and most palatial building on Orbitsville. It was octagonal in plan and had been built on a slight eminence some twenty kilometres east from Beachhead City, to which it was joined by power and communication cables stretched on low pylons. No attempt had yet been made to sculpt the hill according to the President's ideas of what it ought to be, so the glass-and-acrylic edifice was incongruously lapped by a sea of grass. Its first three floors housed those elements of the Starflight administration which the supreme executive had transported from the Two Worlds, and. the top floor was her private residence.

On this evening, the guards who patrolled the perimeter fence were distinctly uneasy. They had heard that a maniac of a flickerwing captain was going to try to crash his vessel through the aperture at interplanetary speed, and the rumour had even quoted an exact minute for the event to occur – 20.06 Compatible Local Time. As the moment grew nearer each man felt a powerful urge to fix his gaze on the distant scattering of buildings, just below the up-curved horizon, which was Beachhead City. They had been told that most of the city had been hastily evacuated to escape the promised pyrotechnics, and nobody wanted to miss the spectacle.

At the same time, however, their eyes were frequently drawn upwards to the transparent west wall of the Presidential suite. Elizabeth Lindstrom herself could be glimpsed up there, screened only by sky reflections, her silk-sheathed abdomen glowing like a pearl – and it was well known that she sometimes kept watch on her guards through a magnifying screen. None of the men relished the idea of being dismissed from Starflight service and sent back to the crowded towerblocks of Earth, and yet the compulsion to stare into the west grew greater with each passing minute.

The suspense was also making itself felt on the top floor of the Octagon, but in the case of Elizabeth Lindstrom it was a pleasurable sensation, heady and stimulating, akin to pre-orgasmic tension.

'My dear,' she said warmly to Aileen Garamond, 'do you think you are wise to watch this?'

'Quite sure, My Lady.'

'But the boy…"

'I'm positive my husband knows what he is doing.' Aileen's voice was firm and unemotional as she laid her hands on her son's shoulders, forcing him to face the west. 'Nothing will go wrong,'

'I admire your courage, especially when the chances are so… .' Elizabeth checked herself just in time. The common, characterless woman beside her appeared genuinely to believe that a ship could run into a solid wall of air at a speed of a hundred kilometres a second and not be destroyed on the instant. Elisabeth was girded with the mathematics which showed how incredible the idea was, but she knew the equations would mean nothing to her guest. In any case, she had no desire to break the news in advance – she wanted to watch Mrs Garamond's face as she saw her husband's funeral pyre blossom on the horizon. Only then would she receive the first payment against the incalculable debt which the Garamond family owed her.

The concept of grief cancelling grief, of pain atoning for pain, was one which few people could properly understand, Elizabeth had often told herself. Even she had not appreciated the logic of it until days after Harald's small body had been cast in sun-coloured resin and stood in its place in the Lindstrom chapel. But it was so true!

There were no flaws in the system of double entries – anguish against anguish, love against love-and this realization had given Elizabeth the strength to go on, even when it appeared that the Garamonds had chosen to die in the black deeps of space. That episode had been nothing more and nothing less than God's way of telling her that he was simply building up the Garamond's credit to the point at which it could be used to wipe out all their debts. In retrospect, it had been fortunate that she had not been able to extract payment immediately, because there would still have been an imbalance and she would never have found her heart's ease. A child is a focus, a repository of love which is added to in each year of its life, and it was crystal-clear that the death of a boy of nine could never be compensated for by the death of a boy of…

'I have the latest computations for you, My Lady.' The projected voice of Lord Nettleton broke in on Elizabeth's thoughts. 'The impact will occur in exactly three minutes from … now.'

'Three minutes,' Elizabeth said aloud, knowing that the accurately beamed sound would not have reached the other woman's ears. Without giving any sign that she had heard, Aileen picked her son up and her face was screened by the boy's body. Elizabeth moved quietly to the other side, as was her due, and waited.

She waited through eons and eternities.

And the ribbed canopy of the sky ceased to turn.

Time was dead…

The lightning bolt came first. An arrow-straight line of hell, searing upwards at an angle into the heavens, isolated for the first perceptible instant, then joined by writhing offshoots, tributaries and deltas of violet fire which flickered and froze on the retina. Faint shadows fled across the sky as the air above Beachhead City was hurled outwards by the fountain of energy.

Appalling though the general display was, there existed at its core – on the threshold of vision – a sense of even greater forces in the shock of opposition. There was a feeling of cataclysmic upward movement, then a bright star burned briefly and dwindled in the south-west. The day returned to normalcy, but seemingly darker than it had been before.

Elizabeth drew a deep quavering breath – no other death she had ever witnessed had been so final. She turned her gaze on to Aileen Garamond's face, and was shocked to see there a look of serenity.

'It was to be expected,' she said.

'I know.' Aileen nodded contentedly, and hugged her child. 'I told you.'

Elizabeth gaped at her. 'You fool! You don't think he's still alive after what you've just…' She was forced to stop speaking as the waves of thunder rolling out from Beachhead City, slow moving in the low-pressure air of Orbitsville, engulfed the building. Reflections of lights stretched and shrank and stretched again as the transparent walls absorbed energy, and small objects throughout the room stirred uneasily in their places. Christopher buried his face in his mother's hair.

'Your husband is dead,' Elizabeth announced when silence was restored to the room, 'but because you are the widow of the most distinguished of all my S.E.A. captains, you will remain here as my guest. No other arrangement would be acceptable.'

Aileen faced her, pale but immovable. 'My Lady, you are mistaken. You see – I know.'

Elizabeth shook her head incredulously and a little sadly. She had been planning to spend perhaps a year in a game of subtleties and suggestions, watching the other woman's slow progression from doubt to certainty about her son's eventual fate. But it was obvious now – in view of Aileen Garamond's mentality, or lack of it – that such strategies would be ineffective. If the full payment were to be extracted, as God had decreed it should be, she would have to speak plainly, in words a child could understand. Elizabeth touched a beautiful micro-engineered ring on her left hand, ensuring that no listening devices could remain in operation nearby, and then explained the accountancy of retribution which demanded that Christopher Garamond should be allowed another three years. He was to have the same lifespan as Harald Lindstrom – but not a day longer.

When she had finished she summoned her physician. 'Captain Garamond's death has left Mrs. Garamond in a state of hysteria. Give her suitable sedation.'

Aileen opened her mouth to scream but the physician, an experienced man, touched her wrist in a quick movement which did not even disturb the boy she was holding in her arms. As the cloud of instant-acting drug sighed through her skin Aileen relaxed and allowed herself to be led away.

Alone again, Elizabeth Lindstrom stood looking out across the western grasslands and was aware – for the first time in over a year – of something approaching happiness. She began to smile.

thirteen

The integrity of the Bissendorf's design was so great, and the onboard preparation had been so thorough, that less than a tenth of the crew died as a result of the passage through the eye of the needle.

Every available man and woman had been co-opted on to the teams which had welded into place a new computer-designed structure, creating load paths which actually utilized the forces of the impact to give the shell enough strength to survive. Until only a matter of minutes before the hellish transit, other gangs had swarmed on the outside of the ship, adding hundreds of sacrificial anodes to those which were already in place serving as focal points for the ion exchange which would otherwise have eaten away the hull during normal flight. The new anodes, massive slabs of pure metal, withstood the brief but incredibly fierce attrition of the lightning which wreathed the ship as it passed along the atmospheric tunnel created by its electron gun. On emerging from its ordeal the Bissendorf's principal dimensions had altered, in some cases by several metres, but it had gone in with all pressure doors sealed – in effect it had been converted into dozens of separate, self-contained spaceships – and there was no loss of life due to decompression.

The entire crew had donned spacesuits for primary protection. Each person had been injected with metallic salts and the ship's restraint fields stepped up to overload intensity, creating an environment in which any sudden movement of human tissue would be resisted by a pervasive jelly-like pressure from all sides. This measure, while undoubtedly a major factor in crew survival, also caused an unavoidable number of deaths. In the few sections where severe structural failure occurred some of the occupants had 'fallen' varying distances under multiple gravities, and the heat induced by electromotive interaction had caused their blood to boil. But, for the vast majority, the internal bracing of their organs against immense G-shocks had meant the difference between life and death.

And yet, all the preparation, all the frenzied activity, would have amounted to nothing more than a temporary stay of execution had it not been for the exotic nature of Orbitsville itself.

The synthetic gravity of the shell material attenuated much more rapidly than that of a solid mass. Although the Bissendorf's slanting course was drawn into the shape of a parabola the curve remained flat, and the crew had sufficient time to control their re-entry into the atmosphere from the inner vacuum of Orbitsville. The vessel's ion tubes and short-term reaction motors were effective against the weak pull of the shell, and it was possible for the Bissendorf to skip along the upper fringes of the air shield, gradually shedding velocity. It was even possible, using the fading reserves of reaction mass, to bring the ship down in one piece, with no further loss of life.

What was manifestly impossible, however, was to make the ship fly again.

All its external sensors had been seared cleanly from the hull, and many of the internal position-fixing devices had been destroyed or confused by the unnatural physics of Orbitsville. But the clocks were still in operation – and they had recorded a time lapse of five days. Five days from the passage through the Beachhead City aperture to the final touchdown on a hillside far into the interior. Starting from that basic fact, and using only a pocket calculator, it took just a few seconds for those on board to realize that they had travelled a distance of more than fifteen million kilometres.

In terms of the overall size of Orbitsville the journey was infinitesimal. A short hop, a stone's throw, a stroll across sunlit grass and woodlands – but in human terms the distance itself was more of a barrier than mountains or torrents. It was known, for instance, that back on Earth many a country postman had in his lifetime walked a total distance equal to a trip to the Moon, but that was only 385,000 kilometres. Walking back to Beachhead City would have been a task to be carried out by successive generations over a period of a thousand years.

Using the vast resources of the Bissendorf's workshops it would have been possible to build a fleet of vehicles which might have cut the journey time down to a mere century – except that wheels and other components would wear out in a matter of months. It would not be possible to transport the maintenance and manufacturing facilities which might have enabled the caravan to complete its golden journey.

There was also the difficulty that no man or machine knew the exact direction in which to travel. It would have been possible to get a rough bearing from the angle of the day and night ribs across the sky, but a rough bearing would be of no value. At the distances involved, a deviation of only one degree would have caused the train to miss Beachhead City by hundreds of thousands of sun-gleaming kilometres.

By the time the dead had been buried, the day was well advanced, and the remaining men and women of the Bissendorf's crew were ceasing to be citizens of Earth. They were experiencing the infinity-change, the wistful, still contentment which poured down from the motionless sun of Orbitsville.

… that calm Sunday that
goes on and on;
When even lovers find their
peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that
once had shone.

fourteen

'We're going back,' Garamond announced flatly.

He studied the faces of his executive staff, noting how they were reacting. Some looked at him with open amusement, others stared downwards into the grass, seemingly embarrassed. Behind them, further along the hillside, the great scarred hulk of the Bissendorf shocked the eye with its incongruity, and beyond it microscopic figures moved on the plain in the rituals of a ball game. The sun was directly overhead, as always, creating only an occasional flicker of diamond-fire on the dark blue waters of the lakes which banded the middle distance. Garamond began to feel that his words had been absorbed by Orbitsville's green infinities, sucked up cleanly before they reached the edge of the irregular ring in which the group was sitting, but he resisted the urge to repeat himself.

'It's a hell of a long way,' Napier said, finally breaking the heavy silence. His statement of the obvious, Garamond knew, constituted a question.

'We'll build aircraft.'

O'Hagan cleared his throat. 'I've already thought of that, Vance. We have enough workshop facilities still intact to manufacture a reasonable subsonic aircraft, and the micropedia can give us all the design data, but the distance is just too great. You run into exactly the same problem as with wheeled vehicles. Your aircraft might do the trip in three or four years – except that we haven't the resources to build a plane which can fly continuously for that length of time. And we couldn't transport major repair facilities.' O'Hagan glanced solemnly around the rest of the group, reproving them for having left it to him to deal with a wayward non-scientist.

Garamond shook his head. 'When I said we are going back, I didn't mean all of us, in a body. I meant that I am going back, together with, any of the crew who are sufficiently determined to make it – even if that means only half-a-dozen of us.'

'But…'

We're going to build a fleet of perhaps ten aircraft. We're going to incorporate as much redundancy as is compatible with good aerodynamics. We're going to fly our ten machines towards Beachhead City, and each time one of them breaks down we're going to take the best components out of it and put them in the other machines, and we're going to fly on.'

'There's no guarantee you'll get there, even with the last aircraft.'

'There's no guarantee I won't.'

'I'm afraid there is.' O'Hagan's pained expression had become even more pronounced. 'There's this problem of direction which we have already discussed. Unless you've got a really accurate bearing on Beachhead City there's no point in setting out.'

'I'm not worried about getting a precise bearing,' Garamond said, making a conscious decision to be enigmatic. He was aware that in the very special circumstances of the Bissendorf's final flight the whole concept of command structure, of the captain-and-crew relationship, could easily lose its validity. It was necessary at this stage to re-establish himself in office without the aid of insignia or outside authority.

'How do you propose to get one?'

'I propose instructing my science staff to attend to that chore for me. There's an old saying about the pointlessness of owning a dog and doing your own barking,' Garamond fixed a steady challenging gaze on O'Hagan, Sammy Yamoto, Morrison, Schneider and Denise Serra. He noted with satisfaction that they were responding as he had hoped – already there were signs of abstraction, of withdrawal to a plateau of thought upon which they became hunters casting nets for a quarry they had never seen but would recognize at first sight.

'While they're sorting that one out,' Garamond continued, speaking to Napier before any of the science staff could voice objections, 'we'll convene a separate meeting of the engineering committee. The ship has to be cut up to get the workshop floors level, but in the meantime I want the design definition drawn up for the aircraft and the first production tapes prepared.' He got to his feet and walked towards the improvised plastic hut he was using as an office. Napier, walking beside him, gave a dry cough which was out of place issuing from the barrel of his chest.

'TB again?' Garamond said with mock sympathy.

'I think you're going too fast, Vance. Concentrating too much on the nuts and bolts, and not thinking enough about the human element.'

'Be more specific, Cliff.'

'A lot of the crew have got the Orbitsville syndrome already. They don't see any prospect of getting back to Beachhead City, and many of them don't even want to get back. They see no reason why they shouldn't set up a community right here, using the Bissendorf as a mine for essential materials.'

Garamond stopped, shielded his eyes and looked beyond the ship towards the plot of land, marked with a silver cross, where forty men and women had been buried. 'I can understand their feelings, and I'm not proposing to ride herd on those who want to stay. We'll use volunteers only.'

'There could be less than you expect.'

'Surely some of them, a lot of them, have reasons for getting back.'

'The point is that you aren't proposing to take them back, Vance. The planes won't make it all the way, so you're asking them to choose between staying here in a strong sizeable community with resources of power, materials and food – or being dropped somewhere between here and Beachhead City in groups of ten or less with very little to get them started as independent communities.'

'Each plane will have to carry an iron cow and a small plastics plant.'

'It's still a hell of a lot to ask.'

'I'll also guarantee that a rescue mission will set out as soon as I get back.'

'If you get back.'

A dark thought crossed Garamond's mind. 'How about you, Cliff? Are you coming with me?'

'I'm coming with you. All I'm trying to do is make you realize there's more to this than finding the right engineering approach.'

'I realize that already, but right now I've got all the human problems I can handle.'

'Others have wives and families they want to get back to.'

'That's the point – I haven't.'

'But…'

'How long do you think Aileen and Chris will survive after I'm presumed dead? A week? A day?' Garamond forced himself to speak steadily, despite the grief which kept up a steady thundering inside his head. 'The only reason I'm going back is that I have to kill Liz Lindstrom.'

Although it had been equipped and powered to carry out one emergency landing on the surface of a planet the Bissendorf was in a supremely unnatural condition when beached with its longitudinal axis at right angles to the pull of gravity. The interior layout was based on the assumption that, except during short spells of weightlessness, there would be acceleration or retardation which would enable the crew to regard the prow as pointing 'upwards' and to walk normally on all its levels. Now the multitudinous floors of the vessel had become vertical walls to which were attached, in surrealistic attitudes, clusters of consoles, pedestals, desks, chairs, lockers, beds, tables and several hundred machines of varying types and capabilities.

Because design allowance had been made for periods of free-fall – most small items, including paperwork, were magnetically or physically clamped in position – very little material had fallen to the lowermost side of the hull, but many of the ship's resources could not be tapped until key areas were properly orientated to the ground.

Teams of forcemasters using valency cutters and custom-built derricks began slicing the Bissendorf s structure into manageable sections and rotating them to horizontal positions. The work was slowed down by the need to sever and reconnect power channels, but within a week the cylinder of the central hull had been largely converted into a cluster of low circular or wedge-shaped buildings. Each was roofed with a plastic diaphragm and linked by cable to power sources on the ground or within the butchered ship. The entire complex was surrounded by an umbra of tents and extemporized plastic sheds which gave it the appearance of an army encampment.

Garamond had placed maximum priority on the design and workshop facilities which were to create his aircraft, and the work was advancing with a speed which would have been impossible even a century earlier. The assembly line was already visible as nine sets of landing skids surmounted by the sketchy cruciforms of the basic airframes.

After weighing ail considerations, the computers from the spaceship had decreed that the stressed-skin principle of aircraft construction, universal to aviation, should be abandoned in favour of die frame-and-fabric techniques employed in the Wright Brothers era. This permitted most of the high technology and engineering subtlety to be concentrated in a dozen pieces of alloy per ship, and the tape-controlled radiation millers hewed these from fresh billets in less than a day. The plastic skinning could then be carried out to the standards of a good quality furniture shop, and the engines – standard magnetic pulse prime movers – fitted straight from the shelf. It was the availability of engines, of which there were twenty-one in the Bissendorf s inventory, which had been the main parameter in deciding upon a fleet of nine twin-engined ships which would set out upon the journey with three powerplants in reserve.

Garamond, sitting alone in the prismatic twilight at the entrance to his tent, was halfway through a bottle of whisky when he heard someone approaching. The nights never became truly dark under the striped canopy of Orbitsville's sky, and he was able to recognize the compact figure of Denise Serra while she was still some distance away. His annoyance at being disturbed faded somewhat but he sat perfectly still, making no sign of welcome. The whisky was his guarantee of sleep and to bring about the desired effect it had to be taken in precise rhythmic doses, with no interruptions to the ritual.

Denise reached the tent, stood without speaking for a moment while she assessed his mood, then sat in the grass at the opposite side of the entrance. Appreciating her silence, Garamond waited till his instincts prompted him to take another measure of the spirit's cool fire. He raised the bottle to his lips.

'Drinking that can't be good for you,' Denise said.

'On the contrary – it's very good for me,'

'I never got to like whisky. Especially the stuff Burton makes.'

Garamond took his slightly delayed drink. 'It's all right if you know how to use it.'

'Use it? Aren't you supposed to enjoy it?'

'It's more important to me to know how to use it.'

She sighed. 'I'm sorry. I've heard about your wife being…'

'What did you want, Denise?'

'A child, I think.'

Garamond knew himself to have been rendered emotionally sterile by despair for his family, but he still retained enough contact with the mainstream of humanity to feel obliged to cap his bottle and set it aside.

'It's a bad time,' he said.

'I know, but that's the way I feel. It must be this place. It must be the Orbitsville syndrome that Cliff keeps talking about. We're here, and it's all around us, for ever, and things I used to think important now seem trivial. And, for the first time in my life, I want a child.'

Garamond stared at the girl through the veils of soft blue air, and a part of his mind – despite the pounding chaos of the rest – was intensely aware of her. It was difficult to pick out a single special attribute of Denise Serra, but the overall effect was right. She was a neat, complete package of femininity, intelligence and warmth, and he felt ashamed of having nothing to offer her.

'It's still a bad time,' he repeated.

'I know. We all know that, but some of the other women are drinking untreated water. It's only a matter of time till they become pregnant.' Her eyes watched him steadily and he remembered how, in that previous existence, it had given him pleasure to look at her.

'Haven't you already got a partner, Denise?'

'You know I haven't.'

That's it into the open, he thought. For me to know that Denise Serra, among all the other female crew members, had no liaisons I would have to have been taking a special interest in her.

'I guess I did know.' Garamond hesitated. 'Denise, I feel… .'

'Honoured?'

'I think that's the word I would have used.'

'Say no more, Vance. I know what it means when somebody starts off by feeling honoured. I've done it myself.' She stood up in one easy movement.

Garamond tried for something less abrupt, and knew he was being clumsy. 'Perhaps in a year, a few months___'

'The special unrepeatable offer will be closed before then.' Denise said with an uncharacteristic harshness in her voice. 'Have you thought about what you're going to do if we can't get a bearing on Beachhead City, if your flight never gets off the ground?'

'I'm counting on your getting that bearing.'

'Don't!' She turned quickly, walked away for a few paces, then came back and knelt close to him. 'I'm sorry, Vance.'

'You haven't done anything to apologize for.'

'I think I have. You see, we've pretty well solved the problem. Dennis O'Hagan didn't want to say anything to you till he'd made a check on the math.'

'But…' Garamond's attention was fully captured. 'How is it going to be done?'

'Mike Moncaster, our particles man, came up with the idea. You know about delta particles?'

'I've heard of delta rays.'

'No, that's historic stuff. Delta particles – deltons – are a component of cosmic rays discovered only a few years ago. During his last leave Mike got himself seconded on to the team investigating cosmic ray refraction by the force field which seals Beachhead City aperture. They were glad to have him because he's pretty good on the Conservation of Strangeness and …'

'Denise! You started to tell me how you were going to get a bearing.'

'That's what I'm doing. Deltons don't interact much. That's why it took so long to find them, but it also means they could travel ten or fifteen million kilometres through the air. Mike is fairly certain they get refracted by the force lens, just like other components of cosmic rays, so we're going to build a big delton detector. Two of them, in fact. One behind the other to give us co-ordinates. All we need then is to pick up a delton, just one, and going back the way it came will give us a straight line home.'

'Do you think it'll work?'

'I think so.' Denise's voice was kind. 'What we still have to determine is how long we're likely to wait before a particle comes this way. It could be quite a while if things aren't in our favour, but we can swing the odds by making the detectors as big as possible, or by erecting a whole bank of them.'

Garamond felt the distance between himself and Elizabeth Lindstrom shrink a little and the joyful sickness spurted within him. 'This… is good news.'

'I know,' Denise said. 'My dowry.'

'You'll have to explain that one.'

'The first time you ever noticed me was on board ship, when I gave the news you wanted to hear about going through the aperture.' She laughed ruefully. 'Being a pragmatist, I must have decided that if it worked once it would work again.'

Garamond moved his hand uncertainly in the dimness and touched her cheek. 'Denise, I…'

'Let's not play games, Vance.' She pushed his hand away and stood up. 'I was childish, that's all.'

Later, while waiting for sleep to relieve him of the burden of identity, Garamond was acutely aware – for the first time in months – that the hard, angry vacuum of space began only a short distance beneath his cot. The feeling persisted into surrealistic dreams in which he had a sense of being poised, dangerously, on the rim of a precipice, with a kind of moral vertigo drawing him over the edge.

fifteen

On his way to the airstrip Garamond was surprised to notice one of his crewmen wearing what could only be described as a coolie hat. He eyed the young man curiously, received a half-hearted salute, and decided the unusual headgear must be a personal souvenir of a tourist trip to the Orient. A minute later, while passing the workshop area, he saw two more men wearing similar hats, which he now realized were woven from fresh silver-green straw. The ancient peasant-styling, with all that it symbolized in Earth's history, was repugnant to Garamond and he hoped it would not become a full-blown fad such as occasionally swept through the crew levels. When he reached the test site, the glinting of flat green triangles in the distance told him that coolie hats were being worn by at least half the men who were clearing grass at the far end of the airstrip.

Cliff Napier was waiting for him at the door to the operations shed, his shoulder-heavy bulk filling the entrance. 'Morning, Vance. We're nearly ready to fly.'

'Good.' Garamond eyed the first aircraft appraisingly then turned his gaze back along the strip. 'It looks like a paddy field down there – why are the men wearing those sunhats?'

'Would you believe,' Napier said impassively, 'to protect them from the sun?'

'But why that sort of hat?' Garamond ignored the sarcasm.

'I guess it's because they're light and easy to make. And it's a good shape if the sun's directly above you and you're working in the dirt all day.'

'I still don't like them."

'You're not working in the dirt all day.' This time there was no mistaking the coldness in the big man's manner.

Garamond locked eyes with Napier and was shaken to feel a momentary surge of anger and dislike. This can't be, he thought. Aloud he said, 'Do you expect me to? Do you think I'm not making the most efficient use of human resources?'

'From your point of view, you are.'

'And from their point of view?'

'The cold season's coming down soon. Most of the crew are staying here, remember. They'd rather be building houses and processing grass into protein cakes.'

Garamond decided against answering immediately in case he damaged a working relationship. He glanced up at the sky and saw that, behind the shield of brilliance, the broadest ribs of light blue were well in the ascendant in the west. They signified that summer was approaching the diametrically opposite point on Orbitsville's shell, that Autumn was ending on the near side.

'This Orbitsville syndrome of yours,' he said after a pause. 'An early symptom is that a man develops an aversion to taking orders, right?'

'That seems to come into it.'

'Then let's sit down together and agree a common set of goals. That way…'

'That way we'd do everything you want and you wouldn't even have to give the orders,' Napier said sharply, but this time he was smiling.

Garamond smiled in return. 'Why do you think I suggested it?' Although the little crisis had passed, he had a feeling it carried significance for the future and he was determined to take appropriate action. 'We'll open a bottle tonight and get our ideas straightened out.'

'I thought we were out of whisky.'

'No. There's plenty.'

"You're on the stuff that Burton makes?'

'Why not?'

An incongruous primness appeared briefly on Napier's dark features. 'Maybe we can fix something up later. How about looking at this airplane?'

'Certainly.' They walked out towards the waiting machine which was the biscuit colour of unpainted plastic. It was a high-wing monoplane, sitting nose-high on its skids and looking like something from a museum of aeronautics, but Garamond had no doubts about its capabilities. The ungainly ship would carry a crew of five at a maximum cruise of five hundred kilometres an hour for fifty days at a stretch, landing after that time to replenish food and water. Even this limitation was forced on it by the fact that more than two-thirds of the payload would be taken up by spares, an iron cow and other supplies.

Garamond glanced from the newly completed machine to the others of its kind further back on the open-air production line, and from them up to the black rectangular screen of the delton detector on the hillside. He felt a vague spasm of alarm over the extent to which his future was dependent on complex artifacts, but this was obliterated by the yearning hunger which kept him alive and was the motive force behind all his actions. It was ironic, he had often thought in the hours before sleep, how – in depriving him of all that was worth living for in his previous life – Elizabeth Lindstrom had provided, in herself, the single goal of his new existence. She had also given him the means of escaping from it, for he could foresee no way of long surviving the act of pulling the President's ribcage apart with his bare hands and gripping the heaving redness within and…

'I know what you're thinking, Vance.'

'Do you?' Garamond stared into the face of the stranger who had spoken to him, and he made the effort which allowed him to associate it with Cliff Napier. There was a psychic wrench and once again he was back into the sane world, walking towards the aircraft with his senior officer.

'Well, don't keep me in suspense,' he heard himself saying.

'I think you're secretly pleased the electronics lab isn't able to build autopilots. If we're going to fly that distance we want to fly it. We want to be able to tell people we did it with our hands.'

Garamond nodded. With our hands, he thought. One of the group standing at the plane was wearing a coolie hat and when its owner turned to greet him Garamond was startled to see the sweat-beaded features of Troy Litman, the senior production executive. Litman was a short pudgy man who had always compensated for the natural untidiness of his physique by paying strict attention to his uniform and off-duty dress, and he was one of the last Garamond would have expected to favour a badly-woven grass hat. Garamond began to doubt his earlier conviction that the design of the grass headgear was symbolic rather than utilitarian.

'The ship looks good,' Garamond said. 'Is she ready to fly?'

'As near as she'll ever be.'

Like the hat, the answer was not what Garamond would have expected of Litman. 'How near is that?'

'Relax, Vance.' Litman grinned within the column of shadow projected by the brim of his hat. 'That ship will take you as far as you want to go.'

'I'm ready to take her up now, sir,' Braunek said opportunely, from the opposite side of the group.

'You're happy enough about it?'

'If the computer's happy I'm happy, sir. Anyway I did a few fast taxis yesterday and she felt fine.'

'Go ahead, then.' Garamond watched the young man climb into the plane's glasshouse and strap himself into his seat. A few seconds later the propellers started to turn, silently driven by the magnetic resonance engines, and the control surfaces flicked in anticipation. As the propeller revolutions built up the group moved out of the backwash and a similar scattering took place among the work gangs at the far end of the runway. The plane began to move and several excited shouts went up, signifying that, despite the computer predictions and tape-controlled machines, there had remained some areas of human participation.

In its unloaded condition the aircraft used very little of the runway before lifting cleanly into the air. It continued in a straight line for about a kilometre, rising steadily, shadow flitting over the grass directly below, then banked into a lazy turn and circled the encampment. The soundless flight seemed effortless, like that of a gull riding on a fresh breeze, but on the third pass Garamond thought he saw a small object detach itself from the aircraft and go fluttering to the ground.

'What was that?' Napier said, screening his eyes. 'I saw something fall.'

'Nothing fell,' Litman asserted very quickly.

'I saw something too,' Garamond put in. 'You'd better get a medic on to the truck, just in case.'

'It wouldn't do any good – we had to pull the transmission out.'

'What?' Garamond stared in disbelief at Litman's uneasy but defiant face. 'One of the first basic procedures we agreed was that the truck would be kept at readiness during flight testing.'

'I guess I forgot.'

Garamond flicked a hand upwards, sending Litman's hat tumbling behind him. 'You are not a peasant,' he said harshly.

'You are not a coolie. You are a Starflight executive officer and I'm going to see that you…'

'Braunek's coming back,' someone said and Garamond returned his attention to the aircraft. The pilot had not tried, or had been unable, to line up on the runway but was coming in parallel to it, his ship rising and sinking noticeably as it breasted the wind. Garamond estimated the touchdown point and relaxed slightly as he saw it would be well to the north of the buildings and tents which were clustered around the hulk of the Bissendorf. The plane continued its descent, side-slipping a little but holding fairly well to its course.

'I told you there was nothing to worry about,' Litman said in a reproachful voice.

'You'd better be right.' Garamond kept his eyes on Braunek's ship. The side-slipping was more noticeable now, but each skid brought the plane a little closer to the centreline of the cleared strip and Garamond hoped that Braunek was good enough at his trade to be doing it on purpose. He knew, however, that there had to come a moment, a precise moment, in every air crash when the spectator on the ground was forced to accept that the pilot had lost his struggle against the law of aerial physics, that a disaster had to occur. For Garamond, the moment came when he saw that the starboard propeller was ceasing to spin. The plane pulled to the right, as though the wing on that side had hit an invisible pylon, and it staggered down the perilous sky towards the hillside. Towards, Garamond suddenly realized, the black rectangle of the delton detector. He was unable to breathe during the final few seconds of flight as the doomed ship, see-sawing its wings, became silhouetted against land instead of sky and then flailed its way through the delton screen. And it was not until the sound of the crash reached him that he was freed from his stasis and began to run.

Braunek's life was saved by the fact that the lightweight frames of the detector screens served as efficient absorbers of kinetic energy. They had accepted the impact, folding almost gently around the ship, stretching and twisting, and then trailing out behind it like vines. By the time Garamond reached the location of the crash Braunek had been helped out of the wreckage and was sitting on the grass. He was surrounded by technicians who had been working in and had run out of the small hut linked to the screens, and one of them was spraying tissue sealant over a gash on his leg.

Tm glad you made it,' Garamond said, feeling inadequate. 'How do you feel?'

Braunek shook his head. 'I'm all right, but everything else is screwed up.' He tried to raise himself from the ground.

Garamond pushed him back. 'Don't move. I want the medics to have a proper look at you. What happened anyway?'

'Starboard wing centre panel dropped oft'

'It just dropped off?'

Braunek nodded. 'It took the engine control runs with it, otherwise I could have brought the ship in okay.'

Garamond jumped to his feet. 'Litman! Find that panel and bring it here. Fast!'

Litman, who was just arriving on the scene, looked exasperated but he turned without a word and ran back down the hillside. Garamond stayed talking with Braunek until a medic arrived to check him over, then he surveyed the ruins of the delton screen. Somewhere in the middle of the wreckage a damaged aircraft engine was still releasing gyromagnetic impulses which sent harmless flickers of detuned energy racing over the metalwork like St Elmo's fire. Where accidental resonances occurred a feeble motive force was conjured up and the broken struts of the framework twitched like the legs of a dying insect. The destruction looked final to Garamond but he checked with O'Hagan and confirmed that the screen had been rendered useless except as a source of raw materials.

'How long till you have another one operational?'

'A week perhaps,' O'Hagan said. 'We'll go for modular construction this time. That means we could have small areas operational in a couple of days, and we could build up to a useful size before your airplanes are ready to take off.'

'Do that.' Garamond left his Chief Science Officer staring gloomily into the wreckage and went down the hillside to meet the group which had retrieved the lost wing section. The men set the plastic panel down in front of him and stood back without speaking. Garamond ran his gaze over it and saw at once that the two longitudinal edges which should have been ridged with welding overlays were square and clean except for small positioning welds which had broken.

Garamond turned to face Litman. 'All right – who was responsible for the welding of this panel, and who was supposed to inspect?'

'It's hard to say,' Litman replied.

'Hard to say?'

'That's what I said.'

'Then check it out on the work cards.' Garamond spoke with insulting gentleness.

'What work cards?' Litman, suddenly tired of being pushed, turned a red, resentful face up to Garamond's. 'Where have you been, Mister Garamond? Did nobody tell you we've only got bits of a workshop left? Did nobody tell you that winter's coming and we just can't afford all the time and material that's going into these flying toys of yours?'

'That isn't in your area of competence.'

'Of course not!' The redness had spread into Litman's eyes as he glanced around the gathering crowd. 'I'm only a production man. I'm just one of the slobs who has to meet your airy-fairy target dates with no bloody equipment. But there's something you seem to forget, Mister Garamond. Out here a man who knows how to use his hands is worth twenty Starflight commanders who have nothing left to command.'

'What'll you do if we decide not to finish your planes?' A low, interested murmur arose from the men behind Litman.

Cliff Napier stepped into the arena. 'For a so-called production man,' he said, 'you seem to do a lot of work with your mouth, Litman. I suggest that you…'

'It's all right,' Garamond cut in, placing a restraining hand on Napier's arm. He raised his voice so that he could be heard by everybody in the vicinity. 'I know how most of you feel about settling down here and making the best of things. And I know you want to get on with survival work before the weather turns. Furthermore, I can sympathize with your point of view about obsolescent Starflight commanders – but let me assure you of one thing. I'm leaving here with a fleet of airplanes, and the airplanes are going to be built properly, to the very highest standards of which we are capable. If I find they don't work as well as they ought to I'll simply turn them around and fly them right back to you.

'So the only way – the only way – you'll get me out of your hair permanently is by building good airplanes. And don't come sniffling to me about target dates or shortage of equipment. Don't forget – I've seen how you can work when you feel like it. What sort of a target date did we have when we were getting ready to punch a hole right through the middle of Beachhead City?' Garamond paused and out-stared the man nearest to him.

'A nice finishing touch,' Napier whispered. 'If they still have pride.'

'Ah, hell,' somebody growled from several rows back. 'We might as well finish the job now we've done most of the work.' There was a general rumble of assent and the crowd, after a moment's hesitation, began to disperse. The response was not as wholehearted as Garamond could have wished for, but he felt a sense of relief at having secured any kind of decision over Litman. The production executive, his face expressionless, was turning away with the others.

'Troy,' Garamond said to him, 'we could have talked that one out in private.'

Litman shrugged. 'I'm satisfied with the way things went.'

'Are you? You used to be known as the best production controller in the S.E.A. fleet.'

'That's all in the past, Vance. I've got bigger things on my mind now.'

'Bigger than a man's life? Braunek could have been killed over that sloppy workmanship.'

'I'm sorry about young Braunek getting hurt, and I'm glad he's all right.' Litman paused and retraced his steps towards Garamond. 'The reason the men went along with you a moment ago is that you gave them Orbitsville – and that's important to them. They're going to spread out through Orbitsville, Vance. This camp won't hold together more than a year or two, and then most likely it will be left empty.'

'We were talking about the plane crash.'

'We don't stand united any more. Any man who trusts his life to a machine he hasn't made by himself and personally checked out by himself is a fool. You should remember that.' Litman turned and plodded away down the hillside, probably intent on retrieving his coolie hat. Garamond stared after the compact figure, filled with the uneasy dislike that a man always feels for another who seems in closer touch with the realities of a situation. He thought hard about Litman's words during the midday meal and as a result decided to turn himself into a one-man inspection and quality assurance team, with entire responsibility for the airworthiness of his aircraft.

The self-imposed task – with its round of visual and physical checking of every aspect of the fleet production – occupied nine-tenths of Garamond's working hours, and brought the discovery that he still retained the ability to sleep without stunning his system with alcohol.

Garamond was spreadeagled across the tailplane of the seventh aircraft, examining the elevator hinges, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was late in the day and therefore hot – temperatures on Orbitsville built up steadily throughout each daylight period, before dropping abruptly at nightfall – and he had been hoping to finish the particular job without interruption. He kept his head inside the resinous darkness of the inspection hatch, hoping the interloper would take the hint and go away, but there came another and more insistent tap. Garamond twisted into a sitting position and found himself looking into the creased dry face of O'Hagan. The scientist had never been a happy-looking man but on this occasion his expression was more bleak than usual, and Garamond felt a stab of concern.

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 up-curving 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.

Delia Liggett, who was at the controls, raised her face to him. 'Is there any chance that…?'

'It isn't Beachhead City,' Garamond said. 'Let's get that clear.'

'I thought there might have been a mistake over distances.'

'Sorry, Delia. We're working on a very rough estimate of how far the Bissendorf travelled, but not that rough. You can start looking out. for Beachhead City in earnest a couple of years from now.' There was silence in the cockpit except for the insistent rush of air against the sides of the ship.

'Then what is that?'

Garamond perversely refused to admit excitement. 'It looks like sky reflections on a lake.'

'Wrong colour,' Braunek said, handing Garamond a pair of binoculars. 'Try these.'

'It has to be an alien settlement,' Garamond admitted as the glasses revealed the beaded brightness of a distant city. 'And it's so far from the entrance to the sphere.'

At that moment Cliff Napier's voice came through on the lightphone. 'Number Two speaking – is that Vance I can see in the cockpit?'

'I hear you, Cliff.'

Have you seen what we've seen?'

'Yeah – and are you wondering what I'm wondering?'

Napier hesitated. 'You mean, what's an alien city doing way out here? I guess they got to Orbitsville a very long time before we did. It might have taken them hundreds or thousands of years to drift out this far.'

'But why did they bother? You've seen what Orbitsville's like – one part is as good as another.'

'To us, Vance. Aliens could see things a different way.'

'I don't know,' Garamond said dubiously. 'You always say things like that.' He dropped into one of the supernumerary seats and fixed his eyes on the horizon, waiting for the wall of daylight to rush towards him from the east. When it came, about an hour later, sweeping over the ground with thought-paralysing speed, the alien settlement abruptly became an even less noticeable feature of the landscape. Although it was now within a hundred kilometres, the 'city' was reduced in the binoculars to a mere dusting of variegated dots almost lost in greenery. During the lightphone conversations between the aircraft there had been voiced the idea that it might be possible to obtain new propeller bearings or have the existing ones modified. Garamond, without expressing any quick opinions on a subject so important to him, had been quietly hopeful about the aliens' level of technology – but his optimism began to fade. The community which hovered beyond the prow of his ship reminded him of a Nineteenth Century town in the American West.

'Looks pretty rustic to me.' Ralston, the telegeologist, had borrowed the glasses and was peering through them.

'Mark Twain land?'

'That's it.'

Garamond nodded. 'This is completely illogical, of course. We can't measure other cultures with our own yardstick, but I have a feeling that that's a low-technology agricultural community up there. Maybe it's because I believe that any race which settles on Orbitsville will turn into farmers. There's no need for them to do anything else.'

'Hold on a minute, Vance.' Ralston's voice was taut. 'Maybe you're going to get those bearings, after all. I think I see an airplane.'

Numb with surprise, Garamond took the offered binoculars and aimed them where Ralston directed. After a moment's search he found a complicated white speck hanging purposefully in the lower levels of the air. The absence of any lateral movement suggested the other plane was flying directly away from or directly towards his own, and his intuition told him the latter was the case. He kept watching through the powerful, gyro-stabilized glasses and presently saw other motes of coloured brightness rising, swarming uncertainly, and then settling into the apparently motionless state which meant they were flying to meet him head-on. Ralston gave the alert to the six other ships of the fleet.

'It's a welcoming party, all right,' he said as the unknown planes became visible to the naked eye, 'and we've no weapons. What do we do if they attack us?'

'We have to assume they're friendly, or at least not hostile.' Garamond adjusted the fine focus on the binoculars. 'Besides – I know I'm judging them by our standards again – but that doesn't look like an air force to me. The planes are all different colours.'

'Like ancient knights going out to do battle.'

'Could be, but I don't think so. The planes seem to be pretty small, and all different types.' A stray thought crossed Garamond's mind. He turned his attention back to the city from which the planes had arisen, and was still scanning it with growing puzzlement when the two fleets of aircraft met and coalesced.

A green-and-yellow low-wing monoplane took up station beside Garamond's ship and wiggled its wings in what, thanks to the strictures of aerial dynamics, had to be the universal greeting of airmen. The alien craft had a small blister-type canopy through which could be seen a humanoid form. Braunek, now at the controls, laughed delightedly and repeated the signal. The tiny plane near their wingtip followed suit, as did a blue biplane beyond it.

'Communication!' Braunek shouted. 'They aren't like the Clowns, Vance – we'll be able to talk to these people.'

'Good. See if you can get their permission to land,' Garamond said drily.

'Right.' Braunek, unaware of the irony, became absorbed in making an elaborate series of gestures while Garamond twisted around in his seat to observe as many of the alien ships as he could. He had noted earlier that no two were painted alike; now he was able to confirm that they all differed radically in design. Most were propeller-driven, but at least two were powered by gas turbines and one racy-looking job had the appearance of a home-made rocket ship. In general the alien planes were of conventional/universal cruciform configuration, although he glimpsed at least one canard and a twin-fuselage craft.

'A bit of a mixture,' Ralston commented, and added with a note of disappointment in his voice. 'I see a lot of internal combustion engines out there. If that's the level they're at they won't be much use to us.'

'How about supplies of fossil fuel?'

'There could be some about – depends on the age of Orbitsville.' Ralston surveyed the ground below with professional disgust. 'My training isn't worth a damn out here. The ordinary rules don't apply.'

'I think it's okay to go down,' Braunek said. 'Our friend has dipped his nose a couple of times.'

'Right. Pass the word along.'

As the fringes of the alien settlement began to slide below the nose of the aircraft Braunek sat higher in his seat and turned his head rapidly from side to side. 'I can't see their airfield. We'll have to circle around.'

Garamond tapped the pilot's shoulder. 'I think you'll find they haven't got a centralized airfield.'

The aircraft banked into a turn, giving a good view of the ground. The city wheeling below the wing was at least twenty kilometres across but had no distinguishable roads, factories or other buildings larger than average-sized dwellings. Garamond's impression was of thousands of hunting lodges scattered in an area of woodland. Here and there, randomly distributed, were irregular cleared areas about the size of football pitches. The brightly coloured alien planes dispersed towards these, crossing flight paths at low altitude in an uncontrolled manner which brought audible gasps from Braunek. They landed unceremoniously, one to a field, leaving the humans' ships still aloft in the circuit.

'This is crazy – I'm not going to try putting us down in somebody's back yard,' Braunek announced.

'Find a good strip outside of town and we'll land in sequence the way we'd already planned,' Garamond told him. He sat back in his seat and buckled his safety straps. The plane lost altitude, completed two low-level orbits and landed, with a short jolting run on its skids, in an expanse of meadow. Braunek steered it off to one side and they watched as the six other ships of the fleet touched down on the same tracks and formed an untidy line. Their propellers gradually stopped turning and canopies were pushed upwards like the wing casings of insects.

Green-scented air flooded in around Garamond and he relaxed for a moment, enjoying the sensation of being at rest. The luxuriousness of his body's response to the silence awakened memories of what it had been like arriving home for a brief spell after a long mission. Ecstasy-living was a phenomenon well known to S.E.A. personnel, as were its attendant dangers. Rigid self-control was always required during home leave, to prevent the ecstasy getting out of control and causing a fierce negative reaction at the beginning of the next mission. But in this instance, as he breathed the cool heavy air, Garamond realized he had been tricked into lowering his guard…

I can't possibly take another two years of flying night and day, the thought came. Nobody could.

'Come on, Vance – stretch the legs,' Braunek called as he leapt down on to the grass. He was followed in close succession by Delia Liggett, Ralston and Pierre Tarque, the young medic who completed the crew of No 1. Garamond waved to them and made himself busy with his straps.

Two whole years to go – at least! – and what would it achieve?

The sound of laughter and cheerful voices came from outside as the crews of the seven aircraft met and mingled. He could hear friendly punches being swapped, and derisive whoops which probably signified an overlong kiss being exchanged.

Even if I get near enough to the President to hill her, which is most unlikely, what would that achieve? It's too late to do anything for Aileen and Chris. Would they want me to get myself executed?

Garamond stood up, filled with guilty excitement, and climbed out of the glasshouse. From the slight elevation, the alien settlement looked like a dreamy garden village. He glanced around, taking in all the lime-green immensities, and dropped to the ground where Cliff Napier and Denise Serra were waiting for him. Denise greeted him with a warm, direct gaze. She was wearing regulation-issue black trousers, but topped with a tangerine blouse in place of a tunic, and he suddenly appreciated that she was beautiful. They were joined almost at once by O'Hagan and Sammy Yamoto, both of whom looked greyer and older than Garamond had expected. O'Hagan wasted no time on pleasantries.

"We're at a big decision point, Vance,' he began. "Five of our ships have sub-standard propeller bearings and if we can't get them upgraded there's no point in continuing with the flight.' He tilted his head and assumed the set expression with which he always heard arguments.

"I have to agree.' Garamond nodded, rediscovering the fact that looking at Denise produced a genuine sensation of pleasure in his eyes.

O'Hagan twitched his brows in surprise. 'All right, then. The first thing we have to do when we meet these aliens is to assess their engineering capabilities.'

'They can't be at the level of gyromagnetic power or magnetic bearings – you saw their aircraft.'

'That's true, but I think I'm right in saying a magnelube bearing can be considerably upgraded by enclosing it within another bearing, even one as primitive as a ball race. All we would have to do is commission the aliens to manufacture twenty or so large conventional bearings which we can wrap around our magnelubes.'

'They'd need to be of a standard size.'

O'Hagan sniffed loudly. 'That goes without saying.'

'I think you'll find…' Garamond broke off as an abrupt silence fell over the assembled crews. He turned and saw a fantastic cavalcade approaching the aircraft from the direction of the city. The aliens were humanoid – from a distance surprisingly so – and shared the human predilection for covering their bodies with clothes. Predominant hues were yellows and browns which toned in with sand-coloured skin, making it difficult to determine precise details of their anatomies. Some of the aliens were on foot, some on bicycles, some on tricycles, some on motor-cycles, some in a variety of open cars and saloons including a two-wheeled gyro car, some were perched on the outside of an erratic air-cushion vehicle. They approached to within twenty metres of the parked aircraft and came to a halt. As the heterogenous mixture of engines associated with their transport coughed, clanked and spluttered into silence, Garamond became aware that the aliens were producing a soft humming noise of their own. It was a blend of many different notes, continuously inflecting, and he tentatively concluded that it was their mode of speech.

Seen up close, the aliens were hairless but had identifiable equivalents of eyes, ears and mouths agreeably positioned on their heads. Garamond was unable to decide what anatomical features their flimsy garments were meant to cover, or to see any evidence of sexual differentiation. He felt curiously indifferent to the aliens in spite of the fact that this first contact looked infinitely more propitious than the wordless futility of his encounter with the Clowns. No adventure in the outside universe held much significance compared to the voyage of discovery he was making within himself.

'Do you want to try speaking with them?' O'Hagan said.

Garamond shook his head. 'It's your turn to get your name in the history books, Dennis. Be my guest.'

O'Hagan looked gratified. 'If it's to be done, then 'twere well it were done scientifically.' He advanced on the nearest of the aliens, who seemed to regard him with interest, and the movement of his shoulders showed he was trying to communicate with his hands.

'There's no need,' Garamond said in a low voice.

Yamoto turned his head. 'What did you say?'

'Nothings Sammy. I was talking to myself.'

'You should be careful who you're seen speaking to.'

Garamond nodded abstractedly. The thing Dennis O'Hagan doesn't realize about these people is that they'll never do what he wants. He has missed all the signs.

All right – assuming we can't get them to make the bearings, is there any point in continuing with the flight? Answer: no. This isn't just a personal reaction. The computers agreed that two airplanes of the type available would not constitute a sufficiently flexible and resourceful transport system. Therefore, I simply can't get back to Beachhead City. It's as clear-cut as that. It always was too late to do anything for Aileen and Chris, and now there's nothing I can even attempt to do.

I've been born again.

The aliens stayed for more than an hour and then, gradually but without stragglers, moved away in the direction of their city. They reminded Garamond of children who had been enjoying an afternoon at a funfair and had become so hungry they could not bear to miss the meal waiting at home. When the last brightly painted vehicle disappeared behind the trees there was a moment of utter silence in the meadow, followed by an explosive release of tension among the plane crews. Bottles of synthetic liqueur were produced and a party set off to swim in a nearby lake.

'That was weird,' Joe Braunek said, shaking his head. 'We stood in two lines and looked at each other like farm boys and girls at a village dance on Terranova.'

'It went all right,' Garamond assured him. 'There's no protocol – what are you supposed to do?'

'It still was weird.'

'I know, but just think what it would have been like if there'd been any diplomats or military around. We met them, and stared at them, and they stared at us, and nobody tried to take anything that belonged to the others, and nobody got hurt. Things could have been worse, believe me.'

'I guess so. Did you see the way they kept counting our ships?'

'I did notice that.' Garamond recalled the repeated gesture among the onlookers, long golden fingers indicating, stepping their way along the line of aircraft.

'Seemed important to them, somehow. It was as if they'd never seen…'

'We've made genuine progress, Vance.' O'Hagan approached with a sheaf of hand-written notes and a recorder. 'I've identified at least six nouns or noun-sounds in their speech and I believe I'd have done better if I'd had musical training.'

'Can't you get somebody to help?'

'I have. I'm taking Paskuda and Shelley and going into the city. We won't stay long.'

'Take as long as you need,' Garamond said casually.

'All right, Vance.' O'Hagan gave him a searching stare. 'I want to see something of their machine capability as soon as possible. I think that would be a good idea, don't you?'

'Excellent.' Garamond had seen a flash of tangerine further down the line of aircraft and was unable to take his eyes away from it. He quickly disengaged from O'Hagan, walked towards Denise Serra but hesitated on seeing that she was involved in a discussion with the six other women of the flight crews. He was turning away when she noticed him and signalled that he was to wait. A minute later she came to him, looking warm, competent, desirable and everything else he expected a woman to be. The thought of lying with her caused a painful stab in his lower abdomen as glandular mechanisms, too long suppressed, found themselves reactivated. Denise glanced around her, frowned at the proximity of other people, and led the way towards an unspoiled area of tall grass. The quasi-intimacy of her actions pleased Garamond.

'It's good to see you again,' he said.

'It's good to see you, Vance. How do you feel now?'

'Better. I'm coming to life again.'

'I'm glad.' Denise gave him a speculative look. 'That was an official meeting of Orbitsville Women's League, detached chapter.'

'Oh? Carry on. Sister Denise.'

She smiled briefly. 'Vance, they've voted to drop out of the flight.'

'Unanimously?'

'Yes. Five airplanes are going to have to give up eventually, and we might as well pick the spot. The Hummers seem friendly and making a study of their culture will give us something to do. Apart from bringing up babies, that is.'

'Do you know how many men will want to stay?'

'Most of them. I'm sorry, Vance.'

'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.'

eighteen

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.

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 upcurving 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.

Everybody, 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 folly 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. Braunek 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 fight 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…

'I think we've arrived,' Braunek called over his shoulder. 'I see something in front of us.'

Garamond moved up behind the pilot and peered through the forward canopy at the flat prairie. It stretched ahead, unbroken, for hundreds of kilometres. 'I don't see anything,' he said.

'Straight ahead of us. About ten kilometres.'

'Is it something small?'

'Small? It's huge! Look, Vance, right there!'

Garamond followed the exact line of Braunek's pointing finger and a cold unease crept over him as he confirmed his belief that they were looking at featureless flatlands.

Yamoto shouldered his way into the cockpit. 'What's going on?'

'Straight ahead of us,' Braunek said. 'What do you think that is?'

The astronomer shielded his eyes to see better and gave a low whistle. 'I don't know, but it would be worth landing for a closer look. But before we go down I want to get an infrared photograph of it.'

Garamond examined the sand-smooth plain once more, and was opening his mouth to protest when he saw the apparition. He had been looking for an object which distinguished itself from its surroundings by verticality and texture, but this was a vast area of grass which differed from the rest only in that it was slightly darker in colour. It could have been taken for a natural variation in the grass, perhaps caused by soil composition, except for the fact that it was perfectly circular. From the approaching aircraft it appeared as a ghostly ellipse of green on green, like a design in an experimental painting. Yamoto opened his personal locker, took out a camera and photographed the slowly expanding circle. He reeled the print out, glanced at it briefly and passed it round for the others to see. On it the area of grass stood out darkly against an orange background.

'It's quite a few degrees colder,' Yamoto said. 'I would say that the entire area seems to be losing heat into space.'

'What does it mean?'

'Well, the grass there is of a slightly different colour to the rest – which could mean the soil is absorbing some mineral or other. And there's the heat loss. Plus the fact that radiation from the outside universe is being admitted… It adds up to just one thing.'

'Which is?'

'We've found another entrance to Orbitsville.'

'How can that be?' Garamond felt a slow unexpected quickening of his spirit. 'We did a survey of the equatorial region from the outside, and besides … there's no hole in the shell.'

'There is a hole,' Yamoto said calmly. 'But – a very long time ago – somebody sealed it up.'

They landed close to the edge of the circle and, although darkness came flooding in from the east only a few minutes later, began to dig an exploratory trench. The soil was several metres thick in the area, but in less than an hour an invisible resistance to their spades told them they had encountered the lenticular field. A short time later a massive diaphragm of rusting metal was uncovered. They sliced through it with the invisible lance of a valency cutter.

Two men levered a square section upwards and then, without speaking the others took it in turn to look downwards at the stars.

nineteen

'This is North Ten, the most advanced of our forward distribution centres,' Elizabeth Lindstrom said, with a warm note of pride in her voice. 'You can see at once the amount of effort and organization that has been put into it.'

Charles Devereaux walked across to the parapet of the roof of the administration building and looked out across the plain. Four hundred kilometres to the south lay Beachhead City, and the arrow-straight highway to it was alive with the small wheeled transports of settlers. Here and there on the road, before it faded into the shimmering distance, could be seen the larger shapes of bulk carriers bringing supplies. The highway ended at North Ten, from which point a series of dirt tracks fanned out into the encircling sweep of prairie. For the first few kilometres the tracks made their way through an industrial area where reaping machines gathered the grass which was used as a source of cellulose to produce plastics for building purposes. Immediately beyond the acetate factories the homesteads began, with widely spaced buildings sparkling whitely in the sun.

'I'm impressed with everything Starflight has done here. My Lady,' Devereaux said, choosing his words with professional care. 'Please understand that when I put questions to you I do so solely in my capacity as a representative of the Two Worlds Government.'

Do you think I would waste time answering them otherwise? Elizabeth suppressed the thought and bent her mind to the unfamiliar task of self-control. 'I do understand,' she assured the dapper grey man, smiling. 'It's your duty to make sure that all that can possibly be done to open up Lindstromland is in fact being done.'

'That's precisely it, My Lady. You see, the people on Earth and Terranova have heard about the fantastic size of Lindstromland and they can't understand why it is that, if there is unlimited living space available, the Government doesn't simply set up a programme of shipbuilding on a global scale and bring them here.'

'A perfectly understandable point of view, but…' Elizabeth spread her hands to the horizons, fingers flashing with jewel-fire, '… this land I have given to humanity makes its own rules and we have no option but to abide by them. Lindstromland is unthinkably large, but by providing only one entrance – and placing restrictions on interior travel and communications – its builders have effectively made it small. My own belief is that they decided to enforce a selection procedure, or its equivalent. As long as Lindstromland can accept immigrants only in regulated quantities the quality of the stock which arrives will be higher.'

'Do you think the concept of stock and breeding would have been familiar to them?'

'Perhaps not.' Elizabeth realized she had used an unfortunate trigger-word, one to which the upstart of a civil servant reacted unfavourably. It struck her that things had already gone too far when she, President of Starflight, was being forced to placate an obscure official in the weakest government in human history. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of Lindstromland, she was beginning to appreciate, had been ill omens.

Devereaux apparently was not satisfied. 'It would be a tragedy if Earth were to export attitudes such as nationalism and…

'What I'm saying,' Elizabeth cut in, 'is that it would be an even bigger tragedy if we were to empty every slum and gutter on Earth into this green land.'

'Why?' Devereaux met her eyes squarely and she made the discovery that his greyness had a steely quality. 'Because the transportation task would be too great to be handled by a private concern?'

Elizabeth felt her mouth go dry as she fought to restrain herself. Nobody had ever been allowed to speak to her in this manner before, with the possible exception of Captain Garamond – and he had paid. It was infuriating how these small men, nonentities, tended to lapse into insolence the moment they felt secure.

'Of course not,' she said, marvelling at the calmness of her voice. 'There are many sound reasons for regulating population flow. Look at the squalid difficulties there were when the first settlers here encountered those creatures they call Clowns.'

'Yes, but those difficulties could have been avoided. In fact, we think they may have been engineered.'

For one heady moment Elizabeth considered burning Devereaux in two where he stood, even if it led to a major incident, even if it meant turning Lindstromland into a fortress. Then it came to her that Devereaux – in abandoning all the rules of normal diplomacy – was laying his cards on the table. She regarded him closely for a moment, trying to decide if he was offering himself for sale. The approach, in greatly modified form, was a familiar one among government employees – show yourself to be dangerous and therefore valuable in proportion. She smiled and moved closer to Devereaux, deliberately stepping inside his proximity rejection zone, a psychological manoeuvre she had learned at an early age. His face stiffened momentarily, as she had known it would, and she was about to touch him when Secretary Robard appeared on the edge of the stair-well. He was carrying a headset and feeding wire out of a reel as he walked.

Elizabeth frowned at him. 'What is this, Robard?'

'Priority One, My Lady. Your flagship is picking up a radio message which you must hear.'

'Wait there.' She moved away from Devereaux. The brusqueness of her man's voice, so out of keeping with his normal manner, told her something important had happened. She silently cursed the obtuse physics of Lindstromland which had denied her easy radio contact with the outside universe. A voice was already speaking when she put on the headset. It was unemotional, with an inhuman steadiness, and the recognition of it drained the strength from her legs. Elizabeth Lindstrom sank to her knees, and listened.

'…using the resources of the Bissendorf s workshops we built a number of aircraft with which it was planned to fly back to Beachhead City. The ships proved inadequate for the distance involved, but they got eight of us to the point from which I am making this broadcast, the point where we have discovered a second entrance to the sphere.

"The entrance was not discovered during the equatorial survey because it is sealed with a metal diaphragm. The metal employed has nothing in common with the material of the Orbitsville shell. I believe it is the product of a civilization no further advanced than our own. This belief is strengthened by the fact that we had no difficulty in cutting a hole in it to let us extend a radio antenna.'

There was a crackling pause, then the voice emerged strongly in its relentless measured tones. 'The fact that we were able to find a second entrance so quickly, with such limited resources, can only mean that there must be many others. Many hundreds. Many thousands. It is logical to assume that all the others have been similarly blocked, and it is equally logical to assume that it was not done by the builders of the sphere.

'This raises questions about the identity and motivation of those who sealed the entrances. The evidence suggests that the work was carried out by a race of beings who found Orbitsville long before we did. We may never know what these beings looked like, but we can tell that they shared some of the faults of our own race. They, or some of them, decided to monopolize Orbitsville, to control it, to exploit it; and the method they chose was to limit access to the interior of the sphere.

'The evidence also shows that they succeeded – and that, eventually, they failed.

'Perhaps they were destroyed in the battle we know to have taken place at the Beachhead City entrance. Perhaps in the end they lost out to Orbitsville itself. By being absorbed and changed, just as we are going to be absorbed and changed. The lesson for us now is that the entire Starflight organization – with its vested interest in curbing humanity's natural expansion – must be set aside. All of Orbitsville is open to us. It is available as I speak…'

Elizabeth removed the headset, cutting herself off from the dreadful didactic voice. She put her hands on the smooth surface of the roof and sank down until she was lying prone, her open mouth pressed against the foot-printed plastic.

Vance Garamond, she thought, her mind sinking through successive levels of cryogenic coldness. I have to love you …because you are the only one ever to have given me real pain, ever to hurt me, and hurt me. She moved her hips from side to side, grinding against the roof with her pubis. Now that all else is ending …it is my turn …to make love… to you…

'My Lady, are you ill?' The voice reached her across bleak infinities. Elizabeth raised her head and, with effort, identified the grey anxious face of Charles Devereaux. She got to her feet.

'How dare you!' she said coldly. 'What are you suggesting?'

'Nothing. I…

'Why did you let this… object enter my quarters?' Elizabeth turned and stared accusingly at Robard who had quietly retrieved the headset and was reeling in the attached wire. 'Get him out of here!'

'I'm going – I've seen enough.' Devereaux hurried towards the stairwell. Elizabeth watched him go, twisting a ruby ring on he, finger as she did so. It turned easily on bearings of perspiration.

Robard bowed nervously. 'If you will excuse me…'

'Not yet,' Elizabeth snapped. 'Get me Doctor Killops on that thing.'

'Yes, My Lady.' Robard murmured into the instrument, listened for a moment, and then handed it to her. He began to withdraw but she pointed at a spot nearby, silently ordering him to stay.

Elizabeth raised the communicator to her lips. 'Tell me. Doctor Killops, has Mrs Garamond had her sedative today yet? No? Then don't give it to her. Captain Garamond is returning, alive, and we want his wife to be fully conscious and alert for the reunion.' She threw the instrument down and Robard stooped to pick it up.

'Never mind that,' Elizabeth said quietly. 'Get my car ready to leave in five minutes. I have urgent business in Beachhead City.'

The shock of hearing by radio that his wife and son were still alive had stormed through Garamond's system like a nuclear fireball. In its wake had come relief, joy, gratitude, bafflement, renewal of optimism – and finally, as a consequence of emotional overload, an intense physical reaction. There was a period of several hours during which he experienced cold sweats, irregular heartbeat and dizziness; and the symptoms were at their height when the little transit boat from fleet headquarters arrived underfoot.

As had happened once before, he felt disoriented and afraid on seeing a spacesuited figure clamber upwards through a black hole in the ground. The figure was followed by others who were carrying empty spacesuits, and – even when the faceplates had been removed and the two parties were mingling – they still looked strange to him. At some time in the preceding months he had come to accept the thin-shouldered shabbiness of his own crew as the norm, and now the members of the rescue party seemed too sleek and shiny, too alien.

'Captain Garamond?' A youthful Starflight officer approached him and saluted, beardless face glowing with pleasure and health. 'I'm Lieutenant Kenny of the Westmorland. This is a great honour for me, sir.'

'Thank you.' The action of returning the salute felt awkward to Garamond.

Kenny's gaze strayed to the sloping, stiff-winged outlines of the two aircraft and his jaw sagged. 'I'm told you managed to fly a couple of million kilometres in those makeshifts. That must have been fantastic.'

Garamond suppressed an illogical resentment. "You might call it that. The Westmorland? Isn't that Hugo Schilling's command?'

'Captain Schilling insisted on coming with us. He's waiting for you aboard the transit boat now. I'll have to photograph those airplanes, sir – they're just too…'

'Not now, Lieutenant. My Chief Science Officer is very ill and he must be hospitalized at once. The rest of us aren't in great shape, either.' Garamond tried to keep his voice firm even though a numbness had enveloped his body, creating a sensation that his head was floating in the air like a balloon.

Kenny, with a flexibility of response which further dismayed Garamond, was instantly solicitous. He began shouting orders and within a few minutes the eight members of the Bissendorf's crew had been suited up for transfer to the waiting boat. Garamond's mind was brimming with thoughts of Aileen and Chris as he negotiated the short spacewalk, with its swaying vistas of star rivers and its constrained breathing of rubber-smelling air. As soon as he had passed through the airlock he made his way to the forward compartment, which seemed impossibly roomy after his months in the aircraft's narrow fuselage. Another spacesuited figure rose to greet him.

'It's good to see you, Vance,' Hugo Schilling said. He was a blue-eyed, silver-haired man who had been in the Exploration Arm for twenty years and treated his job of wandering unknown space as if he was the pilot of a local ferry.

'Thanks, Hugo. It's good to…' Garamond shook his head to show he had run out of words.

Schilling inspected him severely. 'You don't look well, Vance. Rough trip?'

"Rough trip.'

'Enough said, skipper. We're keeping the suits on, but strap yourself in and relax – we'll have you home in no time. Try to get some sleep.'

Garamond nodded gratefully. 'Have you seen my wife and boy?'

'No. Unlike you, I'm just a working flickerwing man and I don't get invited out to the Octagon.'

'The Octagon! What are they doing out there?'

'They've been staying with the President ever since you… ah… disappeared. They're celebrities too, you know – even if there is some reflection of glory involved.'

'But…' A new centre of coldness began to form within Garamond's body. 'Tell me, Hugo, did the President send you out here to pick us up?'

'No. It was an automatic reaction on the part of Fleet Command. The President is out at North Ten – that's one of the forward supply depots we've built.'

'Will she have heard my first message yet?'

'Probably,' Schilling pointed a gloved finger at Garamond. 'Starting to sweat over some of those things you said about Starflight? Don't worry about it – we all know you've been under a strain. You can say you got a bit carried away with the sense of occasion.'

Garamond took a deep breath. 'Are there any airplanes or other rapid transport systems in use around Beachhead City?'

'Not yet. All the production has been concentrated on ground cars and housing.'

'How long will it take the President to get back to the Octagon?'

'It's hard to say – the cars they produce aren't built for speed. Eight hours, maybe.'

'How long till we get back?'

'Well, I'm allowing five hours in view of Mister O'Hagan's condition.'

'Speed it up, Hugo,' Garamond said. 'I have to be back before the President, and she's had a few hours' start.'

Schilling glanced at the information panel on which changing colour configurations showed that the ship was sealed and almost ready for flight. 'That would mean fairly high G-forces. For a sick man…'

He won't mind – go ask him.'

'I don't see…'

'Supposing I said it was a matter of life or death?'

'I wouldn't believe you, but…' Schilling winked reassuringly, opened an audio channel to the flight deck and instructed the pilot to make the return journey in the shortest possible time consistent with O'Hagan's health. Garamond thanked him and tried to relax into the G-chair, wishing he had been able to take the other man into his confidence. Schilling was kindly and uncomplicated, with a high regard for authority. It would have been difficult, possibly disastrous, for Garamond to try telling him he believed Elizabeth Lindstrom was a psychopath who would enjoy murdering an innocent woman and child. Schilling might counter by asking why Elizabeth had not done it as soon as she had had the chance, and Garamond would not have been able to answer. It would not have been enough to say that he felt it in his bones. He closed his eyes as the acceleration forces clamped down, but his growing conviction of danger made it impossible for him to rest. Thirty minutes into the flight he got an idea.

'Do you think there'll be a reception when we get back? A public one?'

'Bound to be,' Schilling said. 'You keep hogging the news. Even while you were away a reporter called Mason, I think, ran a campaign to persuade somebody to go looking for your ship. The betting was fifty-to-one you were dead, though, so he didn't have much success.'

Garamond had forgotten about the reporter from Earth. 'You said my wife and boy are well known, too. I want them to meet me at the Beachhead City transit tube. Can you arrange that?'

'I don't see why not – there's a direct communications link to the Octagon from the President's flagship.' Schilling spoke into the command microphone of his spacesuit, waited, spoke again, and then settled into a lengthy conversation. Only occasional whispers of sound came through his open faceplate, but Garamond could hear the exchange becoming heated. When it had finished Schilling sat perfectly still for a moment before turning to speak.

'Sorry, Vance.'

'What happened?'

'Apparently the President has sent instructions from North Ten that your family are to wait in the Octagon until you get there. She's on her way there now, and they can't contact her, so nobody would authorize transportation into the City for your wife. I don't understand it.'

'I think I do,' Garamond replied quietly, his eyes fixed on the forward view plate and its image of a universe which was divided in two by the cosmic hugeness of Orbitsville, one half in light, the other in total darkness.

The effort of moving under multiple gravities was almost too much for Garamond, but he was standing in the cramped airlock – sealed up and breathing suit air – before the transit boat reached the docking clamps. He cracked the outer seal on the instant the green disembarkation light came on, went through the boat's outer door and found himself in a lighted L-shaped tube. It was equipped with handrails and at the rounded corner, where the sphere's gravitation came into effect, there was the beginning of a non-skid walkway.

Garamond pulled himself along the weightless section with his hands, forced his way through the invisible syrup of the lenticular field, achieved an upright position and strode into the arrival hall. He was immediately walled in by faces and bodies and, as soon as he had opened his helmet, battered by the sound of shouting and cheering. People surged around him, reaching for his hands, slapping his back, pulling hoses and connectors from his suit for souvenirs.

At the rear of the crowd were men with scene recorders and, as he scanned their faces, an uncontrollable impulse caused Garamond to raise his arm like a Twentieth Century astronaut returning from an orbital mission. He cursed the autonomous limb, appalled at its behaviour, and concentrated on finding the right face in the bewildering seedling mass, aware of how much he had always depended on Cliff Napier in similar circumstances. There was a high proportion of men in the uniforms of top-ranking Starflight officials, any of whom could have arranged transport to the Octagon, but he had no way of knowing which were members of Elizabeth's inner cadre and therefore hostile. After a blurred moment he saw a heavy-shouldered young man with prematurely greying hair working his way towards him and recognized Colbert Mason. He caught the outstretched hand between both of his gloves.

"Captain Garamond,' Mason shouted above the background noise, 'I can't tell you how much …'

Garamond shook his head. "We'll talk later. Have you a car?'

"It's outside.'

"I've got to get out of here right now.'

Mason hesitated. "There's official Starflight transportation laid on.'

"Remember the first day we met, Colbert? You needed wheels in a hurry and I… .'

"Come on.' Mason lowered his head and went through the crowd like an ice-breaking ship with Garamond, hampered by the bulk of the suit, struggling in his wake. In a matter of seconds they had reached a white vehicle which had "TWO WORLDS NEWS AGENCY' blazoned on its side in orange letters. The two men got in, watched by the retinue which had followed them from the hall, and Mason got the vehicle moving.

"Where to?' he said.

"The Octagon – as fast as this thing will go.'

"Okay, but I'm not welcome out there. The guards won't let this car in.'

'I'm not welcome either, but we're going in just the same.' Garamond began working on the zips of the spacesuit.

That was a good line to hand the Press, he thought as the yammerings of panic began to build up. That was an authentic general-purpose man of action speaking. Why do I do these things? Why don't I let him know I'm scared shitless? It might make things easier…

Mason hunched over the wheel as he sped them through the industrial environs of the city. 'This is the part you flattened, but they rebuilt it just as ugly as ever.'

'They would.'

'Can you tell me what's going on?'

Garamond hesitated. 'Sorry, Colbert – not yet.'

'I just wondered.'

'Either way, you're going to get another big story.'

'Hell, I know that much already. I just wondered … as a friend.'

'I appreciate the friendship, but I can't talk till I'm sure.'

'It's all right,' Mason said. 'We'll be there in less than ten minutes.'

For the rest of the short drive Garamond concentrated on removing the spacesuit. In the confines of the car it was an exhausting, frustrating task which he welcomed because it enabled his mind to hold back the tides of fear. By the time he had finally worked himself free the octagonal building which housed the Starflight Centre was looming on a hilltop straight ahead, and he could see the perimeter fence with its strolling guards. As the car gained height, and greater stretches of the surrounding grasslands came into view, Garamond saw that there was also a northern approach road to the Octagon. Another vehicle, still several kilometres away, was speeding down it, trailing a plume of saffron dust. It was too far away for him to distinguish the black-and-silver Starflight livery, but on the instant a steel band seemed to clamp around his chest, denying him air. He stared wordlessly at the massive gate of the west entrance which was beginning to fill the car's windshield. The car slowed down as guards emerged from their kiosk.

'Go straight through it,' Garamond urged. 'Don't slow down.'

'It's no use,' Mason said. 'It would take a tank to batter down that gate – we'd both be killed. We'll just have to talk our way in.'

'Talk?' Garamond looked north and saw that the other vehicle seemed to be approaching with the speed of an aircraft. 'There's no time for talking.'

He leaped from the car as soon as it had slid to a halt and ran to the kiosk at the side of the gate. A sun-visored guard emerged, carrying a rifle, and stared warily at Garamond's stained travesty of a Starflight uniform.

'State your business,' he said, at the same time making a signal to the other two guards who were seated inside.

'I'm Captain Garamond of the Stellar Exploration Arm. Open the gate immediately.'

'I don't know if I can do that, Captain.'

"You've heard of me, haven't you? You know who I am?'

'I know who you are, Captain, but that doesn't mean I should let you in. Have you an authorization?'

'Authorization?' Garamond considered putting on a display of righteous indignation, but decided it would not work coming from a man who looked like a hobo. He smiled and pointed at the dust-devil which was now within a kilometre of the northern gate. 'There's my authorization. President Lindstrom is in that car, coming here specially to meet me.'

'How do I know that's true?'

'You'll know when she finds out you wouldn't let me through. I think I'll go back to my car and watch what happens.' Garamond turned away.

'Just a minute.' The guard gave Garamond a perplexed look. 'You can come in, but that other guy stays where he is.'

Garamond shrugged and walked straight at the gate. It rolled out of his way just in time, then he was inside the perimeter and heading for the Octagon's west entrance door, not more than a hundred paces away. A second before it was lost to view behind the flank of the building, he glimpsed the other car arriving at the north gate. It was black and silver, and he was able to see a pale feminine figure in the shaded interior. The certainty of being too late made his heart lapse into an unsteady, lumping rhythm. He was breaking into a run, regardless of what the watchful patrolmen might think, when his attention was caught by a flicker of movement as a window opened in the transparent wall of the uppermost floor. Again he picked out a womanly figure, but this time it was that of his wife. And she was looking down at him.

He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. 'Aileen! Can you hear me?'

'Vance!' Her voice was faint and tremulous, almost lost in the updraft at the sheer wall.

'Pick up Christopher and bring him down to this door as fast as you can.' He indicated the nearby entrance. 'Did you get that?'

'Yes – I'm coming down.'

Aileen vanished from the window. Garamond went to the door, held it open and saw a short deserted corridor with four openings on each side. He debated trying to find stairs or elevator shaft, then decided that if he tried to meet Aileen part way he might miss her. Elizabeth was bound to be in the building by this time and on her way up to the private suite. Aileen and Christopher should be on their way down – but supposing there was only one central stairwell and they met Elizabeth head on? Garamond entered a chill dimension of time in which entire galaxies were created and destroyed between each thunderous beat of his heart. He tried to think constructively, but all that was left to him was the ability to be afraid, to feel pain and terror and…

One of the corridor doors burst open. He caught a flash of brown skin and multi-coloured silks, then Aileen was in his arms. We've made it, Garamond exulted. We're all going to live.

'Is it really you?' Aileen's face was cool and tear-wet against his own. 'Is it really you, Vance?'

'Of course, darling. There's no time to talk now. We've got to get…' Garamond's voice was stilled as he made the discovery. 'Where's Christopher?'

Aileen looked at him blankly. 'He's upstairs in his bed. He was asleep…'

'But I told you to bring him!'

'Did you? I can't think …' Aileen's eyes widened. 'What's wrong?'

'She's gone up there to get Chris. I told you to . …' Voices sounded behind him and Garamond's hunting eyes saw that two guards had followed him almost to the entrance. They had stopped and were looking upwards at the building. Holding Aileen by the wrist, Garamond ran to them and turned. High up within the transparent wall, where Aileen had been a minute earlier, Elizabeth Lindstrom was standing, pearly abdomen pressed against the clear plastic. She stared downwards, screened by reflected clouds, and raised one arm in languorous triumph.

Garamond rounded on the nearest guard and, with a single convulsive movement, snatched the rifle from his shoulder and sent him sprawling. He thumbed the safety catch off, selected maximum power and raised the weapon, just in time to see Elizabeth step backwards away from the wall, into shelter. Garamond's eyes triangulated on his wife's ashen face.

'Is Christopher's room on this side of the building?'

'Yes. I…'

'Where is it? Show me the exact place?'

Aileen pointed at a wall section two to the left of where Elizabeth had been standing. The fallen guard got to his feet and came forward with outstretched hands, while his companion stood by uncertainly. Garamond pointed at the power setting on the rifle, showing it to be at the lethal maximum. The guard backed off shaking his head. Garamond raised the weapon again, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The needle-fine laser ray pierced the transparent plastic and, as he swung the rifle, took out an irregular smoking area which tumbled flashing to the ground. A second later, as Garamond had prayed it would, a small pyjama-clad figure appeared at the opening. Christopher Garamond rubbed his eyes, peering sleepily into space. Garamond dropped the rifle and ran forward, waving his arms.

'Jump, Christopher, jump!' The sound of his hoarse, frightened voice almost obliterated the thought: He won't do it; nobody would do it. 'Come on, son – I'll catch you.'

Christopher drew back his shoulders. A pale shape appeared behind him, grasping. Christopher jumped cleanly through the opening, into sunlit air.

As had happened once before, on a quiet terrace on Earth, Garamond saw the childish figure falling and turning, falling and turning, faster and faster. As had happened once before, he found himself running in a slow-motion nightmare, wading, struggling through molasses-thick tides of air. He sobbed his despair as he lunged forward.

Something solid and incredibly weighty hit him on the upper chest, tried to smash his arms from their sockets. He went down into dusty grass rolling with the priceless burden locked against his body. From a corner of his eye he saw a flash of laser fire stab downwards and expire harmlessly. Garamond stood up, treasuring the feel of the boy's arms locked around his neck.

'All right, son?' he whispered. 'All right?'

Christopher nodded and pressed his face into Garamond's shoulder, clinging like a baby. Garamond estimated he was beyond the effective range of Elizabeth's ring weapons and ran towards the gate without looking back at the Lindstrom Centre. Aileen, who had been standing with her hands over her mouth, ran with him until they had reached the perimeter. The guards, frozen within their kiosk, watched them with uncomprehending eyes. Colbert Mason was standing beside his car holding up a scene recorder. He glanced at a dial on the side of the machine.

'That took two minutes all but fifteen seconds,' he said admiringly, then kissed the recorder ecstatically. 'And it was all good stuff.'

"The best is yet to come,' Garamond assured him, as they crowded into the car.

Garamond, made sensitive to the nature of the benevolent trap, never again went far into the interior of Orbitsville.

Not even when Elizabeth Lindstrom had been deposed and removed from all contact with society; not even when the Starflight enterprise had made way for communal transport schemes as natural and all-embracing as the yearly migration of birds to warmer climes; not even when geodesic networks of commerce were stretched across the outer surface of Orbitsville.

He chose to live with his family on the edges of space, from which viewpoint he could best observe, and also forget, that time was drawing to a close for the rest of humanity.

Time is a measurement of change, evolution is a product of competition – concepts which were without meaning or relevance in the context of the Big O. Absolved of the need to fight or flee, to feel hunger or fear, to build or destroy, to hope or to dream, humanity had to cease being human – even though metamorphosis could not take place within a single season.

During Garamond's lifetime there was a last flare-up of that special kind of organized activity which, had Man not been drawn like a wasp into the honeypot, might have enabled his descendants to straddle the universe. There was a magical period when, centred on a thousand star-pools, a thousand new nations were born. All of them felt free to develop and flower in their own separate ways, but all were destined to become as one under the influence of Orbitsville's changeless savannahs.

In time even the flickerwing ships ceased to ply the trade lanes between the entrance portals, because there can be no reward for the traveller when departure point cannot be distinguished from destination.

The quietness of the last long Sunday fell over an entire region of space.

Orbitsville had achieved its purpose.

ORBITSVILLE
DEPARTURE
by
BOB SHAW

LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
1983

Chapter 1

They had decided to spend the few hours that remained to them walking in Garamond Park.

Dallen had been there several times before, but on this occasion his senses were heightened by a blend of excitement and apprehension. The sunlight was almost painful and colours seemed artificially intense. Beyond screens of trees the coppery roofs of the city shone with a spiky brilliance, and the nearby shrubs and flowers—gaudy as tropical plumage—seemed to burn in the sun's vertical rays. Lime-green lawns sloped down to the only feature of the scene which gave relief to the eye—a circular black lake roughly a kilometre across. Its nearer edge was obscured in part by low mounds of masonry and metal which were all that remained of an ancient fortification. Small groups of sightseers, their hats shifting ellipses of colour, sat among the ruined walls or wandered on the lake's perimeter path.

"Let's go down there and have a look," Dallen said to his wife, impulsively taking her arm.

Cona Dallen held back. "What's wrong? Can't you wait?"

"We're not going to start all that again, are we?" Dallen released her arm. "I thought we had agreed."

"It's all right for you to…" Cona paused, eyeing him sombrely, then in an abrupt change of mood she smiled and walked down the slope with him, slipping one arm around his waist. She was almost as tall as Dallen and they moved in easy unison. The feel of her body synchronising with his made him think of their prolonged session of love-making that morning. It occurred to him at once that she was deliberately working on him, reminding him of what he was giving up, and he felt a stirring of the resentment and frustration which had periodically marred their relationship for months. He repressed the emotions, making a resolution to get all he could from the hours they had left.

They reached the path, crossed it together and leaned on the safety rail which skirted the dark rim. Dallen, shading his eyes, stared down into the blackness and a moment later he was able to see the stars.

The surrounding brightness affected his vision to the extent that he could pick out only the principal star groupings, but he was immediately inspired with a primeval awe. He had lived all his life on the inner surface of the Orbitsville shell and therefore his only direct looks at the rest of the galaxy had come during his rare visits to this aperture. When I get to Earth, he told himself, marvelling, I'll be able to drink my fill of stars every night…

"I don't like this," Cona said. "I feel I'm going to fall through."

Dallen shook his head. "No danger. The diaphragm field is strong enough to take anybody's weight."

"Meaning?" She gave him a playful shunt with her hips. "Are you suggesting I'm too heavy?"

"Never!" Dallen gave his wife a warm glance, appreciating the good humour with which she faced her weight problems. She was fair-haired and had the kind of neat, absolutely regular features which are often associated with obesity. By careful dieting she had usually kept her weight within a few kilos of the ideal, but since the birth of their son three months earlier her straggle had been more difficult.

The thought of Mikel and of leaving him disturbed Dallen's moment of rapport. It had taken him the best part of a year to secure the transfer to Earth, with its consequent promotion to Grade IV officer in the Metagov civil service. Cona had been aware of his plans throughout her pregnancy, but not until after the birth had she revealed her determination to remain behind on Orbitsville. Her overt reason for not accompanying him had been that Mikel was too young for the journey and the drastic change of climate, but Dallen suspected otherwise and his pride was hurt. He knew she was reluctant to leave her ailing father, and also that—as a professional historian—she was deeply committed to her current book on Orbitsville's Judean settlements. The former had allowed no scope for recrimination, but the latter had been the source of many arguments which had been none the less corrosive for being disguised as rational discussion or banter. Being Jewish is like a religion with some people…

Something huge moved in the black depths below Dallen, startling him and causing Cona to jump backwards from the rail. After a second he identified it as an interportal freighter slipping through space only fifty metres or so beneath his feet, like a silent leviathan swimming for the opposite shore of a black lake. His gaze followed the ship until it was lost in the mirages which overlay the more distant parts of the diaphragm field. At the far side of the kilometre-wide aperture was the space terminal where he would soon embark for Earth. Its passenger buildings and warehouses were a dominant feature of the scene, even though the principal installations—-the giant docking cradles for starships—projected downwards into the void and were not readily visible.

"This place bothers me," Cona said. "Everything's more natural in Bangor."

Dallen knew she was referring to the fact that their home town of Bangor, 16,000 kilometres into Orbitsville's interior, was situated in Earth-like hilly terrain. Its official altitude was close to a thousand metres, which meant that amount of sedimentary rock had accumulated there in the Orbitsville shell, but Dallen understood that the geological structure counted for little. Without the enclosing skin of ylem, the enigmatic material of which the vast sphere was formed, the inner layer of rock, soil and vegetation would quickly succumb to instabilities and fly apart. It was an uneasy thought, but one which disturbed only visitors and newly arrived settlers. Anybody who had been born on Orbitsville had total faith in its permanence, knew it to be more durable than mere planets.

"We don't have to stay here," Dallen said. "We could try the rose gardens."

"Not yet." Cona fingered the jewel-like recorder which was clipped to her saffron blouse. "I'd like to get some pictures of the Garamond monument. I might want to include one in the book."

You're supposed to be seeing me off—not working, Dallen objected inwardly, wondering if she had brought in the mention of the book to trigger precisely that reaction. Among the things which had attracted him to Cona in the first place was her independence, and he could see that he had no right to try changing the rules of their relationship. It was good that she was self-willed and self-reliant, but—the thought refused to be dismissed—how much better everything would have been had they been going to Earth together, sharing all the new experiences the journey had to offer.

There was, of course, an alternative to his present course, the alternative repeatedly put forward by Cona. All he had to do was delay his transfer by a couple of years, by which time Mikel would be bigger and stronger. Cona would have finished her book by then and would be mentally primed and prepared to enter an exciting new phase of her life.

Dallen was surprised by a sudden cool tingling on his spine. A radical idea was farming in his mind, thrilling him with its total unexpectedness. There was, he had just realised, still enough time in which to change his plans! He could get out of going to Earth merely by not showing up when the flight was called.

Bureaucratic though Metagov departments were, they all recognised and accepted one fact of human nature—that some people simply could not face the psychological rigours of interstellar travel. Backing down at the last minute and running away so commonplace that there was a slang term for it—the funk bunk—and no passenger's baggage was ever loaded until after he or she had gone aboard.

There was no shame in it, Dallen told himself. No shame in being flexible, in adapting to circumstances the way other people did. He had the opportunity to make a grand, romantic gesture of unselfishness, and there was no need to reveal to anybody, least of all to his wife, that it was actually a supremely selfish act in that it would enable him to hold on to what he cherished.

"Monument. Photograph." Cona wiggled her fingers close to his eyes. "Remember?"

"I'm with you," Dallen said bemusedly, trying to reassemble his internal model of the universe with different building blocks. He walked with Cona along the edge of the aperture to where the path widened into a small semi-circular plaza. Standing at its focus, on the very rim of space, was an heroic bronze of a man wearing a space suit of a design that had been in service two centuries earlier. He had taken off his helmet and was holding it in one hand while, with the other hand shading his eyes, he scanned the horizon. The statue was deservedly famous because its creator had captured a certain expression on the spaceman's face. It was a look of awe combined with peace and fulfilment which struck a responsive chord with all who had had the experience of climbing through an Orbitsville portal from the sterile blackness of space and receiving their first glimpse of the grassy infinites within.

A plaque at the foot of the statue said, simply: VANCE GARAMOND, EXPLORER.

Cona, who had never seen the monument before, said, "I must have a picture." She left Dallen's side and moved away among the knots of sightseers who were standing in the multi-lingual information beams being projected from the statue's base. Dallen, still lost in his own thoughts, advanced until a wash of coloured light flooding into his eyes told him that one of the roving beams had centred itself on his face. There was a barely perceptible delay while the projector studied his optical response to subliminal signals and correctedly deduced that his first language was English, then the presentation began.

Most of his field of view was suddenly occupied by images focused directly on to his retinas. They were of a triple-hulled starship, as seen from space, manoeuvring closer to a circular aperture in the Orbitsville shell. A voice which was neither male nor female spoke to Dallen.

It was almost two centuries ago—in the year 2096—that the first spaceship from Earth reached Optima Thule. That vessel was the Bissendorf, part of a large fleet of exploratory ships owned and operated by Starflight Incorporated, the historic company which at that time bad a monopoly of space travel. The Bissendorf was under the command of Captain Vance Garamond.

You are now standing at the exact place where Captain Garamond, after forcing his way through the diaphragm field which retains our atmosphere, first set foot on the soil of Optima Thule…

The images were now a reconstruction of the first landing, showing Garamond and some of his crew on the virgin plain which was currently occupied by the sprawling expanse of Beachhead City. Relevant facts were murmured in Dallen's ears only to glance off the barriers of his preoccupation. What was to prevent him from actually doing it? What would it matter to the universe at large if he did not make the flight to Earth? There would be some fierce ribbing from the other pilot officers in the Boundaries Commission if he returned to his old job, but where were his personal priorities? What was the opinion of outsiders compared to the feelings and needs of his own wife? And there was three-month old Mikel…

The ruined fortifications visible to your right are among the few remaining traces of the Primer civilisation which flourished on Optima Thule some twenty thousand years ago. Although we know very little about the Primers, we can be sure they were a very energetic and ambitious race. Having discovered Optima Thule, they attempted to control the whole sphere—regardless of the fact that it has a usable land area equivalent to five billion Earths. To this end, they performed the incredible engineering feat of sealing with armour plate all but one of Optima Thule's 548 portals.

Opinions differ about whether they were vanquished by subsequent arrivals, or whether they were simply absorbed by the sheer vastness of the territories they bad attempted to claim. However, one of the first actions of the Optima Thule Metagovernment was to order the unsealing of all the portals, thereby giving every nation on Earth unlimited and free access to…

Cartoon animations floated on the surface of Dallen's vision. Miniature ships were firing miniature radiation weapons, progressively clearing Orbitsville's triple band of portals, allowing the enclosed sun to spill more and more of its beckoning rays into the surrounding blackness of space.

The migrations from Earth began immediately, and continued at a high level of activity for a century and a half. In the beginning the journey took four months, but there came many rapid improvements in spaceship design which eventually cut transit time to a matter of days. At the height of the migrations more than ten million people a year were arriving at the equatorial portals, a transport undertaking of such magnitude that…

Annoyed by the intrusive voice and images, Dallen turned away sharply and broke the beam contact. He retreated to the curving edge of the plaza and sat down on a bench to watch Cona taking her holographic pictures of the monument. Again it seemed to him that her interest in the statue and its historic associations was a little too evident, that she was putting on a show for his benefit. The message was that she would be fully occupied in getting on with her own life while they were apart, but did he have to interpret that as defiance? Was it not possible, knowing Cona, that she was only trying to make things easier for him by not clinging on?

I'd be crazy to cut myself off from this, he thought, poised on the edge of a decision. He stood up and waved as Cona lowered her recorder and turned to look for him. She waved back and zigzagged towards him through the clusters of wide-brimmed hats which were worn almost universally on Orbitsville as protection from the sun's vertical rays. He smiled, trying to visualise how she was going to react to his momentous news. He had the choice of breaking it to her suddenly, going for maximum dramatic effect, or of a more oblique approach in which, perhaps, he would begin by suggesting that they go out of the hotel that night for a special celebration dinner.

Cona had just cleared the groups of sightseers when two boys of about ten ran up to her. She halted and, after a short exchange of words, opened her purse and gave them some money. The boys ran off immediately, laughing and pushing at each other as they went.

"Young monkeys," Cona said on reaching Dallen. "They said they needed carfare home, but you could see they were heading straight for the soda machines."

An inner voice pleaded with Dallen to ignore the incident, but he was unable to control his reaction. "So why did you give them the money?"

"They were just a couple of kids."

"That's precisely the point. They were just a couple of kids and you taught them it pays to ask strangers for hand-outs."

"For God's sake, Garry, try to relax." Cona's voice was lightly scornful. "It was only fifty cents."

"The amount doesn't come into it." Dallen stared hard at his wife, furious with her for the way she was casually destroying what had promised to be the most perfect moment of their lives. "Do you really think I give a damn whether it was fifty cents or fifty monits? Do you?"

"I didn't realise you were so hot on child welfare." Cona, standing within the vertical column of shade from her hat, might have retreated into a separate world.

"And what does that mean?" he asked, knowing exactly what it meant and challenging her to use Mikel as a weapon against him. They were standing on the edge of a precipice and the ground was breaking away beneath their feet, but the big drop might still be avoided if only she held back from using Mikel.

"This touching concern for strange kids," Cona said. "It seems slightly out of place in a man who is about to jaunt off to Earth and leave his own son."

"I…" I'm not going, Dallen prompted himself. Say it right now—I'm not going to Earth.- He strove to force the crucial words into being, but all human warmth had fled his soul. He turned away from his wife, sick with disappointment, locked in combat with the chill, haughty, inflexible side of his own nature, and knowing in advance that it was a battle he could never win.

Three hours later Dallen was on the observation gallery of the passenger ship Runcorn as it detached from the docking cradle and climbed away from the humbling and inconceivable vastness of the Orbitsville shell.

The ship was moving very slowly in the early stages of the flight, its magnetic scoop fields unable to gather much reaction mass in a region of space that had been well scoured by other vessels. As a consequence, the one-kilometre aperture around which Beachhead City was built remained visible for some thirty minutes, only gradually narrowing to become a bright ellipse and then a line of light which shortened and finally vanished. But even when the Runcorn was several thousand kilometres into space the inexperienced traveller could have been forgiven for thinking the ship had come to rest only a short distance "above" the shell. At that range Orbitsville was still only half of the visible universe, a seemingly flat surface which occupied a full 180° of the field of vision, the closest approximation in reality to the imagined infinite plane of the geometer.

Also, it was black.

Except in the vicinity of a portal, there was nothing to see when one looked in the direction of Orbitsville, There were no errant chinks of light, no reflections. As far as the evidence of the eye was concerned the familiar cosmos, which was so richly spangled with stars and galaxies and braids of glowing gas, had been sliced in half. There was a hemisphere of sparkling illumination and a hemisphere of darkness—and the latter was the stupendous, invisibly brooding presence that was Orbitsville. And even at a range of a billion kilometres, a distance which light itself took almost an hour to traverse, the sphere was awesome. It registered as a monstrous black hole which had eaten out the centre of the sky.

What, Dallen wondered, must the crew of the Bissendorf have thought when they were making that first approach all that time ago? What was going through their minds as they saw the edges of the dark circle balloon steadily outwards to occlude half the cosmos?

He could imagine those first explorers inclining to the idea that they had encountered a Dyson's Sphere. The 20th Century concept was that, in order to meet ail its land and energy requirements, a highly advanced civilisation would eventually need to englobe its parent sun and spread across the inside of the sphere which had been created. A Dyson's Sphere, however, would have been a patchy and inconsistent construct, laboriously cobbled together over many millennia from dismantled planets, asteroids and cosmic debris. And it would have been leaking various kinds of radiation which would have given abundant clues about its true nature.

Orbitsville, in stark contrast, would have remained enigmatic. Its shell of ylem was opaque to everything except gravitation, and therefore the wanderers of the Bissendorf would have known only that they were approaching a sun which had somehow been enclosed within a vast hollow sphere. Their long-range sensors would have told them that the surface of the globe was seamless and as smooth as finely machined steel, but no more information would have been forthcoming.

Even now, two centuries later, man's understanding of the sphere's origins was sharply limited, Dallen reminded himself. It was a study which had yielded little in the way of concrete fact, much in the way of speculation—a field which offered less to pragmatic researchers than to poets and mystics…

How does one account for a seamless globe of ultra-material with a circumference of a billion kilometres? There can be only one source for such an inconceivable quantity of shell material, and that is in the sun itself. Matter is energy, and energy is matter. Every active star hurls the equivalent of millions of tonnes a day of its own substance into space in the form of light and other radiations. But in the case of the Orbitsville sun—once known as Pengelly's Star—the Maker had set up a boundary, turning that energy back on itself, manipulating and modifying it, translating it into matter. With precise control over the most elemental forces of the universe, the maker created an impervious shell of exactly the sort of material He wanted—harder than diamond, immutable, eternal. When the sphere was complete, grown to the required thickness, He again dipped His hands into the font of energy and wrought fresh miracles, coating the interior of the sphere with soil and water and air. Organic acids, even complete cells and seeds, had been constructed in the same way, because at the ultimate level of reality there is no difference between a blade of grass and me of steel…

"Quite a spectacle, isn't it?" The speaker was a young woman who, unnoticed by Dallen had positioned herself beside him at the curving rail of the observation gallery. "It seems to pull your eyes."

"I know what you mean," he said, glancing down at her. The illumination was subdued, most of it from the extravagant blazing of star clouds, but he could see that she had Oriental features and was attractive in a forthright physical manner. He would have guessed she was an athlete or in some way connected with the performing arts.

"This is my first trip to Earth," she said. "How about you?"

"The same." Dallen was intrigued to find that, for one unsettling instant, he had been tempted to pose as a veteran space traveller. "This is all new to me."

"I noticed you coming on board."

Dallen weighed all the connotations of the remark, including her awareness of the fact that he was travelling alone. "You're very observant."

"Not really." The woman locked her gaze with his. "I only see what I like."

"In that case," Dallen said gently, "you're a very lucky person."

He turned away and left the gallery, easily putting the woman out of his thoughts. He was still angry with Cona, still feeling betrayed over their not making the trip as a family, but rebounding to another woman would have been a cheap and ordinary response, the sort of thing that many men would have done, but not Garry Dallen. His best plan, he decided, would be to make maximum use of the ship's gymnasium facilities, burn off his frustrations in sheer physical effort.

All the other passengers appeared to be tourists—couples, family units, clubs, study groups taking advantage of the heavy Metagov subsidy to visit the birthplace of their culture—and Dallen felt himself to be a conspicuously solitary figure as he wound his way through them to fetch his training clothes. The gymnasium was empty when he got there and he went to work immediately, pitting his strength against the resistance frames, repeating the same exercise hundreds of times, aiming for a state of mental and bodily exhaustion which would guarantee his night's sleep.

His scheme was successful to the extent that he fell asleep within minutes of going to bed, but he awoke only two hours later with the depressing knowledge that it was going to be a long, uphill struggle to morning. He tried to pass the time by visualising his new job in Madison City, with all its opportunities for holiday travel to hundreds of fabulous old cities and scenic splendours so conveniently crowded on one tiny planet. But his brain refused to cooperate. No bright visions were forthcoming. As he drowsed through the small hours, in that uneasy margin between wakefulness and sleep where strange terrors prowl, Earth seemed an alien and inimical place.

And the doors of the future remained obstinately closed, denying him any hint of what was to come.

Chapter 2

Gerald Mathieu opened a drawer in his desk and, in spite of a drag-induced sense of tightness, he frowned as he looked down at the object within.

The gun was of a type which had once been known as a Luddite Special, and had been custom-designed for a single purpose—that of killing computers. It was also one of the most illegal devices that a citizen could own. Even with Mathieu's extensive connections it had taken him nearly a month to obtain the gun and to make sure that no other person in the whole continent knew it was in his hands.

Now the time had come to use it and he was highly apprehensive.

Merely being caught with the device in his possession would bring a mandatory prison sentence of ten years; and if it were established that he had actually used it he could expect to be removed from society for the rest of his fife. The severity of the punishment was intended to protect people rather than property, because the weapon—in a consequence its inventors never foresaw—had a devastating effect on anyone caught in its beam. In some ways worse than straigthforward murder, had been one judicial comment, and in many ways a greater threat to social order.

"How in hell did I get into this situation?" Mathieu said to his empty office, then dismissed the question, trying to push irrelevancies aside as he picked up the gun and released the safety catch behind the trigger. The whole assemblage was solid and heavy in his hand, evidence of close-packed circuitry within, and a certain angularity and lack of cosmetic finish showed it to be the product of an underground workshop.

Aware that he was in danger of hesitating too long, Mathieu slipped the gun into the side pocket of his loose-fitting jacket and turned to check his appearance in a wall-mounted mirror. He had reached the rank of deputy mayor at the exceptionally early age of thirty-two, and he took a secret pleasure in seeming even younger by virtue of his fair-skinned athleticism. He also had a reputation for the casual perfection of his dress, and it was important that nothing about him should look out of place during the next few minutes. At this time of the morning his chances of encountering others on his way to Sublevel Three were slight, but the risk was always there and if a meeting occurred he wanted it to be unmemorable, something which would quickly be lost in City Hall's humdrum routine.

Satisfied that he had made himself ready, Mathieu went into the corridor and walked quickly towards the emergency stair on the building's north side. The transparent wall ahead of him provided panoramic views of the city of Madison. Its suburbs shone placidly in the distance, colours muted and outlines blurred in the humid air streams swirling inland from the Gulf. Mathieu, with a final glance back along the empty corridor, opened the door to the stairwell and went downwards. He had chosen to wear soft-soled shoes and his progress was both swift and silent, like the effortless sinking spiral of a gull.

Be careful, he thought, quelling a sudden exhilaration. He had omitted his pre-breakfast shot of felicitin, knowing he would need a clear head for the morning's desperate venture, but the drug was bound to be lingering in his system, subtly persuading him that he was invincible. And a fall at this stage could turn the threat of disaster into hard actuality.

The discovery some weeks earlier that Sublevel Three housed an independent Department of Supply computer had, in spite of the chemical shields around his mind, numbed Mathieu with dread. It had been installed decades ago at the instigation of some forgotten Metagovernment official, back in the days when Orbitsville was more actively concerned with the affairs of Earth, and since then had—unknown to Mathieu—been monitoring the distribution of certain categories of imports.

The computer's specification had apparently been drawn up by a bureaucratic supersnoop with a tendency to paranoia. It had an internal power supply which was good for at least a century, and it obtained its entire data input by direct sensing of product identity tags within a radius of fifty kilometres. The single feature of the system which had operated in Mathieu's favour was that the computer did not interact with Madison City's general information network. It sat in the building's deserted lower levels, like a spider interpreting every vibration of its web, acquiring and storing detailed knowledge of the movement of Metagov supplies throughout the region. The information was jealously guarded, locked inside an armoured data bank—but it would be yielded on receipt of the correct command.

And even a cursory glance at the print-out would show that Mathieu had privately disposed of public property worth some half-a-million monits. The consequences of such a revelation were something that Mathieu could not bear to think about. He had resolved to destroy the evidence, regardless of the additional risk.

On reaching Sublevel Three he turned right and went through a ballroom-sized area which had once been used as a computer centre and now was a maze of movable partitions and discarded crates. He found the door he was seeking, one he would never have noticed under normal circumstances, and went through it into a short corridor which had three more doors on each side. The most distant bore the initials N.R.R.D. in stencilled lettering, a combination which meant nothing to Mathieu, and again he wondered how Solly Hume had chanced upon the troublesome computer in the first place. A junior architect in the City Surveyor's office, Hume was a self-styled "electronic archaeologist" in his spare time and was currently trying to have the machine declared obsolete and redundant so that he could buy it on behalf of some like-minded enthusiasts. It had been pure coincidence that Ezzati, the salvage officer, had mentioned the subject to Mathieu during a meeting, thus alerting him to the imminence of disaster.

Mathieu used his master key to open the door and quietly stepped into the fusty little room. The ceiling globe pinged faintly as it came on, throwing an arctic light over a plain metal table which supported the Department of Supply computer. It looked more like a strongbox than a complex electronic monitor, with only a place engraved with chains of serial numbers to indicate its true nature. In a volume not much greater than that of a shoebox were sensors which could track the incredibly faint signals emitted by product identity tags, plus a computer which converted the signal variations into geographic locations and stored them in its memory. Millions of freight movements had been recorded, going back to before Mathieu's birth, but he was solely concerned with those of the last three years—the evidence of his grand larceny.

He stared at the box for a moment with resentment and grudging respect, and then—feeling oddly guilty—drew the Luddite Special out of his pocket.

He aimed its bell-shaped muzzle at the machine and squeezed the trigger.

Cona Dallen switched off her voice recorder, forced to acknowledge the fact that she was too hot and uncomfortable to do any serious work. She had chosen a seat beneath one of the mature dogwood trees in the City Hall grounds, but the shade meant little in the pervasive humid warmth. It was almost four months since she and Mikel had arrived from Orbitsville, and apparently she was no nearer to adapting to the climate of the area which had once been known as Georgia.

And being seven or eight kilos overweight doesn't help, she reminded herself, resolving to have nothing but green salad for the rest of the day. A glance at her watch showed there was more than an hour until the luncheon appointment with Garry. It seemed a pity not to do as planned and outline the next chapter of her book, but on top of the unsuitable working conditions she had a problem in that her subject was becoming increasingly remote.

With its working title of The Second Diaspora, the book should have been a genuine personal statement about the history of Judaism on Orbitsville, but—somewhat to her surprise—the work had gone slowly and badly after Garry's transfer to Earth. That fact had contributed to her agreeing to join him earlier than she had planned. Also, she had been touched when, trying to conceal his nervousness over venturing into academic realms, he had put forward the idea that distance would improve historical perspective. The prospect of ending a year of separation had helped persuade her he was right, that what she really needed was an overview, but now the two-century adventure that had been the founding of New Israel seemed oddly perfunctory, oddly passionless, when observed from a distance of hundreds of light years.

Was her new perspective valid? Was the fate of a single nation a truly insignificant fleck in the vast mosaic of history, or—as had been the case with other writers—had the very act of voyaging from one star to another leached some vital essence from her mind?

It was a mistake to come to Garry, she thought, and immediately regretted having allowed the thought to form. After four years of one-to-one marriage, it seemed that her relationship with Garry might turn out to be the durable armature around which she ought to build the rest of her life.

"Mum!" Mikel picked up the miniature toy truck he had been trundling through the grass and walked backwards until he was pressed against her knees.

"What's wrong, Mikel?"

He pointed apprehensively at a grey-and-white gull which had landed nearby. "A bee!"

"That's a bird, and it won't hurt you." Cona smiled as she clapped her hands and caused the incurious gull to retreat by several metres. To Mikel, every creature which flew was a bee and all four-legged animals were cats, and yet he had a vocabulary of at least a dozen nouns which he applied accurately to forms of mechanical transport. Cona wondered if & child could show engineering aptitude so early.

"Don't like," Mikel said. He continued to press against her and she detected the pure smell of baby perspiration in his coppery hair.

"It's too hot out here—-let's go into Daddy's office and get a cold drink." She stood up, easily gathering Mikel into her arms, and walked towards the north side entrance of the City Hall. Garry's office would be empty till noon and, provided that Mikel was prepared to amuse himself unaided, offered a better environment for working.

The silvered glass doors parted automatically as she reached them, attracting Mikel's interest, and she walked into the air-conditioned coolness of the north lobby. Cona hesitated. The correct procedure would have been to go quarter-way round the building and report at the main entrance before taking an elevator to Garry's second-floor office, but her clothes were sticking to her skin, Mikel seemed heavier with each passing second, and there were no officials around to enforce the rules. Late morning stillness pervaded the lobby.

She opened the door to the emergency stair, a route favoured by Garry when he was in a hurry to get to work, and began the brief climb to the next floor, unconsciously making her footsteps as light as possible. There was a square landing midway between floors, and Cona had barely reached it when the air was filled with the shrill bleat of an alarm signal.

Shocked, filled with irrational guilt, she clutched her son closer to her and froze against the wall, momentarily unable to decide whether to turn back or go on.

The sound of the alarm caused Mathieu to moan aloud in panic.

He backed away from the Department of Supply monitor, knowing that the hail of radiation he had sent blasting through it would have erased programmes and memory alike. For an instant he thought the machine had retained the ability to warn of sabotage, then it dawned on him that there was a still-functioning alarm system somewhere in Sublevel Three, a relic of the days when it had housed a computer centre. This was something he had not even considered, yet another proof that it was foolhardy to plan anything important while under the influence of felicitin…

Why are you standing around? The words reverberated between his temples. Run! RUN!

He dragged open the door of the room and sprinted back the way he had come, moving so fast under adrenalin boost that he could actually hear the rush of air past his ears. His sponge-soled shoes made virtually no sound as he zigzagged through the huge outer room at dangerous speed. The continuing screech of the alarm lent super-human power to his legs as he reached the foot of the emergency stair and hurled himself up it in time-dilated dream-flight, taking four and five steps at each stride, his mouth agape and down-curved, scooping air.

I'm going to be all right, he thought as the floor markers appeared and dropped behind with impossible rapidity. I'm going to get away with…

The woman with the child in her arms appeared before him as in a vision. Time had now almost ceased for Mathieu. In an altered state of consciousness he recognised Cona Dallen, understood that she could and would destroy him, that she had no option but to destroy him, and in that protracted, tortured instant the weapon he was hardly aware of carrying came up level and his finger worked the trigger. A conical storm of radiation, noiseless and invisible, engulfed the woman and child.

Even before they had time to collapse, Mathieu had passed them, silently flitting upwards like a great bat, and the incident was part of his past. He reached the fourth floor landing, opened the door and saw that the length of corridor separating him from the sanctuary of his office was empty. Concealing the gun in a fold of his jacket, he forced himself to walk at normal speed until the blue trapezoid of the office door loomed large enough to receive him, then he turned the handle and went inside.

"It's not like murder," he whispered to the uncomprehending walls, again seeing Cona Dallen and her son go down before him, knowing with a bleak certainty that the scene would play itself behind his eyes forever in an endless loop of recrimination. "It's not a bit like murder."

Chapter 3

"I hate to tell you this, Garry, but it looks like we got a bandit in 1990 Street."

The voice from the transceiver in Dallen's ear came as an urgent, intimate whisper which shook him out of a reverie. Back on Orbitsville the idea of a three-year tour of duty on Earth had seemed valid, and not only because of the benefits to his promotion schedule. Earth, the home planet, had always had a romantic fascination for him, and working there was bound to give him a better opportunity to see it than any number of package tours. But the job was far from what he had expected, his wife was refusing to prolong her visit, and he had a yearning to be home again in Garamond City, breathing the diamond-pure air which roiled in from Orbitsville's endless savannahs. He was disconcerted by and ashamed of his homesickness, regarding it as an immature emotion, but it was with him all the time, only abating when something happened to break the daily routine…

"Are you sure about this?" he said, taking the half-smoked pips from his mouth and tapping it out on his heel. He was standing beside his car on Scottish Hill, a city park which gave extensive view's of Madison's southern and western suburbs. A brief rain shower had just passed over and he had been savouring the cleansed air. The museum section, which included 1990 Street, was less than four kilometres away and with unaided vision he could see the movement of traffic at some of its intersections, vapour-fuzzed glints of morning sun.

"Pretty sure," replied Jim Mellor, his senior deputy, who was on duty in the downtown operations centre. "Two of the new detectors picked up the remnants of a signal from a Lakes Arsenal product identity tag. Somebody has done his damndest to erase it, but enhancement of what's left indicates a TL37 fuze."

"That means a small bomb."

"Small enough to fit in your pocket-—big enough to zap twenty or thirty people." Mellor quoted the figures without relish. "I don't like this, Garry. We've called in all patrols, but they're way out in the sticks and it's going to be twenty minutes before anybody shows."

"Tell them to come in low and quiet, and to land at least a kilometre away from the Street—if our visitor sees any fliers he's likely to pop his cork." Dallen was getting into his car as he spoke. "Can you tell which way he's heading?"

"He was sniffed out on the corner of Ninth, and then on Eighth. My guess is he'd heading for the Exhibition Centre itself. Going for the biggest number of casualties."

"Naturally." Cursing the scant Metagov funding which forced him to monitor the region with inadequate resources, Dallen switched on the car's pulse-magnet engine and drove down the hill towards 1990 Street. Rumours that a show-piece terrorist attack was imminent had been circulating for weeks, ever since he had intercepted a group coming up from Cordele and two of its members had died in the subsequent chase. He had given little regard to the stories, and even less to the refined versions which predicted an attempt on his own life, mainly because there was no special action he could take. His field force of sixteen officers was permanently overstretched, and now it looked as though a price might have to be paid.

Speaking without moving his lips, purely for the benefit of the transceiver in his ear, Dallen said, "Are there many tourists in the museum sector?"

"Not too many," Mellor replied. "Four or five hundred, and maybe a quarter of those are in the Exhibition Centre. Do you want me to start pulling them out?"

"No! That could trigger the crazy bastard off quicker than anything. Can you get a new fix on his position?"

"Sorry. There's practically no signal left in that fuze. It must have been a freak condition that let us pick it up on Eighth and Ninth, and I don't know if it'll happen anywhere else,"

"Okay, but keep me posted—I'm going to walk up 1990 Street from the Centre and see if I can spot him."

There was a brief silence. "That's not part of your job, Garry."

"I'll give myself a reprimand later." The car's engine whined in protest as Dallen angled it down the hill in a series of high-speed swerves, cleaving occasional puddles into silver spray, using the full width of each street and jolting over sidewalk comers where necessary. His knowledge that there was little risk of colliding with another vehicle and none at all of harming pedestrians gave him licence to drive in a manner which would have been unthinkably reckless in normal surroundings. From the air, the Scottish Hill district looked like an ordinary suburb, but all its houses and stores had been empty for decades, sealed by near-invisible plastic skins which proofed their structures against decay. Most of Madison City was similarly deserted, similarly preserved, with time switches bringing on the street and house lights at dusk for the benefit of families who had long since emigrated to the Big O.

Reaching the edge of the museum district, Dallen turned the car into a cross-street and slowed down. He was less than a block away from 1990 Street itself and was entering the "living" sector of the permanent display. Solid images of cars and other vehicles—all of late 20th Century design—moved purposefully ahead of him, and seemingly real people in the costume of the period thronged the sidewalks and went in and out of stores.

The images had been closely packed to create an impression of overcrowded city life on Earth three centuries earlier, before the discovery of Orbitsville. Stationary cars formed a continuous line on each side of the street, apparently leaving no room for Dallen to park, but he knew the illusion was the least of his problems. He drove directly into a resplendent white Cadillac, unable to prevent himself flinching in the instant when the front of his own car burrowed into the convincingly real bodywork of the larger vehicle, and braked sharply. Sounds and smells of Madison circa 1990, accurately reproduced by hidden machines, enveloped him as he got out of the car and began walking north towards the next intersection.

"Garry! I think we just got another whisper near the corner of 1990 and Third." The voice in Dallen's ear now had a discernible edge of nervousness. "He's getting too near the Exhibition Centre."

"I'm on First, turning into 1990 two blocks east of him," Dallen responded. "Assuming we walk about the same speed, that means we should meet up near the corner of Second. It shouldn't be too hard to pick him out."

"Him or her."

"The masculine pronoun covers both genders—specially in this line of business." Aware that he had put too much effort into trying to sound pedantic and cool, Dallen brought his dunking into tighter focus. "Isn't the TL37 a dual-action fuze?"

"Yeah—timer and impact," Mellor confirmed. "That means if you don't immobilise him real fast he's liable…"

"I know what it means, Jim." Dallen negotiated the remaining distance to the intersection, stepping around the animated solid images as though they were real people, partly from instinct and also because there was a sprinkling of tourists in the simulated crowd. In most cases he could identify holiday-makers by the current fashions of their clothing, but some liked to dress in period for their venture into 1990 Street and it could be quite difficult to distinguish them from holomorphs.

He paused at the comer and took stock of his surroundings. A short distance to his right were the crystalline palisades of the Exhibition Centre; at successive intersections directly ahead were A. D. 2090 Street and A. D. 2190 Street, each a recreation of its own historical era; and to his left were the seething perspectives of a Madison City thoroughfare as it had looked three centuries earlier. And somewhere in that oppressive confusion of human beings and holomorphs there lurked a terrorist who was getting ready to ply his trade.

Dallen's confidence wavered as it came to him that he did not even know if his quarry was on the north or south side of the street. The images of the buses and commercial vehicles which jammed the central pavement were impenetrable to the eye, every bit as good as the real thing for providing an intruder with cover. Dallen slipped his right hand into the side pocket of his jacket and gripped the flat shape of his official sidearm. He rotated its beam control, setting the Weapon to emit a broad fan of energy. It was unlikely that he would get enough time for precise marksmanship, and rather than miss his target altogether it would be better to bring down half-a-dozen bystanders and let them denounce him while they recovered in hospital.

"I'm walking east on 1990," he subvocalised. "If I reach the corner of Second without making contact I'm going to assume the bandit is either near me or has got past me. I'll wait thirty seconds then I'll say 'off. As soon as I do that I want you to throw the switch and kill every image projector in the Street. That should take our visitor by surprise and give me a couple of seconds to pick him out."

"Okay, Garry," Mellor said, "but suppose there's more than one."

"It won't matter—I'm geared up to paralyse half the Street."

"I'm with you."

"Be glad you aren't." Dallen moved tentatively along the block, grateful that fashions in men's casual clothing had varied little over the centuries. His tan jacket, slacks and open-necked shirt made a virtually timeless ensemble which enabled him to mingle unobtrusively with tourists and holomorphs alike. He kept to the outer edge of the sidewalk, trying to scan both sides of the Street at once. His task was made a little easier by the fact that he could remember some of its permanent, though insubstantial, residents. There was the newspaper seller at the entrance to the Clarence Hotel, the amiably tubby guard at the bank, the cigar store owner who grinned his idealised grin at passers-by. Figures who paused and spoke to them, obeying their programmes, were immediately identifiable as holomorphs, as were taxi drivers, delivery men and the like.

Dallen's real problem lay with strolling window-shoppers and sightseers. A couple walking hand-in-hand with two small children were likely to be flesh-and-blood tourists, but similar family groups had been included in the Street's cast of holomorphs to establish a homely atmosphere—and there was nothing to stop bombers adopting the same camouflage. By the time he reached the midpoint in the block Dallen's palms were sweating and his heart rate had climbed until there was a continuous fluttering agitation in the centre of his chest.

He paused, striving to appear relaxed, and shielded his eyes from the sun. Business-suited men carrying leather briefcases hurried by him, a mailman with a sackful of letters, a green-shirted youngster conversing earnestly with a blonde in a pink dress, two adolescents eating cotton candy, an elderly woman laden with shopping bags…

This is hopeless, Dallen thought. And it's funny the way some people are making footprints and some aren't.

Narrowing his eyes he picked out an area, some twenty paces ahead, where rain from the recent shower had accumulated in a depression in the sidewalk. The sun had already dried the surrounding concrete, with the result that people who walked through the shallow pool were leaving footprints for some distance on each side of it.

Except for the holomorphs, of course—illusions don't get wet feet. Dallen frowned, wondering why his heartbeat had lapsed into powerful, measured anvil-blows. There was nothing surprising nor even particularly helpful about what he had noticed, and yet … and yet … Lips moving silently, Dallen turned and ran a few paces in the direction from which he had come, giving himself a second look at one batch of pedestrians. The crowd patterns had already changed, but he found the couple he wanted immediately. The man in the green shirt and the blonde woman were still engaged in what had seemed to be a serious conversation, but—Dallen saw the pair with new eyes—only the man was talking, and only the man was leaving fast-fading smears of moisture on the sidewalk.

Dallen slowed abruptly, desperate for time in which to devise tactics, but his erratic movements brought him into near-collision with three women tourists in holiday shorts. They made little sound, a barely audible gasp of surprise, but it was enough. The green-shirted man glanced back at Dallen and began to run, dragging something from his hip pocket as he went.

Dallen hurled himself into pursuit, realised at once that another second was all the time the terrorist needed, and fired his sidearm through the material of his jacket. Several animated figures were caught in the cone of energy, but they were unaffected—holomorphs—and Dallen ran clean through them as he glimpsed the bomber angling forward, rigid and toppling.

"The fuze! The voice in Dallen's head had the hysterical shrillness of a speeded-up recording. How much impact will it stand?

He overtook the falling man, clamped an arm around him and used the momentum of his charge to carry them both into the narrow entrance of an electronics store. Antique television sets in the glazed display areas on each side glimmered with images of an earlier age. A middle-aged couple who had been inspecting the television sets backed off in alarm, the woman pressing a hand to her throat.

"There's nothing to worry about," Dallen said, smiling a reassurance as he moved his right hand down the dead weight in his arms and gripped the metal cylinder which had been partially withdrawn from the bomber's pocket.

"Say, what's going…?" The paunchy man broke off, looking doubtful, as the bomber made glottal clicking noises which indicated that his powers of speech would soon return. "Is that guy sick?"

Dallen weighed the alternatives open to him. The orthodox course would be to produce identification, send the couple on their way and call for assistance. But handling the situation that way, legally and properly, would have an inevitable consequence—a near-complete victory for the terrorist infiltrator. It was almost certain that the bomb's timing device was set to explode it within minutes, which left the authorities with the choice of evacuating the Street and allowing the destruction to take place, or of risking lives in an attempt to fly the bomb to open ground. Either way, the news would go out with tachyonic speed, the message that Madison City was no longer a safe place for visitors. Dallen looked down at the face of the young man he was cradling in spurious intimacy, saw the mute loathing in his eyes, and felt the bleak uncompromising side of his own nature respond in kind. He renewed his smile for the benefit of the watching people.

"Sick?" he said. "We should all afford to be so sick—young Joe here has just swallowed about a hundred monks' worth of happydust. He's got a habit of overdoing it."

The woman's powdery face registered concern mingled with distaste. "Will he be all right?"

"Right as rain, lady—it'll all come back up again any time now." Dallen eyed the couple ingenuously. "Can you lend me something to clean him up with? A handkerchief or a tissue or something." The sounds from the bomber's throat intensified, and Dallen patted his cheek with mock affection.

"Sorry … we're late … our friends are…" The man took his wife's arm and walked her back out to the sidewalk where they promptly moved out of sight.

Relieved to find that the incident had attracted no other spectators, Dallen transferred the cylindrical bomb to the safety of his own pocket, then manhandled the inert figure of his captive to the store's inner door. It swung open as soon as he pressed his badge to the lock. He quickly dragged his burden inside, handling the large man with an ease which came from regular strength training. The interior of the store, apart from the window display area, was empty and mouldering, a long cavern hung with cobwebs. A dank toadstool-smell polluted the air. Heading for a doorway at the far end, Dallen used the special whisper which would be audible only at his headquarters.

"I've got him, Jim," he said. "We're in Cagle's television store in the one hundred block, and there was no fuss—-so play everything quiet and cool. Send a car to the rear of the premises, but tell the crew to wait outside in the alley till I call for them."

Mellor spoke quickly. "What about the bomb?"

"It's going to be defused."

"Garry, you're not going to do something dumb, are you? There's no way to neutralise a TL37."

There's one way, Dallen thought. "Radio reception is pretty bad in here, Jim. Can you pick up my…?" He made the lateral movement of his jaw which switched off the implanted transceiver, and—gouging irregular channels in the silted dust of the floor-dragged his captive into what had once been a square office. There was a flurry of movement in one corner as a grey shape disappeared into a hole in the skirting. Dallen swung the young man into a sitting position against a wall, pulled a billfold from the pocket of the green shirt and scanned its contents.

"Derek H. Beaumont," he announced. "You should have stayed at home in Cordele, young Derek."

"You … should…" Beaumont's mouth contorted with the effort of speaking. "You should … go and…"

"Don't say it," Dallen cut in. "That sort of talk is very uninspired—certainly not worth losing your front teeth over." He took his first considered look at his prisoner and was relieved to find himself reacting with an instinctive dislike which was going to make his task easier. Some of the raiders he had come up against an the past had been personable youngsters, physical models he could have chosen for his own son, but the impression he got from the man before him now was one of arrogance and stupidity. Dilute grey eyes regarded him from a pale oval face which lost rather than gained individuality from a down-curving moustache. The standard-issue Zapata moustache, Dallen thought. Or maybe they've only got one, and they pass it around.

"You better not touch me," Beaumont said.

"I know—I've had hygiene lectures." Dallen took the cylindrical bomb from his pocket, "How many people were you hoping to kill with this?"

"You're the killer around here, Dallen."

"You know me?"

"I know you. We all know you." Beaumont's words were slurred as a result of his paralysis. "And one of these days…"

"Then you'll also know this isn't a bluff—you, young Derek, are going to tell me the combination for this." Dallen flicked the six numbered rings, close to one end of the cylinder, which would have to be correctly set to allow the fuze to be withdrawn.

Beaumont managed something close to a sneer. "Why the fuck should I?"

"I should have thought that was obvious," Dallen said mildly. "You're going to be sitting on top of the bomb if it goes. How long have you got? Ten minutes? Fifteen?"

"You don't scare me, Dallen. You couldn't get away with a thing like that."

"Couldn't I?" Dallen thought for a moment about the effects of an explosion in the crowded Exhibition Centre and felt his humanity bleed away, "if you've got some dim ideas about publicity and propaganda—forget them. I hauled you way back here because a few walls and a good cushion of air are enough to contain a bomb this size. The bang will startle a lot of people, naturally, but they'll calm down when they hear it was one of the city's old gas mains. And nobody is going to hear about you, friend. This time tomorrow you'll be nothing but rat turds."

"You're a bastard, Dallen. You're a dirty…" Beaumont fell silent and the appearance of a thoughtful, introverted expression in his eyes showed that he was struggling to move, to force muscle commands across the artificially widened synaptic gaps of his nervous system. Lentils of perspiration appeared on his brow, but his limbs remained totally immobile.

"I'm every thing you say, and more." Dallen knelt and held the bomb close to Beaumont's face. "What's the combination, Derek?"

"I … I don't have it."

"In that case, I'm sorry for you." The possibility that Beaumont was speaking the truth flickered in Dallen's mind, but he refused to consider it. "I'm going to get out of here now-—in case this thing blows up sooner than we expect—but I want you to know I'll be thinking about you."

Beaumont's pallor intensified, making his face almost luminescent. "We're going to crucify you, Dallen. Not only you … your wife and kid, as well … just to let you see what it's like … I promise you it's all set up…"

"You've got a great talent for saying the wrong thing," Dallen said, keeping his voice steady in spite of the pounding tumult of his chest. "I don't want that combination any more. You can keep it—for a while."

He gently inserted the bomb at the juncture of Beaumont's thighs, making it a silver phallus, then straightened up and walked out of the room on legs that suddenly felt rubbery. It's all gone wrong, he accused himself, putting his back to the opposite side of the same partition that supported Beaumont and breathing deeply to overcome a developing sense of nausea. I should have dumped the bloody bomb and hauled Beaumont outside and cleared the area. But now it's too late. It was too late as soon as he brought in Cona and Mikel…

Taking his pipe from a side pocket, he filled it with black and yellow strands, and had put it in his mouth before realising he had no desire to smoke. All at once it seemed incredible, monstrous, that he was squandering the precious minutes of his life in such a fashion. How had he come to be trapped in tine rotting carcase of a television store with a would-be murderer and a live bomb? Why was he confined to the claustrophobia and pettiness of Earth when he and his family should be soaring free on Orbitsville?

In the two centuries which had elapsed since Vance Garamond's discovery of Orbitsville the circumstance of mankind's existence had completely changed. One of the most quoted statistics connected with the Big O was that it provided prime-quality living space equivalent to five billion Earths, but even more significant was the fact that it had enough room to accommodate every intelligent creature in the galaxy. For the first time in history there had been little or no brake on human expansion, and the migrations had begun immediately.

Earth's technology and industry had become totally absorbed in the last great challenge, that of transporting an entire planetary population across hundreds of light years to its ultimate home. It had been a venture only made feasible by two factors—the old world's declining birth rate, and the irresistibleness of Orbitsville's call. Every nation, every statelet, every political party, power group, religion, sect, church, family, individual could have the equivalent of a virgin world in which to pursue ideals and dreams. Governments had been slower to adapt to the new era than peoples, but statesmen and politicians—faced with the prospect of strutting empty stages—had eventually been persuaded that their duties lay elsewhere.

Each migratory government had, by UN agreement, retained responsibility for law and order in its historic territories, but time and distance had had their inevitable effect. Interest had declined, costs had increased, and many totalitarian states had in the end opted for the clean break solution, with compulsory migration of all subjects. Enforced migration to Orbitsville had not been possible in democratic countries, but that had not prevented governments—anxious to shake the clogging dust of the past from their feet—from using every conceivable inducement and pressure. More and more towns and cities had crumbled, ever larger areas of rural land had become overgrown, as the ordinary people had succumbed to the lure of the golden journey, the free trip to the Big O.

There had, of course, been those who refused to leave. Mostly they had been the very old, men and women who wanted to end their days on the planet of their birth, but there had also been a sprinkling of those who simply rejected the idea of pulling up stakes. And now in the year 2296, almost two hundred years after the finding of Orbitsville, the die-hards in each area were still struggling to maintain a semblance of organised community life. But their situation had become less tenable with each passing decade as facilities had broken down and money and support from Orbitsville had dwindled…

"You're not fooling me, Dallen." The voice from the other side of the partition was confident. "I know you're out there, man."

Dallen remained quiet, tightening his lips.

"I'm telling you the God's truth, man—I don't have no combination."

You shouldn't have threatened my wife and boy. Dallen glanced at his watch, suddenly remembering he had arranged to meet Cona and Mikel for lunch, an appointment he was now bound to miss regardless of how things worked out with Beaumont. He would be unable to get a message to Cona unless he resumed radio contact with Jim Mellor, which conflicted with his resolve to claim ail responsibility for his current actions, it's all gone wrong, he accused himself once more. Why doesn't the moron give in before it's too late?

There was a lengthy period of near-silence—the street sounds were murmurous and remote, part of another existence—then Beaumont spoke in less assertive tones. "What brought you here anyway, Dallen? Why didn't you stay on the Big O where you belong?"

Responding to the change in the other man's attitude, Dallen said, "It's my job."

"Hammering down on folk who's only standing up for their rights? Great job, man."

"They haven't any right to steal Metagov supplies and equipment."

"They got to steal the stuff if they can't afford to pay off Madison City officers on the quiet. Be straight with yourself, Dallen. Do you really think it's right for Metagov to keep a whole city going … a whole city lying empty except for a population of frigging optical illusions … while we got people sick and hungry on the outside?"

Dallen shook his head, even though Beaumont could not see, impatient with old arguments. "There's no need for anybody to go sick or hungry."

"I know," Beaumont said bitterly. "Let ourselves be rounded up like cattle! Let ourselves be shipped off to the Big O and turned out to pasture … Well, some of us just won't do it, Dallen. We're the Independents."

"Independents who feel entitled to be supported." Dallen was deliberately supercilious. "That's a serious contradiction in terms, young Derek."

"We don't want to be supported. We made a contribution too, but nobody … We just want … We…" Overwhelmed by incoherence, Beaumont paused and his laboured breathing was easily audible through the partition.

"And all I want is that combination," Dallen said. "Your time's running out."

He made his voice hard and certain, consciously striking out against the ambivalence he usually felt when forced to think, about Earth's recent past. Cona, as a professional historian, had the sort of mind which could cope with vast areas of complexity, confusion and conflict, whereas he yearned for a dawn-time simplicity which was never forthcoming. In the early years of the migrations, for example, nobody had planned actually to abandon the cities of the home world and let them sink into decay. There had been too big an investment in time. Mankind's very soul lingered in the masonry of the great conurbations, and hundreds of them—from York to New York, Paris to Peking—had been designated as cultural shrines, places to which Earth's children would return from time to time and reaffirm their humanity.

But the thinking had been wrong, bound by outdated parameters.

There had once been an age in which romantics could see men as natural wanderers, compelled to voyage from one stellar beacon to the next until they ran out of space or time—but there were no stars in the night skies of Orbitsville. Generations had come and gone without ever having their spirits troubled by the sight of distant suns. Orbitsville provided all the lebensraum they and their descendants would ever need; Earth was remote and increasingly irrelevant, and there were better things to do with money than the propping up of reins for forgotten cities. Madison, former administration centre for the evacuation of seven states, was one of the very few museum cities to remain viable, and even there funding and time were growing desperately short.

The thought of dwindling reserves of time prompted. Dallen to look again at his watch. "I can't risk babysitting here any longer," he called out. "See you around!"

"You can't bluff me, Dallen."

"Wouldn't dream of trying." Dallen walked towards the front of the store, resisting the temptation to tread noisily on the dusty grey timbers of the floor. The slightest hint of overacting on his part was likely to strengthen Beaumont's resolve. As he dodged the insubstantial stalactites of cobwebs the conviction that he had made a mistake grew more intense and more unmanning. He decided to wait at the outer door for two minutes before dragging his prisoner out to safety, but new doubts had begun to gnaw at his confidence. What if Beaumont genuinely did not know the fuze combination or even the precise timer setting? What sort of justification could he give to others, to himself, if the bomb exploded and sent a blizzard of glass daggers through the pedestrians in 1990 Street?

On reaching the front door he leaned against the frame, pressing his forehead into his arm, and began the familiar exercise of catechising the stranger he had become. What are you doing here? How long will it be before you—personally and deliberately—kill one of these sad, Earth-limited gawks? Why don't you pack in the sad, Earth-limited little job and take Cona and Mikel back to Orbitsville where you all belong?

The last question was one which had confronted him with increasing frequency in recent months. It had never failed to produce feelings of anger and frustration, the helplessness which comes when a mind which likes answers is faced with the unanswerable, but all at once—standing there in the mouldered silence of the store—he realised that the difficulty lay within himself and always had done. The question was childishly simple, provided he faced up to and acknowledged the fact that he had made a mistake in coming to Earth. It was so easy. He—Garry Dallen, the man who was always right—had made a stupid mistake!

Aware that he was rushing psychological processes which could not be rushed, that he was bound to suffer reactions later, he posed the crucial question again and saw that it had become redundant. There was nothing under this or any other sun to prevent his taking his family home. They could be on their way within a week. Dallen, experiencing a sense of relief and release which was almost post-orgasmic, looked down at his hands and found they were trembling.

"Let's get the hell out of here," he whispered, turning towards the rear of the store.

"For Chris'sake, Dallen, come back!" The voice from the office enclosure was virtually unrecognisable, a high-pitched whine of panic. "This thing's set for 11.20! What time is it now?"

Dallen looked at his watch and saw there were four minutes in hand. At another time he would have walked slowly and silently back to the office, turning the screw on his prisoner to show him that life was easier on the right side of the law, but that kind of thinking now seemed petty. Earth-limited, was the term he had just invented. I don't want to be Earth-limited any longer.

He ran to the rear office, shouldered open the door and looked down at Beaumont, who was still unable to move. The silver obscenity of the bomb was projecting from his crotch. Suppressing a pang of shame, Dallen retrieved the cylinder and fingered the fuze combination rings.

"You're going to be bastardin' sorry about this, you bastard," Beaumont ground out, his eyes white crescents of hatred.

"My watch might be slow," Dallen said pointedly. "Do you want out of here, or would you rather stay and…?"

"Six-seven-nine-two-seven-nine."

"That must be a prime number." Dallen began aligning the digits with the datum mark. "Get it? Fuze—primer—prime?"

"Hurry up, for…"

"There we go!" Dallen withdrew the fuze and tossed it into a corner. "Thanks for your cooperation, Derek."

He left the office, walked along a short corridor to the rear of the premises and opened a heavy door whose hinges made snapping sounds as they broke bonds of rust. An unmarked car was waiting in the alley outside, its smooth haunches scattering oily needles of sunlight, and two young officers in uniform—Tandy and Ibbetson—were standing beside it. Dallen smiled as he saw the apprehension on their faces.

"Have a bomb," he said, slapping the cylinder into Ibbetson's palm. "It's okay—it's safe—and there's a character called Derek Beaumont to go with it. You'll find him resting inside, first door on the right."

"I wish you wouldn't do things like this," Ibbetson mumbled. His voice faded as he went through the door, turning his footballer's shoulders to facilitate entry, and lumbered along the corridor.

Vic Tandy, slate-jawed and meticulously neat, moved closer to Dallen. "Would you talk with Jim Mellor? He's going crazy back there trying to reach you."

"He always does. Every time I get into a pocket of bad reception he…" Dallen broke off as he noticed Tandy's expression, oddly wooden and reserved. "Anything wrong?"

"All I heard is Jim wants you to contact him." Avoiding Dallen's gaze, Tandy tried to by-pass him and enter the building.

"Don't try that sort of thing on me," Dallen snapped, gripping the other man's upper arm. "Out with it!"

Tandy, now looking embarrassed, said, "I … I think something might have happened to your wife and boy."

Dallen stepped back from him, bemusedly shaking his head, filled with a sense that his surroundings and the blue dome of atmosphere and the universe beyond were imploding upon him.

Chapter 4

On the butt of the gun there was a stud which had to be depressed and moved from one end of a U-shaped slot to the other. It had been designed that way to ensure that the weapon, a highly expensive piece of engineering, could never be decommissioned by accident. Mathieu ran the stud along its full course, causing the myriad circuits to adopt new and permanent neutral configurations, then he stripped the gun down to four basic parts and hid them in separate drawers of his desk.

The action made him feel safer, but not much. His original plan, now revealed to have been woefully inadequate, had not allowed for a still-functioning alarm system on Sublevel Three, and he could only speculate about other possible deficiencies. The gun had been rendered invisible to any detectors the police might bring in, but there was no guarantee that an existing monitor had not already tracked its course through the building and into his office. If that were the case he would know about it very soon.

Behave normally in the meantime, he told himself, then came a question which was almost unanswerable to one in his state of mind. What do normal people do when an alarm sounds? He pondered it for a moment, like a man confronted by a problem in alien logic, and hesitantly reached towards his communications panel. The solid image of Vik Costain, personal assistant to Mayor Bryceland, appeared at the projection focus. Costain, who was close to sixty, made a profession out of knowing all there was to know about the City Hall and those who worked there.

"What's going on?" Mathieu said. "What was the racket?"

"Give me a break, will you? I'm still trying to…" Costain tilted his near-hairless head, obviously listening to an important message, and nodded decisively—a sure sign he had no idea what to do next. "Call me later, Gerald."

"Don't forget to let me know if the building's on fire," Mathieu replied, breaking the connection. He breathed deeply and regularly for a minute, satisfied that he had put on a reasonable act, gone some distance towards covering his tracks, then he closed his eyes and saw Cona Dallen and her son falling … falling and folding … their eyes already bright and incurious … idiot eyes…

Mathieu leaped to his feet and walked around the perimeter of his office, suddenly unable to dredge enough oxygen from the air. He had made the circuit a second time, faster, before realising he was trying to outrace a part of himself, the part which acknowledged that he—Gerald Mathieu—was a murderer. No amount of sidestepping or playing with definitions was going to change that fact. Continuance of personality was the sole criterion, the only one which counted, and the personalities known as Cona Dallen and Mikel Dallen no longer existed. He had blasted them away in a storm of complex radiations which had returned two human brains to the tabula rasa condition of the newborn infant, and those personalities would never exist again, no matter what therapies were employed.

Garry Dallen will kill me! Mathieu abruptly stopped walking and pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, trying to come to terms with the new thought. There was little that was fanciful or melodramatic about it. Dallen was a big, powerfully built, handsome man who worked a little too hard at appearing casual, who was always a little too quick with the joke or pleasantry designed to put those about him at their ease. Mathieu, a gifted people-watcher, had privately sized him up as inflexible and intolerant, with the capacity to be ruthless in pursuit of what he believed to be right. He had always been afraid of Dallen, even when there was nothing more than well-concealed graft on his conscience—now he had a chilling conviction that Dallen would look straight into his soul, know him for what he was, and come after him like a remorseless machine.

"No more than you deserve," he said, addressing his image in a wall mirror he had had specially installed. The man he saw looked surprisingly relaxed and confident, like a Nordic tennis champion on holiday, giving no indication of criminality or of the hunger which was growing more insistent in him by the minute. The thought of felicitin caused Mathieu to slip a hand into his jacket and touch the gold pen clipped in the inner pocket. It was a functional writing instrument, but with a small adjustment it dispensed a magical ink. A one-centimetre line drawn on the tongue was enough to put right everything that was wrong in Mathieu's life, not only for the present but working in retrospect, right back to the time he had come from Orbitsville at the age of eight.

His father, Arthur Mathieu, had been a minor Metagov official who had followed the promotion trail to Earth and had lost his way in a maze of gin bottles and ill-starred departmental shuffles. The community of government workers in Madison City was small and close-knit, and the boy Gerald—humiliated by his father's failure-—had gone through school as a solitary stroller, barely achieving grades, dreaming of the day he would return to the Big O's delicately ribbed sky and up-curving horizons. Then, when Gerald was sixteen, his father had died in a ludicrous accident involving a hedge trimmer, and suddenly the way back had been open. His mother was returning, his younger sister was returning, but Mathieu had found he was afraid of the return journey and even more terrified of Orbitsville itself. He had claimed the right to an unbroken education and by sheer force of belated effort had built a successful career in Madison, achieving a position which no reasonable person would expect him to quit merely to return to his boyhood home.

Mathieu understood his own private strategy, however. And although one part of his mind assured him his timidity was of no consequence—another part, brooding and illogical, saw it a serious character defect, evidence of a void where there should have been the cornerstone of a personality. He had tried psychological judo, presenting his weaknesses as cute foibles, I've never had the slightest trace of will power—ask anybody who knows me. There is only one way to get rid of temptation—give in immediately. You can always trust me to let you down…

Then had come felicitin, bringer of the ultimate high. Felicitin, which could have been custom-designed by a master chemist for Mathieu's personal salvation, which made the user feel not only good, but right. Felicitin, at five thousand monits and more for an amount the size of a single teardrop.

For which he had become a thief.

For which he had become a murderer.

Mathieu drew the gold pen out of his pocket, clenched both hands around it and made as if to snap it in two. He stood that way for a full minute, changing his grip on the cylinder several times, trembling like a marksman afflicted with target-shyness, then his posture relaxed as he felt himself arrive at one of his rationalisations. There was no need to try kicking the habit. Dallen would be quick to ascertain the events leading to the annihilation of his family, to leap from motive and opportunity to half-intuitive identification. Soon after that Mathieu would be going to the prison colony—if Dallen let him get that far—and in prison one did not have to struggle to escape drug dependency. The cold turkey treatment was thrown in free with the uniform and the rehab tapes.

From beyond his door there came the sound of other doors slamming, excited voices, rapid footsteps. One thing which had not changed over the centuries was the essential dullness of most administrative jobs, and on a heavy summer's morning., with the outside world shimmering on the windows like a multicoloured dream, the sense of ennui in the corridors was almost tangible. Now something out of the ordinary had happened in the building and the word was going around. This was going to be a day to remember.

Mathieu slipped his pen back into his pocket, sat down at his desk and tried to plan the next hour. He decided, having made his for-the-record enquiry, to wait where he was until someone requested his presence downstairs. Frank Bryceland, the mayor, was out of town for two days, so it was likely that Mathieu would be summoned as soon as Costain realised what had happened. As the minutes slowly filtered from future into past he felt mildly surprised at how long Costain was taking, then he began to appreciate the variance between his own informed viewpoint and those of other people in the building. An alarm had sounded without any immediately identifiable cause; a security check could be slow and tentative; and the condition of the woman and child lying on the emergency stair might take time to diagnose, especially as Luddite Specials were far from common by the end of the 23rd Century.

Prompted by impulse, Mathieu went to the window and looked down at the north side car park just as a police cruiser came slewing in from Burlington Avenue. As soon as it had stopped three men got out and ran towards the north lobby. Something gave an icy heave in Mathieu's stomach as he recognised the black-haired figure of Garry Dallen loping along with unconscious power, looking as though he could run clear through the wall of the building. Feeling cold and isolated, Mathieu returned to his desk and sat staring at his hands, waiting.

Perhaps five minutes had gone by before there was a chiming sound and Costain's head hovered before him. Errant flecks of light swarming like fireflies around the image showed the projector was losing its adjustments.

"Can you come down to the north lobby?" Costain sounded both nervous and guarded. "Right now?"

"What's the matter?"

"It looks like somebody has wiped Cona Dallen and her boy."

"Wiped them!" Mathieu conveyed puzzlement. "Do you mean…?"

"Yeah—total brain scour. Didn't you know?"

"No, I…" Mathieu paused, sensitive to the question. "How the hell would I know? I've been sitting in my…"

Costain shook his head. "It's all over the building, Gerald. You'll have to make a statement."

"I'm on my way down." Mathieu stood up as Costain's image dissolved. He went to the door, smoothing his hair and making slight adjustments to the hang of his jacket. It was important for him to look his best when going into a difficult situation, and facing up to Dallen was going to be the worst ever, the ultimate bad scene. The elevator was waiting, and with almost no lapse of time he was in the lobby, working his way through barriers of people, all of whom were facing the door of a room which had once been used by commissionaires, back in the days when Madison had been booming. Vik Costain, as though telepathically forewarned, opened the door as Mathieu reached it, quickly drew him inside and clicked the lock.

"We're all going to roast over this one," Costain said, the folds of his grey face set like rippled lava. "Frank has been griping about security for months."

"I know," Mathieu mumbled, moving further into the room to become part of its central tableau. Cona Dallen was stretched out on her back on the floor, hands making random little pawing movements in the air. Her lightweight saffron dress was in disarray, showing her conical thighs, but the display was asexual because her face was blank and serene, unmarked by identity, and her eyes were those of a baby—bright, humorous, uncomprehending. A bubbled ribbon of saliva ran from one corner of her mouth. Garry Dallen was kneeling beside her, rocking gently with his son gathered in his arms, his face hidden in the boy's hair. Mathieu said a silent farewell to joy.

Costain touched Mathieu's arm. "Who would do a thing like this?"

"I know who did it," Dallen announced in a leaden, abstracted voice. He raised his head and slowly looked around the half-dozen men in the room. Mathieu's heart juddered to a standstill as the grey, tear-lensed eyes locked with is own, but—miraculously—Dallen's gaze wandered away from him without pause. It was as if they had become strangers.

"I did this," Dallen continued.

One of the policemen in the group moved uneasily. "Garry, I don't think you should…"

Dallen silenced him with a look. "I brought my family to this place … I handled the job wrong … pushed too hard … ignored the threats…" A muscular spasm pulled his mouth downwards at the corners, producing a caricature of an urchin who had just been thrashed, and when he spoke each word was the snapping of a glass rod. "Why couldn't I have been with them? I don't deserve a brain…"

"I'm going to see what's holding the ambulance," Costain said, striding to the door.

"Good idea." Mathieu went through the doorway on the heels of the older man, anxious to leave the emotional autoclave of the room. Instead of following Costain to the lobby's outer doors he turned right along the corridor and went into a washroom. It was cool and empty, heavily perfumed with soap. In the furtive privacy of a cubicle he took the gold pen from his pocket, reset the point and drew it across his tongue, making a line twice as long as was usual for him.

I might be lucky, he thought. Perhaps I'm going to get away with it.

He closed his eyes retreating inwards, waiting for chemical absolution.

Chapter 5

The accident occurred about eighty minutes into the flight.

Jean Antony's first intimation that something serious was happening came when instrumentation panels began to go dead without any accompanying warning signals. Her Type 83 freighter was more than a century old and some of its systems were afflicted with a kind of electronic gangrene, but the fault indicator circuits were supposed to be in good shape. The fact that some had failed could be trivial or catastrophic. She knew it could involve as little as an annoying extra maintenance charge, or as much as…

Dear God! The prayer was instinctive, unconnected with religious belief. Dear God, don't let this cargo kill me.

The ship's antiquated ion thrusters were creating only a fifth of normal gravity, enabling Jean to cross the control gallery in one floating stride. She glanced at the master status indicator—an array of glowing block diagrams, most of them in the form of longitudinal sections through the hull—and saw a spreading blackness which could only mean that a Bessemon-D container had ruptured in the cargo hold. For a moment she allowed herself to feel shocked at the sheer unfairness of what had happened, a series of supposedly perfect fail-safe devices failing so dangerously, then came the realisation that she was lingering in a spacecraft which could literally be dissolving around her.

Bessemon-D was a solvent gas which had displaced nine-tenths of the capital equipment traditionally associated with metal foundries. In normal circumstances it was inimical to life, but drifting free within a spacecraft it was capable of ending Jean Antony's existence in a dozen different ways. Destruction of the pressure hull was the obvious danger, but for all she knew the first lethal wisps could already be swirling towards her through ventilation ducts, speeded on their way by plastic impellers. There was no time to waste.

"Code Zero-zero-one!" she shouted as she hurled herself towards the emergency capsule compartment. No acknowledgement came from the on-board computer. As she opened the door to the compartment most of the lights on the control panel began to flicker and a sudden queasiness in her stomach told her the ship's thrust controllers were behaving erratically. She stepped into the capsule and allowed the door to slam and seal behind her. A shuddering unlike anything she had previously encountered in twenty years of astrogation stirred the capsule into life, bringing with it the conviction that it was too late to escape whatever fate was overtaking the mother ship. The capsule's activator button sprang into ruby brilliance, splintering the claustrophobic darkness.

Jean hit the button with the heel of her right hand. There was an explosion, a wrenching jolt and a second later she was adrift in space, only fifty kilometres above the inconceivable vastness of Orbitsville.

Jean's first reflexive action was to check that the capsule's radio beacon was functioning properly. She located the pulsing green rectangle on the miniature instrument panel, touched it for reassurance, then raised her eyes to see how the doomed freighter was faring. The coffin-sized capsule had ail-round visibility, and from its viewpoint the universe was divided into two equal parts. "Above" was a hemisphere of stars, many of them individually brilliant against fainter swarms and the frozen luminous clouds of the Milky Way; "below" there appeared to be nothing.

In spite of her years of plying the two-hundred-plus equatorial portals, Jean's brain still tended to interpret the scene as though she were in a low-flying plane which was skimming the surface of a dark ocean. She scanned the region directly below the capsule, expecting to pick out the lights of the freighter at once, and was surprised and only faintly alarmed to observe unbroken night. Did it mean that every power source on the ship had failed, dousing even the astrogation lights?

That can't be, she told herself. Not so soon.

She frowned, still puzzled rather than worried, turning her head from side to side to take in larger areas of the blackness below her. Then, from a corner of her eye, she became aware of something huge occulting the star fields above her. She twisted around in the confined space and verified what the first intuitive shock had already told her—that the opaque mass was the freighter sliding ahead on its own course.

Refusing to allow herself to panic, Jean studied the larger vessel and tried to decide what had gone wrong with the escape. The answer came quickly. Astrogation and marker lights were slipping across the long silhouette at increasing speed, which meant that the disfunction of its thrust controllers had caused the ship to rotate. And instead of the capsule having been ejected upwards, to carry it into space and clear of the equatorial trade lanes, it had been fired downwards in the direction of Orbitsville. She was bound for a grazing collision with the unseen surface a mere fifty kilometres below.

Until that moment Jean's principal concern had been the loss of the Atkinson Grimshaw, the old ship—named after a favourite Victorian artist—which was on the point of annihilating both itself and most of her assets. With the skimpiness of her insurance coverage, the incident probably meant the end of the one-woman transport business she had been operating for eight years, ever since her mother had died, but now such considerations were trivial. The capsule was travelling downwards at about forty kilometres an hour, and also had a forward component of about thirty thousand—the speed at which it had parted company with the ship. These velocities, relative to the Orbitsville shell, were small compared to normal operational speeds, but they were enough to destroy the thin-walled capsule in the collision which was due in approximately seventy-five minutes.

Life or death, for her, had become a question of how long it would take the rescue services to react.

At the age of forty, Jean had retained the instinctive belief in immortality which comes from good health, good looks, an active intelligence and a satisfying life style. But now, floating in silence above the invisible vastness of the Big O's outer surface, she had to weigh up the chances of surviving the day, knowing in advance that the odds were not in her favour.

Orbitsville had three bands of circular portals—one at its equator, one in each of the northern and southern hemispheres. Those on the equator, spaced at intervals of roughly five-million kilometres, had been given the identification numbers 1 to 207, counting east from the portal which had first been penetrated by Vance Garamond and the crew of his SEA flickerwing. Thriving ports and cities had subsequently sprung up around many of the entrances during the great migrations from Earth, and at that time the equatorial trade lanes had been busy and well regulated. But those cities had been built almost from force of habit, dying manifestations of mankind's need for safe huddling places. With unlimited territory available there was no longer any need for competition, conflict or defence. The millions from Earth had been effortlessly absorbed, lured by Orbitsville's endless savannahs, and—as quickly as they were created—many cities had been abandoned, echoing the fate of their forebears on the home world.

During Jean's career the interportal space traffic had dwindled drastically, and therein lay the threat to her life. She had been flying east from 156 to another still-viable industrial centre at 183. Eighty minutes into the flight she was, as a consequence of the freighter's puny acceleration, only twenty-thousand kilometres from her starting point, and in the old days would quickly have been reached by the high-performance patrol vessels monitoring the traffic around each portal. In the last decade of the 23rd Century, however, the emergency services had been pared down to the minimum and in any case were accustomed to the leisurely type of recovery mission which would have been effective had Jean been ejected upwards. She had a conviction that nobody would even notice anything unusual about her distress signal until it was too late.

She stared down into the featureless blackness and tried to see it as an incredibly hard wall which was rushing upwards with deadly speed. The air circulating around her smelted strongly of rubber and plastics, a reminder that the capsule was new, having been installed a year earlier in compliance with safety regulations. She almost smiled at the irony involved. The old capsule had been equipped with full radio communication and a Covell propulsion unit—either of which could have been enough in her present circumstance to make the difference between living and dying.

Brave new world! Another indication that humans bad turned their backs on space travel, that the dispersal of whole cultures could be followed by pointing telescopes into the night skies of the Big O's interior, charting the firefly glows of their caravans and camps…

As the minutes went by Jean's fear increased. A normal reaction would have been to scan the band of sky close to the Orbitsville horizon in the hope of seeing marker lights drawing near, but she was unable to drag her gaze from the spurious depths below. How far away was the shell now? Could the altimeter have been as haywire as everything else on the Atkinson Grimshaw, giving an inflated reading? Would the capsule's flashing beacons produce even the faintest smudge of reflection in the instant before the collision? Mesmerised, unblinking, Jean stared into the crawling darkness, trying to penetrate screens of after-images to reach the terrible reality beyond.

She had been that way for some time, her lips drawn into a unconscious grimace, when wonder intervened.

First appearing on the extreme left, a thin line of green radiance swept across the vastness of Orbitsville, moving so quickly from east to west that it crossed her entire field of view in less than a second.

Jean gave a sharp scream, keyed up to believe that any change in the unvarying blackness ahead signalled the final impact, then as quietness and stillness returned—as life continued—it began to dawn on her that she had witnessed the unthinkable. The fleeting green meridian had been a genuine phenomenon, an objective reality.

There had been a change in the enigmatic material of the Orbitsville shell.

Facing imminent death though she was, Jean felt a near-blasphemous excitement. Spherology was the name given to the science which had been born two centuries earlier when teams had first begun to study the shell material, and it was a discipline which was characterised by total lack of success. Even when viewed through a quark microscope the material appeared continuous—an embodiment of the pre-Democritus concept of matter—and in two-hundred years of concentrated effort no researcher had been able to make the slightest scratch on it or to alter it in any way. After millions of man-hours of study, spherologists knew the material's thickness, its albedo, its index of friction, and very little more.

It was, however, a basic tenet of their calling that the shell was immutable. And Jean Antony—swinging ever closer to it in the lonely darkness of her collision course—had seen a strange and transient stirring of life, like the first pulse of an embryo heart.

The attendant awe—for one who had spent half a lifetime flying that illusory black ocean—almost transcended the fear of death.

Chapter 6

In five weeks, with some medical assistance, Cona Dallen had learned to walk and to feed herself, and had almost completed her toilet training. According to Roy Picciano, senior physician for the community, her progress had been excellent—at least as good as would have been achieved had she been in full-time care at the Madison clinic. But as the sheer physical burden of looking after an adult-sized baby had gradually eased, the mental wear and tear on Garry Dallen had increased.

At first he had been too numbed by exhaustion and delayed shock even to consider Picciano's prognostication and advice. There had, for example, been no room in his mind for the monstrous suggestion that Cona might never again be able to speak. Her brain and nerve connections and muscles were all there, intact, and he—Garry Dallen, the man who never made a mistake—knew that by sheer perseverance and the force of his own will he would induce that delicate apparatus to function properly again.

The simple mind-filling truth which seemed to elude all doctors was that their science was based on studies of generalised humanity, on what had happened to anonymous masses of commonplace people, whereas in this case the subject was a unique and special entity who was central to Dallen's unique and special existence. Ordinary rules could not apply. Not this time.

The first unmanning blow had been the discovery that it was necessary for Cona and Mikel to live separately, because she was a real threat to the boy's safety. Cona is a baby again, had been the gist of Picciano's comments. She's locked in the true psychosis of the first weeks of infancy, unable to distinguish between herself and the outside world, with a feeling range which is limited to anger, pleasure, pain and fear. All babies react with violent anger when frustrated, especially where food is concerned. Given the necessary size and strength any infant would kill the mother who withdrew the teat too soon or who thwarted any other infantile desire. Cona is big and strong, particularly in comparison to Mikel, and one moment of rage is all it would take.

Dallen never failed to be dismayed each time that sudden fury asserted itself, usually over matters of diet. Cona had always had a strong appetite, and as a thinking adult had barely managed to control her weight by avoiding sweet and starchy foods. The new Cona, even after she had learned to chew, would have been content to subsist on nothing but chocolate and ice cream, and there were clashes when he tried to persuade her otherwise. Initially she had shown her anger by rolling on the floor and screaming, a sound which daunted him both with its volume and incoherence. At a later stage, when co-ordination and spatial awareness had developed, she had once succeeded in striking him on the face. The blow had stung, but the real pain had come in the swiftness of her transition from rage to crowing happiness as he had relaxed his grip on a disputed candy bar.

The message had been clear—Cona Dallen doesn't live here anymore—and it had caused him to back away, timorously, shaking his head in denial…

When Dallen answered the door chimes he was surprised to see Roy Picciano in place of the voluntary worker he had been expecting. It was mid-morning on a Tuesday and he had been planning some necessary shopping before going to the clinic to visit Mikel.

"Betti has been delayed for a while, so I offered to fill in for her," Picciano said, his smile showing the gold fillings which had again become fashionable. He was a bushy-haired, tanned man of about fifty whose preference for lightweight sports clothes created the impression that all his professional appointments were sandwiched between rounds of golf.

"Thanks, Roy." Dallen stepped back to let the doctor come in. "I could have waited, you know."

"It's no trouble. Besides, I wanted to have a look at my patients."

Dallen noticed the use of the plural. "I'm all right."

"You look tired, Garry." Picciano appraised him candidly. "How long are you going to go on like this?"

"As long as it takes. We've been through this before, haven't we?"

"No! I have been through it—you won't even begin to think about the problem."

"It's my problem. I'm responsible for Cona being the way she is."

"That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about," Picciano said, not hiding his exasperation. "You have no responsibilities to Cona, because Cona no longer exists. Your wife is dead, Garry. Your only responsibility now is to yourself. There is always some uncertainty about the progress of erasure cases, but there's one thing I can tell you for sure—the stunted, half-personality which is going to develop in that human shell in the next room will have nothing, nothing to do with your former wife. You've got to accept that, for your own good."

"For my own good." Dallen made the words sound like a phrase from a foreign language. "How long are we going to stand around here in the hall?"

"I'll look at her now." Picciano opened the nearest door and went into the long living room, his heels clacking on the polished composition floor. In his early attempts to deal with Cona's incontinence Dallen had tried putting her in diapers, but she had disliked them intensely, and he had found their appearance grotesque and degrading. He had then settled for removing all carpets and cleaning up after her, a chore which had almost ceased to exist now that she was using the bathroom. She was lying on a blue pneumat, chin propped on her hands, engrossed in watching the swirl of colours and shapes above a nursery imager. Her legs were bent, bare feet circling aimlessly and sometimes colliding. In spite of the loose smock in which Dallen had dressed her she was noticeably plumper than she had been a month earlier.

"Look who's come to see you," Dallen said, kneeling beside Cona and putting an arm around her shoulder. She glanced up at him, eyes bright with window reflections, and returned her attention to the glowing airborne patterns. Dallen took a tissue from his pocket and tried to dab a smear of chocolate from her chin, but she whimpered in irritation and twisted away from him.

"We only got the imager yesterday," Dallen explained. "It's still a novelty."

Picciano shook his head. "Do you know what you're doing, Garry? You're apologizing because the subject—I refuse to call her Cona, and so should you—didn't greet me with polite chitchat and a choice of coffee or sherry. This is what I've been…"

"For God's sake, Roy!"

"I'm only…" Picciano sighed and stared out of the window for a moment. "Did you get her to take all the fifth week medication and tracers?"

"Yes. No problem."

"In that case I'm going to carry out some tests and make notes." Picciano opened his flat plastic case and began to activate an instrument panel incorporated in the lid. "This is all routine stuff and I don't need any help," he added significantly.

"Thanks." Dallen pressed his face against Cona's for a moment without getting any response, then stood up and left the room. A minute later he was out on the street, breathing deeply to cleanse his lungs of the smell of chocolate and urine which in his fancy pervaded the house at all times. He lived near the outer edge of the inhabited strip of Madison, an area which straggled northwards for about five kilometres from the city centre to accommodate a population of several thousand Metagov and local administration workers. For the most part the dwellings were large, stone-built and well screened by trees—evidence of the district's former affluence. The far-off drone of a lawnmower served only to emphasise the mid-week, mid-morning stillness, creating the impression he had strayed into one of the thousands upon thousands of deserted suburbs which migrating families had left to dreams and decay.

Windows and doorways, never aglow, Dallen thought, recalling one of the most popular songs of the last two centuries. Everyone's gone to Big 0…

Dismissing the mawkish lyric, he decided to walk into town and use the time to work on the problem of Derek Beaumont. The tragedy that had befallen Cona overshadowed everything else in his life, but he appreciated a certain irony in the fact that the one man he knew to bear responsibility also provided his only distraction. When not grieving over his wife or coping with the despairing drudgery she now represented, Dallen fantasised about being alone with the young terrorist, about making him name all the relevant names, about hunting and capturing and killing. Part of him, even in lurid visions, drew the line at cold-blooded execution, but another understood only too well that confrontations could be manipulated. It was a technique boys learned at school. Give the enemy a gentle push, encourage him to push back, respond with a harder shove, escalate the violence and keep doing it until suddenly all thoughts of guilt can be discarded and it's time to cut loose and go in hard. When it's merely a matter of temperature, Dallen knew, the blood can be very obliging. And the man or woman who pulled the trigger on Cona and Mikel was going to know the same thing … in the final passionate, exultant moment that person was going to know … and that person was going to he sorry … in the end…

Walking south through slanting prisms of sunlight and green shade, Dallen heard his own footfalls change note as frustration hardened his muscles. Although his job occasioned him to think and act like a policeman, be held no official responsibility for local law enforcement. He was a Grade IV officer in the Deregistration Bureau, and as such his prime concern was with surveying tracts of land that had been declared empty and making sure they remained unoccupied for one full year, after which time Metagov was no longer legally accountable. Madison City itself, thanks to the artificial mix of its population, had virtually no crime, and the police department consisted of an executive and a handful of officers who were mainly concerned with regulating tourist accommodation. In spite of the overlap in their jobs, Dallen had always maintained an easy working relationship with Police Chief Lashbrook. Consequently he had been surprised to find himself not only denied access to the terrorist, but made distinctly unwelcome in the downtown police building.

"It was a sickening thing, what happened to your wife and boy," Cole Lashbrook had said, eyeing him severely over pedant's spectacles. "I'm deeply sorry about it, but I've made every allowance I can. If you persist with your attempts to see Beaumont I'll be forced to take appropriate action against you."

Dallen's fists clenched as his sense of outrage returned. "Against me!" he had almost shouted. "Are you crazy?"

"No, but sometimes I think you are. Beaumont has made a formal complaint about what you did to him in back of that store, Garry. The dust hasn't settled over that business of the pursuit fatalities a couple of months back, and now there's this … And on top of it all you come round here and expect to be let loose on my prisoner!"

"Your prisoner?" Dallen had refrained with difficulty from pointing out the police department's past willingness to allow onerous duties to be performed by his own force.

"That's right. He was in possession of an explosive device and that makes it a criminal matter, and I intend to deliver Beaumont for trial in good health—a condition he may not be in if you get near him."

"Exactly what does that make me?"

"Garry, you're a man who has been known to go too far—even when you weren't personally involved in a case—and I'm not going to help you land yourself behind bars."

Thanks a lot, Dallen repeated to himself, immune to the blandishments of the placid sunlit warmth through which he was walking. In the two centuries since the discovery of Optima Thule, to give Orbitsville its constitutional name, there had been a general and steady decrease in traditional crime. Most crimes had involved property in one way or another, and as the race had been absorbed by a land area equivalent to five billion Earths—enough to support every intelligent creature in the galaxy—the basic motivations had faded away. Keeping pace with that change, many vast and complicated legal structures had become as obsolete as barbed wire, and progressively fallen into disuse.

Even on Earth, where there were historical complications, a community the size of Madison operated on a fairly informal basis as far as the law and its enforcement were concerned. In the days immediately following the blanking of his family Dallen had been certain that somehow he would obtain private interview with Beaumont. He had never allowed himself to consider the possibility of his being unable to force the prisoner to talk. He had fuelled himself night and day on the conviction that Beaumont would give him a name, the name, and that events thereafter would take a divinely ordained course. Now he was haunted by a suspicion that the young terrorist would be arraigned at the next session of the regional court and receive the routine sentence of—irony of ironies—deportation to Orbitsville. And once Beaumont reached Botany Bay, the popular name for the area surrounding the N5 portal, he would be beyond the reach of Dallen or any other private citizen. Economics and celestial mechanics had conspired to bring about that particular circumstance. A starship docking at an equatorial port simply went into orbit around Optima Thule's central sun, but only a few vessels—all owned by Metagov—were fitted with the complex grappling equipment which enabled them to cling like leeches to entrances in the northern and southern bands…

"What's wrong with your car, old son?" The voice from only a few paces away startled Dallen. He turned his head and found that a gold Rollac convertible had slowed to a crawl beside him without his noticing. The top was down and at the wheel was the buoyantly plump figure of Rick Renard, a man who had started showing up recently at the city gymnasium used by Dallen. Renard had red curly hair and milky skin which was uniformly dusted with freckles. He also had an uncanny ability to needle Dallen and put him on the defensive with just about every remark he made.

"Why should anything be wrong with my car?" Dallen said, deliberately giving the kind of response Renard was seeking, as if to be wary of his snares would be to pay the other man a compliment.

Renard's slightly prominent teeth gleamed briefly. "Nobody walks in heat like this."

"I do."

"Trying to lose weight?"

"Yeah—right now I'm trying to get rid of about a hundred kilos."

"I'm not that heavy, old son," Renard said, eyes beaconing his satisfaction at having provoked an outright insult. "Look, Dallen, why don't you get in the car with me and ride downtown in comfort with me and use the time you save to enjoy a cold beer?"

"Well, if you put it like that…" Suddenly disenchanted with the prospect of walking, Dallen pointed at the curb a short distance ahead, making the gesture an instruction as to where to halt the car. Renard overshot the mark by a calculated margin and scored back against Dallen by allowing the vehicle to roll forward before he was properly in, causing him to do some quick footwork as the door closed.

"Aren't we having fun?" Renard's shoulders shook as he enjoyed a private triumph. "What do you think of the car?"

"Nice," Dallen said carelessly, slumping into the receptive upholstery.

"This lady is sixty years old, you know. Indestructible. Brought her all the way from the Big O. None of your modern Unimot crap for me."

"You're a lucky man, Rick." Feeling the passenger seat adapt itself to his body, coaxing him into relaxation, Dallen was impressed by the car's sheer silent-gliding luxury. It came to him that its owner had to be wealthy. He vaguely recalled having heard that Renard was a botanist who had come to Earth on some kind of a field trip, which had suggested he was a Metagov employee, but salaried workers did not import their own cars across hundreds of light years.

"Lucky?" Renard's narrow dental arch shone again. "The way I see it, the universe only gives me what I deserve."

"Really? Do you accept donations from any other source?"

Renard laughed delightedly. "As a matter of feet, my mother was a Lindstrom."

"In that case, shouldn't the universe be getting hand-outs from you?" Dallen closed his eyes for a moment, glad to be distracted from his own affairs, and considered Renard's claim to be related to the legendary family which had once monopolised the space travel industry. For a brief period after the Big O's discovery its official designation had been Lindstromland, and the Scandinavian connotations of its present name hinted at the clan's continuing if muted influence. In their heyday the Lindstroms had amassed a fortune which, apparently, was beyond human capability to diminish; and if Renard was connected with them, no matter how tenuously, he was no ordinary botanist.

The universe only gives me what I deserve. Dallen got a mental image of his wife—wandering aimlessly through shaded rooms, smock gathered to the waist, crooning to herself as she masturbated on the move—and the pressures within him grew intolerable. Cona deserved better…

"I heard you're a botanist," he said quickly. "You collect flowers?"

Renard shook his head. "Grass."

"Ordinary grass?"

"What's ordinary about grass?" Renard said, smiling in a way intended to let Dallen know that his education was incomplete. "So far we've found only thirty or so species on Orbitsville—an incredibly low number considering the areas involved and the fact that we have more than ten thousand species on Earth. The Department of Agriculture did some work on determining mixes of Earth seeds which are compatible with Orbitsville soil and the native species, but that was in the last century and it was a half-assed effort anyway. I'm doing the job properly. Soon I'll be going back with over a thousand seed varieties and maybe two thousand square metres of sample trays."

"So you work for Metagov."

"Don't be so naive, old son—all Metagov wants from Earth is a decree nisi." Renard turned the steering wheel with a languid hand, swinging the car into an avenue which ran due west. "I work for nobody but myself."

"But…" Dallen grappled with unfamiliar concepts. "The transport costs must be…"

"Astronomical? Yes, but it's not so bad when you have your own ship. For a while I considered chartering, then I realised it made more sense to reuse an old flickerwing from the graveyard and amortise the cost over three or four trips."

"That's what I would have done," Dallen said, concealing his grudging awe for an individual who could so casually speak of owning the artificial microcosm that was a starship. "What have you got?"

"A Type 96B. It was designed for bulk cargo work, so there aren't any diaphragm decks, which means it isn't all that suitable for my work. But I got round that by building really tall racks to hold the grass trays. Do you want a free trip to Orbitsville?"

"No, not at … Why?"

"I need people to tend the samples by hand—not worth installing automatic systems-—and I'm paying with free transportation. That way everybody benefits."

"Perhaps I'll become an entrepreneur."

"You're not cut out for it, old son—you've conditioned yourself to think small." Renard's smile conveyed affectionate contempt. "Otherwise you wouldn't be in the police."

Tm not a policeman. I work for…" Dallen widened his eyes, belatedly aware of the car's change of direction. "Where the hell are we supposed to be going?"

Renard chuckled, again pleasurably triumphant in what appeared to be a never-ending personal game. "This will only take a couple of minutes. I promised Silvia I'd drop by with a carton of glass she's been waiting for."

"Silvia who?"

"Silvia London. Oh, I don't suppose you've ever been to the Londons' place?"

"Not since my polo stock got woodworm."

"I like you, Dallen," Renard said appreciatively "You are a refreshingly genuine person."

And you are a refreshingly genuine bag of puke, Dallen thought, wondering how he could have been stupid enough to give up part of his day to such criminal waste. His previous encounters with Renard in the gymnasium had been brief, but they should have been enough to let him recognise and beware of a stunted personality. Renard's life appeared to he a continuous power game, one in which he never tired of contriving all the advantages, one in which no opponent was too small and no battlefield too insignificant.

The present situation, with Renard at the wheel of a car and therefore temporarily in control of his passenger's movements, was a microscopic annoyance, and yet the other man's obvious relish for what he was doing was turning it into something else. Furious with himself for being drawn in, Dallen nevertheless sat up straighter and began watching for an opportunity to quit the car. It would have to be done in a single effortless movement—otherwise Renard would score even more points—and for that the car would have to be practically at a standstill. Renard glanced sideways at Dallen and promptly accelerated, hastening the alternation of tree-shadow and sunlight over the curving gold hood.

"You'll enjoy meeting Silvia," he said. "You've got to see her jugs."

"Maybe I'm not interested in pottery."

"Maybe that's not what I mean, old son."

Dallen kept his gaze fixed on the pavement ahead. "I know what you meant, old son."

"I do believe he's angry!" Renard craned his neck to look into Dallen's face. "I do believe I've succeeded in provoking the puritanical Mr. Dallen. Well, well!" Shaking his head in amusement, Renard turned the car into a wide driveway with scarcely any slackening of speed. The level of illumination dropped abruptly as walls of foliage closed in on each side.

"These reactionary times we're living in must suit you very well." Renard spoke with quietly ruminative tones, surprising Dallen with the change of tack. "Personally, I'd have been happier thirty years ago, back in the Sixties. I suppose you've noticed the pattern in the last few centuries? The steady build-up of liberalism … peaking two-thirds of the way through … then the violent swing the other way to close out the century and start the next. Why do you think it happens? Why is it that Mary Poppins concepts like mortality and monogamy and family refuse to lie down and die?"

I'm going to presume be doesn't know what happened to Cona and Mikel, Dallen told himself. When the car stops I'm going to walk way, and if he has enough sense to let me go that will be the end of it…

The house which was coming into view on a low hill was not what Dallen had expected. All he knew about the Londons was that they were supposed to be wealthy and that they were a focal point for an unorthodox philosophical society—the sort of people whose chosen setting would abound in gabled roofs, leaded glass and all the overt signs of respectability and tradition. Instead, the London residence turned out to be a three-storey redbrick house—rather too small for its imposing location—around which had been tacked an untidy skirt of timber-framed extensions. Additions had been made to additions in an undisciplined manner which would not have been tolerated in the days when zoning regulations were taken seriously. A stack of greying lumber had been left near the entrance to the main building.

"Rebecca's replacement wouldn't have lost much sleep over this place," Renard said, bringing the car to a crunching halt on a square of brown gravel in front of the house.

Dallen nodded and remained silent, guessing that the allusion had been literary. He got out of the car and was turning to leave when a tall brunette in her late twenties came out to the front steps of the house to greet Renard. She was wearing a close-fitting white shirt and white pants which showed off a full-bosomed but lean-hipped figure. A hint of muscularity about her forearms suggested to Dallen that here was a woman who kept in trim by sheer expenditure of energy. Her face was small and quite square, with neat features and a slight prominence of chin which gave a near-truculent fullness to her lower lip. It was a face which in spite of its liveliness and intelligence, many would have considered disappointing, but Dallen found himself alerted and oddly disturbed, like one who is on the verge of recalling a vital missed appointment.

"…and his name is Garry," Renard was saying to the woman. "I've never seen him go into a trance like this before—perhaps if you pointed your chest somewhere else…"

"Shut up, Rick. Hello, Garry." She gave Dallen a brief smile, her attention already focused on two transit cartons which rested on the rear seat of the car. "Is this my glass?"

"It certainly is, courtesy of Renard's doorstep delivery service. I'll carry it in for you."

"Thanks, but I'm quite capable of moving a box or two." The woman reached into the car, picked up a carton and bore it away into the house.

"I'll say you are," Renard said admiringly, his gaze lingering on the white-clad figure before he turned to Dallen. "What did I tell you?"

Dallen felt a pang of annoyance then realised that what he disliked about the question was not so much the sexism as the proprietory pride. This is crazy, he thought, alarmed at the speed and uncontrollability of what was happening inside of him. If a woman like that is mixed up with Renard she can't be a woman like that. Unwilling to consider what his motives might be, he picked up the second carton and carried it into the house. Its weightiness confirmed his guess about Silvia London being physically strong. She met him at a doorway on the left of the hall, smiled again and gestured for him to go on through.

"Thanks," she said. "Straight ahead to the studio, please."

"Okey-dokey." Brilliant conversational opening, he thought, appalled. Where did I dredge that one from? He went through a high-ceilinged, conventionally furnished room and into another whose airiness and overhead windows proclaimed it to be part of the house extension. He came to a halt, transfixed, as he saw that the fierce light in the outer room was transformed into a multi-hued blaze by a screen of stained glass which reached almost to the ceiling.

Dallen's first impression was of a huge trefoil flower. All edges of the three enormous petals were in the same plane, which would have made it possible for the construction to serve as an incredibly ornate window, but the central surfaces were a bewildering series of complex three-dimensional curves, sculptures in glass. Geometric patterns based on circles and ellipses radiated from a sunburst centre, swirling and interacting, generating areas of intense complication in some places and smoothing into calm simplicity in others. The technique was almost pointillé, deriving its effect from myriad thousands of colour fragments, most of which were no bigger than coins. Dallen's sense of awe increased, rippling coolness down his spine, as he realised that the glowing tesserae—which he had taken to be brush-dabs of transparent paint—were actually individual chips of stained glass bonded with metal.

"My God," he said, with genuine reverence. "It's … I've never , .

Silvia London laughed as she took the carton from him and placed it on a nearby workbench. "You like it?"

"It has to be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." Dallen filled his eyes with mingling rays, mesmerising himself. "But…"

"A third of a million."

"I'm sorry?"

"The first thing everybody asks is how many separate pieces of glass," Silvia said. "The answer is a third of a million, almost. I've been working on it continuously for four years."

"Why? For God's sake, why?" Renard spoke from behind Dallen, having entered the studio unnoticed. "With an imager you could have built up the same effect in a few days. Throw continuous computer variation and it would be even better. What do you say, Garry?"

"I'm not an artist."

"You could still venture an opinion." Silvia spoke lightly, but her brown eyes were holding steady on Mien's. "Why should I give up four years of my life to one unnecessary project?"

His answer was instinctive. "Something which sets itself up as a mosaic really has to be a mosaic—otherwise it's no use."

"Near enough," she said. "You can come back anytime."

"Crawler," Renard sneered. "Silvia, when are you going to-drop this phoney reverence for old … what's his name … Tiffany and his methods? You know perfectly well that you cheat."

She shook her head, glancing at Dallen to include him in what she was saying. "I cut the glass with a valency knife because it's so fast and accurate. And instead of edging each piece with copper foil so that it can be soldered, I transmute a couple of millimetres of it into copper, for reasons of speed and strength. But Tiffany himself would have used those methods if they'd been available to him—therefore in my book it isn't cheating."

"And how about the cold solder?"

"Same criterion applies."

"I should know better than to argue with a woman," Renard said, cheerfully unconvinced. "When are you and I going to have dinner?"

"We've been over all that."

Renard picked up a fish-shaped piece of streaky blue glass from the bench and peered through it. "How is Karal these days?"

"His condition is stable, thank you."

Renard held the strip of glass closer to his eyes, converting it into a mask. "I'm glad about that."

"Yes, Rick." Silvia turned to Dallen with an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry about the conversation becoming so cryptic. I'm not interested in adultery, you see—even though my husband is old and very ill. When I refused to date Rick a moment ago he, quite naturally—being the sort of person he is—asked me if Karal would die soon, and when I told him there was no immediate prospect of it he couldn't even make a convincing attempt to appear pleased."

"Silvia!" Renard looked scandalised. "You make me sound so crass!"

"I'm tempted to make the obvious reply to that one, but…"

"Don't mind me," Dallen put in. "I quite enjoy the sound of knuckles on flesh." He had slipped into his social armour by reflex, buying time in which to gain some control over what was happening behind his eyes. Information had been coming in too fast. The fantastic glass edifice filling she studio had an over-powering presence of its own, but something about Silvia London was even more disturbing. He had just learned that Renard had no claim on her, that she was a person upon whom Renard could not make a claim, and the result had been an immediate explosion of images and sense impressions—Silvia seen across a supper table; Silvia broodily examining a damaged fingernail; Silvia at the controls of a high-G zoom car, Silvia floating lazily in a sun-gilded pool; Cona raising her gaze in momentary bafflement from an historical text; Silvia lying with her head in the crook of his left arm; Cona trailing footprints of her own urine from room to shaded room…

Silvia looked thoughtfully at Dallen. "I can't help wondering… Have we met before?"

"It isn't likely," Renard said, grinning. "His polo stick got woodworm."

Dallen moved away from Silvia, closer to the stunning glass mosaic. "I thought this was a flower at first, but it's astronomical, isn't it?"

"Yes. It's a representation of a Gott-McPherson cosmos."

Dallen frowned, still expunging visions. "I thought McPherson was a spherologist. Isn't he on the Optima Thule Science Commission?"

"Yes, but it's his work on cosmogony that inspires me as an artist," Silvia said, caressing the glass with the tip of a finger. "Actually, as it stands the screen shows a pure Gott cosmos. The scenario he devised in the 20th Century called for the creation of three separate universes at the moment of the Big Bang. He labelled the universe we live in Region I. It's composed of normal matter and of course in our universe time goes forward. This is it in the left-hand zone, with all the colours and forms naturalistic by our terms of reference." Silvia crossed to the other side of the screen, stepping with care over a wooden support, choosing the constricted route between Dallen and the glass. Her hair touched his lips.

"In the opposite panel is the Region II universe, created in the same instant as ours, but rushing backwards into our past and composed of anti-matter. I've suggested its nature by using inverted forms and colours which are complements of those in Region I. Gott also postulated a Region III universe—a tachyon universe—which has sped far ahead of us in time and will remain in our future until all the universes meet each other again in the next Big Bang. This is the tachyon universe in the centre section—elongated abstract patterns, leached-out opalescent colours."

"Aren't you glad you asked?" Renard's bow of teeth gleamed. "If you want to appear intelligent and interested ask where McPherson comes into the picture."

"I'm sorry," Silvia said, her eyes again locking with Dallen's. "I do tend to presume that my private manias are universal."

"It's all right," Dallen replied quickly. "It's really … well, fascinating … and as a matter of fact I was going to ask about McPherson's contribution."

Renard burst into full-throated laughter, hamming up his scorn by slapping his thigh, and walked away into the old part of the house, shaking his head.

"Perhaps he's kind to animals," Silvia said, pausing until Renard was out of earshot. "McPherson refined Gott's ideas and also added a Region IV universe—an anti-tachyon universe which is fleeing ahead of Region II into its past. It's being incorporated into the design as a fourth panel complementing Region III, but there isn't enough ceiling height here to let me assemble the whole screen. That will have to wait."

"For what?"

"Completion of Karal's memorial college, of course."

"I see," Dallen floundered. "I'm afraid I don't know much about your husband's work."

"There's no real reason why you should—he isn't a publicity-seeker."

"I didn't mean…"

Silvia laughed, showing predictably healthy teeth. "You're far too normal to be keeping company with Red Rick, you know. Why do you do it?"

"He promised he could get me into movies," Dallen said, trying to decide why he was unhappy about being described as normal. What's going on here? he thought. I'm supposed to he the one who always holds the conversational high ground.

"I'm sure you'd be interested in what Karal has to say." Silvia's gaze had a disconcerting softness. "We're having some people around tomorrow night—would you like to join us?"

"I…" Dallen looked down at the woman and felt a surge of genuine panic as he realised how close he had come to opening his arms to her. There had been no reason to it, no sense of having been given an invitation, not even any special pressure of desire—it was just that his arms had almost moved by themselves. And Cona is still a prisoner, still where I put her.

"I'm busy tomorrow," he said, his voice unexpectedly loud.

"Perhaps some other evening would…"

"My wife and I never go out." Dallen strode out of the studio and into the adjoining room, where he found Renard studying some botanical prints clustered on a wall. The high-ceilinged room seemed mellow and cool, part of another age.

"Ready to go?" Renard looked quizzical. "I thought an art lover like you would have been in there for ages. What have you been doing to this young man, Silvia?"

"Thanks for your help with the glass," she said to Dallen, entering the room behind him, and it seemed to him that her manner was now overly correct. "The cartons are quite heavy."

"No trouble. If you'll excuse me—I have an appointment in town." Dallen went out to the front of the house, prepared to leave the premises on foot, but Renard caught up with him and within a minute-after an exchange of formalities with Silvia—they were in the car and roiling silently between banks of foliage. Warm air currents touched Dallen's forehead. The world looked subtley different to him, as in the first moment after stepping out of a bar in daytime. He felt that something momentous had happened, but what made it unsettling was the lack of evidence that anything at all had taken place. It was a matter of interpretation. He had never met a woman quite like Silvia London before, and could have been misreading the signals because of unfamiliarity or male egotism. Or perhaps sheer sexual deprivation. When he had mentioned Cona's frequent masturbation to Roy Picciano the doctor had suggested that it could cease if they resumed a physical relationship, but Dallen had found the idea repugnant beyond words…

"That was a nice little divertimento for all concerned," Renard said. "What went on in there?"

"Meaning?"

"The two of you came out of the studio like robots." Renard looked amused. "Did you try to touch her?"

Dallen sighed in exasperation. "Stop the car and let me out."

"No need to get huffy, old son," Renard said, accelerating out into the street. "It's two years since her old man went off to the Big O to die, and nobody has got near our Silvia in all that time. It's a criminal waste, really, but she has compensated by inventing this game called New Morality Musical Beds. Cumbersome title, but I've just made it up. When the music stops—by music I mean Karal's emphysematic rattling—there's going to be one hell of a scramble, and Silvia wants the field to be as large as possible.

I'm going to win, of course. It's a foregone conclusion, but she doesn't want to admit that to herself. I guess the illusion of choice gives her a bit of a lift."

The tone and content of what he had just heard outraged Dallen on behalf of Silvia, but he was distracted by new information. "I didn't realise Karal London lives on Orbitsville."

Renard nodded. "A place near Port Napier. He only appears in holomorph form at Silvia's little soirées, you know. Personally, I find it somewhat distasteful."

"A sensitive person like you would."

"Unkind, Garry, unkind."

"What's this about emphysema?"

"That's what is killing him. I'm told he can barely cross a room."

"But…" Dallen began to feel overwhelmed. "Why?"

"Why is he allowing himself to die of a disease which can be cured? Why didn't he either stay here or take Silvia to Big O with him?" Renard glanced at Dallen, arched teeth gleaming. "Obviously she didn't have enough time to get on to hobbyhorse number two otherwise you'd know all about it. That would have been something else for you to find … um … fascinating."

"Forget I asked," Dallen said, his patience fading.

"It's all part of the Great Experiment, man!" Renard laughed aloud, alerting the part of Dallen's mind that remained permanently on guard against being ribbed. "Haven't you heard you're going to live for ever?"

"I think somebody from Nazareth may have mentioned the idea."

"This is nothing to do with religion, old son," Renard said, apparently for once deciding to impart straight information. "Old Karal is anti-religious and anti-mystical. He set up his Anima Mundi Foundation a few years back with the express purpose of…"

"Garry? Have you got your ears on?" The voice came from Dallen's implanted transceiver. "This is Jim Mellor."

"I'm listening," Dallen sub-vocalised, shocked by the unexpected communication from his deputy after weeks of radio silence. "Is something wrong?"

"I've got some bad news for you," Mellor said. "Beaumont has escaped."

"Escaped!" Dallen felt old preoccupations take over his mind. "Pick him up again."

"It's too late for that," Mellor replied, sounding both angry and embarrassed. "It happened three days back, but Lashbrook only told me a few minutes ago. Beaumont will be back in Cordele by this time."

Dallen closed his eyes. "So I go to Cordele."

"What's the matter with you?" Renard said loudly from beside Dallen, an intruder from another dimension. "Are you talking to yourself?"

Dallen shut him out, concentrating on the exchange with his deputy. "Get a ship ready for me, Jim—I'll be with you in a few minutes."

"But…"

"In a few minutes, Jim." Dallen made the practised sideways movement of his jaw which switched off his transceiver, then tried to relax into the deep cushions of the seat. He felt a cold, pleasurable anticipation which—even though he could recognise it as a sickness—restored lost illusions of purpose.

Chapter 7

The Valley was not really a valley. It was a narrow strip, almost a kilometre in length, where Orbitsville's soil and bedrock had been scooped away to reveal a substantial area of shell material. Ylem was dark and non-reflective, so at night the strip had the appearance of a cold black lake. The research buildings anchored along it on suction foundations, continuously illuminated, looked like a flotilla of boats linked by power and communications cables.

Dan Cavendish had worked in the Valley for more than forty years, but he still got a contemplative pleasure from walking its length, knowing that only a few centimetres—the thickness of shell—beneath the soles of his boots was the edge of interstellar space. Since the death of his wife three years earlier he had found it difficult to sleep the night through, and had developed the habit of patrolling the strip from end to end in the darkness, meditating and remembering. Although devoid of stars, the Orbitsville night sky had a beauty of its own which was conducive to an old man's evaluation of his life.

The popular conception of the Big O was of a thin shell of ylem, 320 million kilometres in diameter, completely englobing a small sun, but scientists were very much aware of a second concentric sphere without which the entire system would not have been viable. It was much smaller than Orbitsville and non-material in nature, a globular filigree of force fields capable of blocking the sun's out-pourings of light and heat. It was composed of narrow strips, effectively opaque, whose function was to case great bars of shadow on the grasslands of Orbitsville, producing the alternating periods of light and darkness, day and night, necessary to the growth of vegetation. The inner sphere could not be studied directly, but its structure was observable in the bands of light and darkness moving across the far side of Orbitsville, roughly two astronomical units away. During a day period the banding showed as a delicate ribbed effect, barely noticeable, but at dusk the alternations of paler and deeper blue stood out vividly. And at night the hundreds of slim curving ribs became the dominant feature of the sky, swirling across it from two opposite points on the horizon, merging into a prismatic haze where they dipped behind denser levels of air.

Cavendish's life—all ninety-two years of it—had been spent on Orbitsville without his tiring of its beauty or its mystery. There were many questions about the incredible construct and he had refused to become dispirited over the fact that no answers had been forthcoming in spite of all the Optima Thule Science Commission's efforts. It was an article of his personal faith that a breakthrough was bound to come, eventually, and if possible he wanted to be on hand when it happened. That was why he was clinging to his job in defiance of all efforts to make him retire. Now that Ruth was gone his work was all that was left to him, and he had no intention of giving it up for anybody. In particular, he was not going to be squeezed out by Phil Vigus, the senior technical manager, with whom he had been conducting a private feud for several years. The intrusive thought of Vigus caused him to snort with anger.

"Thinks I'm over the hill, does he?" Cavendish said to the encompassing darkness at the eastern end of the Valley. "I'll show the schmuck who's over the hill."

He unfolded his portable stool and sat down to rest, dismissing from his mind the stray thought that talking aloud to himself could be evidence that Vigus's claims were justified. It was a fine night, with just a few wisps of cloud drawn across the striated sapphire of the sky, and he had the place to himself. All other staff members had gone to their bungalow homes and the absence of lights on the slopes surrounding the Valley showed they were in bed and asleep. Cavendish repressed a pang of envy and regret as he recalled the deep comfort of waking in the darkness and staying awake just long enough to touch Ruth's shoulder and be reassured. They had had a good life together and he was not going to betray her at this stage by starting to feel sorry for himself. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and submerged his identity in the numinous magic of his surroundings, the glowing enigma that was Optima Thule at night.

So many unanswered questions…

Who had built Orbitsville? And why? Was it really an artifact, in the limited human sense of the word, or was it—as some religious thinkers maintained—evidence of a Creator who worked in diverse modes? Could it be a manifestation of Nature in a form which only seemed strange to men because of the paucity of their experience?

As a native of Orbitsville, Cavendish was instinctively inclined to the belief that it was a natural object, yet he had always been perplexed by certain salient features. There was, for example, the question of gravity. By means which no man could begin to understand, the thin shell of ylem generated gravity on the sphere's inner surface—and none on the outer surface—which suggested that Orbitsville had been designed as a habitat. There was also the matter of the portals. To a logical being there could be only one explanation for the three bands of circular apertures. They had to be entrances—but that led to the tricky concept of God as Engineer.

Some could accept that idea easily; others objected on the grounds that divine engineering should be divinely perfect, whereas there were unaccountable irregularities connected with the portals. Orbitsville itself was exactly spherical, a symmetry to satisfy any theologian, but why were there 207 portals on the equator instead of some number more suggestive of ethereal harmony? Why were the northern and southern bands not at precisely the same latitude, and why were there 173 portals in the former and only 168 in the latter? Furthermore, why did the portals themselves vary a little in size and spacing?

The arguments had been raging for two centuries, with numerologists in particular mining their richest lode since the heyday of the Great Pyramid, but nothing was settled. Spherology continued with its record of non-achievement. Nobody understood why radio communications were impossible within the Big O. Nobody had analysed the mechanisms which kept the great shell in a stable relationship with the enclosed sun and its remote outer planet. Cavendish was an inorganic chemist and therefore was not professionally concerned with the problems of macro-spherology, but on the personal level he had his yearning for an advance, even a single step forward, to be made in the time that was left to him. It would compensate for the forty-plus years of frustration he had experienced since coming to the Valley.

His lean frame balanced uneasily on the stool, Cavendish gazed along the line of buildings floating on their lake of ink. Some had been stripped down and rebuilt several times as series of experiments were terminated and others took their places. A number of the buildings and machines had inverted counterparts of themselves, like mirror images, clinging to the outside of the Orbitsville shell and positioned by dead reckoning from the edge of the nearest portal. Although separated from each other by a mere eight centimetres of ylem, no machine had ever been able to communicate with its opposite number. Cavendish was usually positive in his outlook, but there were times when he suspected that his field of endeavour, shell structure, was the least promising in the Commission's programme.

On a night like this, when the breeze was cool and it was difficult to remember his wife's voice, he could believe that more centuries would pass before ylem yielded any of its secrets—and by then it might be too late. Mankind would have dispersed into and been absorbed by Orbitsville's infinite meadows. A thousand times a thousand rural tribes would be permanently busy re-inventing the steam and internal combustion engines, and would have no use for the blueprints of the ultimate machine.

Cavendish gave a low sigh, deciding that he should be in bed. He got to his feet and was stooping to pick up the stool when the surface on which he was standing blinked with green radiance. A line of light, glowing on the full width of the Valley's floor, swept by him, travelled the length of the strip and vanished at its western end in a fraction of a second.

"What the…!" Cavendish stared into the familiar backdrop of night, suddenly feeling unsafe.

He had lived all his life on the Orbitsville shell and knew the material to be totally inert, changeless, more stable by far than any planetary crust. It was not supposed to pulse with green light … because if that could happen other changes might occur … and he could almost feel the ylem dissolving beneath his feet … hurling his unprepared and unprotected body downwards and outwards … into the space between the stars…

Mark Denmark was obviously unhappy. He squared up various stacks of paper on his desk, frowning all the while, then went to the window of his office and rocked on the balls of his feet while he inspected the view. The Valley and its wide-eaved buildings and the surrounding slopes reflected the sun's vertical rays, looking exactly as they always did, embalmed in brilliance which had an ancient Egyptian quality to it. Denmark shook his head as though something outside had failed to pass muster, returned to his chair and began tapping his front teeth with a pen.

"Dan, we've checked every read-out from every instrument," he finally said. "There aren't any spikes. There aren't any blips or dips. In fact, there is simply no trace of any abnormal event."

"That's not surprising—considering we don't have any photometers aimed at the shell." Cavendish spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, concealing his disappointment over the lack of corroborative readings. He had been awake ail night, voyaging on mental oceans of surmise, elated by the near-certainty that the science of spherology was about to take that long-awaited step forward. Now it was beginning to look as though he had taken a step backwards, lost ground in the battle over his delayed retirement.

Denmark leaned forward, hunching his shoulders. "Dan, I don't need to tell you that light can't come into being by itself. What you described sounded like an excitation phenomenon, but nothing got excited—except maybe your optic nerves."

"I'm perfectly healthy," Cavendish snapped. "Don't try that stuff on me."

"I'm only trying to stop you making a pig's ass of yourself. If you insist on your report going on log you'll draw a lot of attention, then you'll really find out what it's like to be under pressure. Christ, Dan, if everybody else can accept retirement at eighty, why can't you?"

"Because I'm not ready."

"Ready or not, one of these days … The Commission can insist, you know."

Cavendish glanced around the office in feigned surprise. "Have I come to the wrong place? Are you the chief scientist or the personnel manager?"

Denmark's grey eyes clouded with annoyance and his mouth withered into a thin line. Watching the change of expression, Cavendish wondered if he had gone too far. Denmark was a natural researcher whose temperament had been poisoned by the constant struggle to keep all his projects functioning on dwindling budgets, and in the past months he had become moody and unpredictable. All it takes is one word from him, Cavendish thought, becoming alarmed. Just one interoffice memo and I'm out in the cold with nothing but…

"Good morning, men!"

The unexpected voice, coming from the open door, provided what Cavendish hoped would be a welcome diversion. He turned towards it and his spirits sank as he saw the stubby, bull-necked form of his old adversary, technical manager Phil Vigus, entering the office. Vigus, who was ultimately responsible for the reliability of all equipment, took every complaint as a personal insult—a trait which had often brought him into conflict with Cavendish. He had long regarded Cavendish as a cantankerous geriatric, and at that particular moment was the last person Cavendish wanted to see.

"Take a seat, Phil," Denmark said. "I'm glad you dropped by."

"Really?" Vigus lowered his bulk into a chair. "What have I got that you want?"

Denmark gave him a cold fleeting smile. "You've got millions of monits' worth of equipment strung out along the Valley, and I've just been informed by Mr. Cavendish here—who else?—that it's a load of crap. I used to think the shell material was inert, didn't you? Well, apparently ylem can become so agitated that it lights up like a traffic sign, and not one of your piss-poor instruments even gives a quiver. What do you think of that?"

"That's not what I said," Cavendish protested, shocked by the sheer crudity of Denmark's attack and deducing from it that he had landed himself in a genuine crisis. This was a tailor-made chance for Vigus to come down on him with both feet, to add his managerial clout to that of Denmark. Both men working in unison could have him issued with his walking papers in a couple of hours.

"I presume, from the scuttlebut I picked up this morning, that we're talking about Dan's wonderful green flash." Vigus's lips twitched in amusement. "They're already calling it his nocturnal emission."

"That's it," Denmark said gleefully, and having been presented with a joke went on, as humourless people do, to run it ragged. "Some people get hot flushes at night—Dan gets green flashes. What do you say, doc? Is it a serious ailment?"

"I can tell you one thing about it." Vigus stared hard at Cavendish for a second, eyes unreadable, his expression curiously benign.

Executioner's compassion, Cavendish thought. Here comes the big knife.

"Tell me the worst," Denmark prompted.

"It's infectious," Vigus said. His tone was calm, very neutral, but Cavendish felt a premonition.

Denmark looked disappointed. "What does that mean?"

"I read a lot of reliability reports, from all over., Not just on research equipment, on nearly anything.

Three weeks or so ago a pilot called Jean Antony baled out of an old freighter on the equatorial run, close to 156. The ship apparently was a deathtrap, nothing working right, and she got herself ejected downwards. Her capsule actually grazed the shell before it was recovered, so it was a near-miracle she got out of it alive." Vigus paused for an unnecessarily long time, still looking at Cavendish.

"Stirring stuff," Denmark said drily, "but I don't…

"Just before the collision Jean Antony saw a green flash. Just like Dan's. She described it in her accident report, but nobody paid any heed. It was written off as nerves or a stray reflection on the capsule's transparencies."

Denmark nodded. "I'd say nerves—you know what women are like."

"This one saw a thin band of green radiance moving fast across the shell from east to west," Vigus asserted. "Something is happening, Mark—something very unusual—and the sooner you report Dan's observations to Commission HQ the more credit you'll be able to grab for yourself."

"I'd like to thank you," Cavendish said to Vigus as they left the admin building together. "If you hadn't chimed in when you did … Mark was all set to dump me, you know."

"He'd only have been forced to take you back on again, after you'd become famous." Vigus grinned in the vertical prism of shadow cast by his coolie-style hat. "You're going to be insufferable enough as it is."

"Thanks a lot," Cavendish said, pretending to be insulted, but feeling better inside than he had done at any time in the three years since his wife had died. Life, it would seem, still had something to offer.

Chapter 8

Dallen took the little patrol ship to a height of eight thousand metres—enough to render it invisible from the ground—and drifted in over Cordele from the north. About a third of the built-up area had been destroyed by old fires, but from the air large tracts looked almost as they would have done forty years earlier when the city was being officially deregistered. Only the high proportion of greenery, obliterating the street patterns in some places, hinted at the progressive decay which would eventually erase all obvious signs of habitation. Armies of wood-boring insects were hard at work down there, tidying up the stage for the benefit of future performers.

The map projected on the navigation screen beside Dallen was decades out of date—in the eyes of the Metagov cartographers Cordele no longer existed—but it was adequate for his purpose. He touched a button which activated the ship's scanning system and a bright red dot appeared in the middle of a western suburb. It was standard procedure with the Madison police to radio tag some personal item belonging to detainees, often a belt buckle, and now the coded signal was telling Dallen exactly where he would find the man he was hunting.

He watched the glowing speck long enough to assure himself it was not moving, then swung the ship into a curving path which took it out across the blurry-edged strip of solder which was the Flint River. Twenty kilometres west of the city Dallen made a rapid descent through the heavy water-logged air, watching the atlas-page sweep of territory below him expand to become a sunlit reality clothed with vegetation which moved visibly with changes in the wind. At a height of only a few metres he skimmed eastwards, taking advantage of every irregularity in the terrain to hide his approach to the city. The outer ring of abandoned restaurants, motels and commercial buildings appeared ahead of him, many of the structures completely obscured by kudzu vines. Dallen threaded the ship through them in silence, bringing it as close to his destination as he dared, and grounded by the sheared-off side of a small hill.

He studied the map display for a moment, noting that he was some three kilometres from his target, then took off a print which he folded and put away in his pocket. He was confident that he could go straight to Beaumont without extra guidance, but returning to the ship might not be so simple and he wanted to minimise the risk of getting lost. After checking various pieces of equipment, including his sidearm and quarry finder, he slid the pilot door open and stepped down onto a thick carpet of moss and ground-hugging creepers. Going by the book, he should have retracted the slim tubes of its wing field generators before leaving the ship unattended, but in the interests of a quick getaway he chose not to do so. Nobody was likely to chance upon the ship and in any case the tubes, which were the only vulnerable part, had been freshly coated with repellant paint.

It was a little past noon and a thickly murmurous heat lay over the surroundings, the main elements of which were overgrown shrubs and ruinous single-storey houses. A plastic-skinned microbus stood nearby, contriving to look almost serviceable after more than forty years, except for the tree which had grown up through the engine compartment.

Dallen set off in the direction of the city centre, walking quickly, checking his progress with those street signs which were still legible. The tension that was growing within him manifested itself in his increasing jumpiness. He fought it by refusing to think about what lay ahead, absorbing images of his environment, turning himself into a camera. Concrete light poles had crumbled here and there, doubling over and exposing ferrous brown veins. Some houses which had looked quite intact from a distance were revealed as mere clay overlays erected by termites, the enclosed timbers long since digested. On the window of a store, miraculously still intact, some long-departed humourist had sprayed the words, GONE TO LAUNCH.

Dallen experienced a growing sense of bafflement. Why did people cling on in places like this? He knew there were parts of the world where human labour had again become valuable, where the petty chieftains of the new age—men who could feel their power growing as Orbitsville lost interest in Earth—prevented their slave-subjects from taking the big trip. But it had always had always been different on the NorAm continent-—so why had a few chosen to remain behind in conditions like this? Question to be taken literally: what on Earth possessed them? Dallen cursed as the words of the old song, the one he had always disliked, paraded behind his eyes…

Streets fallen silent, blowing dust,

Railways and bridges, growing rust,

Christmas is only untrodden snow,

Everyone's gone to Big 0…

The sounds of children at play startled him into alertness. He paused and listened to the feint but unmistakable pleasure cries which might have been drifting through a time warp from a previous century. There were seven blocks between him and his target, but he deduced he was reaching the edge of an enclave which possibly was guarded. He moved forward with greater caution, one hand gripping the sidearm concealed in his pocket, and reached an intersection where the pavement had been lifted and fragmented by trees and their roots. A stand of rank grass and weeds provided cover from which he was able to reconnoitre the street ahead.

Vegetation was much in evidence everywhere, obscuring the signs of habitation, but he saw at once that the houses had been deliberately thinned out and that the empty spaces were under cultivation. Although no people were directly visible, he could see a vehicle moving in the distance and from somewhere nearby there came the bleating of a sheep. Sensing that it would be pointless to try moving through such an area undetected, Dallen left the shade of the trees and walked openly along the street, his stride casual but long. A group of small children, shabbily dressed but healthy looking, came running out of nowhere chanting a play rhyme and as quickly disappeared behind hedges.

Their presence was somehow disturbing to Dallen, then he realised he had always unconsciously thought of the Independent communities as being entirely composed of mulish disgrunted adults. Over-simplification, he thought. An occupational disease of Deregistration Bureau workers.

Cordele had been depopulated in 2251 and kept empty for the statutory whole year, which meant that the people now living in it did not exist as far as Metagov was concerned. The convenient administrative fiction was that none of the small groups of dissidents who wandered in the spreading wilderness of the country would have been attracted to the deserted cities. But shelter and other necessities were to be had for the taking there, and the cities could again serve in their most basic role—places where those who needed to could band together for mutual support. In those circumstances children were bound to arrive, officially non-existent children, disenfranchised, not entitled to education or even the most rudimentary health care.

I'm getting out of the Bureau, Dallen told himself once again. As soon as I collect my back pay—as soon as I get what I'm owed for Cona and Mikel.

He made steady progress towards his destination, encountering more and more people as he got farther into the enclave. Some of the adults eyed him curiously as he passed, but showed no inclination to challenge him. Either the local population was large enough for a stranger to remain inconspicuous, or the people were less defensive and insular than he had supposed. At a comer of one block he saw an open-air produce market apparently running on the barter system, and the presence of several mud-spattered trucks indicated that somebody was farming on a comparatively large scale.

On reaching the seventh block inwards Dallen found that it was non-residential, the side he was nearest being occupied by a brick-built church, a bank and a three-storey hotel. The hotel was the only building of the three which .looked as though it had been kept in use. Making sure he was not being watched, Dallen took out the quarry finder—which was tuned to the signal from Beaumont's belt buckle—and looked at its circular screen. A crimson arrow glowed on its surface, pulsing rapidly, pointing to the hotel. Aware of the measured thudding of his heart, Dallen angled across the street. He entered the off-street parking area and had almost reached the building's entrance when a thick-set man materialised in the dense shade of the canopy. The man was youngish, prematurely grey, and had a pump-action shotgun slung on his shoulder.

"Where do you think you're goin', fella?" he said, sounding curious rather than hostile.

Dallen absorbed the fact that the hotel was serving as some kind of headquarters. "I've got to see the boss."

The man extended a hand, husking thumb and fingers together. "Papers."

"Sure thing." Dallen smiled, slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and fired tine sidearm without taking time to grip its handle. The wide-angle cone of radiation sleeted through the guard's body, turning him into an organic statue. Dallen closed with him before he could topple and, taking a chance on the small lobby being empty, waltzed the rigid form back into the hotel. A door beside the desk looked as though it led to staff washrooms. It was necessary to take another risk, but Dallen had begun to feel supercharged with confidence, like a man high on felicitin, and he bore the guard through the door without pause. The room beyond was empty. It took him only a few seconds to bundle the inert figure into a closet, then he was out in the lobby and running for the stairs.

On the second-floor landing he checked with the quarry finder and got a reading which told him to go left. Dallen hurried silently along the corridor, dragging the sidearm from his pocket, and halted at a door which was indicated by an abrupt swing of the bright arrow. Allowing no time for reflection, filled with a heady certitude, he twisted the handle and went through the door fast. The room contained one bed upon which was lying a black-haired woman of about twenty, naked except for a rumpled waist slip. She stared up at Dallen without moving. Items of her discarded clothing were draped on a chair, among them a durocord skirt and a man's belt with a metal buckle.

"It's Beaumont I want," Dallen said in a fierce whisper, unable to accept that something had gone disastrously wrong. "You'll be all right as long as you keep quiet. Do you understand that?"

The woman nodded, opened her mouth and screamed.

"You stupid…!" Dallen almost silenced her with his paralyser, then realised there would be no point. The scream seemed to have been amplified rather than damped by the building's partition walls and he could already hear startled male voices in an adjoining room. He turned back to the door, thoughts in turmoil, and was trying to choose between two unpromising courses—running for the street or locking himself in—when the woman pulled the trigger.

Harry Sanko, "mayor" of West Cordele, was wearing a full business suit, complete with traditional-style collar and tie, regardless of the moist heat. He was in his early forties and had regular features with a Latin cast which was emphasised by a neat pencil-line moustache. He was well-fed, articulate, forceful in his manner and smiled a lot in spite of having only one front tooth.

"What you did was stupid," he said to Dallen. "The only word for it is … well … stupid."

Dallen managed to nod in agreement. He had been dragged the length of the corridor to a conference room and had been pushed into one of the high-backed chairs which surrounded a circular table. Sanko was sitting opposite him and two burly young men armed with shotguns were standing at the door. The fact that Dallen was able to move his head meant that he had been zapped with a low-power personal defence weapon, but he derived scant comfort from the knowledge. He was very much aware of being totally helpless.

"Marion is a close friend of mine," Sanko went on. "She's a protegée, you might say … and if you had touched her … or if you had used this on her…" He tapped Dallen's sidearm, which was lying on the table in front of him, and shook his head, apparently awed by inner visions of his retribution.

"I told you I was only interested in Beaumont," Dallen replied. "I didn't know your so-called protegée had his belt."

Sanko leaned forward and showed his single tooth. "You are quite a stern character, aren't you, Dallen? You're sitting there, paralysed, helpless, not knowing whether I'm going to have you strung up or castrated with a blunt knife, yet you can't help referring to Marion as my so-called protegée. A man in your shoes should be more diplomatic. I mean, how do you know I'm not sensitive?"

"People who plant bombs usually aren't."

"So that's it!" Sanko stood up, walked quickly around the table and sat down again, hard enough to make his chair creak. "I've got news for you, Mister Metagov—-this is a civilised community here in West Cordele. We've got laws, and we enforce them. We don't have electricity or clean water or any amenities like that, but we're not savages. We don't go in for terrorism."

"Beaumont does."

"Beaumont was a brainless punk."

"Was?" Dallen's fingers twitched, first sign of returning mobility. "Does that mean…?"

"It means he's dead. He was tried and executed yesterday along with two of his buddies—for stealing community property. Does that seem a trifle harsh to you?"

"No—just barbaric."

Sanko gave a barely visible shrug. "You've got to understand that in any Independent community almost the worst crime anybody can commit is the crime of waste. We have a small cash reserve for buying black market medical supplies, and Beaumont and his brother cretins blew some of it on bomb kits.

A few months back two of them wrecked one of our last working automobiles, and if they hadn't totalled themselves along with it we'd have had to…" Sanko broke off and gazed solemnly at Dallen, his tooth digging into his lower lip.

"I don't get this," he finally said. "Why are you here? What was Beaumont in your soft little life?"

"The day I pinched him in Madison be said his friends were going after my family." Dallen spoke slowly and carefully, his mind laboring to assimilate the news of Beaumont's death and the wider implications of what he had just heard. "About the time he was saying that somebody went into the City Hail and used a Luddite Special on my wife and son … but…"

"But what, Mister Metagov? Brain beginning to stir? How much cash does it take to buy one of those fancy toys?"

A corrosive acid was seeping through Dallen's mind, burning away one world-picture, disclosing another. "Somebody in Madison … Probably somebody in City Hall itself…"

"What were you saying about barbarism a minute ago?"

"But I can't see why," Dallen went on. "There was no reason for it."

"Maybe a slug of this will get your head working." Sanko took a silver flask from his pocket, came round the table and poured some of its contents into Dallen's mouth. "A Luddite Special is its own reason, man. It only does one job."

"There can't…" Dallen gagged as warm neat liquor reached his throat, but the spasms seemed to accelerate the return of sensation to his limbs. He became aware of a twitching in his calf muscles.

"Your wife and kid must have known something. They must have seen something." Sanko drained the flask and tossed it to one of the armed men who caught it and left the room unbidden. "You're no Sherlock Holmes, are you?"

Dallen wasted no time in speculating who Sherlock Holmes was. He was appalled at his own lack of perception, at the weeks he had wasted, at his unconscious arrogance in assuming that he and his futile, insignificant, Earth-limited activities had been the root cause for what had happened to Cona and Mikel. The alternative theory was that there was a monster roaming loose in Madison City, enjoying the immunity that Dallen had personally gifted to it—but what had been the original crime? What could have been sufficiently serious to justify the erasure of two personalities? Had k been a murder? The circumstances did not fit—nobody had been found dead or reported missing.

"It still doesn't make sense," Dallen said. "We don't have any serious crime in Madison."

"I love it!" Sanko laughed aloud, his mouth and the solitary tooth forming a notched dark circle. "Graft doesn't bother anybody in Madison and that means it isn't serious."

"There might be some petty…

"Listen to me—Madison City is a kind of general store for all the big Independent communities in this part of the world. They come from as far away as Savannah and Jacksonville, any place that can scrape up big money, and it's from Madison they buy their generators, water purifiers, truck engines, whatever. Didn't you know?"

"I know my wife and son weren't involved."

"You're starting to bore me, Dallen. How did you get to Cordele? By car?"

"I flew."

"That's a pity—if you'd come by car we'd have taken it and let you walk back. A flier is no use to us though, so I guess you can take it away as soon as you've thawed out."

It was only then that Dallen realised he had been expecting imprisonment or worse. "You're letting me go?"

Sanko looked exasperated. "Maybe you expected to be cooked and eaten."

"No, but with what I know about Beaumont…" Dallen paused, deciding not to make a case for his detention.

"Try a little experiment," Sanko said, taking Dallen's sidearm and dropping it into his own pocket. "When you get back to Madison make out a report saying you heard some non-existent people claiming to have ended the non-existence of some other non-existent people. I'd like to hear what sort of reaction you get."

It was late afternoon when Dallen reached the city. He circled in low over the south-western districts, over Scottish Hill and the immaculate, hermetically sealed suburbs which would later begin to glow in a simulation of life as the lights came on in a thousand empty streets. The tall buildings of the city centre, projecting above vivid toyland greenery, were washed with sunlight and looked impossibly clean, idyllic. A visitor winging down from space might have con-eluded that here was a community of contented, rational beings leading well-regulated lives—but Dallen's mood was one of disaffection as he picked out the pastel geometries of the City Hall.

His reckless dash to Cordele had, as well as providing vital information, jolted him out of grief-dominated patterns of behaviour, freed him from the emotional conviction that a craving for justice and revenge would, if strongly enough felt, bring about its own ends. He had been reminded that there was no even-handed arbiter, and that the most successful hunters were those who stalked their prey with coldness and calculation.

His ship hovered for a moment, then began its purposeful descent, its shadow a drifting prismatic blur which advanced and retreated according to the lie of the land beneath.

Chapter 9

Gerald Mathieu stood at the window of his office and watched the Bureau patrol ship slant down across the sky for a landing at Madison's inner field. The notion that Garry Dallen might be at the flying controls entered his mind, but he dismissed it and walked back to his desk. Dallen's prolonged absence from the City Hall had been welcome to Mathieu as a breathing space, but it was making him obsessive, giving his subconscious mind too much time to elaborate on the image of a dark superhuman Nemesis.

He had survived his encounter with Dallen immediately after the incident … woman and child, crumpling, failing, idiot eyes shining … but the circumstances had been exceptional and had not quite dispelled his fear of the other man's intuitive power. Since then that fear had been growing, week by week, and now the prospect of eventually having to face Dallen again ranked with all the other great phobias of his life. There was the dread of venturing into infinite black space, of living in a wafer-thin shell of alien metal, of being exposed as a criminal, of ever having—even once—to exist for a full day without felicitin. And now there was the next meeting with Garry Dallen…

Mathieu sat down at his desk and tried to concentrate on the backlog of work. The job of mayor or deputy in an artificial city bore little resemblance to that traditionally associated with the titles. It was more akin to being executive officer for a very large theme park, and Mathieu's responsibilities ranged from public relations and tourist information to recruitment and purchasing. Even with extensive electronic assistance the job was demanding, especially as the city's annual revenue was in a steady decline. Mathieu had deferred for several days decisions about reducing engineering budgets, but on his way to the office that morning had promised himself good progress. It would be a sign that he was still functioning well, that a single unlucky accident… woman and child, crumpling, going down before him, minds blown away… was not going to ruin his entire career.

He called up a set of cost analysis graphs on the desk's main screen and strove to link the varicoloured blocks and lines to external reality. Silent minutes went by. The graphs shimmered on the surface of his eyes, tantalising him by refusing to be drawn into his head. He was beginning to feel a mild panic when the internal communicator chimed and Mayor Bryceland's features appeared at the projection focus, eyes blindly questing. Taking only a second to smooth down his jacket, Mathieu accepted the call, making himself visible at the caller's terminal.

"Let's have a talk about the conference," Bryceland said at once. "What have you got so far in the way of a programme?"

Mathieu was baffled for a moment, then it dawned on him that Bryceland was referring to a conference of museum city managers which Madison was scheduled to host in the coming November. "I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, Frank," he said. "Perhaps next week…"

"Next week!" Bryceland's puffy countenance registered dismay. "I suppose you're aware how important this conference is?"

"Yes. I'm also aware it's five months away."

"Five months is no time at all," Bryceland grumbled. "Specially the way you're working these days."

"Meaning?"

"Try to figure it out for yourself." Bryceland's image dissolved into transient specks of light, ending the conversation.

"Jesus Christ!" Mathieu leaped to his feet, fists clenched, angry and afraid at the same time. He walked around the office and paused at his full-length mirror for reassurance. The blond-haired figure gazing at him from the safety of that other office, the one in the looking-glass world, appeared exactly as it should—tail, young, athletic, successful, immaculate. But were the eyes beginning to show signs of strain? Was there a slight hunching of the shoulders which indicated harmful tensions?

Mathieu raised one hand to touch the rose-petal perfection of his white collar, but the figure in the mirror betrayed him. It guided the hand to the inner pocket of his jacket, and found himself holding the gold pen, the one which dispensed a magical ink. He hesitated, trembling on the edge. It was regarded as medically impossible for anyone to kick the felicitin habit unaided, but since the day of the incident … woman and child, crumpling, unique human flames guttering … he had been holding off on the fixes until after office hours. The motive had been self-defence, the plan to avoid dangerous confidence, but five weeks had gone by and his position had to be growing more secure with each passing hour. And there might be a greater hazard in the displaying of personality changes dating back to the precise day of the crime … woman and child, crumpling, falling…

He clicked the pen's changeover mechanism and quickly drew the point across his tongue.

As he was returning the gold cylinder to his pocket he felt a twinge of curiosity about the exact amount of felicitin left in its reservoir. There was no anxiety involved, no urgency, simply a mild desire to confirm that all was well. He raised the pen to his eye and rotated it until the light from the window was caught in an integral glass capillary. The shock was almost physical, dragging his mouth out of shape, causing him to take a step backwards.

There was under a week's supply, where there should have been enough for a month.

Along with the confirmation that he had been using too much of the drug came the first surge of induced reassurance, blessed certainty that he could handle any difficult situation which arose. Felicitin, as he had noted before, worked fast.

The main problem to be considered was that his supplier was not due in from the west coast for another two weeks, and the solution was straightforward—he would cook up a good reason and make a special flight to Los Angeles. QED. Everything would be fine. In fact, now that he thought about it constructively, discovering that his drug stock was low was one of the best things that had ever happened to him. The pen dispenser was a rich man's toy—making it far too easy to take an over-generous dose—so from next week onwards he was going to use microcaps. That system was much better. It would give him a foolproof method of monitoring his consumption, would also save him a lot of money, and would also be a major step towards the day when he would be able to quit using the drug altogether.

All was well with his world—and the wondrously heartening aspect of it was that things could only get better…

Mathieu adjusted the hang of his jacket to his satisfaction, smiled at his reflection in the mirror, and sauntered back to his desk.

Chapter 10

Dallen had endured the emptiness and quietness of the house for as long as his temperament would allow, and now he had begun to get a last-man-in-the-world feeling.

From the front window he could see most of one shallow slope of the city's North Hill, and there was no sign of movement anywhere in that expanse of nostalgic blue dusk. The progressive appearance of lights—distant speckles of gold, peach and amber—provided little comfort, because he knew that automatic switches were producing exactly the same effect in the uninhabited districts of Limousin, Scottish Hill and Gibson Park. Everything looked right for the tourists gliding down from orbit on the evening shuttle, but from where Dallen stood it was almost possible to believe that Earth's last citizens had been spirited away while he was dozing.

The words of the old song tried to invade his mind… Out on the freeway, moonflowers blow; Everyone's gone to Big O… but he blocked them off, turning away from the window to walk through silent rooms in which his imagination still detected a hint of urine. Yesterday there had been a message from Roy Picciano explaining that he had, in view of Dallen's late return, taken Cona to the clinic for extra tests which would last at least three days. Give yourself a break, the recording had concluded, take a couple of days off.

At first Dallen had been unable to accept the advice. The sortie to Cordele had left him physically tired, but he had driven to the clinic and spent time with Cona and Mikel. She had been bored and then angered by his attempts to get her to speak, and the boy had been asleep in his cot in the adjoining room, one hand clutching a tiny yellow truck. Dallen sought consolation in the fact that Mikel still had a special liking for toy vehicles, but it was a desperately thin lifeline. The infant personality had been erased before it had properly formed—so how could it ever be retrieved? You want a replacement for your baby son, sir? Must have a fondness for miniature cars? Wait just a moment, sir—we've got the exact model you need…

Dallen had left the clinic with a tearing pain in his throat and a dark chill gathering in his mind. He could go to the chief of police with a new theory about the five-week-old crime, but Lashbrook would seize on the lack of obvious motive as an excuse to take no action. In any case, Dallen reminded himself, he had no wish for the culprit to be taken by the authorities and shipped off to Botany Bay. The punishment would have to be much more drastic, personally administered, a venting of suppurative poison, and for that he would have to End the guilty person unaided.

And there still remained the enigma of the motive. Glib words about a Luddite Special being its own motive explained everything and nothing. What he needed was a credible reason for somebody who worked in City Hall to use such a device on an innocent woman and child, and his brain seemed quite unequal to the task. Grief, bitterness and undirected hatred were no aids to analytical thought.

It was in that state of mind that Dallen had fallen asleep in an armchair after reaching home. When he bad wakened in the middle of the night there had seemed no point in transferring to a lonely bed, so he had stayed in the chair till morning. A full day spent in brooding, snacking and dozing had further reduced his drive, and now ,he felt too dispirited to think at all. The house had become a tomb, a prison, a place from which he had to escape. Ceasing his aimless drifting, he took a cool shower, shaved and changed into fresh clothing, all the while telling himself that he had no definite plans, that he might be going to the gymnasium or to a bar or to his office. It was not until he had actually started the engine of his car and had to choose a destination that he acknowledged he was going to see Silvia London.

He drove south with the top down, following the route he had traversed the previous day with Rick Renard. A few major stars were visible through the city's canopy of diffused light, forming a sparse background to Polar Band One, which was nearing zenity. The north-south line of space stations and parked ships had once been a brilliant spectacle in the night sky, but it had dimmed as the era of the great migrations had drawn to a close. Now it was mainly composed of irreparable hulks, many of which had been partially cannibalised to enable other ships to make final departures for Orbitsville. Dallen could only see it as a symbol of Earth's decline and he had no regrets when turning west removed the thinly jewelled braid from his field of view.

Lights were on all over the London residence and its extensions, and the presence of at least twenty cars on the apron of gravel added to the impression that there was a sizable party going on inside. Dallen, who had been expecting a much smaller gathering, swung his car into a vacant space and got out, discovering that he was close to Renard's gold Rollac. He hesitated for a second, suddenly dubious about entering the house, then noticed Silvia at a ground-floor window in animated conversation with someone he could not see. The vertical rays from an overhead lamp emphasised the pouting fullness of her lower lip and highlighted her breasts, making her look impossibly voluptuous, like a sexist illustration on a cassette cover. He watched her for a moment, feeling like a voyeur, and went into the house.

"Welcome to this informal meeting of Anima Mundi Foundation!" The voice came from a thin, high-shouldered man of about sixty who was standing in the centre of the square hall. He was casually dressed in slacks and floral shirt, but his silver-bearded face had a conscious dignity which would have been more in keeping with donnish robes. A bar of unnaturally high colour reached from cheekbone to cheekbone across the saddle of his nose.

"Is this your first visit to one of our discussion evenings?" he said, giving Dallen a formal smile.

"Yes, but I only came to…" Dallen broke off as he realised he was speaking to a holomorph. The visual illusion was perfect, only betrayed by a slight studio quality to the voice. It had been beamed at Dallen's ears too accurately, robbing it of any acoustic interaction with the considerable volume of sound coming from rooms on either side of the hall.

"In that case let me introduce myself," the holomorph said. "I am Karal London, and I offer you some wonderful news—you, my friend, are going to live for ever."

"Is that a fact?" Dallen replied uneasily, loathe to converse with the unseen computer which was directing the holomorph's responses.

"Not only is it a fact, my friend—it is the single most important truth in the cosmos. You will have ample opportunity to discuss it during the evening—and there is a comprehensive range of study aids, all available to you free of charge—but let me begin by asking you one vital question. What is…?"

The question was lost to Dallen as the door at his right opened and the buoyantly curvaceous figure of Rick Renard appeared, martini glass in hand. He grinned on seeing Dallen, walked straight to the holomorph and shoved his knee into the vicinity of its groin.

"Out of the way, you silly old fart," he commanded, stepping into the solid image and causing it to flow and fragment. "This really balls the whole system. Old Karal programmed the set-up himself before he left for Orbitsville, but he was too conceited to allow for anybody being disrespectful enough to stand right inside him. The computer just doesn't know how to react."

"I'm not surprised," Dallen said, reluctantly amused.

"Wait to you see this." Renard edged backwards a little, allowing London's image to reassemble itself in front of him, now apparently with four arms, two of which belonged to Renard and were waving like those of a Balinese dancer.

"…long been postulated that mind is a universal property of matter, so that even elementary particles would be endowed with it to some degree," the grotesque image was saying in London's voice. "We now know that mind is a universal entity or interaction of the same order as electricity or gravitation, and that there exists a modulus of transformation, analogous to Einstein's basic equation, which equates mind stuff with other entities of the physical world…"

The superimposed image abruptly vanished, leaving the floor to a triumphant Renard. "The programme can't cope, you see. Old Karal should have stuck to his physics."

"He didn't expect sabotage."

"What did he expect? People come here for some free booze and a bit of discreet lusting after Silvia—not to be lectured by a miserable bloody apparition. Come on, old son, you look as though you could use a drink."

"It's been one of those days."

"Yeah." Renard paused, his gold-freckled face looking uncharacteristically solemn. "I've only just heard about your wife and kid."

"I don't want to talk about that."

"No. It was just that I … Ah, hell!" Renard led the way into the room from which he had emerged and went to a long sideboard which was serving as a bar. Dallen asked him for a weak Scotch and water, and while it was being prepared took the opportunity to look around. There were about two dozen people in the room, most of them men, who were standing in groups of three or four. He recognised several faces from various City Hall departments, but was unable to see Silvia.

"She's around somewhere," Renard said knowingly, flashing his narrow bow of teeth.

Dallen concealed his annoyance over having his screens penetrated so easily. "Why are these people here? They can't all be theoretical physicists."

"Metaphysicists would be more like it. Karal claims there are special particles called mindons which are harder to detect than neutrinos because they exist in what he calls mental space. It's all a bit abstruse for a mere botanist, but apparently our brains have mindon, look-alikes in mental space—where most of the physical laws are different—which enable us to survive death. Karal doesn't talk about dying—he refers to it as becoming discarnate.

"It's all supposed to be very comforting and uplifting," Renard added as he handed Dallen a clinking glass. "Personally, I prefer this stuff or an occasional dab of jinks."

"Felicitin?" Dallen was only mildly curious. "Can you get it right here in Madison?"

Renard shrugged. "A dealer comes through from the west coast once a month, so somebody in town must be really hooked on the stuff."

"Who's got that kind of money?"

"Dealers don't talk. Felicitin isn't illegal, as you know, but heavy users generally get up to some highly illegal activities sooner or later. You can sometimes spot them, though, if you know what to look for."

Dallen sipped his drink and was a little surprised to find it had been mixed exactly to his specification. Renard was on his best behaviour. How, he wondered, would you pinpoint a person who was really dosing up on Felicitin? Look out for someone who was always cool and calm, exuding that air of serene confidence…? A memory picture flickered briefly behind his eyes-—tall young man with Nordic good looks, expensively tailored, relaxed, smiling. Dallen concentrated until he had identified the image as that of Gerald Mathieu, the deputy mayor, then frowned and peered into his glass as a coldness developed in his stomach.

"I hope this isn't supercooled ice," he said. "I've heard this stuff can be bad for you."

Renard smiled. "It's always the ice—never the booze."

Dallen nodded, becoming aware of a man and woman purposefully moving closer to him. He turned and saw the rotund figure of Peter Ezzati, the city's salvage officer, accompanied by his equally plump wife, Libby. While they were shaking hands he noticed that the woman's eyes were following his with a kind of melting intensity and he guessed with a sinking feeling that she was a tragedy buff, a professional sympathiser.

"Is this your first time here, Garry?" Ezzati said. "Are you enjoying it?"

"I'm a bit vague about what I'm supposed to enjoy."

"The talk, mainly. Karal can be quite convincing about his mindons, if you follow his argument right through, but it's the conversation I like. You get guys here whose minds aren't limited to sport and sex, who can talk about anything. For instance, what do you think about these green flashes they're getting on Orbitsville?"

Dallen was baffled. "I'm afraid I…

"You're the first policeman we've had at the meetings," Libby Ezzati put in, her gaze still a channel for moist compassion.

"I'm not a policeman," Dallen explained. "I work for the Deregistration Bureau."

Libby shot an accusing glance at her husband, as though charging him with having told her lies. "But you can arrest people, can't you?"

"Only for things like being on land where there's an exclusion order in force."

"That's another thing," Ezzati said. "Is it true they're pulling the deregister line in to a forty kilometre radius of Madison?"

Dallen nodded. "The population here is shrinking. There's enough good farming land within the radius."

"I don't like it—it's all part of a process." Ezzati considered what he had just said and appeared to find it significant. "All part of a process."

"Everything is part of a process," Dallen said.

"I'm not talking philosophy—I'm talking people."

"You're talking piffle, darling," Libby told her husband, and having allied herself with Dallen decided it was rapport time. "You know, Garry, Kipling had a vital message for all of us when he pointed out that God never wasted a leaf or a tree…"

"Rick is the botanist around here." Dallen walked away quickly and went back into the hall where the rematerialised holomorph of Karal London was addressing two new arrivals … discarnate mind composed of mindons interacts with matter only very weakly, but that doesn't call its existence into question. After all, we have yet to detect the graviton or the gravitino … Coming out of the beam of sound, Dallen went into the room opposite and found it populated like the one he had left, small groups standing and talking earnestly in an ambience of low-placed lights and amber drinks.

He worked his way through them and went into the extension where yesterday morning, which seemed an aeon ago, he had first seen Silvia's incredible glass mosaic screen. The studio was empty. Diffuser lamps were shining behind the trefoil panels, providing a patchy illumination which obscured the design of the three universes, shading them off into a mysterious darkness suggestive of the vast tracts of the cosmos beyond the limits of human vision. Dallen found the entire construct beautiful beyond words, and again he was awed by the sheer amount of labour that it represented. His appreciation of art was untutored, a chief criterion being that a piece should appear difficult, to have taxed the artist's powers, to have been hard work—and by that standard alone the screen, with its hundreds of thousands of varicoloured glass chips, had to be the most impressive and soul-glutting creation he had ever seen.

"It's not for sale," Silvia London said from close behind him.

"Pity—I was going to commission a dozen." He turned and found himself warmed by her presence. Everything about her seemed right to him—the humorous intelligence in the brown eyes, the determination of the chin, the strength combined with the utter femininity of the fullbosomed figure sheathed in a pleated white dress.

"Perhaps I could make you a little suncatcher," she said.

"It wouldn't be the same. Being little, I mean. It's the size of this thing—all those separate pieces of glass—which helps make it what it is."

Silvia's lips twitched. "You're a dialectical materialist."

"Step outside and say that," Dallen challenged. Silvia laughed and this time his arms, unbidden, actually opened a little to receive her. He froze in a turmoil of guilt and confusion. Silvia seemed to catch her breath and her eyes became troubled.

"I was talking to Rick a little while ago," she said. "He told me what happened to your family. I'd heard about it before, but I didn't realise … I didn't connect you…"

"It's all right. It's my problem."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I've heard of people making a full recovery."

"It depends on how close they were to the gun. If only the memory cells are affected it's possible for a person to be re-educated, recreated almost, in a year or so, because all the connecting networks that person built up are still intact. But if the cell connections have been damaged…"

Dallen hesitated, shocked at finding himself discussing the subject with an outsider, and even more so by what he was about to admit to himself. "Cona and Mikel were hit at very close range. I think they're gone."

"I'm so sorry." Silvia stared at him for a moment, shoulders slightly raised, as if coming to a decision. "Garry, I'm not trying to push Karal's ideas at you, but there's something I'd like you to see. Will you come and look?"

"I don't mind," He said, setting his glass down.

"Through here." Silvia led the way to the back of the studio, into a workshop which was equipped with a range of machine tools, and from there into a short corridor. At the end of it was a heavy door which she opened by thumbprinting the lock. Revealed was a large square chamber which was dominated by a rectangular transparent box resembling a display case in a museum. Suspended inside the box on near-invisible wires were six spheres of polished alloy roughly a metre in diameter. Dallen went closer to the case and saw that each sphere was surrounded by a cluster of delicate needle-like probes, all of them impinging in a direction normal to the surface. Wires from the bases of the probes converged on instrument housings on the floor beneath the case.

"Impressive," Dallen said. "I've seen a Newton's cradle before, but not his double bed."

"My husband and five other volunteers are surrendering their lives for this experiment," Silvia replied, making it clear that flippancy was not welcome. "The probes are not actually touching the spheres, though it looks that way. The tip of each one is ten microns from the surface. They're kept at that distance by sensors and microcontrols even if the spheres are disturbed by local vibrations or earth tremors or temperature changes. The system compensates for all natural forces."

"What's the point of it?"

Silvia's face was solemn. "It won't compensate for supranatural forces. Karal is planning to move the first sphere in the line when he becomes discarnate. If he is successful, as he fully expects to be, the sphere will make contact with one or more probes, and there'll be a signal."

"I see." Dallen sought a way to conceal his instinctive scepticism. "Proof of life after death."

"Proof that what we call death is merely a transition."

Dallen realised that he had to be honest. "Haven't other people tried to send signals back from the quote other side unquote?"

"They weren't physicists with a full understanding of quantum non-location and the forces involved."

"No, but … I never heard of mindons before tonight, but I gather that if they exist at all their interaction with matter is very, very weak. How could a … discarnate entity composed of mindons hope to move a thing like that?" Dallen flicked his thumb to indicate the nearest of the massive spheres.

"Karal teaches that mindons are somehow related to gravitons."

"But we don't even know that gravitons exist."

"But, but, but!" Silvia's smile was sadly messianic. "Has it ever struck you how onomatopoeic that word is?"

"I'm in a constant state of wonderment over it," Dallen said and immediately cursed the verbal reflex which often tricked him into hurting those he had no wish to hurt, but Silvia was unaffected.

She went straight into a discourse on nuclear physics, the gist of which was that not all fundamental interactions are common to all particles—a neutrino having just one—which opened the theoretical door for mindons having only the mental interaction plus another, as yet undemonstrated, with gravitons. The picture Dallen received was one of a dead Karal London somehow riding herd on a swarm of gravitons and guiding them across interstellar space to collide with one of the six spheres. He also gleaned that there were five other elderly disciples—-one on Orbitsville, one on the planet Terranova, three in various parts of Earth—who had similar visionary plans, each with a separate sphere as his target. It was a scenario which Dallen found quite preposterous.

"I'm sorry," he said, 'it's too much for me. I can't believe it."

"Belief isn't necessary at this stage—all you have to do is accept that it's all conceivable in terms of present day physics." Silvia spoke as one repeating a creed. "A personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain's complex physical organisation in order to develop."

"My brain is getting a bit overheated," Dallen said, dabbing imaginary sweat from his brow.

"All right—here endeth the first lesson—but I warn you you'll get more of the same when you come back." Silvia walked to the door of the chamber and paused for him to join her. "If you come back."

"I don't scare easily." You liar, he told himself, you're going weak at the knees. He was acutely aware as he walked towards her that a clearly delineated "business" phase of the encounter had ended, that they were alone, and that she was waiting in the actual doorway, which meant there would be a moment in which it would be almost impossible to avoid contact. He went to her and an instinct prompted him to extend his hands, palm outwards and fingers slightly apart, in a gesture which had meaning only for the two of them and only for that unique instant. Silvia put her hands against his, interlocking their fingers, and the warmth of her entered him and changed him. He tried to move closer, but she checked him with a slight increase of pressure.

"Don't kiss me, Garry," she said. "I couldn't handle it."

"Does that mean it's too soon?"

She eyed him soberly. "I think that's what it means."

"In that case," he said, deciding that a change of mood would be good strategy, "shall we repair to wherever people repair at a time like this?"

Silvia nodded, looking grateful, and they walked back through the studio to the main part of the house, where she parted from him to attend other guests. Dallen's feeling of elation lasted perhaps five seconds after she was lost to view, and then—as he had known it would—there came a reaction. The predominant emotion was guilt, his constant companion in recent weeks, but now a caustic new element had been added, one he had trouble identifying. Was it in the acknowledgement of what Silvia London could do to him, his belated discovery of the difference between affection, which he had always assumed to be love, and another kind of emotion altogether—wayward and unsettling—which might really be love?"

I ought to get out of here, he thought. I ought to get out of here right now and never come back. He turned to walk to the door and almost collided with Peter Ezzati and his wife.

"You've been getting your indoctrination," Ezzati said gleefully. "I can tell by your face."

"Peter!" Libby was overtly tactful. "Garry doesn't want intrusions."

Dallen looked down at her, recalled his earlier lack of manners and forced a smile. "I'm afraid I get a bit irritable when it's past my bedtime—I must need a cocoa infusion or something."

"I'll get you a proper drink," Ezzati said, moving away. "Scotch and water, wasn't it?"

Dallen considered calling him back and refusing the drink and leaving immediately, then came the realisation that it was still only around ten in the evening and his chances of sleeping if he went back to his empty house were zero. It could be a good idea to spend some time with neutral and undemanding people, to wind down a little and prove to himself that he was a balanced and-mature person with complete control over his emotions.

"I was reading a bit about probability math the other day," he said, seeking total irrelevancy. "It said that if two people lose each other in a big department store there's no guarantee they'll ever meet up again unless one of them stands still."

An expression of polite bafflement appeared on Libby's round face. "How interesting."

"Yes, but if you think about it that has to be one of the most useless pieces of information ever. I mean…"

"I've never been to a big department store," Libby said, "it must have been wonderful to visit somewhere like Macy's before they let New York go down. Something else that's been lost…"

Dallen was unable to produce an original comment. "You win some, you lose some."

"If that were the case things might be reasonable, but the fact is that we lose, lose, lose. Optima Thule has taken everything and given nothing back."

In spite of his emotional disquiet, Dallen was able to interest himself in the point of view. "Aren't we taking from Optima Thule? Isn't it doing all the giving?"

"I'm not talking about patches of grass. What has the human race done in the last two centuries? Nothing! There has been practically no progress in any of the arts. Science is static. Technology is actually slipping back a notch or two every year. Orbitsville is a sink!"

"This seems to be my lecture night," Dallen said.

"I'm sorry." Libby gave him a rueful smile and he realised he had been too quick to categorise her earlier. "I'm a romantic, you see, and for me Orbitsville is an ending, not a beginning. I can't help wondering what Garamond and all the others would have found if Orbitsville hadn't been there and they had kept on going."

"Probably nothing."

"Probably, but now we'll never know. There's a galaxy out there, and we turned our backs on it. Sometimes, when I'm feeling paranoic, I suspect that Orbitsville was built for that very reason."

"Orbitsville wasn't built by anybody," Dallen said. "Only people who have never been there can think of it as an artifact… When you've actually seen the oceans and the mountains and the…" He broke off as Ezzati appeared at his side and thrust a full glass into his hand with unnecessary vigour.

"Some of these guys have a bloody nerve," Ezzati muttered, his apple cheeks dark with anger. "I'm doing no more favours, folks—not for anybody."

Libby was immediately sympathetic. "What happened?"

"That young weasel Solly Hume, that's what happened! He's getting tanked up in the next room, and when I hinted to him—purely for his own good, mind you—that he was overdoing it a bit he had the gall to say I owed him fifty monits."

"Peter, you haven't been borrowing," Libby said, looking concerned.

"Try to talk sense, will you?" Ezzati gulped down some liquor and concentrated his attention on Dallen. "Last week I practically gave that kid Hume an obsolete computer for his stupid bloody society, and tonight he had the nerve to ask for his money back. Said its guts had been denatured or something like that. What does he expect from a gizmo that's been lying in a basement since the year dot?"

"Perhaps he thought it would have glass tubes," Dallen said, wishing his own problems could be so trivial. "You know—hollow state technology."

"No, it's only an old Department of Supply monitor he found on Sublevel Three. There used to be a computer centre down there. Apparently this thing was supposed to keep tabs on municipal supplies. It beats me why anybody would want to be bothered with it."

Dallen felt the coolness return to his system, as if a door was swinging ajar.

"You've argued yourself into a corner, darling," Libby said scornfully. "If the monitor was so boring and useless in the first place you were lucky to get fifty monits for it."

"Yes, but…" Ezzati glared at her, unwilling to concede the point. "I'll take it back from Hume and advertise it properly. Electronic archaeology is a big thing these days, you know. As a matter of fact…" He frowned into his glass as he swirled its contents. "…I might already have another customer. I seem to remember somebody else asking me about that machine."

"Now you're being childish," Libby said, her voice vibrant with scorn. "Admit it."

Dallen stared frozenly at Ezzati, willing him to produce a name.

"Perhaps you're right," Ezzati said with a shrug. "Why should I get worked up when it isn't my money that's involved? You don't get any credit for bringing the job home with you. Not around here, anyway. There was a time when I was dumb enough to believe that all it took to get a man to the top in Madison was hard work and dedication and loyalty, then I got wise to myself and … Gerald Mathieu!"

"You got wise to yourself and Gerald Mathieu?" Libby stared at him, feigning concern, and raised her gaze to Dallen's face. "Have you any idea what my idiot husband is talking about?"

"I'm afraid he has lost me," Dallen said, moving away in search of a place where he could be alone with his thoughts, where he could begin to draw up his plans.

Chapter 11

There were now only two aircraft at the disposal of Madison City's executive board, and one of them had been grounded for more than a week pending the arrival of parts. Mayor Bryceland was inclined to treat the remaining machine as his personal transport, with the result that it had taken Mathieu four anxious days to get behind its controls. He had one decent fix of felicitin in hand, but had been rationing his usage severely to obtain that slender reserve. As he fastened down the aircraft's canopy he felt tired and apprehensive, almost certain there would be a last-minute hitch to prevent his taking off.

Far off to his right, its lower surface obscured by heat shimmers, was the blue-and-white hull of a space shuttle which had just landed. The churning of the hot air above the expanse of ferrocrete was so violent that Mathieu had difficulty in seeing the disembarking tourists, but it seemed to him that there were less than usual. It had already been a bad year for the hotels along Farewell Avenue—the thoroughfare which had once channeled millions of emigrants into space—and it looked as though things were going to get worse. There had to come a day, Mathieu realised, when the remote bureaucrats of Optima Thule would pull out the plug and stop subsidising the holiday pilgrimages to Earth. And when that happened he would be out of a job and would have to consider returning to his birthplace.

The thought of venturing out among the stars, of having to spend the rest of his life on the surface of an incredibly flimsy bubble, brought the usual stab of agoraphobic dread. He began to reach for the gold pen in his inner pocket, became aware of what he was doing and returned his hand to the aircraft's control column. Far ahead of him, a quivering silvery blur at the lower edge of the sky's blue dome, was a freighter coming in from Metagov Central Clearing in Winnipeg. It gradually drifted off to one side and the on-board microprocessor advised Mathieu that it was in order for him to begin the flight.

Deciding to do the work himself, he extended the aircraft's invisible wings to take-off configuration and increased the thrust from its drive tubes. In a matter of seconds he was soaring above the complex of disused runways which constituted most of Madison Field. He banked to the west and levelled off at only a hundred metres, aiming at the serried green ridges which were the southernmost reaches of the Appalachians. The ship's shadow raced beneath him, fringed with prismatics from sunlight which had become entangled in force-field wings.

It came to Mathieu that this was his first time to be airborne since the City Hall incident … woman and child, crumpling, plastic doll faces with plastic doll eyes…and that he was deriving none of his customary satisfaction from the experience. Flying fast and low on manual control over the empty countryside had been one of his most biding pleasures, the perfect escape from all the pressures of identity, but on this summer morning his problems were easily keeping pace, like invisible wingmen.

The pay-offs he had to make to run his illegal business were growing at a frightening rate, his work was suffering, women friends were reacting badly to changes in his temperment, and—looming above all else—was the responsibility for having extinguished two human personalities. There was the associated guilt … and the consequent fear of Garry Dallen, which felicitin could only allay for short periods … and it was hard to say which was casting the greater pall over his existence. And he had become so very, very tired…

Mathieu opened his eyes and stared at the green wall of hillside which was tilting and expanding directly ahead of him, filling his field of view.

Christ, I'm going to die!

He shouted a curse as he realised where he was and what was happening to him. His hands pulled back on the control column, but the hillside kept coming at him, huge and solid and lethal, determined to reduce his body to a crimson slurry. It was aided and abetted by the laws of aerodynamics which imposed a lag between a control demand and the ship's response, and he knew only too well that the penalty for acting too late was death.

Mathieu cringed back in the seat, eyes distended and mouth agape, as the expansion of the hillside speeded up to become a green explosion. The control column was back to its full extent, punishing the shuddering airframe, calling on the ship to do the impossible—then an edge of sky appeared.

The horizon rocked and fell away beneath the ship's prow.

For perhaps a minute Mathieu sat mouthing swear words, stringing them into a meaningless chant while his heart lurched and thudded like a runaway motor which was tearing itself from its mountings. Only when his breathing had retained to normal and the prickling of cold sweat had died away from his forehead and palms was he able to relax, but even then he did not feel quite safe. He glanced around the quiet-droning environment of the cockpit and had actually begun to check his instruments when it dawned on him that the new threat, the new source of danger, was in his own mind.

An idea had been implanted, one which had been conceived during the brush with oblivion. For a single instant, in the midst of all the prayer and panic, there had been the temptation—strange, sweet and shameful—to push forward on the stick. In that split-second he could almost have gone willingly to his death, riding the crest of a dark wave.

Mathieu tried so consider the notion dispassionately. It was shocking and unnatural to him, and at the same time it was strangely beguiling, full of intriguing contradictions.

He had no wish to die—but he was attracted by the prospect of being dead.

A state of non-existence had many advantages. There would be no more nightmares and no more of the terrible waking visions. There would be no guilt or fear. There would be no need to steal, no need to finance his habit. There would be no need to lie or to hide. There would be no need to go on and on tricking people into believing he was what he appeared to be.

There would be no need to fear going into space or the prospect having to face the dizzy vastness of Orbitsville. There would be no need to dread failure.

There would be no future and no past. In short, there would be no Gerald Mathieu, the man who only existed as a compound of failure. And as a special bonus, one he could claim immediately, there would be no need to hold at bay the tiredness which had begun to follow him everywhere like a stalking animal.

That was perhaps the most seductive aspect of the idea. He could start right away by closing his eyes for a short period, say for one minute, just to see what happened and how he felt about it. There did not have to be any great melodramatic decision to commit suicide—it was more like a game, or an experiment which could be terminated at any point he chose…

Mathieu glanced at his airspeed indicator and saw that he was doing almost a thousand kilometres an hour. Nice round figure, he thought. He relaxed his grip on the yoke, closed his eyes and began to count off the seconds. At once he became aware of the low-amplitude hum of the power plant and the rush of atmosphere along the pressure skin. The ship was suddenly alive, yawing and twisting and dancing, impossibly balanced on an invisible pyramid of air.

On the count of only twelve Mathieu snapped his eyelids open and found he was still flying straight and level. The universe was unchanged—a blueness of prehistoric purity above and all around him, vivid grasslands streaming below the ship's nose, occasional farm buildings smothered in vegetation, fleeting targets for his imaginary World War Two cannon.

It's risky flying at this height, he told himself. A man could get killed.

He took a deep breath, blinked to clear his eyes, and gave the task of flying his full attention, wondering if he would ever again summon up the courage for the great gamble. The aircraft butted and squirmed its way through a patch of turbulence, then settled down to quiet sensationless flight. It was hot in the cockpit and the sun seemed to be exerting a gentle downward pressure on his eyelids.

Mathieu resisted it for several minutes before deciding there would be no harm, no real danger, in shutting his eyes for a mere ten seconds. It was, after all, just a game.

There was no blackness when he closed his eyes—-only a pink infinity swarming with magenta and green after-images. He reached the count of ten easily and decided to try for twenty. If I fell asleep now Garry Dallen would never be able to touch me. I'm not going to sleep, of course, but it would be so good to stop running up those concrete stairs, to stop pulling the trigger on the woman and child, to stop seeing them crumpling, falling, idiot eyes staring…

An angry bleeping from the control console told Mathieu important changes were taking place in the outside universe, changes he ought to know about.

But he waited another five seconds before opening his eyes, and by then it was possible to distinguish separate blades of grass on the hillside which filled the entire field of view ahead.

He had time for one flicker of gratitude over the fact that there was absolutely nothing he could do.

It was easy, he thought, in the instant of the plane becoming a bomb.

Easy as

Chapter 12

The planning of a murder presented special difficulties, Dallen had realised.

Among them were the sheer novelty of the problem parameters and the ingrained moral objections which constantly disrupted his chains of thought. But this can't be me, the jolting recrimination would run, I just don't do this kind of thing. There was also the overriding need to make the murder look like an accidental death. An obvious homicide would trigger an investigation which was certain to reveal the circumstances which had led to Mathieu's fateful encounter with Cona and Mikel Dallen in the quietness of the north stairwell—and from there a short step in elementary police logic would lead to Garry Dallen.

The subsequent punishment would be little in itself. Dallen did not even regard a one-way trip to Orbitsville's Botany Bay as a punishment—which was partly why he could not allow Gerald Mathieu to escape along that road—but it would separate him from Cona and Mikel, thereby adding to the hurt they had already suffered. There was only one way for the issue to be resolved. Mathieu would have to die, preferably in a way he fully understood to be an execution, but which would appear like an accident to all others. And therein lay the practical difficulties.

Edgy and preoccupied, Dallen wandered into the kitchen and found Betti Knopp preparing lunch. She was a middle-aged voluntary worker who came to the house three days a week to shoulder the burden of looking after Cona, a duty she performed conscientiously and in almost total silence. Dallen was grateful to her, but had not managed to build any kind of conversational bridge. Aware of her uneasiness over his presence in the kitchen, he excused himself and went into the main room. Cona was standing at the window, looking out at the sloping perspectives of the North Hill. Her hair had been combed and neatly arranged in an adult style by Betti, and her attitude was one of wistful contemplation, just as in the period of homesickness following her arrival from Orbitsville.

Dallen was tempted to indulge in fantasy—the past weeks had been nothing more than a nightmare and Cona was her old self. He went to the window and put his arms around her. She turned and snuggled against him, making a cooing sound of pleasure and only the smell of chocolate, which the old Cona always avoided, interfered with the illusion that somehow his wife had been restored to him. He stared over her head in the direction of Madison's City Hall, unable to stop dashing his mind against the barriers of the past. If only he had not arranged to have lunch with Cona that day. If only he had been in his office. If only she had gone in by the main entrance. If only Mathieu had blanked the Department of Supply monitor a day or an hour or a minute later or earlier…

Dallen gave a low grunt of surprise as he discovered that Cona had cupped her hand on his genitals and was beginning to massage him with clumsy eagerness. For a second he almost yielded, then self-disgust plumed through him and he stepped back abruptly. Cona came after him, giggling, her gaze fixed on his groin.

"Don't do that," he snapped, holding her at arm's length. "No, Cona, no!"

She raised her eyes, reacting to the denial in his voice, and her face distorted into ugliness in a baby grimace of rage. She went for him again, strong and uninhibited, and he had to struggle to hold her in check. At that moment Betti Knopp came into the room with a tray of food. She gave Dallen a worried glance and turned to leave.

"Bring it," he ordered, pushing Cona down into an armchair. The sudden force he had to use either hurt or alarmed her and she gave a loud sob which in turn drew a gasp from Betti, the first sound he had heard her make that day. She knelt by Cona and attracted her attention by noisily stirring a dish of something yellow and glutinous. Dallen stared helplessly at the two women, then strode to the other end of the room and activated the holovision set.

"Speak to me, please," he said to the solid image of a thin, silver-bearded man which appeared at the set's focus. Dallen had dropped into a chair and folded his arms across his chest before realising the image was that of Karal London. He leaned forward intently.

…was in his early sixties," a news reader was saying, "and is understood to have refused treatment for the lung condition which led to his death. Doctor London was best known in the Madison City area as a philanthropist and creator of the Anima Mundi Foundation, an organisation devoted to promoting an exotic blend of science and religion. It was his work for the Foundation which took him to Optima Thule two years ago, and today there are unconfirmed reports that a bizarre experiment—-designed by Doctor London to prove some of his theories—has been…

"Mister Dallen!" Betti Knopp appeared directly in front of him as if by magic, hands on hips, elbows stuck out in the classic posture of exasperation. "There's something we have to get straight."

He said, "Wait a minute—I'm trying to hear what…"

"I won't wait a minute—you're going to hear me out right now!" Betti, who had been almost totally silent for weeks, was transformed into a noise-making machine. "I don't have to take all this high-and-mighty treatment from you or anybody else."

"Please let me hear this one item, and then we'll…

"If you think you're too important to talk with me why don't you contact the clinic and see if they got somebody more to your taste? Why don't you?"

Dallen got to his feet, tried to placate Betti and only succeeded in attracting the attention of Cona, who added to the noise level by starting to pound on her tray with a dish. He turned and ran upstairs to his bedroom, slammed the door shut behind him and switched on another holovision. The local newscast was still running, but now the subject was hotel closures. He tried to activate the set's ten-minute memory facility and swore silently but fervently as he remembered it needed repair. Tense with frustration, he considered returning to the downstairs set, then came an abrupt shift to a more analytical mode of thought.

It had been established that Karal London was dead, so the big question troubling Dallen related to the strange experiment. Was the fact of its being mentioned at all an indication that there had been a surprising result?

The notion seemed more preposterous than ever—the idea of a deceased scientist reaching out across the light years from Orbitsville and disturbing & material object on Earth—but why were the information media interested? Would anybody connected with the Anima Mundi Foundation have been in a hurry to spread word of a negative result?

And why, he thought in a conflict of emotion, am I standing around here?

There were five cars already parked on the gravel in front of the London place, and among them—inevitably it seemed—was Renard's gold Rollac. The front door of the house was open. Dallen went inside, found the hall deserted, and turned left to walk through the living room and the studio beyond. Afternoon sunlight had transformed the fantastic glass mosaic into a curtain of varicoloured fire. Dallen hurried past it and made his way to the corridor which ran towards the rear of the premises, following a murmur of voices. He reached the chamber housing the experimental apparatus and found the door ajar.

In the dimness beyond were perhaps a dozen people in a rough circle about the case containing the six metal spheres. As his eyes adjusted to the conditions Dallen made out the white-clad figure of Silvia London, with Renard standing next to her. She was slightly stooped and was hugging herself as though trying to ward off coldness. Dallen knew she had been crying. He paused in the doorway, uncertain of his right to enter, until Renard beckoned to him.

Feeling conspicuous, he moved forward a few paces and joined the circle of watchers whose attention was fixed on the first sphere in the row of six. A lengthy silence ensued and he felt a growing disappointment, a sense of anticlimax. It was apparent to him now that the members of the group were still waiting for a sign, for proof that their mentor continued to exist as an entity composed of virtually undetectable particles.

Naivety of that magnitude, he supposed, would in itself be a newsworthy item, and he too was guilty in that respect, otherwise he would still be at home. Or would he? He had discovered that his unconscious mind possessed neither scruples nor pride, so it was quite possible that he had come to the London house quite simply to be seen by Silvia as soon as possible after her husband's death—a tactic his conscious mind could only despise.

Irritated by yet another plunge into self-analysis, Dallen looked for an unobtrusive means of escape from the circle, but even Renard was displaying a kind of reverent absorption in the gleaming sphere and its matrix of sensors. Playing up to Silvia now that Karal is out of the way? The sheer adolescent bitchiness of the thought sparked Dallen's annoyance with himself into full-blown anger.

He turned to walk out—and in the same instant a blue lumitube above the first sphere flickered into life.

It glowed for several seconds, during which the silence in the chamber was like grey glass, then the light faded. The silence was disrupted by near-explosive sighs followed immediately by the clamour of voices. Somebody gave a quavering but triumphant laugh. Dallen continued to stare at the polished sphere while he tried to rebuild his private view of the universe.

If the brief wash of photons from the lumitube meant what it was supposed to mean, Karal London was actually in the same room with him, occupying the same space. The imputation was that, released from his body by death, the physicist had been able to rove out across interstellar space and by some unimaginable means impose his will on the forces of gravity.

The message was that the human personality could survive dissolution of the body, had the potential for immortality.

Dallen felt a stealthy chill move down his spine and he shivered. Could he now believe that the Cona Dallen to whom he had been married also still existed in another kind of space? Or would London's theory have it that the assault on her physical brain had to be equally destructive to a mindon counterpart? But that implied…

"I'm a victim of philosophical rape," Renard whispered, appearing at Dallen's side. "Old Karal has screwed up at least half of my highly expensive education."

Dallen nodded, his gaze fixed on Silvia who was leaving the chamber amid a knot of men and women, all of whom were speaking to her at once. "Where's everybody going? Don't they want to wait and see if anything else happens?"

"Nothing more is expected—that was the fifth signal. Didn't Silvia mention that bit? It's ail part of Karal's experimental procedure. As well as having a separate target, each volunteer is supposed to send a different number of pulses." Speaking in a low voice, with none of his customary scoffing vulgarity, Renard explained that the first signal had been detected four hours previously. On receiving it Silvia had notified some officers of the Foundation and, in accordance with an agreed plan, they had sent a tachygram to Karal London's residence in Port Napier, Orbitsville. There had come immediate confirmation that London had just died. For most workers in the field of the paranormal that would have been sufficient proof of the theory, but London had wanted to go further. The arrival of a predetermined number of signals would, as well as being a powerful argument against a freak equipment malfunction, demonstrate that in his discarnate form he could reproduce familiar human thought patterns. It would also show that time in mental space was compatible with time in normal space.

"I hate to admit it," Renard concluded, "but I owe the good Doctor London an apology."

"Aren't you a bit late?"

"Not at all." Renard faced the now empty chamber and spread his arms. "Karal, you old bugger, you're not as crazy as you look."

"Very handsome apology," Dallen said.

"The least I could do, old son—it isn't every day that somebody is obliging enough to die and leave you his wife. Did I mention that Silvia is going to the Big O with me?"

Dallen's heart sledged against his ribs. "It must have slipped your mind."

"Beautiful self-control, Garry—you didn't even blink." Renard's arch of teeth glinted as he peered into Dallen's face. "The Foundation's main job now is to spread the glad tidings, which means there's no point in Silvia hanging around here when somebody else can keep an eye on the experiment. All the scientific bodies have their headquarters on Orbitsville, so…

"Will she address them herself?"

"Only as a figurehead—and that's a job she's really cut out for. There'll be some qualified physicists from the Foundation going out to do all the talking, and I'm giving everybody a free trip." Renard smiled again. "Just to prove what a genuinely decent person I am."

"Of course." Determined not to become involved in any of Renard's private games, Dallen began to leave.

"Wait a minute, Garry." Renard moved to block the doorway. "Why don't you go back to Orbitsville with us? There's nothing on this clapped-out ball of mud for you or your family. I've got most of my grass specimens on board the ship and we'll be ready to go in a couple of days."

"Thanks, but I'm not interested."

"Free trip, old son. And no delays. Worth thinking about."

Dallen repressed a pang of dislike. "If I asked why you wanted me along, would you give me a straight answer?"

"A straight answer? What an unreasonable request!" The humorous glint faded from Renard's eyes. ""Would you believe that I just like you and want to help?"

"Try something else."

"Garry, you shouldn't be so unbending. What if I say it's because you're the nearest thing I have to a rival? I told you before that the universe looks after me and gives me everything I want, which is fine-but it gets a bit boring. I mean, I know I'm going to have Silvia … I can't lose … but if you were around there'd be the illusion of competition, and it would make life more interesting for all concerned. How does that sound?"

"It sounds weird," Dallen said. "Are you on felicitin right now?"

Renard shook his head. "I'm naturally like this—and I'm not letting you out of here until you agree that we're all going to Orbitsville together."

"That's an infringement of my liberty." Dallen smiled pleasantly, masking the glandular spurting which accompanied the thought of being allowed to put his hands on Renard. He had taken one step towards him when a confusion of sounds reached them from another part of the building—startled voices, an irregular hammering, the shattering of glass. Rename! turned and walked quickly along the corridor with Dallen at his heels. A rapid increase in the noise level told them the commotion was originating in the studio section. The repeated splintering of glass gave Dallen a sick premonition.

He entered the studio at a run and had to edge through a cluster of people to see what was happening. Their attention was concentrated cm Silvia. She was gripping a long metal bar and was using it, swinging from one side and then the other, to destroy her glass mosaic screen.

At each slicing impact another part of the unique creation ruptured and sagged, and brilliant motes of colour sprayed like water droplets. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies were annihilated at every stroke. Silvia laboured like an automaton, hewing and clubbing, sobbing aloud each time she overcame the inertia of the heavy bar. Her face was white, the eyes Samson-blind to the transient bright-hued fountains she was creating.

Four years' work and a third of a million pieces of glass, Dallen recited in his head in a kind of dismayed chant. Please don't erase your own life.

He wanted to dart forward and bring the destruction to an end, but was paralysed by a curious timidity, a fear of intruding on private torment. All he could do was stand and watch until Silvia's strength failed. She raised the bar high, aiming for the uppermost part of the trefoil design, but it wavered and circled in her grasp and she had to let it fall. She stood for a moment, head bowed, before turning to face the group.

"It was a memorial," she said in a dazed, abstracted voice. "Karal doesn't need a memorial. He isn't dead." She stared at Dallen, breathing hard, and took a half-step in his direction.

"You're coming with me," said Libby Ezzati as she stepped forward and put a motherly arm around Silvia's shoulders. "You're going to lie down."

"It's the best thing," agreed Peter Ezzati, apparently having just arrived at the house. His rotund body was encased in a dark formal suit to which he had added a band of black crepe on one arm. He positioned himself beside Silvia to help usher her out of the studio and recoiled, comically startled, when she clawed at his armband.

"Take that bloody thing off!" Her voice was shrill and unrecognisable. "Don't you understand? Are you too bloody stupid to understand?"

"It's all right—everything is all right," Libby soothed and with a surprising show of strength half-lifted Silvia clear of the floor and bore her away into the main part of the house. It seemed to Dallen that Silvia's eyes again sought out his before two other women rallied to Libby's aid, closing in on Silvia and shutting her off from his view. He stared after them until a large petal of glass belatedly detached itself from the gutted screen and crashed to the floor. The sound of it triggered a crossfire of conversation in the group of watchers.

"Spectacular, wasn't it?" Renard murmured to Dallen. "Electra herself couldn't have put on a better show."

Dallen, baffled by the reference, saw that Renard was cool and untouched, perhaps even amused by the monumental act of destruction he had witnessed. "Rick, you're a real credit to the human race."

"What are you trying to say, old son?"

"That I don't like you and I'm getting dangerously close to doing something about it."

Renard looked gratified. "Which one of us do you reckon it's dangerous for?"

"Have a good trip to Orbitsville." Dallen turned to walk away and almost blundered into Peter Ezzati, who had removed his armband and was still looking flustered.

"Everything is happening at once," Ezzati said.

"Karal dying … the experiment … Silvia … And I was late getting here because I was following the news about Orbitsville. These green lights have to mean something, Garry. I'm starring to get a bad feeling about them."

"What green lights?" Dallen felt he had reached saturation point as far as new information was concerned, but something in Ezzati's manner prompted him to make the enquiry.

"Haven't you been following the news? They've discovered these bands of green light drifting across the shell, inside and out. At first they thought there was only going to be one, but more and more of them are showing up, getting closer together."

"Is it some kind of ionisation effect? Something like an aurora?"

Ezzati shook his head. "The Science Commission says the bands don't register on any type of detector they've got, except photographically. You can see them if you're looking directly at the shell, but that's all."

"Then they can't amount to much."

"I wish I could shrug them off like that," Ezzati said, frowning. "I don't like what's happening, Garry—the shell material is supposed to be totally stable."

"It isn't going to explode, you know." As a native of Orbitsville, one who had flown millions of kilometres over its grasslands and mountains and seas, Dallen clearly understood the sheer immutability of the vast globe. Since coming to Earth he had found that people who had never been to Orbitsville were unable to cope with its scale, and tended to think of it as something like a large metal balloon. The inadequacy of their vision was often shown in the way they spoke of people living in Orbitsville, whereas those who had first-hand experience invariably said on Orbitsville.

There could be no substitute for seeing the reality of the sphere from the direct observation area of a ship. Once was always enough. The Big O was daunting but somehow reassuring, and nobody who had ever looked on it could be quite the same person again.

"I'm not suggesting it's going to explode, it's just that…" Ezzati paused and cocked his head like a bird.

"I knew there was something else I had to tell you. With not coming into the office these days, I don't suppose you'll have heard about Gerald Mathieu."

"Mathieu?" Dallen held his. voice steady. "What about him?"

"He set out for the west coast this morning, but he didn't get very far—his ship went down somewhere near Montgomery."

"Forced landing?"

"Very forced. From the analysis of the way his beacons snuffed out it looks as though he flew smack into a hill."

The words impacted on Dallen's mind like a bowling ball hurled with pin-splintering force, scattering all his preconceptions about the immediate future. Instead of satisfaction at the idea of Mathieu meeting a violent death, he felt an immediate sense of loss. It had to be wrong for the man who had casually destroyed a family to escape so easily, so quickly, without even knowing that he had been judged and condemned, without even looking into his executioner's eyes.

"Is there any definite…?" Dallen swallowed to ease the dryness in his throat. "Is Mathieu dead?"

"Don't let Silvia hear you use that word around here." Ezzati smiled broadly and patted Dallen's upper arm. "Discarnate is the accepted term. It looks as though young Mathieu is as discarnate as a dodo."

"I find that … hard to believe," Dallen said, belatedly coming to terms with the new situation. Mathieu's death had relieved him of a terrible responsibility, freeing him to deal with other commitments which, thus far, he had avoided thinking about in detail.

Ezzati looked up at him with some anxiety. "Look, Garry, I didn't mean to sound flippant. Was Mathieu close to you?"

"Not really. I'm going home." Dallen was outside the house and walking to his car, the world around him a blur of shimmering colours and steamy warmth, before he realised that he really was going home. He and Cona and Mikel had wasted too much time on Earth.

Chapter 13

The universe consisted of a bowl of pure blue glass.

Three objects had been tossed into the bowl and were lying, quite near each other, at the bottom of the azure curvature. Most prominent was a circular object which was intensely bright, so much so that it was painful to look directly at it. He classified it as a nearby sun. Next was a small, pale crescent, almost lost in the bombardment of light, and that had to be a non-radiant body—a planet or a moon.

The third object differed from the others in that it was larger and did not have precise geometries. It was a misty and elongated patch of white, with traces of a feathery internal structure. After some thought he identified it as a cloud.

The word initiated a rapid sequence of associations-atmosphere … moisture … rain … land … vegetation…

I'm alive!

The astonishing thought brought Mathieu to his feet in a split second, gasping with shock. He made several little darting runs in different directions, like a wild creature which had been trapped, only coming to a standstill when he realised the terrors were ail in his mind, that no final calamity was about to overtake him. Nothing more could happen. He shaded his eyes and took his first near-rational look at the sunlit hillside.

Crimson and gold tatters of his aircraft were strewn over a wide area, and far off to his right the power plant was sending up plumes of smoke as it tried to ignite the lush grass. The pointed nose, minus its canopy, was the largest fuselage section to have survived the impact. A short distance behind the cockpit it had the semblance of a mashed cigar, ragged pennants of alloy skin enclosing a profusion of spar stumps, broken pipes and cables. Much farther down the slope was a surprisingly neat scar in the earth, as though some giant plough had upturned a short straight furrow.

Mathieu gave a shaky laugh which faded quickly into the surrounding stillness. To his own ears it had sounded insane. He examined himself and found that his tan suit was torn in places and was liberally smeared with soil and grass. A pulsing stiffness in his limbs told him he was extensively bruised, that in a day or two he would scarcely be able to move, but otherwise he was miraculously unharmed. A sudden weakness, engendered by awe rather than anything physical, caused him to sink to his knees.

I'm supposed to be dead!

The realisation that he had tried to commit suicide astonished Mathieu almost as much as his survival of the crash. He could think of nothing more stupid and pointless than ending his life, especially as the future had so much to offer. The only explanation he could suggest for his still being alive was that he had regained his sanity in the last hurtling seconds and had hauled back on the control column just in time—but what had prompted him to try killing himself in the first place?

A picture of Garry Dallen ghosted through Mathieu's consciousness—a swarthy Nemesis, hard-muscled, running in tireless pursuit, the handsome face cold and unforgiving, the eyes murderous…

Could that have been the reason? Fear of Garry Dallen, coupled with his own nagging remorse over what he had done to Dallen's wife and child?

Mathieu considered the matter carefully and felt his bafflement increase. Surely, no matter how much nervous stress he had been under, he would have needed better motives than those for committing suicide. He had nothing to fear from Dallen—for the straightforward reason that Dallen had no way to connect him with what had happened to his family. Mathieu had been very careful all along to cover his traces, to make sure that nobody in authority could find out about his private disposal of Metagov property. That had been the whole point in his blanking out of the Department of Supply monitor, and with its memory successfully obliterated he was doubly safe.

True, there had been the incident with Cona Dallen and her baby on the north stair, but Dallen had no way to link him with that, and it had not been premeditated. Sheer back luck had brought all three of them together at that crucial moment, and he had done only what he had to do to protect himself, no more and no less. It was regrettable that two other people had become involved in that way, but it was not as if he had committed murder. Two new personalities would emerge to replace those which had been lost—so, in a way, the books were balanced. Certainly, there was no reason for him to go through life burdened with remorse or guilt.

If anybody was to blame it was the crooked chemists and their dealers who charged such iniquitous prices for minute quantities of…

Mathieu stood up, plunged a hand into his inner pocket and withdrew his gold pen. It was undamaged. He clicked the barrel into the special position, priming it to dispense its magical ink, then paused and frowned down at the sunglittering cylinder. Upheavals were taking place within him; mental landscapes were undergoing cataclysmic change.

In a single movement he snapped the pen in half and hurled it away from him. He turned so that he was unable to note where the pieces fell and considered what he had just done, half-expecting an onslaught of panic. Instead he felt a sweet emptiness, a total lack of concern.

"Maybe I am dead," he said aloud, shaking his head in wonderment over the knowledge—so different from the vagrant hopes of the past—that he would never again have to use felicitin. So novel was the state of mind that it took him an appreciable time to interpret it, but he was no longer a user!

The feeling of certainty persisted even when he reviewed the medical facts. There was a distinct personality profile common to those who became dependent on the drug, and he had never heard of spontaneous remissions or unaided escapes. His entire future had been predicted around the fact that he was hooked on felicitin … (Was "hooked" a sufficiently graphic word? How about skewered? Or impaled?) … and now, suddenly, the drug was irrelevant.

A sputtering sound from the aircraft's power plant drew Mathieu's attention to the scattered wreckage, and his sense of wonder over his survival returned. The contours of the ground must have exactly matched the ship's line of flight, giving it seconds instead of microseconds in which to shed its kinetic energy, and thereby saving his life. Such events were not unknown in aviation lore—a similar thing had happened to St. Exupery in North Africa—but still he had a distinct sense of the miraculous. A religious man would have been down on his knees giving thanks to God. Mathieu, however, had more earthly concerns, among them the question of how long it would take him to get back to Madison City so that he could proceed with the important business of being alive.

He was alone in a sea of verdant green which shaded into blue as it reached the vaporous blur of the horizon. This area of what had once been Alabama had been deregistered more than a century earlier and now it looked as though it had never been touched, as though the first boats had yet to come straggling across the Pacific.

The nearest population centre was probably Madison City itself, hundreds of kilometres to the east, so there was no point in straying from the wreckage of his aircraft. With the gradual emptying of the country's airspace, all the paraphernalia of traffic control had been abandoned in favour of a system using computers in each aircraft. The transport department computer in Madison would have known about the crash as soon as it had happened, and in theory an emergency team should already be on its way to him.

Deciding that he should get some gentle exercise while waiting to be picked up, Mathieu began walking along the hillside. He had taken only a few paces when his attention was caught by a pulsing speck of ruby light which appeared low above the eastern horizon. It was the beacon of an aircraft which seemed to be heading in his direction.

He watched the approaching flier for a minute or more before realising it was a rescue ship.

The discovery was yet another shock in what seemed to be an endless series. He had assumed, in view of his sense of relative well-being, that he had been only lightly stunned in the crash—but the arrival of the recovery craft implied that he had been unconscious for a considerable time, perhaps as much as thirty minutes. In that case, according to his admittedly sketchy medical knowledge, he should have been suffering an intense headache and nausea. He prodded in a gingerly fashion around his skull, almost expecting to find a severe but previously unnoticed wound, and confirmed that he was basically uninjured.

The thunderous arrival of the high-speed ship cut short his speculations. It swooped down out of the sky, chunky fuselage bristling with cranes and other recovery gear, came to a halt at a height of some fifty metres and made a vertical descent on screaming reaction tubes. Grass blasted outwards from the touchdown point before the engines died, then a hatch in the ship's belly slid open. Four men, one of them carrying a stretcher, dropped out of it and came running towards Mathieu.

He gave an oddly self-conscious wave and walked to meet them, repressing the urge to chuckle as he got his first glimpse of their pop-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of pure astonishment.

The brandy was the first he had tasted in months, and Mathieu found it unusually satisfying. He took sip after sip of the neat liquor, relishing its warmth and flavour while he watched the countryside drift by beneath the rescue ship.

Even after they had checked him out with handheld body scanners, confirming that he had no internal injuries, the medics had wanted to put him in a bunk for the return trip to Madison. Eventually, however, he had got his way and had been allowed to occupy a passenger seat in lordly isolation at the rear of the cabin. The medics and salvage experts were clustered at the front, and the frequency with which they glanced in his direction was a sign they had not from the shock of finding him in the land of the living.

Aided by the relaxing effect of the brandy, he amused himself by picturing how they would have taken the news of the second miracle, the private one. Almost a full hour had passed since he regained consciousness on the hillside, but there had been no wavering in his new attitude towards felicitin. He knew he was free of the addiction which had so grotesquely distorted his life, and now anything seemed possible…

The door to the flight deck slid open and a crewman came aft carrying a radiophone. He handed it to Mathieu, told him that Mayor Bryceland was calling and returned to his station. Bryceland was already speaking when Mathieu raised the instrument to his ear.

"…only thing that matters is that you are all right, Gerald. That goes without saying. It's a big relief to all of us that you haven't been injured. My God, I mean … When I heard the ship had been wrecked!"

"You heard right, Frank," Mathieu said peacefully, having divined the real purpose of the call. "The ship doesn't exist any more."

"But if you're only bruised…"

"I was very lucky, Frank—I'm all right, but the ship is metal confetti." Mathieu paused, visualising the consternation on the mayor's puffy features, and decided to turn the screw a little more. "I'm glad things didn't work out the other way round."

"So am I—that goes without saying. I don't want to rush things, Gerald, but the insurance department boys have been at me already … Was there a control failure?"

"No. I fell asleep."

"Then the autopilot must have failed."

"I'd switched it off."

"Oh!" There was another pause and when Bryceland spoke again a noticeable coldness had appeared in his voice. "That wasn't too bright, was it?"

"It was pretty damn stupid. Suicidal, in fact."

Bryceland gave an audible sigh. "Gerald, you sound as if you're enjoying this."

"I am." Mathieu took a sip of brandy. "I'm going into orbit on free booze and laughing my head off over the entire episode."

"I'm going to assume it's shock that's making you talk this way."

"Not shock—it's the thought of you having to hoof it like an ordinary mortal for a while. That's making me hysterical, Frank."

"I see," Bryceland said grimly. "Well, possibly by the time you get back into the office I'll have some news about your employment status that'll calm you down a bit."

"What makes you think I'll ever go back?" Mathieu broke the connection and set the phone down, aware that he had virtually thrown away his job. He took stock of his feelings and found no regrets. Until a short time ago the prospect of being fired would have terrified him, but now he was quite unmoved. It was, he realised, another consequence of his conversion. He no longer needed the job and all its opportunities for graft because he no longer needed felicitin. But what if, as had happened before, his lack of interest in the drug proved to be only temporary? What if it was all part of some complex response to the brush with death? One which would fade in a few hours?

The questions were pertinent, and there was an instant during which his system tried to react with panic, but the moment passed. It was as if the striker on an alarm bell had stirred briefly and then had returned to quiescence. His inner certainty prevailed, and now something new was being added.

There's nothing to keep me here on Earth, Mathieu thought. And I'm no longer afraid of going to Orbitsville.

The idea of returning to the place of his birth was strange, perhaps the most disturbing so far in the day's train of inner changes, and yet it was powerfully seductive. There was a felicitin-type tightness about it. His life on Earth had been a reenactment in miniature of the planet's own history. It had been a story of waste, failure and futility, one which deserved to be brought to a quick ending.

And it might be that the journey to Optima Thule would be for him what it had been to the human race in general—a rebirth, a radical change of direction, a turning away from darkness and towards light.

The decision was instantaneous.

Mathieu set his glass aside, no longer interested in its contents. He was going to Orbitsville and wanted his departure to take place without delay, but there were some practical problems. The sensible course would be to patch up his relationship with Mayor Bryceland, resign gracefully with the customary three months' notice, and eventually leave for Orbitsville with a fat severance payment logged into his bank account. But to one in his frame of mind that approach seemed intolerably slow. His new impetuosity told him he had done with Earth and therefore should leave at once, which meant cutting a few comers.

He leaned back in his chair, staring unseeingly at the drifting landscape below, and analysed the problems facing him. Ships were travelling from Earth to Ultima Thule every day, and with the tourist trade in decline there was no shortage of passenger places, but Mathieu's difficulties lay elsewhere. He had only a small reserve of cash, and walking out on his job was going to deprive him of some benefits and cause long delays with others—all of which meant he would be hard pressed to cover the cost of an unsubsidised ticket. There was an additional complication in the form of Mayor Bryceland, who would not want him to leave before a replacement arrived, and therefore would do everything in his power to block the clearances necessary for travel on a Metagov-owned ship.

What Mathieu needed was somebody who controlled the physical means of getting to Orbitsville and who also owed him a favour. Years of constantly being on the make had led him to build up a range of useful contacts, many of them of a somewhat irregular nature, but privately owned or chartered starships were something of a rarity. There was somebody, though—it was simply the matter of locating the right file in his memory—and that somebody was…

Mathieu gave a self-satisfied grunt when a name formed itself in his thoughts almost at once. Rick Renard, the playboy botanist, was reputed to have connections with the legendary Lindstrom family, and for that reason Mathieu had been exceptionally helpful to him. The indulgences had ranged from overlooking a sheaf of import restrictions on a fancy Rollac car to allowing publicly owned warehouses to be used for the temporary storage of botanical samples. And, providentially it seemed, Renard was soon to depart for Orbitsville.

I've found the way, Mathieu thought, reaching for the radiophone, unable to delay taking immediate and positive action. I'm going home at last.

Chapter 14

It was not until his car had struck the curb for the second time that Dallen realised how the sheer mental overload of the past hour had rendered him unfit to drive.

He braked and pulled in to the side in one of the North Hill's quietest avenues. The car shuddered slightly as he switched off the engine. He located his pipe in a jacket pocket, filled it with strands of yellow and black, abstractedly staring straight ahead as he tamped them down with his finger. It seemed that each time he visited the London place he got his consciousness stretched, but the last occasion had left him with no reserve capacity whatsoever. So many new matters clamoured and competed for his consideration that he was unable to focus properly on any of them.

Impose some order, he told himself. Find patterns.

The task struck him as being impossible, and the most he could do, sitting in the metal-and-glass suntrap of his car, was to pick out certain symmetries.

Karal London was dead—but Karal London could not be dead, only made discarnate. The success of his fantastic experiment had profound significance for religion and philosophy, and yet as far as emotions were concerned it seemed to have little immediate relevance. Silvia's reaction had shown that. Death continued to be Death, no matter what the cool voice of the intellect proclaimed; and men and women would still mourn its intervention just as they had always done. The racial subconscious would have to assimilate a great deal of mindon science before there dawned the era of the blithe burial or the cheerful cremation, before London was hailed as the man who put the fun into funeral.

Gerald Mathieu was dead—but Gerald Mathieu could not be dead, only made discarnate. What was the personal significance of that for Dallen? The wash of photons from a single light bulb in London's laboratory had carried the message that Mathieu, too, had entered an afterlife and would exist perhaps for ever as a mindon entity. Did that mean the whole concept of punishment by execution was now invalid? Perhaps the only genuine retribution would have lain in making the punishment fit the crime, in blasting Mathieu's physical brain with a Luddite Special and scattering its mindon counterpart to whatever kind of thin winds that blew through an extra-dimensional ether. And now it was too late even to think about that.

In any case, the dominating element of revenge had been removed from Dallen's life, and the resultant vacuum had been filled by new emotions centred on Silvia London. Silvia was going to Orbitsville, and—further symmetry—so was he…

Feeling the mental convection begin again, the restless whirlwind of thought fragments, he seized on the prospect of leaving for the Big O. That was a concrete fact, one which involved him in practical matters and a host of auxilliary decisions. He could, for instance, go immediately to the City Hall, arrange a transfer to Orbitsville on the next scheduled flight and clear out his desk. A good clear-cut short-term goal. A way to deaden his mind and at the same time delay the moment when he would have to return home and pick up the burden represented by Cona.

The decision made, Dallen discovered he had forgotten to light his pipe. He dropped it back into his pocket, switched on the car's magnetic engine and drove down the Hill towards the centre of Madison. Bars of tree-shadow and sunlight beat silently on the vehicle in quickening tempo. Traffic was quite sparse at that time of the afternoon and it took him less than ten minutes to reach the City Hall and park near the main entrance.

He went straight to his office on the second floor and paused when he saw the unfamiliar name plate on the door. It said: M.K.L.BYROM. Dallen had forgotten that his post was being filled by a replacement Grade IV officer who had been flown down from Winnipeg. He tapped the door, walked into the office without waiting for an invitation and was surprised to find Jim Mellor, his senior deputy, who usually worked in the operations centre, seated alone at the big communications console.

"Garry!" Mellor grinned, hoisting his tall cranelike figure out of the chair, and shook Dallen's hand. "What are you doing here?"

"I should be asking you that. Promotion?"

"No chance! I came over to mind the shop for a while."

"Well, I only came in to notify somebody that I'm quitting this job and transferring back home on the first available ship. Consider yourself notified."

"I guessed you'd be doing that sooner or later, but you ought to give the word to Ken Byrom."

"I've no more time for all the red tape. Why can't you pass the good news on on my behalf?"

"You know, Garry—proper channels. Besides, he wants to have a few words with you."

"What about?"

"Ken likes everything done according to directives. He's all knotted up over the weapon you lost in Cordele—not to mention taking a ship while you were officially on leave."

"Tell him to…" Dallen studied the other man's narrow face. "Did you drop yourself in it by tipping me off about Beaumont?"

"Me!" Mellor looked indignant. "I never tipped nobody off, not noways nohow."

"You're one of the people I'm going to miss around here," Dallen said, briefly gripping one of Mellor's stringy biceps. "Now, I'm going to collect a few things from my desk and…"

"Ken has done all that for you." Mellor opened a closet, took out a large bulging envelope and handed it to Dallen. "I think he wants a permanent assignment in Madison."

"He's welcome. Why isn't he here, anyway?"

"Went across to the inner field with a bunch of the others to see Gerald Mathieu."

"Mathieu?" The tone and content of what he had just heard flicked at Dallen's nerves.

"Yeah. You know about what happened to him?"

"I heard."

"Wildest thing! That's why this place is empty—they all had to have a look for themselves."

Dallen considered the first meaning that Mellor's words had for him—that a large group of normal people had flocked across town to view a plastic sack full of bloody tissue and bone splinters—and was forced to reject it. The alternative, the incredible alternative, was a chaotic new element in the agitation that already existed in his thoughts. Gerald Mathieu still alive! Still alive\ Dallen abruptly felt sick and bruised, like a fighter on the ropes.

He pretended to check the contents of his envelope. "Lucky escape, was it?"

"Lucky!" Mellor flung up his arms in protest at the inadequacy of the word. "He went into a hill at one K! The ship was reduced to chaff, but Mathieu walked away from it with nothing worse than bruises. What a guy!"

"The cockpit must have been in one piece."

"Yeah, the cockpit must have been in one piece, but the rest of the ship … Hey, Garry, you don't have anything against Mathieu, do you?"

"Of course not. Why do you ask?"

"Nothing. It was just the way you…"

"I'll see you around, Jim." Dallen left the office and stood for a moment in the cottony silence of the corridor, trying to reorganise his thoughts. Everything had changed once again. It was a perfect illustration of the intense relationship that binds a hunter to his quarry, forcing him to follow every swing and swerve with greater and greater concentration and fidelity until the pursuit reaches its climax. His life would not be his own again until Mathieu was dead, and that—much though he disliked the idea—meant delaying the return of the Dallen family to Orbitsville.

The first sensible step in the new situation should be to withdraw his verbal resignation, but he was in no mood to face Mellor again at that moment. Mellor was not a particularly perceptive man, but he had picked up Dallen's resentment over hearing Mathieu spoken with admiration. That had been a lapse on Dallen's part, and it was something he would have to take extra care over if—as was quite possible, given the irrationality of most human beings—Mathieu were to be elevated to the status of local hero because of his amazing luck. It was important for Dallen to show no enmity towards Mathieu, to display no special interest. On the other hand, he should display no special lack of interest either … Or was his thinking becoming too involuted and obsessional?

Frowning, breathing deeply to ease the growing pressure between his temples, Dallen walked along the corridor towards the elevator which would drop him into the building's main reception area. In the past he would have taken a short cut by way of the north-side emergency stair, but that was a trick he had passed on to Cona, and as a result of it she and Mikel had been … He wrenched his thoughts back into the present as a door opened just ahead of him. Vik Costain, personal assistant to the Mayor, came hurrying through it and almost collided with Dallen.

"I'm so sorry," Costain exclaimed in his prissy manner. There was a flustered expression on his grey face and his hairless scalp was glistening with perspiration.

"You should slow down a bit," Dallen said, "or get personal radar."

"Spare me the witticisms, Garry—this has been the worst afternoon in my thirty years in this place."

"Frank giving you a hard time?"

Costain turned his eyes up for a second. "Between him and Beau bloody Brummel…

"Who?"

"Young Mathieu. They've been having a radiophone battle for the last hour and I'm right in the middle of it, and there's nobody here to do any goddamn work. I suppose you've heard the latest about Mathieu?"

Dallen nodded. "Mister Indestructible."

"Not that," Costain said impatiently. "He has just quit his job without giving notice, and that throws his workload on to Frank and me. Frank is furious."

"I'll bet he is," Dallen said, again the hunter, feeling the hunter's quickening of the pulse as the trail makes a sudden swing. "What is Gerald planning to do with himself?"

"Orbitsville. He claims he's getting out immediately on some kind of special flight. Have you ever heard of this Renard character?"

"Renard?" Dallen felt a sick satisfaction, a furtive and intoxicating glee, which spread through him as he imagined being close to Mathieu for almost a week in the unnatural environment of a starship. So many dangerous complexities, so many traps for the unwary, so many ways in which a man could be overtaken by premature death…

"As a matter of feet," he said peacefully, "Rick Renard and I are good friends. Oddly enough, I've been thinking of going home with him on the same flight."

Chapter 15

Renard's ship detached itself from Polar Band One and began the long climb to the edge of interstellar space.

Almost half-a-century old, the Hawkshead was a bulk cargo freighter which had been built when Earth's space technology was still high on a crest. It had the classic configuration developed by the historic Starflight company—three equal cylinders joined together in parallel, with the central one projecting ahead by almost half its length. The control deck, living quarters and cargo space were in the central cylinder; the outer pair housing the thermonuclear drivers and flux pumps, plus the warp generators which were only brought into play in the higher speed regimes. Because the huge magnetic fields created by the pumps swirled out symmetrically from the fuselage, ships of the type were popularly known as flickerwings, though the name was misleading. The fields were vast insubstantial scoops which gathered interstellar matter for use as reaction mass.

Spatial weather conditions were good as the Hawkshead spiralled outwards from the orbit of Earth. Great billows of energetic particles which had originated in the heart of the galaxy were rolling across the Solar System. These sprays of fast-moving corpuscles—which meant as much to the starship as wind, wave and tide had done to oceanic clippers—provided a rich harvest for the vessel's drivers, enabling it to accelerate at better than 1G.

In the first century of interstellar travel it had been necessary for a ship to attain a speed of some fifty million metres a second before it entered a paradoxical domain, governed by the laws of the Canadian mathematician Arthur Arthur, where Einsteinian ideas about space and time no longer held sway. Arthurian physics had made it possible for a ship to journey between Earth and Orbitsville in only four months, with almost no relativistic time dilation, but even that kind of mind-defying speed had been insufficient for the needs of the Migration. The solution, born out of experience and computer-enhanced genius, had been the tachyonic mode, described by one orthodox theorist as "crooked accountancy applied to mass-energy transformations", and it had cut the transit time to an average of six days.

It was a brief time by anybody's standards, and that thought was much on Dallen's mind as he stood in the ship's observation gallery and watched the Earth-Moon system begin to shrink to the semblance of a double star. His move against Gerald Mathieu would have to be made very soon.

Dallen had been too busy winding up his affairs in Madison to think much about the journey which lay ahead, but in view of the circumstances he had half-expected some of the features of an old-style oceanic cruise. He had visualised Renard sitting at the head of the evening dinner table, with Silvia London nearby, revelling in and taking every conceivable social advantage from his position as benefactor-employer. That notion had been compounded from ignorance of conditions aboard freighters and the assumption that Renard would have despotic control over the ship's daily routine.

In actuality Renard seemed to spend most of his time in bitter argument with the freighter's captain, Lars Lessen, a morose, pigeon-chested man in his fifties. Lessen, it transpired, had undertaken to provide a crew and run the ship on a fixed-price contract, and he was deeply unhappy with the way things were working out.

Forty years earlier the Hawkshead would almost have flown itself to Orbitsville. Now more and more human interventions were required to keep its myriad systems in operation, and the extra man-hour payments were gnawing into Lessen's profits. He reacted by waging psychological warfare on Renard—one tactic being to call him with unnecessary frequency over minor decisions—and to Dallen's surprise seemed to be gaining the upper hand, evidence of the advantages of playing on one's home ground.

The ship had one largish canteen area, in place of Dallen's imagined dining room, but it was jealously monopolised by the thirty-strong crew. The group of ten supernumeraries recruited by Renard were more-or-less expected to use the mealomat dispensers and eat in their rooms. These were prefabricated cabins ranged in a partial circle on Deck 5, the one just above the vertiginous well of the cargo hold.

The living arrangements, which could have been described as unsociable, came as an unwelcome surprise to the others, but they suited Dallen quite well because Cona had not taken to space travel. She had become hysterical during the brief shuttle ride to the ship, necessitating heavy sedation, and had continued to react badly to the confinement of the cabin Dallen shared with her and Mikel. The only way he could keep on top of the situation was by dosing her with a tranquiliser prescribed by Roy Picciano, a drug which on Dallen's insistence included an effective libido depressant.

Mikel was rapidly becoming a normal-seeming infant, one who played a lot with his toy vehicles and showed an obvious pleasure on seeing his father, but Dallen found himself still unable to make a wholehearted response. No matter how often he cursed himself for the lack of emotional generosity there remained a hint of reserve, a stubborn feeling that fate was a salesman trying to fob him off with a substitute product.

The story of what had happened to his family was quick to circulate among the Hawkshead's crew, bringing sympathy he could well have done without, but a welcome result was that four women in the field engineering section volunteered a baby-minding service. Dallen accepted with gratitude, conscious of the fact that no matter how much genuine concern other men might show for one in his predicament it was always women who came through with the sort of practical help which made a difference in life's daily battles. As well as freeing him to do his quota of work on the grass trays, the arrangement gave Dallen some extra time with his fellow passengers.

The first shipboard meeting with Gerald Mathieu was a tableau of civilised awkwardness and non-communication. It took place on the narrow strip of deck between the cabins and the abyss of the ship's hold. There were no other people in sight, and as the two men drew together Dallen was almost swamped by a manic urge to seize his chance, to end his baleful and unnatural involvement with the other man in a single burst of primitive violence. For one thunderous instant the idea seemed almost feasible—a sudden grapple and lift, a body plunging into the lethal steel-spiked depths, a story about a freak accident…

But what sort of accident?

The guard rail was chest-high and, try as he might, Dallen was unable to invent an incident in which one man could be propelled to his death without suspected homicidal intent on the part of the other. Abruptly the crucial moment passed, its karma-potential fading. There was a sense of ponderous wheels, having hesitated, juddering into a new set of positions—and now Dallen was faced with the problem of how to address a person he saw only as a walking corpse.

"Hello, Gerald," he said, smiling, glancing at the spartan surroundings. "Like to buy a ticket for the mutiny?"

Mathieu met his gaze squarely. "That's yard-arm talk, Mister Christian."

Christian? Dallen thought, disconcerted. I've got to start reading books, the way Cona wanted.

Before he could compose a reply the odd little nonincident was over and the tall figure of Mathieu was moving out of sight between two cabins, ice-smooth blond hair glowing dully in the ship's dismal illumination. He was wearing immaculate silvery grey casuals—his idea of clothes suitable for manual work—and looked as composed and urbane as ever, but Dallen thought he had detected a difference in the man. Had it been in the hard calmness of the eyes? Was that typical of one who was stoking up on felicitin, or had Mathieu's skirmish with death—by all accounts a remarkable escape—wrought some profound change in his character?

It makes no difference, Dallen told himself, rejecting the alien idea which had tried to enter his mind, the idea that Mathieu was in the process of becoming a new person, one who might not deserve the fate which was in store for him. Dallen had little patience with any kind of violent criminal, but the species he had least time for were those who murdered innocents and then, while their appeals against execution were filtering through, composed books or holoplays about the sanctity of human life. He denied Mathieu any right to plead "not guilty for reasons of resurrection". It was essential that the issues of life and death, crime and punishment, sin and retribution should retain their old clarity—enough complication had already been introduced into his thoughts by the Karal London experiment.

Mathieu and London should have remained in separate compartments of his life, but they had a disconcerting way of merging in his thoughts like images in an antique stereo viewer, both of which had to contribute to make a rounded picture. London taught that after death there came new life. Mathieu had already enacted his own little pastiche on that theme—the shock of his "death" and return to life was still reverberating in Dallen's system—and the philosophical implications continued to cloud his thinking about his family tragedy.

Given that there was no such thing as death in the former sense of the word, that it was merely the gateway to a new existence, could execution still be regarded as a penalty? What kind of punishment was it that simply advanced the next phase of an evildoer's life? And, going further, how serious a crime was murder if it meant that the victim had similarly been introduced to his own immortality?

It makes no difference, Dallen repeated to himself, angered by the mental clamour following his deceptively bland encounter with Mathieu. He returned to his own cabin and spent some time examining the contents of the small travel bag he had privately labelled his execution kit.

It held a miscellany of items ranging from blades and wires to drug containers, gathered almost at random, any of which might become an unobtrusive murder weapon in suitable circumstance. No plan had yet crystallised, but some dark instinct kept drawing his attention to the most innocent-seeming object of the lot—a miniature spraycan of paint he had taken from Madison City's transport workshops.

The first in-flight meeting with Silvia London was equally unsatisfactory from Dallen's viewpoint.

He had not seen her since her cathartic act of destroying the glass mosaic in her home, but he knew she was being accompanied on the journey by two officers of the Anima Mundi Foundation. Both were women and previously unknown to him. They had dealt with the considerable media interest given to Silvia before the start of the voyage, and now seemed to be coaching her for various kinds of public appearances in major cities. Their presence reminded Dallen that Karal London, in spite of the obviously cranky aspects of his operation, had been a determined and far-sighted man with a serious mission in life. It also made him wonder if he had allowed himself to be too much influenced by Renard's male chauvinist analysis of Silvia's relationship with the dead man.

Her reaction to the news of London's "discarnation" had, in a way, pleased him with its message that she was far from being the simplistic sexual timebomb described by Rick Renard—but there was another part of him, repressed throughout his adult life, which savoured the thought of being the first to bed a voluptuous young woman after she had been deprived of sex for two years. And his emotional dichotomy was made worse by the fact that he was quite unable to read Silvia's signals, had no way of knowing if what had passed between them meant everything or nothing. One interpretation was that he was a fantastically lucky man who had only to reach out his hand and take one of life's choicest offerings; another was that he was an overgrown adolescent with delusions inspired by a surplus of imagination, conceit and hormones.

I fail to see the difficulty, old son, he could imagine Renard saying to him, were he himself not one of the problem's parameters. Why not simply go ahead and try your luck?

Why not indeed? Dallen asked himself as he entered the Deck 4 compartment which contained the bank of mealomats and saw the black-clad figure of Silvia amid a group of five women at the machines. Unfortunately the question presupposed his being a normal man in normal circumstances. There was no allowance for internal confusions and conflicts, for his unmanning guilt over Cona and Mikel, for his dehumanising compulsion to annihilate Gerald Mathieu, for his reluctance to resolve the question of Silvia too soon in case it transpired that it had all been a game which Renard had won in advance by virtue of his money, power and grinning confident insensitivity.

Silvia was discussing the choice of food with a companion, and as Dallen drew near he saw that, although slightly pale, she looked as though she had recovered from her period of trauma. He took in the firm-jawed face and the prominence of the lower lip, the massy fullness of breasts emphasised by the flatness of abdomen, the air of easy strength combined with femininity, and inside him was born a pain which had something to do with the fact that he had never read poetry and therefore did not have access to the words needed to let Silvia know how he felt about her. He was hesitating, overwhelmed, when she looked in his direction. She carried on her conversation without the slightest break, but her eyes engaged Dallen's and remained there, unwavering, while he moved towards another row of machines.

He smiled at her, then developed the conviction it was the same meaningless facial grimace he had made earlier on meeting Mathieu, and deliberately broke the visual contact by moving behind a drinks dispenser. Freed of the intense emotional pull, he selected food for Cona and himself, and when he emerged from an alley of cabinets Silvia was gone.

A few minutes later, back in his cabin, he found Cona sitting on the edge of her bed, blinking drowsily. Her smock had ridden up to her broadening hips, exposing a wisp of colourless hair at the juncture of puckered thighs. He twitched the hem of the garment down to her knees and began setting out dishes of food on the foldaway table. The air smelled of stale perspiration.

"Din," Cona mouthed with effort. "Di-in."

"Very good," Dallen said, blanking out his freshly renewed mental image of Silvia's face. "Say dinner. Din-ner."

"Din!" Cona shouted in sudden manic joviality, lurching towards the table. She picked up a spoon, holding it sideways in her fist, and reached for a dish of chocolate mousse. Dallen had found that if he gave in and permitted her to eat some dessert at the beginning of a meal it was then quite easy to coax her into having a fair amount of the main protein dish, but all at once the idea was intolerable.

Without speaking, he closed his hand over Cona's and steered the spoon towards a block of moulded salad. She froze for a moment, then began to resist with her considerable strength. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he had half-risen to his feet to gain leverage and had clamped Cona's head against his hip. Subduing her with furious ease, he forced her to take salad on to the spoon and was guiding it to her mouth when something prompted him to glance towards a mirrored wall at the far side of the room.

The tableau he saw there, with its ancient formalised composition—oppressor looming over the oppressed—could have been from any period in history. The medium could have been grainy 20th Century or age-darkened oil paint or perspectiveless woodcut, but the principal elements were the same. Faces of torturer and victim alike—both robbed of all humanity—turned towards the camera-artist as though demanding to go on record for posterity. Dallen released his wife at once and stood facing his reflection.

"Bastard," he whispered. "The bastard has to pay."

Chapter 16

As a preliminary to the execution Dallen kept a close watch on Mathieu's movements.

He was quickly rewarded by the discovery that Mathieu, even when he had a freedom of choice, preferred a fixed pattern of activity. The work schedule called for each person in Renard's team to be responsible for two adjacent stacks of grass trays, the most tedious task being the rotation of the sunlight panels to give a reasonable simulation of night and day. Each tray also had to be lightly watered at some time during its "night" period. There was no hard-and-fast rule about exactly when the watering should be carried out, but Mathieu liked to do it as soon as he had removed each sunlight panel, starting at the top of the stacks and methodically working down to deck level.

Every morning at eleven, ship time, he climbed a twenty-metre alloy ladder attached to the front of one stack and serviced its top layer of trays. That done, he stretched all the way across the aisle and worked on his other stack from its rear, taking advantage of his long reach to avoid making two separate ascents. It was a technique of which Renard did not approve, but he had contented himself by sourly reminding Mathieu he was not covered by industrial insurance. And Dallen had listened to that particular exchange with satisfaction, knowing it would help smooth his way through what was to follow…

On the fifth morning of the voyage he awoke early. Cona was snoring peacefully in her bed at the other side of the prefab, and Mikel was fast asleep in his cot, one foot projecting through the bars. There was little in the peaceful, tallowy dimness of the cabin to indicate that it was part of an engineered structure which was hurtling through distorted geometries of space. Were it not for near-subliminal, amniotic fluttering in the air Dallen could have believed himself to be in a holiday chalet anywhere on Earth or Orbitsville. His thoughts turned at once to Silvia London, only a few paces and partitions away on the same deck, but he hurriedly blanked out a vision of how she might look in bed. His morning erections were becoming painfully insistent, and on this crucial day all his mental and physical energies had to be directed elsewhere.

He quietly got out of bed and took stock of his emotions, trying to ascertain how he felt about his decision to proceed immediately with Mathieu's execution. There was a certain sense of disbelief mingled with a cold sadness and fears for his own safety—but the basic resolution was still there, intact, a dominating force which excluded compassion or regrets.

That's all right, he thought, unaccountably relieved. Nothing has changed.

Taking care not to disturb Cona or Mikel, he used the radiation shower cubicle—wishing it could have been a stinging water spray—and got dressed in the soft shirt and slacks which were his usual working attire. He brought the travel bag out of a closet and took from it the small container of special paint, which he put in his breast pocket.

There was nobody else abroad on Deck 5 when he left his cabin, so we went straight to the tubular elevator cage, dropped himself to the bottom of the cargo hold and stepped out into an angular jungle of scaffolding. Tall stacks of grass trays, half of them glowing under artificial sunlight, created a three-dimensional confusion of brilliance and shadow. There were puddles on the floor and the air was warm and humid, rich with meadow scents, dulling metal surfaces with condensation.

It took Dallen less than a minute to make sure no others had showed up early for work, then he went to Mathieu's two stacks and climbed the innermost ladder, the one always used by Mathieu. At the top, precisely when it was necessary for him to be alert and at peak efficiency, he was numbed by an awareness that he was at the point of maximum danger. He was only a few metres below the ring-shaped Deck 5, in a position readily visible to anyone who might emerge from a passenger cabin, and now his scheme—so foolproof when evaluated in the security of his bed—seemed reckless beyond belief.

With a final swinging glance at the circular guard rail above, he took the paint container out of his shirt pocket and sprayed a colourless fluid on to the ladder's top rung. Highly nervous, fighting off a tendency to shake, he returned the container to his pocket and slid commando-fashion to the foot of the ladder. The greenhouse stillness of the bottom deck was heavy and undisturbed. Dallen ran to the elevator, took it up to Deck 5 and within a matter of seconds was back in the sanctuary of his cabin, where Cona and Mikel were still asleep. The entire sortie had taken approximately three minutes.

Dallen sat down at the table and considered what he had done. The emulsion with which he had sprayed the ladder was manufactured for law enforcement bodies under the brand name of Pietzoff, and it was peculiarly suitable for his purpose. It was used to prevent people clinging to security vehicles and the vulnerable wing generator tubes of aircraft. Finger pressure on the deposited crystals would produce a neural shock which would affect Mathieu's whole body, not only repelling him from the ladder but preventing him from grasping anything which might lessen his fall.

There was no absolute guarantee that the impact with deck would kill him, but Dallen intended to be close to the scene of the "accident", first to reach the fallen man, and would need only the briefest moment to complete his work. An extra shearing of the neck vertebrae would go unnoticed among Mathieu's other injuries. The final step would be to ascend the ladder, ostensibly checking for faults, and wipe away the Pietzoff emulsion with the solvent sponge already in his pocket.

At that point, justice having been done, he could return to a normal life.

Dallen spread his hands on the table and frowned down at them as—for the first time—he tried to envisage the future which lay beyond Mathieu's death. What would constitute a "normal life in his case? A Metagov job sufficiently undemanding that he would be able to devote most of his time to rehabilitating Cona? Perhaps he would be provided with a pension on compassionate grounds and given a house on the edge of one of those heroic developments which straggled a short distance into Orbitsville's endless oceans of grass. That way he could make Cona his life's work—and what would the career landmarks be? The day she learned to flush the toilet for herself? The day she completed her first sentence? The first night on which, in the mental chaos of the dark hours, he failed to turn her away from his bed?

Abruptly Dallen felt that he was drowning. He dismissed the feeling as a psychological effect, then realised he had breathed out and had actually omitted to initiate the next inhalation, as though his autonomous nervous system had gone on strike. He snatched air in two noisy sighs and sprang to his feet, feeling trapped within the confines of the cabin. The time display on the wall showed that it was not yet eight in the morning. Food? Would breakfast help? Dallen felt his diaphragm heave gently at the thought of eating, but coffee seemed a reasonably inviting prospect, a way of getting through a few minutes.

He made sure that Cona and Mikel were not likely to awaken, let himself out of the cabin and went upstairs to Deck 4, the first full deck. There was nobody in the mealomat area, although he could hear some crew members talking in the adjoining canteen.

Dallen drew himself a cup of black coffee, considered taking it into the canteen, then on impulse walked up another flight of stairs and went into the small observation gallery. It was deserted. Such vantage points tended to be used only during normal-space manoeuvring in the vicinity of Earth or Orbitsville—in mid-voyage, cocooned in a ship's private continuum, there was little to see outside. The universe presented itself as an intense spot of blue ahead of the ship and an equally bright locus of red astern. On the rare occasions when a vessel passed close to a star an ultra-thin ring of light would expand out of the forward spot, slide by the ship on all sides like a conjurer's hoop and shrink into the speck of ruby brilliance behind.

Unconcerned about the lack of spectacle, Dallen dropped into a chair and sat in the theatrical darkness sipping his coffee, his thoughts still dominated by the future. Fixing the time of Mathieu's execution seemed to have removed a short-term goal which had acted as a barrier. Now the shutters had been lifted and decades lay ahead of him in a blur of shifting probabilities—and from what he could see of the temporal landscape it looked bleak. To be more analytical, without Silvia London it looked bleak. To be even more analytical—and to add a dash of honesty and self-interest—with Cona and without Silvia it looked bleak.

And that, came the insidious thought, is a circumstance that can easily be changed.

All he had to do was quit being stubborn and accept what qualified physicians had been telling him all along—that Cona Dallen, author and historian, no longer existed. That meant he had no moral obligations to her, that all contracts were nullified. The body Cona had inhabited was entitled to good care, to the comfort and security in which a new personality would be able to develop within its own limitations, but there was no logical reason for Garry Dallen's own life to be subordinated to the process. He should be concerned, but not interned. He had placed himself in a prison whose walls were made of mist, and all he had to do was walk free…

Fine! QED! Welcome to the bright, shadow-free world of rationality!

Dallen felt a surge of elation and wonderment over how easy it had been to put his life into logical order, a sense of giddy uplift which was immediately followed by the plunging realisation that he had achieved precisely nothing. He was building castles of romantic dreams around Silvia London—all on the strength of a few ambiguous words and enigmatic looks. What he needed was hard information, a straight yes or no from the woman in question, but right from the beginning he had behaved like a tongue-tied yokel in Silvia's presence…

"In the name of Christ!" he whispered savagely, swept by a sudden boiling surf of impatience over a state of mind in which he could calmly arrange the death of a fellow human being and at the same time cower back from asking one question of a woman. He crushed the empty cup in his right hand, producing a loud crackle which caused a barely-seen figure to glance in his direction from the opposite end of the gallery. The other person was a woman, and he had no idea how long she had been sitting there. He identified the thick-set, middle-aged figure as Doctor Billy Glaister, the Foundation officer who shared a cabin with Silvia, and he found himself moving towards her with no conscious sense of volition. She looked up in surprise, her face an indistinct glow in the darkness, as he halted at her side.

"Hello," Dallen said. "Restful in here, isn't it?"

"Usually," she replied coolly. "! come here when I want peace to think."

"Hint taken." Dallen tried an ingratiating chuckle. "I'll clear off and leave you to it. By the way, is Silvia in her room?"

"I expect so. Why?" The doctor had ceased being distant and now was openly hostile.

The notion that here might be another rival for Silvia immediately appeared in Dallen's mind, but something—all the more momentous for being unanticipated—had happened inside him and he welcomed the extra challenge. He hunkered down beside the woman, deliberately invading her personal space.

"I want to have a word with her. I presume she's allowed visitors?"

"Don't be impertinent. Silvia has had many stressful factors to contend with lately."

"It was decent of you to step out and give her a break." Dallen stood up, left the observation gallery and walked quickly towards the nearest stair.

The time was 8:50, leaving him more than two hours before his preordained rendezvous, and he felt a vast relief over the knowledge that he was at last committed to positive action. He was alert and competent, as though he had shaken off an enervating spell. He descended to Deck 5 and, not sparing a glance for the netherworld of scaffolding and lights visible in the central well, went to the box-like cabin being used by Silvia and tapped the door. She opened it, immediately sprung away from him with a swirl of a blue cotton dressing gown, then froze in mid-stride and turned back.

"I thought you were…" Her eyes were wide with surprise, seeming darker than usual against a morning paleness he had never seen before and which gave him a stabbing sexual thrill of such power that he almost gasped.

"May I come in?" he said steadily.

Silvia shook her head. "It's too … I'm not even dressed."

"I've got to come in." He crossed the threshold and closed the door. "I have to talk to you."

"About what?"

"No more games, Silvia. I know I shouldered my way in here uninvited. I know I'm being bad-mannered and that my timing couldn't be worse, but I have to know about us. I need a direct statement from you—a simple yes or a simple no."

"You make it seem like a business transaction." Silvia appeared to have recovered her composure, but her colour had heightened.

"Is this better?" He took the single pace that was necessary to close the distance between them and, very slowly, allowing her ample time to twist away, placed a hand at each side of her waist and gently drew her towards him. She came to him, yielding with a peculiar sagging movement which brought their groins together first—sending a Shockwave of sensation racing through his body—followed by a leisurely meeting of bellies, breasts and mouths. Dallen drank the kiss, gorging himself until its natural ending.

"I've still got to hear you say it," he whispered, touching his hips to her ear. "Yes or no?"

"This isn't fair."

"To hell with fair—I've had enough fairness to last me a lifetime. Yes or no?"

"Yes." She thrust herself against him almost aggressively, with a force he had difficulty in matching. "Yes!"

"That's all I need to know." Intensely aware that the dressing gown was no longer fully lapped around her torso, he closed his eyes to kiss Silvia again and found himself looking at Gerald Mathieu's broken corpse.

"Trouble is," he said, floundering and distracted, "I'm not sure what to do next."

She smiled calmly. "How about locking the door?"

"Good thinking." Dallen thumbed the door's security button and when he turned back to Silvia the dressing gown was around her ankles on the floor. Dry-mouthed and reverent, he surveyed her body, then took her extended hand and went with her to the bed. She lay down at once and locked herself on to him, now trembling, as he positioned himself beside her. They clung together for a full minute, he still clothed, simulating the sex act in a way which by every law of nature should have aroused him to near-orgasm, but each time he allowed his eyes to close there was Mathieu's serene-smiling death mask with the tridents of blood at each corner of the mouth and the anaesthetic coldness was gathering in his own loins, emasculating him, denying him any stake in the game of Life. Without waiting for Silvia to sense what was happening, he rolled away from her and dropped into a kneeling posture at the side of the bed. She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him in puzzled reproach.

"It's all right," he said, almost grinning with relief at the clarity of his understanding of the situation. "This won't make any sense to you, Silvia, but I was trying to be two people at once, and it can't work."

"That makes perfectly good sense to me." Her understanding was intuitive, almost telepathic. "How long will it take you to become one people?"

Dallen gazed at her in purest gratitude. "About two minutes. There's something I have to do. Would you please wait? Right here? Like this?"

"I wasn't planning to go anywhere."

"Right." He stood up, strode to the door of the cabin and let himself out. A life for a life, he thought, amazed at the simplicity of the psychological equations in an area where he would have expected layer upon layer of murky Freudian complexity. Being born again allowed for no half-measures. He could not take from both existences, racking up debits in each, and therefore Gerald Mathieu had to be spared.

With the after-image of Silvia's full-breasted nakedness drifting in his vision, Dallen closed the cabin door behind him, but did not lock it. He turned towards the elevator. Two men—Renard and Captain Lessen—were approaching on the curved strip of deck between the cabins and the cargo well. As usual, they were engaged in heated argument, but Renard broke off on the instant of seeing Dallen and came straight to him, his gold-speckled face solemn.

"What were you doing in there?" he said directly. "It's a bit early for visiting, isn't it?"

Dallen shrugged. "Depends on how well people know each other."

"You're not fooling anybody, old son." Renard showed his bow of teeth as he waited for Lessen to sidle by him and get beyond earshot. His gaze was hunting over Dallen's face, and each passing second brought a change of his expression—amiable contempt, incredulity, alarm and dawning anger.

"If you'll excuse me," Dallen said, "I've got work to do." He tried to walk towards the elevator, but Renard detained him by placing a hand on his chest.

"You'd better listen to me," Renard said in a venomous whisper. "If I…"

"No, you'd better do tine listening for once," Dallen said in matter-of-fact, conversational tones. "If you don't take your hand off me I'll hit you so hard that you'll be hospitalised for some time and may even die."

Renard was trying to form a reply when Lessen called to him in an aggrieved bark from the foot of the stair to Deck 4. Dallen ended the encounter by side-stepping Renard and walking to the elevator cage.

During the quivering descent to the bottom of the hold he indulged in a moment of satisfaction—perhaps Renard's trust in the universe was somewhat misplaced—and when the elevator stopped he went confidently to the lane which ended at Mathieu's stacks, taking the solvent sponge from his side pocket as he crossed the puddled floor. Sounds of movement nearby indicated that somebody was at work on the trays, but it was not until he had actually turned the corner that Dallen realised that things were not what they should be. High in the geometric jungle, amid the scattered bars of light and shade, there were unexpected signs of movement.

Somebody was climbing to the top of Mathieu's ladder.

In the instant of recognising the climber as Mathieu himself, Dallen saw that he was in the act of teaching for the topmost rung. With a despairing grunt, knowing he was too late to prevent the calamity, Dallen hurled himself to the foot of the ladder and turned his eyes upwards, bracing himself for what could easily be a crippling impact.

He was greeted by the sight of Mathieu angled nonchalantly outwards from the ladder, the slim plastic tube of his spray hose coiling down from his waist. His weight was taken by his right hand gripping the top rung.

"What's going on down there?" Mathieu said, his attention caught by the sudden movement.

"Nothing," Dallen assured him. "I slipped, that's all." He backed up the story by pressing a hand to his side as though nursing a strained muscle.

Mathieu descended at once. "Are you hurt?"

"It's nothing," Dallen said, experiencing a strange mixture of emotions at being so close to the man who had so profoundly affected his life. "But we ought to get a mop and take away some of this surface water before somebody really gets hurt." He rubbed his side, excusing himself from the chore.

"I'll do it," Mathieu said compliantly. "I think there's a kind of broom closet near the elevator." He moved away and was lost to sight among the stacks.

As soon as he was sure of being unobserved, Dallen climbed Mathieu's ladder in a kind of vertical run, stopping when his face was level with the top rung. The light was less than ideal, but he could easily discern the frost-like coating of Pietzoff emulsion on the full length of the alloy tube, which meant that Mathieu should have received a fierce neural jolt as soon as his fingers had exerted pressure cm the embedded crystals.

The only explanation Dallen could conceive was that the container he had stolen in Madison had come from a defective batch. Intrigued, momentarily forgetting the need for urgency, he lightly flicked the rung with a fingernail as a test.

The paralysing shock stabbed clear through to his feet.

His muscle control instantly disrupted, Dallen sagged and fell—then recovery came and he clung to the ladder, gasping with fright. He had almost dropped the whole way to the metal deck, a lethal twenty metres below, and had been saved only by the fact that his nail had served as a partial barrier to the Pietzoff's neural charge. And Mathieu was due to return at any second. Striving for full control over his body, Dallen inched upwards to regain the height he had lost. He squeezed the solvent sponge to activate it, wiped the top rung free of paint and got to the bottom of the ladder just as Mathieu appeared with a mop and bucket which could have been props from a period play.

"I love these high-tech solutions to the problems of space flight," he said, gamely cheerful as he set to work on the water-beaded deck, looking like a blond holo star making a bad job of playing a menial.

Dallen nodded, still slightly shaky, still baffled by his experience at the head of the ladder. By all the rules governing such things, Mathieu should have taken the big drop and hit the deck like a sack of bones. Was it possible that his right hand was an extremely lifelike prosthetic? Or was it merely, returning to the prosaic, that there had been an uneven distribution of crystals in the emulsion and Dallen had chosen the wrong place for his test? It hardly seemed likely, but it was the most acceptable explanation he could devise. Nobody was immune to Pietzoff.

"To think I gave up a good job for this," Mathieu said, mopping with casual efficiency. "I must have been crazy."

"Why did you pack it in? Was it Bryceland?"

"Bryceland? Mal-de-mayor?" Mathieu's eyes showed a cool amusement. "No, Garry, it was time for me to travel, that's all."

"I see." Again Dallen found it difficult to cope with the complexity of his reactions to Mathieu. The fact that the man had been spared a summary execution did not mean that he should be allowed to avoid the establishment's penalty for a major crime, but was it now too late to bring an accusation against him? What evidence would remain at this late stage? And, underlying everything else, why did the man himself seem to have changed? The difference was indefinable, but it was there. Gerald Mathieu had always given him the impression of being a vain gadfly, a hollow man, but now…

What's the matter with me? Dallen demanded of himself in bemused wonderment. Why am I where Silvia isn't?

He gave Mathieu a dismissive wave, walked back to the elevator and pressed the button for Deck 5. The cage made its customary shuddering ascent, passing layer after layer of miniature grassy plains, some in shadow, others bathed in artificial sunlight. By the time it halted at the ring deck Dallen had relegated Mathieu to the past. Nobody was about—the Hawkshead's crew spending virtually all their working hours in the outer hulls—and he was able to go without delay to Silvia's cabin. He was keyed-up and exhilarated as he pressed the door handle, so preternaturally alive that he could actually feel the subtle agitation of the ship's air. The handle refused to turn. Dallen tapped lightly on the door and stepped back a little, disappointed, when it was opened by the solidly androgynous figure of Doctor Billy Glaister.

"Silvia can't see you now," she announced triumphantly. "She's got to…"

"It's all right, Billy," Silvia said, appearing beside the other woman. In the short interval since Dallen had last seen her, she had brushed her hair back and had dressed in a black one-piece suit. She came out of the cabin, drew the door to, caught Dallen's arm and walked him towards the nearby stair.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Billy is inclined to be over-protective."

"Is that what you call it?"

"That's what it is!" Silvia halted and gave him a very wise, very womanly smile. "When you cool down a little you'll be as glad as I am that she came back. This place isn't for us, Garry. Admit it."

Dallen glanced at the environment of smudged metal walls, stanchions and pipe runs. "It's idyllic."

She laughed and, in an unexpected gesture, raised the back of his hand to her lips and kissed it, somehow proving to him that all was well. "Garry, we'll reach Optima Thule in a day or two and as soon as Rick unloads his grass well he going on to Beachhead City, where there are good hotels, and where we'll have all the time we need to be together and make our plans. That's worth holding on for, isn't it?"

He looked down at her, unable to admit she was right, and forced himself to return her smile.

By the time another day had passed the ship had ceased most of its geometrical manipulations and was rapidly reaching a condition in which it could be perceived as a real object by outside observers. That, in turn, meant that human and inorganic watchers aboard the vessel could once again receive information from the normal space-time continuum.

Still shedding velocity at a rate of more than 1G, the Hawkshead took its bearings from Orbitsville's beacon network and began making course corrections, heading for Portal 36. The entrance had been assigned to it by the Optima Thule Science Commission because the surrounding terrain had never been contaminated by developers and therefore would yield the cleanest data in large-scale botanical experiments.

Professional space travellers rarely devoted any time to visual observation during final approaches to Orbitsville. At close ranges the vast non-reflective shell had always occluded half the universe, cheating the eye and confusing the intellect, creating the impression that nothing existed where in fact there was an impenetrable wall spanning the galactic horizon.

Thus it was that no member of the Hawkshead's crew was at a direct vision station when the vessel, guided by artificial senses, began groping its way towards Portal 36.

And thus it came about that it was Doctor Billy Glaister, habitual visitor to the ship's observation gallery, who discovered that Orbitsville had undergone a radical change.

The enigmatic material of its shell—black, immutable, totally inert in two centuries of mankind's experience—was suffused with a pulsing green light.

Chapter 17

The onset of weightlessness, gradual though it was, brought problems for Dallen.

In the early stages Cona had enjoyed her growing gymnastic ability, and had come dangerously close to hurting herself or Mikel during exuberant and ill-coordinated frolicking about the cabin. Then, as the Hawkshead's main drive neared total shutdown, the feeling of unnatural lightness progressed to become an outright falling sensation, and Corn's pleasure turned to fear. She clung to the frame of her bed, white-faced and whimpering, but resisted his efforts to secure her with the zero-G webbing. Mikel was more manageable, allowing himself to be tethered to his cot, and seemed less concerned with himself than with his toys' new tendency to float away in the air.

Dallen was retrieving a favourite model truck for him when a single chime from the communications panel signalled that the ship was entering the state of free fall. An uneasy lifting sensation in Dallen's stomach was accompanied by the sound of Cona retching.

Cursing himself for not having been prepared, he twisted towards her just in time to be caught in the skeins of yellowish fluid which had issued from her mouth. The acid smell of bile filled the cabin at once and Mikel began to sob.

Fighting to keep the heaving of his own stomach in check, Dallen drew a suction cleaner pipe out of the wall and used it to hunt down every slow-drifting globule. It took him another five minutes to clean himself and change his clothes, by which time his thoughts were turning away from his domestic troubles and towards truly macroscopic issues. As soon as the flickerwing drive had been deactivated the Hawkshead would have been able to enter radio contact with Orbitsville and request some kind of official explanation for what had happened to the shell. Presumably Captain Lessen already had the information, but—disturbingly—there had been no general announcement.

As one who had been born on Orbitsville, Dallen was anxious for that explanation. For him the sight of the inconceivable expanse of green fire, like a boundless ocean alive with noctilucence, had been the emotional equivalent of a severe earthquake. He had grown up on the Big O, had a primitive unquestioning faith in its permanence and immutability—and now the unthinkable was happening. Tendrils of new ideas were trying to worm their way into his mind and were making him afraid in a way that he had never known before, and it was a process he could not allow to continue.

As the minutes dragged by without any word from Lessen his unease and impatience grew more intense. Finally, and not without a twinge of guilt, he took a double-dose hypopad from a locker and placed it on his thumb. He went to Cona and, while overtly trying to make her more comfortable, pressed his thumb against her wrist and fired a cloud of sedative into her bloodstream. As soon as the drug had begun to take effect, rendering her drowsy and passive, he clipped the zero-G webbing across the yielding plumpness of her body and with a reassuring word to Mikel left the cabin.

The standard-issue magnetic stirrups he had fitted to his shoes made walking difficult at first, but by the time he reached the control deck he was moving with reasonable confidence. He found Lessen, Renard and a small group of the ship's officers gathered in front of the view panels, most of which showed luminous green horizons.

"You are not permitted in here," Lessen said to him at once, puffing his chest.

"Don't be ridiculous," Dallen said. "What the hell is going on down there?"

"I must insist that you…"

"Forget ail that crap." Renard turned to Dallen with no sign of his former animosity. "This is really something, old son. We talked to Traffic Central and were told that the whole shell lit up like that about five hours ago. Before that, apparently, they had a lot of green meridians chasing each other round and round the surface, but now the illumination is general.

"And you notice the pulsing? They say it started off at about one every five seconds, but now it's up to nearly one a second." Renard grinned at the discrete views of Orbitsville, excited but seemingly untroubled.

It's all part of a process, Dallen thought, remembering his conversation with Peter Ezzati, his instinctive alarm feeding on Renard's lack of concern.

"What did they say about landing?" he said. "How does it affect us?"

"It doesn't. The word from the Science Commission is that the light doesn't affect anything. It's only light. Nothing is showing up on any kind of detector-except photometers, of course—so we just ignore it and go ahead with the landing. They say it's business as usual at all the other entrances."

"I don't like it" Lessen said gloomily.

Renard clapped a hand on his shoulder. "You don't have to like it, old son. All you have to do is fly my ship, so I suggest you get on with it without wasting any more valuable time. Okay?"

"If you don't mind," Dallen said, "I'd like to stay here and watch."

Renard made a sweeping gesture. "Be my guest."

Lessen swelled visibly, looking as though he would protest, then shrugged and with a practised zero-G shuffle moved to a central console. He keyed an instruction to the ship's computer. A few seconds later Dallen felt a faint tremoring in the deck and glowing jade horizons changed their attitudes as the secondary drive came to life. A short time later Portal 36 showed up on the forward screen, visible at first as a short dark line floating in the green luminescence. The line grew longer and thicker, developing into a widening ellipse which quite abruptly became a yawning aperture in the Orbitsville shell.

Dallen, in spite of knowing what to expect, felt a coolness coursing down his spine as he saw the blue-the impossible blue—of summer skies within the portal. For a moment he had an inkling of how Vance Garamond and his crew must have responded two centuries earlier when their flickering nosed its way into the shaft of sunlight radiating into space from the historic Portal 1. As the aperture became a perfect thousand-metre circle of azure, Orbitsville's interior sun swam into view and steadied at the centre.

Without quite knowing why, Dallen found himself having to blink to clear his vision. I should have been with Silvia for this, he thought, wondering if she was in the Deck 3 observation gallery.

"We're docked on station at an altitude of two thousand metres," Lessen said, glancing at Dallen to see if he was absorbing the information. "Beginning our descent now."

Dallen gave him a friendly nod, accepting the verbal peace offering, and watched the circle expand in a lateral screen. The descent was slow but continuous, and after fifteen minutes the separation between the ship and its destination had been reduced to tens of metres. Propelled and maintained in the docking attitude by computer-orchestrated thrusters, the Hawkshead was lowering itself towards one edge of the aperture. Sting-like grapples were projecting beneath the central hull, ready to clamp the ship in place. At any of Orbitsville's principal ports it would simply have been a matter of sliding into one of the huge docking cradles, but here it was necessary for the ship to find its own anchorage.

The final step, Dallen knew, would be to extend a transfer tube from an airlock and drive it through the diaphragm field which kept Orbitsville's atmosphere from spewing into space. He estimated that unloading the grass and seed samples could take no more than a day, and from that point on Silvia and he would be free to…

"I don't like this," Lessen announced, speaking with a studied calmness which had the effect of momentarily stopping Dallen's heart "Something doesn't add up."

As if to ratify the captain's statement, crimson and orange rectangles began to flash on the control console to the accompaniment of warning bleeps. Two of the ship's officers moved quickly to separate consoles and began tapping keys with quiet urgency. The deck stirred like an animal beneath Dallen's feet.

Renard cleared his throat. "Would somebody care to tell me what's going on? I do own this thing, you know."

"The thrusters are still delivering power," Lessen said. "But the ship has stopped moving."

"But all that means is…" Renard broke off, his coppery eyebrows drawing together.

"It means something is counteracting the thrust—and our sensors can't identify it. We have a separation of twenty eight metres between the shell and the datum line of the hull, so there is no physical obstruction, but we can't detect any field-type forces. I don't like it. I'm going to back off."

"There's no need for that," Renard said. "Push a bit harder."

The officer at the smaller console to Dallen's left raised his head. "There's no indication of any threat to the ship."

"I don't care," Lessen replied, strutting nervously like a dove. "Traffic Central said conditions were normal at all other portals, but they can't vouch for anything here. We'll have to dock somewhere else."

"Like hell we will," Renard said. "I've got an agricultural station and a team of bloody expensive research workers waiting for me down there. We're going in right here."

"You want to bet?" Lessen palmed a master control with showy vigour, asserting his authority.

Watching him closely, Dallen saw a look of spiteful triumph which lasted only a few seconds and vanished as the patterns of red and orange on the console changed. New audio alarms began an insistent buzzing. Dallen felt vulnerable and totally helpless as he tried in vain to interpret the various information displays around him. It's all part of a process, came the fugue-thought. Orbitsville doesn't catch fire for nothing…

"We're not gaining any altitude," the officer on his left said.

"Don't tell me things I already know," Lessen snapped, specks of saliva floating away from his lips. "Get me an explanation."

His subordinate's jaw sagged. "But…"

The protest was drowned in the clamour of yet another alarm, this time not the discreet warning emitted for the benefit of flight managers but a blood-freezing bellow which deliberately mimicked the obsolete klaxon to achieve maximum effect. Three blasts were followed by a recorded announcement:

"EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! THE PRESSURE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED. ALL PERSONNEL MUST PUT ON SPACESUITS WITHOUT DELAY. EMERGENCY!"

The message was repeated until Lessen killed the control deck speakers, and even then it could still be heard booming through the ship's lower compartments.

Dallen watched in sluggish disbelief as Lessen and the other officers went purposefully to lockers and opened them to reveal the dark-mawed golem-figures of spacesuits. Renard, too, seemed unable to move. Looking exasperated rather than alarmed, he stood with gold-freckled arms folded across his chest and gaped at the men who were struggling into suits.

"This isn't a safety drill," Lessen called out, his gaze fixed on Dallen. "You'd better get down to your cabin and look after your family. You'll find two suits in the emergency locker and a pressure crib for the boy."

"I don't feel any pressure drop," Dallen said, unable to shake off a dull obtuseness.

"That's right," Renard put in. "What's all the panic?"

Lessen, now fully suited except for the helmet, said, "I don't know what's happening, but I can assure you this is a genuine emergency. Something kept us from making contact with the shell, and when we tried to back off something else pushed us back down again. Both those forces are still at work. We're in a vice and something is winding hard on the handle—that's what the strain monitors say—and the hull is beginning to split."

"You don't seem ail that worried to me," Renard accused.

"That's because I'm in my suit." Lessen gave Renard a malicious smile, refusing to cease feuding with him regardless of how dire he believed the situation to be.

Renard swore and ran towards the stairs in an ungainly slouch, his stirrups clacking noisily on the metal-cored deck. Dallen followed him as in a slow-motion dream. The emergency warning continued being broadcast on the lower decks, but he still had to contend with a sense of unreality.

Lessen had spoken of a mysterious "something" which, although invisible, was exerting a crushing force on the starship—but did it actually exist? Space was a sterile vacuum, not the habitat of mysterious entities who attacked ships. The Hawkshead was long past its best, and a more likely explanation for all that had occurred was that some of its systems had gone haywire. After all, the only evidence for the putative emergency was in information displays, and such devices could easily be…

Crang! Crip-crip-crip-crip-CRANG!

The sounds of a metal structure failing under stress came as Dallen was between Decks 4 and 5, and were followed by a slamming of unseen metal doors. This time his eardrums responded to a drop in air pressure, and now the emergency was real and now he was afraid. Truly afraid. Several people, Silvia among them, were gathered on Deck 5 helping each other with the unfamiliar task of putting on spacesuits. Giving Silvia a tense half-smile, Dallen slipped by them and went into his own cabin. Mikel, a toy vehicle clutched in each hand, was staring up at him uncertainly, but Cona was drowsing in her bed, oblivious to the disturbance.

"Everything is fine, son," Dallen said. "We're going to play a new game."

Keeping up a flow of reassuring patter, he opened a red-painted closet door and removed the pressure crib. It was an egg-shaped affair, with a transparency near one end, and had ample room for an infant. His hands trembling with haste, Dallen put Mikel inside it and closed the seals. Mikel gazed at him through the transparency, startled and reproachful, then began to cry. The sound reached Dallen by way of a speaker on the crib's life support control panel.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I promise it won't be for long."

He took an adult suit off its clips in the closet and began the more difficult task of getting Cona inside it. She was too drug-laden to offer any wilful resistance, but the sheer flaccidity and mass of her body, coupled with the lack of leverage due to zero gravity, hindered his every action. Within seconds he was sweating profusely. His co-ordination was impaired by anxiety, the constant aural battering from the PA system and Mikel's sobbing, plus the repetitious chanting in his head.

What's happening to the ship?

What's happening to Orbitsville?

When he finally got the suit closed around Cona and was reaching for the helmet she flung her head back in an involuntary spasm and struck him squarely on the bridge of the nose. Half-blinded by tears, he snorted out several quivering beads of blood and fitted Cona's helmet in place. She gave him a seraphic smile through its crystal curvatures, closed her eyes and lapsed back into sleep.

Grateful for the respite, he unzipped his own suit and was partially into it when the ear-punishing warning broadcast abruptly ceased. There was a moment of silence, then Lessen's voice was heard at a more tolerable volume. He spoke with irritating deliberation, either for clarity or in an effort to inspire confidence.

"This is Captain Lessen. The ship has suffered severe damage to its pressure hull. We have no alternative but to abandon the ship. Do not be alarmed. All crew and passengers should assemble immediately in the main airlock in the first quadrant of Deck 4. I repeat—do not be alarmed. You have only thirty metres of open space to cross, and there will be ropes to prevent anyone from drifting free. Go immediately to the main airlock in the first quadrant of Deck 4."

Dallen finished donning his suit and fitted the helmet in place, an action which activated the oxygen generator and temperature control systems. He had never worn a spacesuit before, except in safety drills, and felt oddly self-conscious as he tethered the crib to his belt and went to the cabin door with Cona awkwardly in tow. The other passengers had already left the ring-shaped Deck 5, but a crewman on his way to the next level saw Dallen's difficulty and came to his aid, taking responsibility for getting Cona up the narrow stair.

"Thanks," Dallen said. "I had to give her some heavy sedation."

"Save some for me," the man replied, his voice made disturbingly intimate by Dallen's helmet radio.

They reached the airlock and were impatiently counted into it by another suited crewman. The square chamber was large enough to hold the entire ship's company, all of whom seemed to be present judging by the babble of sound transmitted into Dallen's helmet. With the crib in his left arm and with Cona's bulk clamped to him by his right, he forced his way into the throng as a metal door slid shut behind him. The noise level increased abruptly as red lights began to glow on the walls and ceiling to indicate that the chamber's air was being bled off. More tremors coursed through the deck.

Suddenly Lessen's voice, augmented by his command transmitter, cut through the din. "Quiet, please! As you will have noticed, our suit radios operate on a common frequency. Stop all unnecessary talk immediately, otherwise … Well, I'm sure you can all see the need for speed and efficiency… His voice was lost in a renewed burst of sound which was followed at once by a guilty near-silence.

Dallen became aware of the inner skin of his suit tightening itself against his limbs. A few seconds later a different set of lights began to flash on the outer wall of the chamber and he realised he was surrounded by vacuum. The uneasy novelty of the experience faded from his mind as the airlocks's outer doors parted to admit a shaft of sunlight beaming out of a breathtaking blue sky.

Until that moment Dallen had thought of the ship as hovering above the outer surface of Orbitsville—now, with a mind-wrenching shift of perception, he found himself peering upwards. The portal was a one-kilometre lake of blackness set amid Orbitsville's endless pampas, a circular well of stars, and anybody standing at its edge and looking downwards would see the Hawkshead as a huge submarine trapped below the surface. Inhabitants of the Big O lived with stars beneath their feet.

There was a multiple gasp of surprise from the assembled company as the airlock doors retreated fully and a section of the Orbitsville shell became visible at one side of the rectangular opening. It had an alien aspect, one never before seen by human eyes. In place of the inert and non-reflective darkness was a sheet of pale green radiance of an intensity which almost equalled that of the interior sky. The light was pulsing in a way that made the shell seem alive. Dallen stared at it, strickenly, filled with superstitious awe.

Orbitsville doesn't catch fire for nothing, he thought.

It's all part of a … What frequency of pulsing did Renard mention? Was it once a second? Surely what I'm seeing is faster than once a second…

There was a flurry of activity near the edge of the airlock and the white-armoured figure of a man flew from the ship towards the portal, a line uncoiling behind him. He traversed the open space in only a few seconds, but missed the portal's edge by a short distance and Dallen saw him rebound from the invisible surface of the diaphragm field. He twisted sideways, with the brief flaring of a reaction torch, and managed to catch hold of a short ladder which was clamped to the edge. He went up it, visibly forcing himself through the field's spongy resistance, and other men—dressed normally, moving freely in Orbitsville's airy, sunlit warmth—were seen momentarily as they helped him to safety. There was a spontaneous cheer from the watchers below.

He made it, Dallen thought bemusedly. He made it, and it was so easy, and everything is going to be all right, after all…

"That single line is enough for our purpose," Lessen announced. "We will move along it hand-over-hand, starting with the supernumeraries. Attach yourself to the line with one of the short tethers you will find at your waists. There will be no difficulty, so don't worry. Now let's go!"

Dallen moved forward through the crowd with his weightless human encumbrances, steadied and assisted by willing hands. Ahead of him, figures were already linked to and ascending the line. Captain Lessen, distinguished by red triangles on his shoulders, was positioned at the rim of the airlock, personally checking that each departing passenger was properly clipped to the line. The direct sunlight glittered through crystal helmets and Dallen was able to recognise Silvia just as she set off across the void, closely followed by Renard. She went upwards towards their promised land with the fluid athleticism he would have expected.

The last passenger due to go before Dallen reached the bottom of the line was Gerald Mathieu. While his tether was being checked he gazed fixedly at Dallen, but without any sign of recognition, his face as colourless and immobile as marble. Without glancing into the starry gulf at his feet, he gripped the line and went up it slowly like a patient machine, barely advancing one hand beyond the other. Dallen. tried to clip Cona on next, but Lessen prevented him.

"It'll be easier if you go first and bring your wife along behind you," Lessen said. "How is she?"

"Asleep on her feet."

"Just as well. Don't worry—we'll get her there."

"Thanks." With Lessen's help, Dallen linked himself to Cona at the waist, then connected both of them to the lifeline. The crib tethered to his waist was an additional complication, but the absence of weight and rope friction worked in his favour and he found it surprisingly easy to progress upwards with his two human satellites. Mikel had stopped sobbing and was staring placidly through the transparent panel of his ovoid. Dallen tried to concentrate all his attention on the sunlit blue sanctuary above, but there was a hungry blackness all around him and—even more distracting—the Orbitsville shell seemed to have grown brighter. The light from it was so intense as to interfere with vision, but the superimposed pulsing seemed to have increased its frequency to two or three times a second.

At this rate it will soon be continuous, Dallen thought, the first ice crystal of a new dread forming at the centre of his being. What will happen then?

He was now near the midpoint of the lifeline and was so close to Orbitsville that he could see the minutest details of what was happening at the edge of the portal. He saw Silvia and Renard, aided by other hands, force their way through the closure field and stand up, figures greatly foreshortened. Silvia removed her helmet immediately and he saw her breasts rise as she drew deeply upon Orbitsville's pure air. She stood at the very run of space, her face troubled as she looked downwards in his direction. Dallen tried to climb faster and made the discovery that he had caught up on Gerald Mathieu, who had stopped moving and was clenching the line with both fists,

"Mathieu! What the hell are you doing? Dallen positioned his helmet close to Mathieu's, looked closely into his face and recoiled as he saw the blind white crescents of the eyes and the fixed, frozen grin.

Captain Lessen's voice sounded clearly above a background hubbub. "What's happening up there?"

"It's Mathieu," Dallen replied. "I think he's dead. He's either dead or cataleptic."

"Christ! Can you push him ahead of you?"

"I'll try." Aware of the people below him on the line crowding nearer, Dallen gripped the nearer of Mathieu's gloved hands and tried to prise the rigid fingers open. Then he gasped in purest terror as the impossible happened.

The universe split into separate halves.

On Dallen's left, below him, was the partially sunlit bulk of the ship, looming against the spangled backdrop of the galaxy. Down there he could see the red-glowing rectangle of the airlock, with spacesuited figures awaiting their turn to ascend the lifeline. Lessen was peering up at him, one hand raised to screen his eyes from Orbitsville's sun.

On Dallen's right, above him, was the inconceivable hugeness of Orbitsville itself. Up there, in one segment of his vision, he could see Silvia London and others outlined against a delicately ribbed blue sky. The remainder of his field of view on that side was taken up by the awesome green brilliance of the shell material, pulsing now at a frenetic rate, many times a second.

But in the centre, separating the two hemispheres of the universe, was a layer of utter blackness. It was narrow—barely wide enough to contain Mathieu, Dallen and his family—but he understood with an uncanny clarity that it stretched from one boundary of the cosmos to the other, that it was a dimension apart, at a remove from the normal continuum.

How…? Thought processes were painfully slow in the cryogenic chill that had descended over his brain. How can I understand what I shouldn't be able to understand?

A figure moved in the black stratum ahead of him, perhaps close, perhaps very distant. It was elongated, unlikely to be humanoid, and almost impossible to see—black sketched on black, a glass sculpture concealed in clear water.

Have no fear, Garry Dallen. Its voice was not a voice, but a thought implanted in Dallen's mind, perceived by him in the form of words, but cognisable beyond the limits of language. I serve Life, and therefore you will not be harmed. Let it be known to you that I am a member of a race which has almost complete mobility in time and space. We are the ultimate embodiment of intelligent life. A meaningful comparison cannot be made, but you would say that we are farther ahead of humans in our evolution than humans are compared to, say, trilobites. We do not apply a generic name to ourselves, but a convenient noun for your use—fashioned according to your linguistic principles—is Ultan. I repeat that we Ultans are servants of Life, and there is no reason for you to be afraid.

I can't help being afraid, Dallen responded. Nothing could have prepared me for this.

That is true. Chance has placed you in what may be a unique situation, but its duration will be very brief even by your standards—only a matter of seconds. All we require of you is that you do not break Gerald Mathieu's grip on the line or in any way force him towards the instrument you know as Orbitsville.

Why? What is happening? Even as he formulated the questions Dallen understood that he had already been altered by his mental contact with the other being. The mere fact of his being rational and self-controlled in the circumstances indicated that he had borrowed, no matter how temporarily, inhuman attributes from the dweller in the black dimension. He also understood that what his mind structure forced him to interpret as a human-style sequential dialogue was a near-instantaneous transfer of knowledge.

You are a fellow servant of Life, came the reply, and the ethic demands that you be informed of matters concerning your existence.

Be warned, Garry Dallen! The intervention by a different Ultan "voice" jolted Dallen, drawing his attention to another quadrant of the layer of blackness in which he was framed. As the second Ultan invaded his mind he saw it moving, blackness modifying blackness, a barely perceptible presence.

You are about to be given a false interpretation of the Ethic, the later arrival continued. I urge you to reject it and all its implications.

Wait! The human must now be allowed to reach his own conclusion and act accordingly, the first Ultan countered.

I concede that, in our present situation of deadlock, no other course is possible, but the Ethic requires that you present him with facts only. You must not influence his judgement.

I am content to let reason be my advocate.

As am I—it can only be to my advantage.

Dallen sensed he was listening to implacable enemies, beings who had long been engaged in some awesome struggle and who were reluctant to arrange an armistice. While their attention was concentrated on each other he became aware of the figure of Mathieu clamped rigidly by his hands to the line just above him, and the essential mystery of what was happening grew deeper. The first Ultan wanted to prevent Mathieu reaching Orbitsville—but why? What could be the…?

Garry Dallen, an agreement has been reached. Dallen's individuality was again lost in that of the entity which had first made him aware of it. The circumstances of our meeting will be fully explained to you so that you may choose to obey the Ethic in the full light of reason.

As a foundation upon which to build your understanding, let it be known to you that the universe you inhabit is not Totality. I can see, though, that you have already encountered ideas relevant to this subject, and therefore I shall use compatible language.

It is necessary for you to know that at the instant of the
Primal Event, known to you as the Big Bang, four universes are created. The one you inhabit—Region I in the terminology of some of your philosophers—appears to you to be constructed of normal matter and to have a positive time flow. It is counterbalanced by another universe—Region II—which from your viewpoint is composed of antimatter and has negative time flow. The Region II universe is moving farther and farther into your past, although its inhabitants naturally regard their matter as normal and their time flow as positive. They can never observe your universe, but they would conceive of it as being composed of antimatter and travelling into their past.

In addition, as postulated by some of your cosmogonists, there is Region III—a tachyon universe, which is rushing ahead of your universe in time; and there is Region IV—an anti-tachyon universe, which is fleeing into your past ahead of Region II. In the natural scheme of things, the four universes are not due to confront each other until the curvature of the space-time continuum brings them all together again—at which point there will be yet another Big Bang and a new cycle will begin again.

Dallen caught a memory-glimpse of a fantastic glass mosaic with its intricate petals. I confirm that these ideas are not new to me, although I personally cannot cope with the concept of time itself being curved.

The phrase "time itself" is at the heart of your difficulty, but it is enough for you to accept my statement. We Ultans are inhabitants of Region III, your tachyon universe, and our mobility in time and space gives us an overwhelming advantage in dealing with such concepts.

But I am more puzzled than before, Dallen responded. You have explained nothing.

The groundwork has to be extensive. It follows from what I have said that the universes created by each Big Bang have to be closed universes. The attractive force in each universe has to be strong enough to recall its myriad galaxies from the limit of their outward flight, thus reassembling all the matter in the cosmos in preparation for the next Big Bang.

Were it not so, all the galaxies would continue to disperse. Eventually they would grow cold, and would die, and absolute darkness would descend over a cosmos which consisted of black cinders drifting outwards into infinite blackness. There would he no more cycles of cosmic renewal. Life would have ended for ever.

All that is clear to me. Dallen, in his altered state of consciousness, was aware of his infant son gazing with darkly rapt eyes from the interior of his egg-like crib. But, still, nothing has been explained.

The reason for our intervention in your affairs is this. After an unknown number of comic cycles an imbalance has developed. We have learned that Region II is an open universe. It cannot contract. It is destined to expand for ever, and without the contribution of its matter the nature of the next Big Bang will be radically altered. We foresee a catastrophic disruption of the cycle of cosmic renewal.

Dallen strove to concern himself with the fate of an anti-matter universe which had come into being perhaps twenty billion years earlier and had been travelling into the past ever since. How would such an imbalance occur? If the mass of the Region II universe is equal to this one its gravitation must be…

But gravity is not all, Garry Dallen. There is another and equally vital force which can augment and influence gravity, which can permeate and inform matter.

Dallen, transcending himself, made the intuitive leap. Mind!

That is so. The graviton and the mindon have a clear structural affinity, though it is one you are not yet equipped to understand. There is a major difference, however. Gravity is an inherent, universal and unavoidable property of matter—whereas mind arises locally and uncertainly, by chance, when there is sufficient complexity in the organisation of matter, and when other conditions are favourable. It then propagates throughout galactic structures, enhancing the chances of mind arising elsewhere, and at the same time potentiating the action of gravity.

Most of your philosophers regard mankind as insignificant in the cosmic scheme, but your race and a million others are the cement which binds universes together. It is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

So Karal London was on the right track! There was no time for Dallen to be swamped by awe—the information exchanges continued at remorseless speed. You are telling me that mind did not flourish in the Region II universe.

That is correct. The conditions were never favourable. Even we Ultans cannot say why, but the probability of that situation arising naturally is so low that we suspect a malign intervention at an early stage of Region II's history.

I protest! The second Ultan stirred in the blackness. I have allowed you uninterrupted access to the human, but you abuse my forbearance by applying terms like malign to the natural forces which shape Totality.

I apologise, but the important thing for Garry Dallen to understand at this stage is that we have never regarded the situation as irretrievable. We have taken steps to normalise it.

But that means… Dallen's mind was a sun going nova. Orbitsville!

Yes. Orbitsville is an instrument, one which was designed to attract intelligent life forms and to transport them back through time to the Region II universe. And the moment of departure is close.

No! The rapport between Dallen and the Ultan began to weaken, but he was still sufficiently in thrall to the near-invisible alien to react logically rather than emotionally. It won't work! It can't make any difference—one sphere to an entire universe.

We have deployed more than one sphere. To be sure of capturing a viable stock we constructed similar instruments in every galaxy in your universe. Each galaxy, depending on its size, has anywhere from eight to forty spheres, all of them in localities favourable to the development of intelligent life. Your race's discovery of Orbitsville was not entirely fortuitous.

A hundred billion galaxies, multiplied by…! Dallen faltered, numbed by immensity, as he tried to calculate the number of Orbitsvilles scattered through the universe.

The total may be large by human scales of magnitude, but the Region II universe has as many galaxies as this one—and all have to be seeded. The Ethic requires it.

WRONG! The forceful contradiction from the second Ultan disturbed and confused Dallen, further weakening the inhuman persuasive force of the first. He took one step nearer to his normal state of being, and as emotion began to pit itself against intellect his thoughts homed in on Silvia London. She was on Orbitsville. And Orbitsville, now pulsing so rapidly that the eye detected only a frenzied hammering on the retina, was about to depart…

Garry Dallen, you can see for yourself the fallacious nature of that interpretation of the Ethic. As the second Ultan forced itself upon Dallen's mind he detected it as an agitated swirling current of blackness. I, in common with many of my kind, understand that we Ultans have no right to impose our will, our necessarily limited vision, upon the natural ordering of Totality. The imbalance between Regions I and II in the present cycle heralds drastic change—that is trite—but it was change which produced us and all we know. Resistance to change is wrong. Totality must evolve.

Why tell me? The psychic pressure on Dallen was becoming intolerable. I'm only a man, and I have other…

Chance has placed you in a unique situation, Garry Dallen. My forces are at a disadvantage in this part of this particular galaxy, and consequently I have had to proceed by stealth.

You have learned that Orbitsville is an instrument. To nullify it I, too, constructed an instrument—one which has only to make contact with the Orbitsville shell to be absorbed into it and denature it and lock it into the Region I continuum for ever. That instrument is the physical form of the being you knew as Gerald Mathieu.

I chose him because he wanted to terminate his own life, and because in your society he existed in circumstances which would allow him to travel to Orbitsville and approach it unobtrusively. When he killed himself by deliberately crashing his aircraft I recreated him—incorporating the physical modifications necessary for my purpose—and directed him to this point.

Unfortunately, his approach was detected and the preparations for the translation of this sphere into the Region II universe was speeded up. In addition, enormous energies are being directed against the body of Gerald Mathieu, paralysing it, counteracting my energies.

And now everything depends on you, Garry Dallen.

You are at the fulcrum, at the balance point of two of the greatest personalised forces in any universe, where neither can dominate you—where your own reason, will and physical strength can decide a cosmic issue.

Only seconds remain before the sphere is due to depart, but there is time for you to break Gerald Mathieu's hold on the line and propel his body into contact with the shell.

I, on behalf of the Ethic, charge you with that responsibility…

Dallen sobbed aloud as the two hemispheres of the divided universe clapped together.

His senses were returning to normal, but he knew that the entire confrontation with the Ultans had taken place between heartbeats. A confusion of gasps and startled cries from his suit radio suggested that the watchers in the Hawkshead's airlock had shared the experience to some extent. His three companions in the centre of the extra-dimensional episode knew least of all—Cona floating in her drug-induced torpor, Mikel in his starry-eyed incomprehension; Gerald Mathieu, dead but not dead, frozen to the line which snaked upwards to…

Dallen's breathing stopped as he saw that the shell material was a plane of green fire, its pulsations now so close together as to be almost beyond perception. The departure was imminent. There were no more reserves of time. Silvia was standing at the rim of the portal, leaning dangerously over the abyss, but restrained by Rick Renard's arms. Her lips were moving, forming words Dallen needed to hear, and her eyes were locked on his.

"Silvia," he shouted, surging up the line towards her. Mathieu's rigid body blocked the way, the blind face grinning into his. There had been talk of a great responsibility … of forcing the instrument that was Mathieu across those last few metres of space … but would take time … and there was no more time … the shell material was as bright as the sun … burning steadily…

No more fairness, Dallen screamed inwardly. This is for ME!

He unclipped himself from the lifeline, from his wife's inert figure, from his son's crib. He clawed his way around Mathieu's body, frantic with haste, and launched himself upwards toward the rim of the portal. Silvia extended her arms as if to catch him…

But Orbitsville vanished.

He had missed Silvia by a second, and now she was separated from him by a gulf of time equal to twice the age of the universe.

Dallen drew his knees up to his chin, closed his eyes, and went slowly tumbling into the newly created void.

Chapter 18

The headquarters of the London Anima Mundi Foundation had been set up a short distance south of Winnipeg for a number of reasons, an important one being administrative convenience, it was close to Metagov Central Clearing, the largest fragment of governmental machinery remaining on Earth, and therefore was at the centre of a pre-existing communications. and transport network. A trickle of offworld traffic was coming in from the Moon, the various orbital stations and from Terranova, the single small planet which had been discovered before Orbitsville had relegated it to the status of a backwater. The level of traffic was barely enough to keep the facility alive, but that was seen as an important contribution to the Renaissance. The global picture was more encouraging than many futurologists would have predicted, but it would be a long time before there would be any reserve capacity in the technology-based industries.

Dallen was satisfied with the location for reasons of his own, not the least being that the climate was often comparable to that of his native Orbitsville. There were days, especially in spring and fall, when the air flowing in across the high grasslands had an evocative steely purity which, taking him unawares, would cause him to tilt his head and search the skies as though he might see in them the pale blue watered silk archways of his childhood. And even in midsummer, when the temperatures were higher than he would have preferred, the air was lively and had a freshness he did not associate with Earth.

This was a good place to bring up my son, he thought as he waited for the breakfast coffee to percolate. Good as any place you would find.

It was a diamond-clear morning—one of a seemingly endless succession of fine mornings in that summer—yet he was acutely conscious of the date as he moved about the familiar environment of the kitchen. August 25, 2302. Only nine years had passed since Orbitsville had departed for another universe, but it had been two whole centuries since an exploration ship had slipped away from the Earth-Moon system heading for unknown space. Now the Columbus was fully stored and ready to spiral out of Polar Band One to test itself against sun-seeded infinities, and the date would be one for the history books.

The thought of books drew Dallen from the kitchen and into the pleasant, long-windowed room he used as a study. One wall featured a custom-built rosewood case which held exactly four hundred literary works, many with antique bindings which proclaimed them to be early editions, in the centre of the case, glazed and framed, was the handwritten reading list which had been the basis of the collection. Dallen smiled as he ran his gaze over the display, taking a wholesome and pleasurable pride in having read every volume, from Chaucer right through to the major 23rd Century poets. His brain, conditioned by nine years of schooling in total recall techniques, effortlessly recreated the circumstances in which he had recovered the list…

For protracted aching minutes after the disappearance of Orbitsville the group of people who had tried to enter Postal 36 had been too stricken to think coherently or act constructively. Dallen remembered continuing his slow-tumbling fall towards the sun, his mind a chaotic battleground for alien concepts and a crushing sense of personal loss, unable to care much about whether he was going to be lost or saved. He had teen thousands of metres away from the Hawkshead before the crewman dispatched by Captain Lessen had overtaken him and jetted them both back to safety. The ship's pressure skin, abruptly released from an invisible vise, had resealed itself within its elastic limits and the air losses were no longer a matter of urgency.

In the days that followed Dallen had been able to lose himself in hard work, because—once the incredible truth about the sphere had been accepted—there remained the practical business of the return to Earth.

Many starships, ranging in type from bulk carriers to passenger vessels, had been left in a vast circle around the sun when Orbitsville had vanished from the normal continuum. Forming part of the same circle, but in much larger numbers, had been an even wider variety of interportal ships, many of which had been en route when their destinations had ceased to exist. In some extreme cases, maintenance workers on exterior port structures had been left floating in space, clinging to sliced-off sections of docking cradles.

The salvage operation had been facilitated by the fact that everything left behind was in a stable and tidy orbit around the sun, and was also provided with stellar heat. As a preliminary to the retreat to Earth, all personnel with only spacesuits or unpowered habitats to keep them alive had been located and rescued by small craft. Next, all ships—large and small—had gathered in a single orbiting swarm, and the interstellar vessels had taken on board every human being left in that region of space. That stage of the operation had been complicated by the arrival of twelve ships from Earth and one from Terranova, all of which had been locked in warp transfer at the time of the disappearance, but the problems had been mostly concerned with credibility and had eventually been resolved. The thesis that Orbitsville no longer existed, although astonishing, was remarkably easy to demonstrate.

The logistics of assembling the return fleet had been such that Dallen had plenty of time to rescue his family's possessions from the condemned Hawkshead and transfer them to an aging but grandiose passenger liner, the Rosetta, in which they had been assigned a suite. And it had been while repacking some oddments that he had found the reading list folded and tucked into a rarely-used tobacco pouch. Cona had prepared it for his benefit three years earlier. It detailed four hundred books she regarded as important and which she had urged him to read.

"That's purely for starters," she had said, smiling. "Just to give you some idea of where you came from and where you ought to be going."

The old Dallen had refused the intellectual gift, inflicting unknown pain by not trying even one of the suggested books, but the new Dallen had been determined to make amends. Standing there in the special sunlight of that special morning, he touched the oiled wood of the bookcase, recognising and respecting all that remained to him of his former wife. The body which had once belonged to Cona was now inhabited by a cheerful and uncomplicated young woman who had a mental age of about thirteen and whose home was on a nearby farm owned by the Foundation. Belatedly accepting his former physician's advice, Dallen had renamed her Carol and used the name automatically in his thoughts.

He went to visit Carol once a month and occasionally they would go horseback riding together, and he was always glad that their relationship, although pleasant, was cool and undemanding. Carol treated him as she would an uncle, sometimes enjoying his visits a lot and at others showing impatience over being dragged away from the stables. The active farming life had pared her figure down, taking years off her apparent age, with the result that when Dallen saw her from a distance there was little to remind him of his former wife—Cona Dallen doesn't live here any more—and he had learned that all grief has to fade.

"Coffee in five minutes," he shouted, hearing the first subdued thump from the old-style percolator in the kitchen. He arranged settings for three people at the breakfast bar, then returned to the study and sat down at his desk. The computer displayed his job notes for the day, but he found it hard to concentrate on the symbols when the lawns and shrubs beyond his window were glowing with a phosphorescent nostalgic brilliance and the Columbus was circling up there beyond the atmosphere, making ready for deep space. Dallen reached for his pipe and, while filling it, allowed his thoughts to drift back over the previous nine years.

Dwelling in the past was psychologically inadvisable for most people, but in his case it had literally become a way of life, a profession. Project Recap had been set up within weeks of his return to Earth after the Orbitsville departure, with Dallen as a principal director. In the early stages all but three of the thirty-four men and women who had witnessed and been affected by the seminal encounter with the Ultans had been part of the team, each making a unique contribution to the collective memory. The ineffable moment of wordless, mind-to-mind contact had been shared by all, but the common experience had been interpreted by individuals in different ways, modified by their intelligence, outlook and education.

Holorecordings of the event—with their hazy images of black entities shimmering in blackness—had proved to the rest of humanity that something had happened, but it had been the very diversity of the participants' reactions which had finally eliminated all theories about mass hysteria. Doctor Glaister, for example, with her background in particle physics, had emerged from the experience with recollections which varied a great deal from Dallen's in some places, especially where the "dialogue" had touched on the relationship between mindons and gravitons. The detailed insights she had received—"cameos of cold logic, engraved in permafrost, with the black ice of eternity showing through" was how she once described them—revitalised her entire field of learning, in spite of the fact that only one in a thousand of its workers had not been translated into the Region II universe.

The effect had been similar, though to a lesser extent, with some technical and engineering experts of the Hawkshead's crew, and it was largely as a result of their subsequent work that the exploration ship Columbia would be able to fly at close to tachyon speeds, bringing the core of the galaxy within mankind's reach. Other members of the same group had formed a cadre of inspired technocrats who, with material assistance from Terranova, were playing a vital role in the Renaissance.

The after-effects of the unique encounter had not been uniformly beneficial, however. The three men who had not been able to participate in Project Recap had been jolted by their experience into a profound autism which still gave little sign of abating. Dallen himself, prime target for the Ultans' psychic energies, had been disturbed for weeks, prone to nightmares and loss of appetite, alternating between periods of torpor and hyperactivity. When he had learned that his work for the Project would involve repeated and full-scale mental regression to the encounter he had at first refused to cooperate in any way, and only gradually had overcome his instinctive fears. There had also been the problem of his disbelief in the essential proposition.

The central idea was that the Ultans could be used retrospectively as a kind of sounding board for scientific and philosophical beliefs to be specially implanted in Dallen's mind. By drug-intensified hypnotic regression he would be able to meet the superhuman entities again and again, recreating a special state of consciousness, continuing to harvest or corroborate knowledge, to glean and scavenge until the law of diminishing returns made the exercise pointless.

His scepticism had gradually faded when he discovered he had already, in association with Billie Glaister, helped change men's thinking about no less a question than the ultimate fate of the universe. Cosmologists had never been able to find enough mass in the universe, even with allowance for black holes, to guarantee that it was closed and therefore cyclic. The best they had been able to hope for was the Einstein-de Sitter model of a marginally open or flat universe, one which barely expanded but would go on doing so for ever. However, the mindon/graviton component imposed a positive curvature on spacetime, promising an infinite sequence of Big Squeezes and Big Bangs. The cosmological timescales were such that Dallen could feel little personal concern, but he could see that a cyclic universe was more pleasing to philosophers.

Of much greater interest to him were the questions posed by the mindon science of the Renaissance. The very fact that it not only accepted personal immortality, but had it as a cornerstone, made it unlike any scientific discipline that had gone before. It was exuberant, optimistic, mystical, life-centred, full of wild cards, boasting as one of its creeds a statement hypnotically retrieved by Dallen from the Ultan encounter: it is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

Dallen liked to regard himself as an integral part of the universe, and he savoured the irony in the way in which human beings, who had until recently accepted a life expectancy of some eighty years, were now debating their prospects of surviving the next Big Bang as mindon entities.

"Science used to be preoccupied with tacking on more and more decimal places," a colleague told him. "Now We add on bunches of zeroes."

It had been that moral buoyancy, the powerful life-enhancing elements of mindon science, which had given Dallen the necessary incentive to join Project Recap. To the world at large the demanding aspect of his work had been the mental wear and tear caused by the periods of intensive study of abstruse subjects followed by regressions and the subsequent debriefings. Dallen had found the process intellectually harrowing, but the principal strain had been emotional—for it entailed his losing Silvia London time after time. One system of thought demanded that he regard her as having lived out her life billions of years before the oldest stars in the universe were formed; but in another—the one which was instinctive and natural to Dallen—she was vitally alive, separated from him only by some malevolent trick of cosmic geometry. And both systems had exacted their due of bitter tears.

For months after the premature death of his mother Dallen had been haunted by fantastic dreams in which she was still alive, and on his awakening his grief had returned with almost its original force. A similar sequence occurred with Silvia. Over and over again, in the slow-motion quasi-existence of hypnotic regression, he saw her reaching her arms towards him as he flew upwards to the edge of the portal. He saw her tears and was able to read the words on her lips: I love you, I love you, I love you…

The subsequent dreams were varied. In some he reached the portal and forced his way through the diaphragm field in time to voyage with Silvia into the Region II universe, in others she remained behind with him in the normal continuum, but—dreams being what they are, with their own laws and logics—the one that troubled him most was the one which took the threads of reality and wove them into the most fantastic, least realistic pattern. Dallen had it on the authority of the Ultans themselves that there were anywhere from eight to forty of their titanic spheres in the Milky Way system. He had also been told that the sphere known to mankind as Orbitsville had been forced to leave earlier than scheduled—which meant that the others were still located in various arms of the galaxy, still making their unhurried preparations to depart for another continuum. In the dream Dallen sailed out on a tachyon ship, found one of the remaining spheres, and entered it just in time to be transported to a Region II galaxy. And in the dream he quit the second sphere and flew with magical ease and certainty to Orbitsville, and was reunited with Silvia.

To the dreaming mind such epic flights, far from seeming preposterous, are perfectly natural and normal, and that was the vision Dallen's unconscious elected to repeat most, its poignancy magnified by the very factors which divorced it from reality. At first he expected the dream to retain its full power, then he realised that his grief over the loss of Silvia was following the merciful and inevitable course of all passions. Pain softened into sadness, sadness mellowed into resignation, then it came to Dallen that he was truly a different person. The change had begun when he had finally acknowledged that he deserved to love Silvia and be loved by her in return, and it had been accelerated by his having, for the first time in his life, work he found absorbing and worthwhile.

Cosmogony and cosmology were only part of Project Recap's domain—there was the subject of the Ultans themselves. As the one who had had the closest mental contact with the enigmatic beings, Dallen was assigned the position of leading expert in the brand-new field of study, but he was well aware of his human inadequacies. In common with all other members of the original encounter group, when he tried to empathise with the Ultans, to penetrate their minds, all he divined was an overpowering sense of coldness. For Dallen the feeling was reinforced by his recollection of the icy calmness of the aliens, of their dispassionate reliance on logic as they tried to influence him mere seconds before the Orbitsville departure.

There were arguments and counter-arguments, all based on speculation. Perhaps the humans, like receivers tuned to a single radio frequency, had been oblivious to a wide spectrum of telepathic transmission. The Ultans, it was reasoned, must be capable of human-like feelings because they were engaged in conflict and were not above using subterfuge. On the other hand, perhaps they had betrayed no trace of emotion because—and this was the argument which had dismayed many people—the fate of Orbitsville, so important in human terms, was infinitesimal in the Ultan scheme of existence. After all, what did it matter about one sphere when more than a million times a million of them had been deployed in an olympian struggle to shape a future universe? Nothing could be deduced about the probable outcome of that struggle, nor about the super-dimensional symmetry of the next Big Bang, using the fact that Orbitsville was now located in Region II. Orbitsville was too insignificant, a single grain of sand on a storm-swept shore…

"This is the last call for coffee," Dallen bellowed. "If nobody shows up I'm having the lot."

There was a scuffling and the sound of laughter from the direction of the bedrooms, and a second later Nancy Jurasek and Mikel jostled their way into the kitchen. Nancy was an engineer with the Industrial Reclamation Office in Winnipeg. She devised ways of reactivating municipal services for the benefit of people drifting back into the cities from the old independent communes. She was dark-haired and vivacious, and in the two years she had been living with Dallen had built an excellent relationship with Mikel, playing the role of substitute mother or sister when required, but in general simply being herself. One of her most valuable contributions had been in bringing out the irreverent and fun-loving side of Mikel's nature, characteristics he had had little chance to develop in the cloistered atmosphere of the Foundation.

Mikel accepted a beaker of coffee from Dallen, sipped it and made a grimace of distaste. "The thing I look forward to most about the Columbus," he said earnestly, "is getting a break from Dad's coffee."

Dallen pretended to be hurt. "I was going to make a big flask of it to send with you."

"There's a law against shipping toxic wastes."

Mikel dodged a playful swipe from Dallen, sat down at the breakfast bar and began to eat toast. Although not quite eleven years old, he was taller than Nancy and had an unruly appetite. He also had a prodigious talent for mathematics and physics, and had fully earned his place on the Columbus science team. Dallen's feelings had been mixed when he was giving his permission for Mikel to go on the exploratory flight. His instinctive parental feeling was that the boy was too young to leave home and venture into space, even for two months, but in his regressions to the Ultan encounter he had had repeated glimpses of the infant Mikel's face, the eyes blackly luminous as they gazed from the interior of the ovoid crib. It was something he had never discussed with the others, and there were no relevant criteria, but Dallen could half-believe that his son had been born again in that moment, a true child of space, with a mind/brain complex which by a freak of destiny had been readied by Gerald Mathieu for a singular congress with the Ultans, a tabula rasa for alien stylii.

If that were the case, if Mikel had been uniquely prepared to lead new generations to the stars, it could be seen as a curious atonement for Mathieu's original crime. Thinking back to the awesome events nine years in the past, Dallen could find in himself no residue of the hatred which had dominated and disfigured a part of his life. When Gerald Mathieu had been reeled back into the Hawkshead's airlock he had been found to be dead, with no apparent physiological cause. His body had been consigned to the Orbitsville sun and it was as though Dallen's negative emotions had gone into that stellar crucible with it. Now the entire episode seemed like a dream, and all that remained to him from it were echoes of feelings, stray reflections of things that might have been.

Had the group which reached the portal also been in mental contact with the Ultans? Dallen posed himself the familiar, unanswerable questions as he sipped his coffee. Were they telepathically appraised of their situation? Or had they been mystified when the ship and all connected to it had ceased to exist and strange constellations had flared beneath their feet? Had Silvia and Renard had children? What was she doing at that very moment, forty billion years ago in a different universe?

"You seem a little quiet this morning," Nancy said. "Worried about Mikel?"

"'No, the Columbus is a good ship," Dallen replied, glancing at his son who was still munching toast. "And he'll only be gone for two months."

"Two months for this trip," Mikel said, his eyes growing darkly rapt in the way that Dallen remembered so well. "In that time we'll travel farther than anybody has ever done, but that's just for starters. Soon we'll be able to do anything … cross the galaxy … go hunting for Ultan spheres…"

Nancy gave a delighted laugh. "Dream on, child!"

"It isn't as far-fetched as you might think," Mikel said, a solemn expression appearing on his face as he tapped into his prodigal's intellect. "Here's a possible scenario for you to consider. We know that the Ultans put a minimum of eight spheres into this galaxy, and we were also told that they selected locations favourable to the development of intelligent life. Well, when we have improved our knowledge of this region of space sufficiently we will be able to decide what characteristics it has that make it a good site for a sphere. Then we can search for other similar areas in the galaxy and track down other spheres."

"Easy as pie," Nancy said scornfully, "but what happens if you bump into the Ultans themselves?"

Dallen enjoyed the way in which Nancy and Mikel were consciously playing word games, building an edifice of purest fantasy, but at some point they had begun to stray close to the chimerical never-never land of his old recurrent dream. He found himself oddly intent as he waited for the boy's answer.

"But that's what we'd be trying to do," Mikel said. "The spheres themselves are of no value to us. What we want is to find the Ultans, study them, learn from them, communicate with them."

"And what great message would you pass on?"

Mikel frowned, and for an instant his boyish features were overprinted with the face of the man he was to become. "For one thing—I'd let them know we don't appreciate being treated like cattle."

Dallen turned away thoughtfully, realising he was almost afraid of his own son, then it came to him that he was listening to the voice of a new age. The Orbitsville phase had ended. In future when men' set out to straddle the galaxy they would be searching for more than just areas of grass on which to pitch their tents. Equipped with superb tachyon ships, girded with mindon science, consciously immortal, they would have aims which could be incomprehensible to men of Dallen's generation. But there was nothing wrong with that, he reasoned. It was a sign that mankind was on the move again, and he should feel nothing but gladness that he had contributed to the process of vital change.

In the afternoon Dallen stood with one arm around Nancy at the Winnipeg spaceport, watching the shuttle carry his son up to an orbital rendezvous with the Columbia. There was no denying the sadness he felt over parting with the boy, at the idea of Mikel spending his eleventh birthday farther from Earth than men had ever been before. But the transcendental mood of the morning still lingered, sustaining him as the shuttle dwindled to a silver point and disappeared in the wind-scoured blueness of the sky.

Ultans, he thought, we'll see you around!

Orbitsville Judgement

BOB SHAW

LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
1990

…could thou and I with Fate conspire,
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not scatter it to bits – and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Omar Khayyam

PART ONE:
THE HAMMER RISES

CHAPTER 1

The ancient constellations – star groups which had presided over mankind's entire history – vanished in one quiet instant, and were immediately replaced by new stars arrayed in unfamiliar patterns.

It was the most astounding event in the annals of astronomy, but it was witnessed by relatively few people. Only those who happened to be working near portals and looking outwards at the crucial moment saw the cosmos being transfigured. The news of it spread to the far interior of Orbitsville, of course, but the process took time and had little impact on the complacent market town of Orangefield. Most of Orangefield's inhabitants had never made the journey to a portal – and therefore had never even seen a star – and happenings in the outside universe tended to be of secondary importance to them.

Distant suns might have changed their positions; remote galaxies might have done a strange shuffle – but crops still had to be gathered in the apron of cultivated land surrounding the town. The wheels of commerce and local industry still had to turn; no man or woman had been excused any chores; and infants still had to be fed, bathed and powdered before being tucked into bed for the night. During the hours of darkness the Orbitsville sky, which had never known stars, continued to exhibit its watered-silk striations, hundreds of delicate arches of blue and darker blue spanning the horizons – and life gave every indication of proceeding very much as usual…

Jim Nicklin's home, lending library and workshop were combined in a single timber-framed building which occupied a pleasant site on the north edge of the town. It was constructed of fortwood, a local timber which, even when left unpainted, had a satisfying appearance and the durability of stone. Considered simply as a building, it was somewhat lacking in architectural merit – having been added to in a haphazard manner at various times in the previous fifty years – but it suited Nicklin's needs and life style very well. It was easy to clean and maintain, and yet provided ample space for all his activities. It was within easy reach of the town's amenities, and yet for the most part looked out on farmlands and distant savannahs.

There was a good fused-earth road a little more than a hundred paces from Nicklin's front porch, but his property was separated from it by a broad stream. The clear water contained several varieties of fish which had been imported from Earth more than a century earlier, and now were as well established as if they had been there for geological eras. In addition to providing Nicklin with sport and occasional fare for the table, the stream gave him a comforting sense of being partitioned from the outside world.

To reach his premises, personal visitors and customers were obliged to make use of a small wooden bridge, at the far end of which was a gate which he could lock when he was in the mood for solitude. The fact that the stream could easily be waded, and also was well provided with stepping stones, was immaterial. When would-be callers saw that Nicklin's gate was closed they understood they had chosen an unsuitable time, and – unless their business had a fair degree of urgency – would turn away. Respect for a person's wish to be alone was basic to society in most regions of Orbitsville.

Although Nicklin had the reputation of being a moody and changeable individual, his unsociable spells usually manifested themselves only when nightfall was drawing near. That's what he gets for being a bachelor, was the view of most of Orangefield county's women and quite a few of the men. It isn't right for a normal, healthy young man to be living on his own and going to a lonely bed at night. However, in spite of their reservations concerning Nicklin's bachelorhood, very few of the eligible females had ever seriously thought of trying to attract him into the socially acceptable state of marriage.

He had not yet turned thirty, was tall, fair-haired, reasonably handsome and had only the faintest trace of a bulge above the belt buckle – but his boyish face, with its small nose and blue eyes, was slightly too boyish. It often bore a philosophic and mildly puzzled expression, as though he had just worked out how many angels could stand on the head of a pin and was dissatisfied with the answer. His eyes sometimes seemed amused when the folk about him were engaged in serious debate; or they could mirror a deep concern when there was nothing but laughter all around. In spite of his acknowledged genius for the repair of domestic appliances and light machinery, he gave the impression of somehow being impractical. He struck people as being soft, a dreamer who was ill-equipped to deal with the hard knocks which rural life could deal out on a plentiful basis. The women of Orangefield township and county were conditioned to respect tough, pragmatic men who had the potential to be tireless workers and good providers – so when choosing husbands they tended to overlook Jim Nicklin.

That arrangement suited Nicklin quite well. Orangefield was a low-tech community which was modelled on the ideal of a small town in the American mid-west, circa 1910, with some elements borrowed from equally idealised English villages of the same period. The quality of life was good – enhanced by the fact that high-tech resources could be called upon from outside when emergencies occurred – but Nicklin had observed that married men always had to work harder than bachelors, and led lives which on occasion were marred by domestic troubles. Not being greatly enamoured of toil, he was quite satisfied with his mode of existence, especially as there were more than enough times when he got himself into ample trouble with no assistance from a marriage partner.

He had an uneasy suspicion that one of those times was near at hand as he watched the heavy-shouldered figure of Cort Brannigan cross the bridge and come striding towards the workshop entrance. It was early on a fine spring morning, the sort of morning which might have been designed to uplift the human spirit, but there was something about Brannigan's gait and out-thrust jaw which suggested that, if anything, his spirit was in a meaner and more joyless condition than usual.

He was a sixty-year-old farmer, who had a mixed-produce spread eight kilometres north of the town, and in spite of being obese he was renowned as a brawler. His great belly, which could absorb strong men's best punches, surged as he walked, glowing intermittently as it moved in and out of the cylinder of shadow created by his wide-brimmed hat. Several of the cinnamon sticks he habitually chewed to obliterate the smell of alcohol projected from his shirt pocket. He had no time for Nicklin as a person, and only dealt with him because there was no other competent repair service in the county.

Some ten days earlier he had brought in his wife's sewing-machine, which needed to have a bracket welded or brazed, and had demanded priority service. Nicklin was afraid of the big man, although he did his best to conceal the fact, and had promised the repair would be taken care of within a couple of days. He had intended to pass it over without delay to Maxy Millom, his part-time employee, but Maxy had not been around that afternoon. There had been a flurry of urgent work the following morning, and somehow the sewing-machine had been forgotten. When Brannigan had telephoned to enquire about it Nicklin had put him off with a hastily concocted excuse, and then – incredibly, it seemed in retrospect – had forgotten the machine all over again.

At that very moment it was being worked upon by Maxy in the shed he used for welding operations. The job would take only a few minutes, so Brannigan would not have to leave empty-handed, but the machine was bound to reek of hot metal when finally produced, and the big man would realise at once just how much priority his esteemed order had been given…

"Good morning, Cort," Nicklin said, mustering a smile as Brannigan came into the shop and approached the low counter. "Great morning, isn't it?"

"Hadn't noticed." Brannigan glanced over the shelves behind Nicklin. "Where is it?"

"It? Oh, the sewing-machine! Maxy will be bringing it through in a minute."

"Isn't it ready?"

"It's been ready for ages, Cort … sitting right here and ready to go…" Nicklin forced his brain into higher gear. "I just noticed a rough spot on the welding – just a minute ago – so I told Maxy to take it back and smooth it out. We don't want your good lady scratching her hand, do we?"

Brannigan studied Nicklin as though he were some unpleasant primitive life form. "I bumped into young Maxy in the bar of the Victoria Hotel last night. Got to talking to him for a while." Brannigan increased the intensity of his stare, as though he had just said something very significant.

"Really?" Nicklin toyed nervously with his empty coffee cup as he divined what was coming next. "That was nice."

"When I asked him about my machine he said he didn't even know I'd brought it in. What have you to say to that?"

Nicklin mentally cursed his assistant for not having either the loyalty or the savvy to cover up for him. "You can't trust a word Maxy says when he's had a couple. Poor kid gets confused. I think his memory goes."

"It had gone last night, that's for sure," Brannigan growled, his gaze probing Nicklin's soul. "He couldn't even remember having any relatives over in Poynting – let alone a favourite uncle who had just died, and whose funeral he had just attended."

"My problem is that I trust people too much." Nicklin put on a disappointed expression, at the same time wondering what insane impulse had prompted him to blurt out that particular lie. To make matters worse, he had completely forgotten having done it, otherwise he might have been able to bribe Maxy into collusion.

"I let Maxy put just about anything over on me when he wants some extra time off," he went on. "You know what? I'm going to go over to the welding shop right now and fetch your machine, and while I'm there I'm going to give that kid the worst…"

Nicklin's voice faltered as he glanced out through the nearest window and saw the pear-shaped figure of Maxy approaching with the sewing-machine tucked under his arm. Maxy's bottle shoulders and wide, slabby hips made him look older than his nineteen years when he was seen at a distance. Like many slightly misshapen men, he had great physical strength, and was walking so energetically that he appeared to spring clear of the ground with every step. He had not bothered to put on his hat for the short walk between the two buildings, and his scalp – shaven to forestall premature baldness – shone in the sunlight with the whiteness of lard.

Nicklin, who had been hoping to keep Maxy and Brannigan apart, almost groaned aloud at the sight. Please, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he prayed inwardly, please allow Maxy to have developed some common sense, diplomacy, loyalty or compassion during the night. Make him keep his mouth shut about the dead uncle business. That's not too much to ask…

Maxy burst into the shop with unnecessary force, glaring at Nicklin with hostile eyes. "What for," he demanded, "did you tell Mr Brannigan I had an uncle in Poynting who died?"

Terrible sentence construction, Maxy, Nicklin thought, his mind trying to escape into irrelevances as he realised he was well and truly boxed in. His brow prickled with cool sweat.

"Yeah, that's what I'd like to know." Beneath its frosting of silver stubble, Brannigan's face was that of a man who was prepared to commit murder.

Confronted by his accusers, Nicklin was suddenly amazed by how angry they were. They were behaving as though he had committed some terrible crime against them … as though he had betrayed their trust in a matter of the utmost gravity … and, when it came down to it, who were they? Nobodies! He had no need of them. In fact, they were the ones who needed him! It was, now that he thought of it, rather like the trial scene at the end of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice is coming to her senses and realises that all the entities who are crowding and harassing her are nothing more than playing cards. There was absolutely nothing to prevent him from, as Alice had done, rising up and venting his irritation with one great shout of, Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!

"What are you grinning at?" Brannigan shot Maxy a can-you-believe-this? glance and leaned across the counter, coming so close that Nicklin received a warm gust of cinnamon from his breath. "I don't see anything funny."

Nicklin, who had not been aware of showing amusement, did his utmost to emit that single devastating shout which would scatter his oppressors as though they were leaves caught up in a tornado. His mouth opened, but no matter how he strained no sound was issued, and he realised amid an up-welling of despair that the simple act – natural to anyone who had any backbone to speak of – was beyond his capabilities. He was hemmed in, trapped, about to be humiliated, and could envisage no possible means of escape.

"There must be some misunderstanding here, gentlemen," he said, mind racing with the futility of an engine which has just snapped its load shaft. "I don't think I ever actually said anything about…"

He broke off, becoming aware of a new element in the scene, something which with a modicum of luck could terminate the current unpleasantness. Beyond the wide shady eaves of the building, the agile figure of Zindee White – aged thirteen and a bit – could be seen sprinting across the stretch of grass which separated her family's home from Nicklin's property. She was wearing a bright red T-shirt and orange shorts, and was moving so fast that a visible cloud of dust and pollen swirled in her wake. She was the most regular customer for Nicklin's library service, and – in spite of the age difference – possibly his best friend. It was obvious that she had some important news to impart to him. From past experience he knew that "important" could embrace anything from the acquisition of a desired toy to the discovery of a jewel-bug with exceptional markings. Whatever it was on this occasion, Nicklin vowed, he was going to find some way to make it his ticket to freedom.

Thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he thought while giving a theatrical start of surprise. "Here's young Zindee!" he exclaimed. "And just look at that speed. I hope there isn't anything wrong at home."

Before Brannigan and Maxy could reply, Zindee stormed in through the shop's open door, her sneakers slapping the floor with the force of her deceleration. "Jim! Have you heard the—?"

Realising that Nicklin was not alone, she stopped speaking, folded her hands behind her back and came around the counter to stand at his side. He saw it as a little gesture of solidarity, and was gratified. Zindee was breathing heavily after the run, and Nicklin detected from her the buttery smell of clean perspiration.

"What d'you want, kid?" Maxy said irritably.

Zindee gazed coldly at an old adversary. "Nothing to do with you, baldy."

A look of outrage appeared on Maxy's face, and Nicklin wished he had the child's casual facility with insults. It was a matter of ingrained principle with him that he would never make offensive remarks about any feature which had been foisted on a person by the lottery of birth. If people had unpleasant personality traits, something for which they could be held responsible, then on that score they were fair game – the only snag being that, even so, he found it almost impossible to inflict verbal wounds.

"That brat needs a lesson in manners," Brannigan said.

Zindee studied him for a moment, decided it could be imprudent to cross swords, and moved a little closer to Nicklin. "Have you heard the news, Jim?" she whispered.

Maxy cupped a hand to his ear, intruding. "What news? Speak up a bit, kid."

Zindee hesitated, but Nicklin – determined to develop the situation – gave her a nod of encouragement. "Go ahead, Zindee – what is it?"

"It's just been on our television – the world has moved!"

Nicklin half-smiled as he looked down at Zindee. Her face was round and freckled, with a chin which was tiny and yet determined, and with wide-set eyes which beaconed intelligence and integrity. Her features were perfect, those of an archetypal little girl as envisaged by generations of artists, and over the years Nicklin had learned how to read that face. His smile faded as he saw the anxiety there.

"What do you mean, Zindee?" he said. "How could the world move?"

"Somebody's been on the job," Maxy put in with a guffaw and switched to a falsetto voice. "Did the world move for you, darling?"

"It's just been on television," Zindee insisted. "All the stars are different, Jim. All the ships that were docked outside the portals have disappeared. There was a woman who had just arrived from Earth … Silvia London, I think she was called … and she was crying a lot … and she said her ship had vanished…"

"The Council should never have allowed television to come into Orangefield," Brannigan said, shaking his huge head – in spite of his violent streak and weakness for alcohol, he was quite puritanical and righteous in most other aspects of his life. "It rots people's minds, that's all it does, with them trashy three-dees. That kid's a perfect example – she don't know what's real and what isn't."

Nicklin did not even subscribe to the sound service which was cabled in from Weston Bridge, but within the last few days he had heard talk of an odd phenomenon which was supposed to be affecting Orbitsville's great shell. It had been said that luminous green lines were moving across both surfaces of the sphere. There had been no way for him to verify the report in person, because the soil and rock strata were more than a thousand metres deep in the Orangefield region. In any case, he had a subconscious desire to forget that he lived in the interior of a shell of ylem which was 320 million kilometres in diameter and only eight centimetres thick.

A product of two centuries of migration, during which virtually the entire population of Earth had moved to Orbitsville, Nicklin thought of his environment simply as "the world" and lived his life exactly as he would have done on a normal planet. But the shining green lines had been something entirely new, and some of the townsfolk had mooted the idea that they were an omen, a prelude to some great event…

"Come on, Zindee!" Nicklin took the child's hand in his and walked with her towards the door of the shop, feeling more relief over his fortuitous escape than concern about any putative threat to his pleasantly humdrum existence. "Let's go over to your place and get ourselves a better idea of what this thing is all about."

"I was talking to you," Brannigan said, scowling.

Nicklin flicked Maxy's shoulder as he passed him. "See to Mr Brannigan for me – and don't forget to give him his bill."

CHAPTER 2

Cham and Nora White – Zindee's parents – had a veterinary practice which they operated from their home on the plot next to Nicklin's land. The fact that they dealt solely with small animals made the couple appear almost as idiosyncratic as Nicklin in the eyes of a sizeable section of the community. The farmers of the area adjudged maintaining the health of livestock to be a worthy occupation, but devoting one's energies to the care of sickly cats, hamsters and the like was regarded as – to say the least of it – a mildly eccentric form of behaviour.

Being classed as oddities had created something of a bond between Nicklin and the adult Whites, but that was almost as far as the relationship went. They were remarkably similar in appearance for a couple with no blood ties – medium build with a tendency to chubbiness, sharp noses, florid complexions and a general red-gold-brown coloration. Nicklin quite liked the Whites' squirrelly appearance, but their unfailing industriousness and lack of humour had deterred him from trying to build up a close friendship.

Unexpectedly, in view of their Calvinistic outlook, they were among the few people in Orangefield who subscribed to the television service which could be piped in at some expense from Weston Bridge. Nicklin knew that Cham and Nora atoned for the self-indulgence by restricting their viewing to the evening hours, and therefore he was surprised on entering the house to find them seated near the set in the main room. It was an indication that Zindee's obvious concern was justified, that something really serious was taking place.

"Morning, Jim!" Cham called out, gesturing for him to sit down. "What do you think of this caper?"

Nicklin nodded a greeting in response to Nora White's tense smile. "I don't know what to think yet. Zindee gave me the bare details."

"It was Zindee who alerted us – that's why we're in here at this time of the day," Cham said, defending himself against any possible charge of sinful sloth. "Can you credit this? They're saying that Orbitsville has moved!"

Nicklin released Zindee's hand and lowered himself into a plumply cushioned armchair. "How do they know?"

"Apparently it's either the universe or us. Look!"

Nicklin directed his attention to the televiewer stage which occupied one corner of the room. The scale control had been set for roughly half-size projection, with the result that the stage appeared to be populated by groups of perfectly formed midgets, male and female, some of whom were obviously distraught. The grassy surface on which they were standing was littered with discarded space suits, some of them resembling corpses. It was obvious that there had been little or no development of the area – the background, apart from a scattering of single-storey prefabs, was the featureless green of Orbitsville's ubiquitous savannahs.

"Where is that?" Nicklin said.

"Portal 36. There's nothing there but an agricultural research station." Cham paused as a series of ripples swept through the scene, momentarily distorting the human figures and reminding the viewers that those seemingly real and solid human figures were only bi-laser projections, holomorphs. "We were warned the image quality could be pretty poor. Apparently all the permanent outside antennae and reflector satellites have disappeared. The TV engineers are working with lash-ups."

"This is a kind of amateur broadcast, anyway," Nora White added as Zindee went to sit on her knee. "The network is showing it because those people were in the middle of disembarking when their ship vanished. They actually saw it happen."

Cham flapped one hand in an appeal for silence. "Listen to this guy – he was on before."

"We are about to have another word with Rick Renard, the owner of the Hawkshead, the cargo ship which was attempting to dock at Portal 36 when – literally – it vanished into nothingness," an invisible commentator said. The televiewer scene changed, flowing outwards around Renard until he occupied the centre of the stage. He was a curly-haired young man with the sort of buoyant and healthy plumpness which is underpinned by well-developed muscle.

"As has already been mentioned," he said in a high-income drawl, "my ship had attempted to dock in the normal manner, but Captain Lessen was unable to complete his manoeuvre. There appeared to be some kind of repulsive force acting on the ship and preventing it from getting to within thirty metres of the Orbitsville shell.

"The shell itself was in a highly unusual condition – it was shining with a greenish light which was pulsing on and off several times a second. It is possible that the radiation had something to do with repelling the ship. Perhaps it hadn't – I don't really know. It was all so … I mean…"

Renard smiled unhappily and Nicklin saw that his lips had begun to quiver. The man looked as though he would have the sleek arrogance of the very wealthy in normal circumstances, but it was obvious that he was now in a state of shock. He shook his head, bringing the interview to a premature end, and turned to a black-haired woman of striking appearance who was standing just behind him, looking equally distraught. He put his arms around her and she slowly inclined her head on to his shoulder.

"I've seen that woman before," Cham White announced triumphantly, as though claiming a prize. "She's connected with some so-called scientific organisation which says it has proof of life after death. Her name is Silvia … Silvia…"

"London," Zindee supplied.

"That's right. Of the … um … Anima Mundi Foundation. I wonder what she was doing on that ship."

"If you find her so fascinating, why don't you just take yourself off to Portal 36 and ask her?" Nora said tardy.

"There's no call for you to be jealous," Cham replied, looking gratified over what he saw as a compliment. "Besides, from what we've heard so far, it'll be quite some time before anybody will be able to travel between portals."

"Why is that?" Nicklin said.

"No ships! You're not paying attention, Jim. Everything, but everything, that was outside the shell has disappeared – and that includes all the interportal ships."

"I wasn't thinking," Nicklin mumbled, shrugging slightly in response to a sympathetic glance from Zindee. It came to him that he had not really accepted the sensational news as being true. The portals, those kilometre-wide circular holes in the Orbitsville shell, were almost five million kilometres apart. Taking a direct interior route from one portal to another, even if Mach 2 aircraft were available, would entail ninety days of non-stop flying – the kind of odyssey which was ruled out by logistics and economics.

"I keep expecting somebody to discover that it's all been a hoax, or a mistake," Nicklin explained. "Two or three hundred years ago, back on Earth, somebody made a radio broadcast of a play about invaders from some nearby planet and it panicked a lot of people."

"H. G. Wells," Cham said knowledgeably. "It was H. G. Wells who made that broadcast."

"Whoever it was, he scared a lot of people and there was no need for it."

"This is different, Jim," Nora White said. "I wish they would skip all this human interest stuff and take us back to the scientists in Beachhead. At least they had some idea of what they were talking about."

As if responding to her wish, the scene on the platform faded and, after some sparkling swirls of colour, was replaced by a holomorphic group of men and women seated at a circular table. A female voice announced the return to the main OTTV studios in Beachhead City for further expert comment, then went on to name all the members of the panel and list their qualifications. The first speaker, named Carpenter, was a youthful professor of observational astronomy from the Garamond University.

"The events of the past few hours are unique in the history of Optima Thule," he began. "Incredible though it may seem…"

"You can easily tell that guy's a scientist," Cham said loudly. "Nobody else would be pompous enough to refer to the Big O as Optima Thule."

"Be quiet," Nora chided. "The rest of us want to hear what he's saying."

"…understand that when we say everything outside the shell has disappeared, we mean everything! At close range, all interstellar and interportal ships which were in dock have vanished, plus several of the latter which were en route between portals. And not only ships – docking cradles, cargo handling gear, passenger transfer tubes, even radio and TV antennae. Anything which was projecting beyond the boundary line of Optima Thule has been sheared off – with a perfect mirror finish on the metal sections, incidentally – and has vanished from our awareness."

Professor Carpenter paused to take a sip of water. "At what we might style as intermediate range, the outer planet of our own local system – Napier – has vanished. All this is trivial, however, compared to the fact that – on the cosmic scale – every star known to us can no longer be observed, every galaxy known to us can no longer be observed.

"To my mind, there is only one possible interpretation of those facts, incredible though it may seem – and that is that Optima Thule has been repositioned."

"I can't believe this," a grey-haired woman said, shaking her head with an air of sadness. "You claim to be a qualified scientist, and yet you sit there and try to make us believe that our world – Orbitsville – has been moved!"

"I am a qualified scientist," Carpenter replied, in the measured tones of one who was determined not to be provoked. "And I did not say that Orbitsville had been moved. The word I used was 'repositioned'. It is obvious that no movement in the conventional sense of the word was involved – the repositioning was achieved instantaneously."

His words were followed by a babel of voices as all the holomorphs tried to make points at the same time. Nicklin gave up trying to follow the various threads of argument and lapsed into a reverie until the televiewer scene changed. The group at the table dissolved, to be replaced by an outdoors shot – a view of Portal 1 at the centre of Beachhead City. It was recognisable because of the statue of Vance Garamond, the discoverer of Orbitsville, at the edge of what appeared to the casual eye as a circular black lake.

The camera advanced until it was poised at the edge of the aperture then rotated forwards, simulating a leisurely dive into space. When it steadied the corner of the Whites' living room was filled with an intense blackness which was stippled with hundreds of glowing specks. Professor Carpenter could be heard in voice-over, commenting on the complete absence of familiar star patterns and the presence of totally alien constellations.

As always, Nicklin found the view of the outside universe to be something of a disappointment. Orangefield was less than a thousand kilometres from Beachhead – an easy enough journey by air – but he had never taken the trouble to go there, and hence had never seen the stars in actuality. For him, those remote flecks of light had very little relevance to the problems, pressures and pleasures of everyday life. His family had been on Orbitsville for six generations, and the course of their lives had not been affected in any way by stars or patterns of stars…

"And what about Earth?" another man was heard to say.

"We no longer know where Earth is. We don't know how to get there." Carpenter sounded as though he was deriving a perverse satisfaction from the negatives. "Therefore all contact with Earth has been lost, probably for ever. That also goes for Terranova, of course."

Who cares about Earth or Terranova? Nicklin thought. Museum pieces! Staring into the near-featureless blackness was beginning to make him feel drowsy. He decided to give it just another five minutes, time enough to be sure that Cort Brannigan had vacated his premises, then he would take his leave of the Whites and get back to important business. It was the task of the astronomers to find out why the universe looked different – in the meantime he had a juice extractor and a bicycle wheel to repair, jobs which had been promised for that very afternoon.

Nicklin allowed his eyelids to close, creating an exquisite feeling of relaxation in his eyes. The sensation was so pleasant that he was immediately aware of the risk of lapsing into sleep, something which would be embarrassing in front of the tireless Whites…

"Just look at old man Jim," Cham White said loudly, his voice reaching Nicklin across murmurous summer meadows of contentment. "Working for ten minutes has worn him out."

Nicklin roused himself with a start. "Sorry, sorry – I got very little sleep last night." The lie came unbidden to his lips.

"What was the matter?" Nora said, showing a neighbourly concern. "Tummy troubles?"

"Yes." Nicklin seized on the suggestion with gratitude and began to elaborate on it. "I ate a chunk of apple pie just before bed, and I made the mistake of putting a slice of cheese on it."

"Apple pie, eh? Have you started taking cookery lessons?"

"No – it was a little gift from May McVickar." Nicklin listened to his own words with growing dismay. Why did he get himself into this kind of situation? And what had possessed him to appoint May McVickar as his fictional benefactor? She lived only a couple of kilometres away, and was quite friendly with the Whites, and the two women could easily meet and begin chatting and comparing notes within the next day or two. In fact, with his luck, the silly old bitch could arrive on the Whites' doorstep at any minute…

Nicklin was casting around in sudden alarm for a way to get off the subject of apple pie when he became aware of an unusual sound from outside the house, one which was beginning to conflict with the voices of the televiewer. It was growing in volume, and was so incongruous in the rural quietness of the area that several seconds went by before he was able to resolve it into separate components. There was brassy marching music overlaid with an amplified male voice which, although the words could not yet be distinguished, sounded like that of a politician or an evangelist.

"Seems like we've got visitors," Nicklin said, rising to his feet and making for the door. "This I must see."

He gave the Whites a perfunctory wave and escaped from the house into the vertical rays of the Orbitsville sun. Its warmth seeped through his hair and spread like hot oil on the crown of his head, making him wish he had brought a hat. He shaded his eyes and peered through curtains of midge-clouded brilliance. On the road beyond the stream was a slow-moving procession of about ten vehicles, a mix of campers and trucks, all of them painted powder blue. On the side of each, pulsing in photoactive orange dyes, was the message: COREY MONTANE is leading you home.

"Oh no," Nicklin whispered, "not another bible thumper! Please, O Gaseous Vertebrate, not another holy roller!"

Denial of his prayer came in the form of a crashingly distorted announcement, the gist of which was that evangelist Corey Montane would be visiting Orangefield for three days. His intention was to bring salvation to any of the locals who had the good sense to heed his preachings. All the others would, naturally enough, be doomed.

The speaker's words faded and became even less decipherable as the cavalcade began to pass out of sight behind a stand of whistle trees. But before intelligibility was lost altogether Nicklin picked out a fragment – "Orbitsville is a tool of the Devil."

That's just great, he thought bitterly as he began walking towards his own property. It looked as though for the next three days he would be under the threat of having his privacy invaded by earnest heliumheads. And worse, the therapeutic calm of the village green, where he liked to stroll in the evenings, was likely to be shattered by noisy sermons, appalling music and collectors of cash. There was one feature that all religious missions, all purveyors of spiritual peace, all renouncers of worldly gain had in common – somebody had to collect the cash.

All thought of what was going on in the outside universe had been displaced from Nicklin's mind. Frowning and looking disconsolate, as befitted one who had found genuine cause for concern, he made his way home through the lush green grass.

CHAPTER 3

Helping to erect the marquee had left Corey Montane feeling tired and slightly shaky, and now he was sitting on a canvas chair outside his camper, refreshing himself with a pot of his favourite tea. As he sipped the fragrant brew he allowed his gaze to drift around the shops, inns and occasional private dwellings which ringed Orangefield's central green. The scene – with its imported oaks and chestnut trees – was one of idyllic, nostalgic tranquillity.

Throughout history different sections of humanity had formed their own visions of the perfect setting for the jewel of life, ranging from the sentimental New York of Frank Capra to the serene Antarctic demesnes of the twenty-first-century poet, Richard Caine… But for an astonishing number of people the ideal would always closely approximate what Montane was seeing now. In the charmed age which the surroundings lovingly recreated, cigarettes did not cause cancer, it was no sin to eat butter and cream, nuclear weapons were unthought-of, and work brought fulfilment and not hypertension. Hefty, bearded cricketers might be on their way by steam train to contend with the local team; a distant mechanical murmur might be the Wright brothers tinkering with some impractical machine in their corrugated-iron workshop.

At times like this it was easy for Montane to understand why so many inhabitants of Orbitsville opted to live in low-tech communities. It pained him, therefore, to remember that his natural human response to all he saw was part of the terrible danger which Orbitsville held in store for all of God's children. It was the bait in the Orbitsville trap…

"You all right, Corey?" The speaker was Nibs Affleck, who had approached from the direction of the marquee, where the adjustment of turnbuckles was still going on. He was a serious-eyed young man whose florid complexion was the legacy of a long spell of alcoholism. He had joined the crusade a year earlier and had found in it enough inspiration to enable him to fight free of his habit. As a result, he was fiercely loyal to Montane and showed his gratitude by being solicitous – embarrassingly so at times – about his mentor's health.

"I'm fine, Nibs," Montane said, glancing up from under the flat cone of his sun-hat. "Just a little tired, that's all."

"You should leave jobs like putting up the tent to the rest of us."

"You may be interested to learn that being sixty years old does not qualify one for a wheelchair." Montane smiled to show that he was not offended. "Besides, you know our rules. Nobody is so high and mighty that he is excused his share of work – and that includes me.

Affleck shuffled his feet and looked miserable. "I didn't mean you were…"

"It's all right, Nibs – you were just being thoughtful and I thank you for that. Now, will you do me a favour?"

"You bet, Corey!" Affleck said eagerly, his round face brightening. "Just name it!"

"This town actually has a daily newspaper – a real Mark Twain job, by all accounts – and I might consider advertising in it. I'd appreciate it if you would go and get me a copy."

"You bet, Corey!" His eyes glowing with simple happiness, Affleck turned and bounded away across the green.

Montane watched his progress with troubled eyes. Affleck was a good-hearted, industrious man, but he was an innocent – not the kind of disciple the crusade was desperately short of. What Montane really needed was a team of smart fast-talkers with the talent for raising large sums of money, the sort of men and women who – with a mesmeric combination of business acumen and evangelistic fervour – could induce rich men to part with fortunes. It was quite difficult to find millionaires on Orbitsville, because the acquisition of great wealth involved the manipulation and control of others, and it was no easy matter to do that to individuals whose birthright it was to trek off into the interior, at any time the mood took them, and claim the equivalent of a county, or a country, or even a continent. And such wealthy people as could be lured out of their strongholds were disinclined to hand large sums of money over to what they saw as ingenuous Jesus freaks.

There had been a time when Montane had believed that he would be able to attract the sort of funding necessary for the success of the crusade, that God would speak through him and touch the hearts of men – but that had been six years ago. He almost groaned aloud when he thought of how much time had gone by since his awakening, and of how little had been achieved…

For the first fifty years of his life Corey Montane had been a conventional and unremarkable inhabitant of Pewterspear 97. The numerical suffix given to any place-name referred to the nearest portal, and that was as close as Orbitsville had come to devising a zip code system. The fact that Pewterspear had a number close to 100 meant that the city was almost as far from Beachhead as it was possible to get, but that had not troubled Montane. He had liked being well away from the great urban centres of commerce and industry. He had owned and run a small home bakery, which yielded a modest but comfortable income from the sale of a variety of spicy meat pies and elaborate Danish pastries. His wife, Milly, and grown-up daughter, Tara, had helped in the business in a relationship that was nearly always harmonious. He enjoyed a range of outdoor pursuits – principally flying light aircraft – and was well liked in the town.

The chances were that Montane would have lived out his allotted ninety years in the same pleasant and undemanding manner, but everything had changed for him in the space of a few seconds…

It was a wet morning in the early part of the year – but Montane was not in a mood to find the rain depressing. It was coming down in the form of very large, clean, tumbling drops, each of which created a spiky crystal crown in miniature as it impacted with the pavement. His vision seemed preternaturally clear – the way it could be in the prelude to a migraine – and he saw the crowns in diamond-sharp detail, just as he had done in childhood. He wondered if that could be what had inspired his present feelings of boyhood optimism, in which for him the bad weather was recreating the ambience of Christmas Eve. The section of the street he could see was crowded with shoppers, complete with umbrellas and turned-up collars, who were determined to obtain last-minute Christmas gifts in spite of the rain, and the lighted windows of the other stores were cheerily reflected on the wet ground, adding to the Yuletide atmosphere.

Montane smiled as he noted yet another similarity to the festive season – business had been exceptionally brisk that morning, so good that it was already necessary for him to replenish his window display. He decided to begin at once – while there was a break in the flow of customers – by slicing up a large veal-ham-and-egg pie, and perhaps a couple of the battenbergs, which sold well under the folksy name of marzipan windows.

"Milly," he called out, taking a brick-shaped pie out of the refrigerator, "What did you do with the knives?"

"They're here – in the steriliser." His wife was in the kitchen at the rear of the shop.

"Would you like to bring them out here?"

Milly gave a barely audible tut of impatience and he remembered that she was about to go over to the Canterbury to have morning coffee with a few friends. A moment later she came hurrying into the front of the shop with the knives on a tray. And somehow-it was surmised afterwards that wetness tramped in from the street had been responsible – she managed to slip and fall forwards.

Montane expected anything but tragedy on that nostalgic grey morning, but the sound that Milly emitted as she hit the floor told him at once that something terrible, something totally unreasonable and unfair had happened. It was an appalling sound – part grunt, part sigh – expressive of pain, surprise and fear.

"Milly!" Montane ran to the end of the counter, looked down and saw his wife lying face downwards on the floor. The tray was beneath her. Face contorting with shock, he dropped to his knees and rolled her over. A knife, which must have turned its point up to meet her descending body, was protruding from just below the left breast.

She died in his arms, staring up at him with a bemused expression, while the knife-handle – stirred by her heart's last contractions-playfully wiggled and circled amid the growing stain on her tangerine blouse.

Montane tilted his head back and. howled with grief.

The hours and days that followed were almost as nightmarish as the initial cataclysmic event. After the police had made some preliminary enquiries and the ambulance had departed with the body, he turned to his daughter in the depths of his despair, needing support and consolation. To his astonishment, she reacted to him with silent, glacial fury, almost as though he had engineered her mother's death. He was unable to penetrate the barrier she had erected between them, and as soon as the funeral was over she packed a bag and walked out, refusing to give any hint as to where she was going…

Thinking back to those traumatic days of six years ago, Montane found cause for philosophical wonderment in the fact that his awakening had been prompted, not by the loss of his wife and daughter, but by a geological peculiarity of the Pewterspear area.

The town was situated in a broad dish-shaped depression which, on the old survey maps, was designated as McIntosh's Bottom. Montane had always been aware of the name, but to him it had been little more than an inspiration for vulgar schoolboy jokes. He had also been aware, though with little interest, that the rocky soil on which the town was built was as little as two metres thick in many places. It was common practice in the local construction industry to support the more massive buildings on short piles which penetrated down to the Orbitsville shell, but that too had been of minimal concern to Montane – until his first visit to his wife's grave.

He had been kneeling by the still-fresh plot, striving to wrest some degree of reconciliation from the notion that she would become one with the earth. Death was part of a natural cycle … springing from the soil, returning to the soil…

Then had come the shocking realisation that Milly's body, her sacred body, was suspended only a hand's breadth above the featureless grey sheet of ylem which formed Orbitsville's vast shell. And beyond that, only centimetres away, was the harsh emptiness of interstellar space! There could never be any peace for her, for either of them, in those supremely unnatural circumstances; there could be no gentle absorption into the ancestral unity of a God-given world; there was no rightness to Milly's shallow interment…

Montane had remained kneeling by the grave for more than an hour – his mind poised like a hovering kestrel half-way between divine inspiration and insanity – and when finally he had stood up on aching legs he had been a different man.

People with medical knowledge had later told him that his transformation had been a consequence of delayed shock, rather than a profound religious experience, but Montane had known better. Much better. Infinitely better.

Even while sitting, as he now was, sipping tea on Orangefield's sun-dappled common, the principal element of his thoughts was bafflement over the fact that virtually nobody else was aware of having fallen into a devilish trap. What kind of mass insanity, what form of collective blindness, had suddenly afflicted humanity upon the discovery of Orbitsville?

The people of two centuries ago were products of a civilisation which had always been forced to fight tooth-and-nail simply to remain in existence. They were hard, cynical and suspicious; they knew the cosmos provided no free lunches – and yet when Orbitsville had been found they had swarmed to it like wasps to the honey pot.

Nobody had said: Wait a minute! Let's think this thing over before we do anything hasty. What we have here is a huge sphere made of some material which defies analysis, but which has artificial gravity. It also has force lines around its sun in the form of a cage which has been beautifully engineered to provide night and day, and a progression of seasons. The thing is obviously an artefact! It seduces us by promising to meet all our needs, to fulfil all our dreams. It is too good to be true – therefore it has to be a TRAP!

Montane had no idea who had created Orbitsville, but he knew in his heart and soul that the makers – those who had schemed to pervert the course of human destiny – were no friends of God. Orbitsville had remained quiescent for what men regarded as a long time, two whole centuries, but that was a brief span in the context of the history of the universe. A carnivorous flower always remained motionless until its victim was far back in its throat, beyond any possibility of escape.

There had been reports recently of glowing green lines moving across the surface of the great sphere, and to Montane they were the equivalent of the first hungry quiverings of a Venus fly-trap's jaws, just before the trap was sprung…

His thoughts returned to more mundane matters as he again caught sight of Nibs Affleck in the distance. A fleck of white showed that he had obtained the newspaper, and a rapid change of position indicated that he was still running. Montane half-smiled as he tried to recall the times when he too had been blessed with so much physical energy that he could afford to burn some of it off in needless exertion. At sixty, he still looked vigorous – with his glossy dark hair, unlined face and straight back – but recently his capacity for manual work had been greatly diminished. He did not suspect any furtively gnawing illness; it was just that his mental burden seemed to weigh him down more with each passing year. Mettle fatigue, he had dubbed it. The spirit could become poisoned with the toxins of weariness in the same way as an overworked body.

Affleck slid to a halt beside him, his complexion rendered even more hectic through running in the heat. "Here's your paper, Corey. I got you one."

"I can see you did." Montane set his cup on the ground. "How much did it cost?"

"I wouldn't take any money from you, Corey," Affleck said, looking offended. "It was nothing anyhows – only a quarter."

"Thank you, Nibs." Montane considered pressing the money on Affleck, then realised the youngster would get the maximum value out of it in the form of the giving pleasure. He raised a hand to acknowledge Affleck's departure in the direction of the marquee, then turned his attention to the newspaper. It was large and unwieldy, like those in historic videos, but it had been laser-printed in a modern open typeface – the publishers had not gone overboard in their devotion to the past and its ways. Montane, having no wish to strain his eyes, nodded in approval.

The front page lead – headlined MAIN STREET TO STAY IN THE DARK – was a long piece about a wrangle in the town council caused by some local businessmen applying for permission to erect illuminated signs on the façades of their stores. The other reports dealt with such issues as an unfamiliar type of tough ground-hugging weed being found on a farm, and the mayor's wife putting on an exhibition of her own water-colours.

Montane scanned the columns with indulgent interest, and was about to go to the next page when he noticed a very brief story right at the bottom of the sheet. It was the mention of astronomers in the sub-heading which caught his eye – he had long been sensitised to anything dealing with Orbitsville's relationship to the natural galaxy. The piece read:

EMBARRASSED ASTRONOMERS

If anybody notices a pink glow on the horizon tonight, in the general direction of Beachhead, it will not be caused by that city's surfeit of stoplights. Instead, it will be emanating from the red faces of our overpaid stargazers who today were forced to admit that they have lost visual contact with our known universe!

Professor Carpenter of the Garamond University tried to explain away this minor act of carelessness – after all, anybody could mislay a few billion galaxies – by claiming that Orbitsville has moved to a new position in space!

Take heart anybody who noticed a peculiar lurching sensation during the night. It was not the foundations of your houses shifting – just the foundations of science!

Montane's heart had begun a powerful thudding as he lowered the newspaper to his lap and stared blindly into the distance. He was neither deceived nor reassured by the anti-science, debunking tone of the report. He would have to verify the story, of course, but it was evident to him that some astounding cosmic event had occurred. The all-important questions now were: Had the Orbitsville trap been fully sprung, or was this some preliminary stage? Were all of Orbitsville's inhabitants doomed, or could there yet be time for a few of them to escape by starship to a natural and God-given planet? Was he, by virtue of not having done enough during his six years of awareness, responsible for the ultimate demise of the human race?

Racked by guilt and dread, he rose to his feet and walked quickly towards the marquee, where his followers were laughing as their day's labours came to an end.

CHAPTER 4

In preparation for leaving the library, Nicklin checked over his list of deliveries and found there were three that he could conveniently drop off at customers' houses on his way into town. They were softbacks – a Western by Jack Schaefer; a slim volume on the design and making of different shapes of paper gliders; and a cheerfully illustrated treatise on the railways of Victorian England. The books were slightly bulkier than they would have been when first printed, because of the permatome coating which made the pages virtually indestructible, but otherwise it was hard to tell from their condition that they were well over two centuries old.

It occurred to Nicklin that the library trade might be adversely affected if the astronomers took any length of time to sort themselves and their equipment out and re-establish contact with Earth. Like most other library operators, he dealt mainly with the past. Orbitsville had produced practically no literature of distinction, or even works of passing interest – a consequence, the experts claimed, of all social pressures and constraints having been removed. Competition and conflict had always been the mainsprings of great art, and on Orbitsville – with free land equivalent to five billion Earths available – there was little reason for people to compete for anything, and even less for going to war. As an inevitable result, the experts went on, the few individuals who bothered to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, were unable to produce anything that was not passionless, shallow and trivial.

Nicklin doubted if his customers in low-tech Orangefield had bothered to analyse their tastes in reading matter to that extent, but he knew they showed a solid preference for books which had been published on pre-migration Earth. They seemed to be motivated by nostalgia, not for the Old World itself but for the feel of a period characterised by cosy security and comfortable certitudes. The market was too diffuse to interest publishers on Orbitsville, so the small commercial vacuum had been filled by LOG – the Library Owners' Guild – which imported containers of miscellaneous books scavenged from the abandoned towns and cities of Earth.

Turning his attention to more immediate concerns, Nicklin set out the notepad which would enable late callers to help themselves to books and record the details for him. He gave the counter a final wipe with a duster and, without locking the door, went outside to wait for Zindee.

She must have been watching from her window because she appeared at once, bounding across the intervening grass with her usual display of energy. With her parents' permission, Nicklin was taking Zindee into town for a sundae, and she had acknowledged the specialness of the occasion by putting on her best sunhat, the pink one with the pictures of Toby the Tortoise speeding around the rim in a manner which no real life chelonian could emulate. Nicklin put on his own hat – a flat cone of reflective gold – as soon as he moved out from under the broad eaves of his shop, and was grateful for the protection it provided. Orbitsville's sun was always directly overhead, night coming only when it was eclipsed by the next bar of the solar cage, and as a result the heat from it built up steadily throughout the day. To venture out at any time of the day without donning suitable headgear was to invite a severe case of sunstroke, but the period still referred to as "evening" was the riskiest.

"Hi, Jim!" Zindee arrived at his side in a perceptible swirl of air currents. "Know something? I could eat the biggest sundae in the whole world."

"You'll have to graft for it," Nicklin said, putting on a tough voice as he handed over his three books. "I'm going to trust you to deliver those, and each time you drop one you'll forfeit a scoop of ice cream. Is that clear?"

"Yes, boss." Zindee gave him a kind of cringing salute and they set off in the direction of the town centre. They crossed the bridge and were walking in the shade of the tall whistle trees which lined the road when Nicklin noticed that the child seemed slightly subdued. Praying that it was nothing to do with Orbitsville's supposed change of location, he asked what was on her mind.

"I keep thinking about all those weird things they said on TV this morning," she replied.

He snorted with amusement. "I wouldn't worry about it."

"But it's scary, Jim. Doesn't it bother you?"

"About the world having moved?" He gave another snort. "I'm a light sleeper, Zindee – I think I would have noticed something if the world had moved during the night."

"But what about the stars? They're all different."

"How do we know that?" Nicklin, who had never seen a star and whose knowledge of astronomy was sketchy, began to invent new theories of cosmic physics. "I read that astronomers sometimes discover a cluster of a dozen or so really distant galaxies. Then they look a bit harder and find that the so-called cluster is actually just one galaxy. The light coming from it gets bent this way and bent that way as it is travelling towards the wise men. So they run around squawking, getting themselves into a state over discovering eleven galaxies that don't even exist!"

Zindee frowned. "What has that got to do with…?"

"It shows that when it comes to stars and the like you just can't trust your eyes. Light rays can bend. It could be that space … that space…" Nicklin felt a surge of the old heady, guilty elation which often gripped him when he found that what had started off as a rubble of words was cementing itself into a lofty edifice. "…is not homogenous, not the same everywhere. There could be inclusions, anomalous regions where light gets really twisted up, where what you see is all-scrambled. If Orbitsville has drifted into one of those regions the outside universe is bound to look different. It's only natural."

"Jim," Zindee looked up at him with the absurdly solemn face of a thirteen-year-old professor of logic, "to me that sounds like a load of male ox."

"It explains the facts better than all that stuff about Orbitsville having moved millions of light years during the night."

"Yeah? And what about all the ships and docks that have disappeared?"

"The anomaly doesn't confine itself to affecting light," Nicklin went on, still on a creative high. "It's a kind of a storm, a spatial tornado which whips interstellar dust particles up to near the speed of light. That increases their mass, you see … builds up their energy … Particles in that state could scour Orbitsville clean in a few seconds, like a giant sandblaster."

"And what about…?" Zindee closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. "I wonder if Mr Chickley has got in a fresh supply of chopped walnuts. He didn't have them last time – remember? – and you can't make a sundae that's worth a doodle without chopped walnuts."

"Very smooth change of subject," Nicklin said. "Almost imperceptible."

"I got bored talking about … all that stuff."

"I told you at the start that it was pretty dull." Nicklin nudged Zindee with his elbow, putting her off her stride, and she came back at him by shoving hard with her shoulder. They continued walking towards the town centre, their progress slowed by sporadic horseplay and the three small detours needed for the book deliveries. The district was quite typical of Orangefield, with its hushed avenues and masses of ornamental vegetation screening low houses which were roofed with red or green tiles. The scene, Nicklin decided, could have been some privileged part of Earth, except that at this time of the day the sun would have been low in the sky, sinking to the western horizon. He tried to imagine living in an environment in which the sun wandered right across the dome of the heavens during the course of the day, but he only succeeded in conjuring up a queasy sensation, a feeling of balancing on a slowly tilting platform.

"I hear something," Zindee said. "What do I hear?"

They were still a few minutes' walk from the town common, but when Nicklin concentrated he became aware of a grumbly, low-frequency agitation of the air, a disturbance which was alien to Orangefield's sleepy suburbs. "It's the holy rollers. They didn't waste much time getting started on the spiel, but they're not getting any money out of me, and I'll tell you that for nothing."

"What's a spiel?"

"It's when some character sets out to persuade you that things would be much better if you transferred all the money in your pocket into his pocket."

To Nicklin's surprise, Zindee looked up at him in sudden eagerness. "Let's go and hear what they're saying."

"What about your ice cream?"

"It won't melt." She moved slightly ahead of him, tugging his arm. "Come on, Jim!"

Nicklin shrugged and compliantly quickened his pace. The sound of amplified speech grew louder as they neared the common, and when the open space came into view he saw that a large tent had been erected at the centre. It seemed to have been intended only for use in rainy weather, because in front of it there was some low staging supporting a platform. On the platform was a tall dark-haired man who was addressing an audience of perhaps four hundred, most of whom were seated on stacking chairs. The remainder were straggled in a rough circle, having chosen to stand although quite a few of the seats had not been taken. Hedging their bets, Nicklin thought approvingly. That way they can hear what's going on and still make a quick getaway before the collectors try to nab them.

When Zindee and he reached the perimeter of the crowd she made as if to squeeze through and claim a seat, but he held her back. She scowled up at him for a moment, but with a good-natured quirk to her lips, then took up a position where the human barricade was thin enough to let her get a good view of the speaker. Nicklin stood behind her, and it was only then that he was able to tune his senses into what the man on the platform was saying.

"…this evening's edition of the Orangefield Recorder. The piece I am referring to was very witty. It was well written, in a sarcastic style. Perhaps its author is here with us tonight? No? It doesn't really matter too-much if he or she is here or not, because I have no bones to pick with the anonymous scribe. That journalist was simply doing a job, stating the newspaper's point of view on what no doubt appeared to be yet another classic case of the learned scientist revealing that he hasn't enough sense to come in out of the rain.

"We have a saying back in Pewterspear – that being educated doesn't stop you being stupid – so I have some sympathy with the popular vision of the scientist who splits his pants as often as he splits atoms."

The speaker paused to allow gratified laughter from the audience to subside – then his mood changed. His stance was unaltered, even his expression remained the same, but everyone who was there knew at once that the jokes were over, that it was time to get down to the serious business of the meeting. In spite of himself, Nicklin was impressed. Assuming that the speaker was Corey Montane, Nicklin took note of the fact that he was dressed in very ordinary clothes – a plain grey coolie hat, blue short-sleeved shirt, grey slacks – not the robe or ultra-respectable business suit usually associated with hawkers of faith. Montane also spoke in normal tones, his speech completely devoid of showy mannerisms. He appeared to rely on the direct, unvarnished communication of thoughts. Nicklin liked that and, against his expectations, found himself waiting with genuine interest for the main content of Montane's message.

"But on this occasion, my friends, I have to tell you something you have no wish to hear." Montane's voice, picked up by outfacing loudspeakers, could be heard rolling away into the distance through the immaculate gardens and around the redundant chimneys of Orangefield. "On this occasion, my friends, I have to tell you that not only were the astronomers in Beachhead City perfectly justified in sounding a warning – they have failed, completely, to appreciate the terrible dangers facing every man, woman and child on this huge bubble that they so naively think of as 'the world'.

"How do I know this? I'll tell you how I know. I know because I have been expecting an event like this for the past six years. I have been expecting it ever since I came to the realisation that Orbitsville is the Devil's trap. It was carefully laid out by the Devil, it was oh so carefully baited by the Devil – and now it is in the process of being sprung by the Devil!"

A murmur passed through the audience, a shifting sound equally expressive of surprise, concern and derision. The glowing expanse of sun-hats, variously coloured ellipses which appeared narrower the farther they were away from Nicklin, became briefly agitated.

Montane raised his hands and waited for the disturbance to subside. "I am not omniscient. I have no direct line to God, on which He tells me what the future holds in store for His children. I do not know what the Devil's exact plans are – all I know is that, through God's divine mercy, we have been granted a breathing space. He could have ignored our predicament, and we would have deserved that, because it was through our own wilfulness that we left the world which He specially created for us. We turned our backs on the Eden He provided, and in our arrogance and blind stupidity we flocked to this metallic bubble. We allowed ourselves to be enticed into the trap.

"But, as I have already said, there is still a little time left. God willing, there may be enough time for some of us to escape from the Devil's snare, and to do that we have to build starships. We have to quit Orbitsville. Earth may be denied to us for ever – a fitting punishment for our transgressions – but we can still fly to another God-given world, a new Eden, and make a new beginning for the human race."

There was a fresh disturbance in the audience, a subdued commotion which took longer to die away, and in the midst of it could be heard voices of protest reinforced by sceptical laughter. It costs a lot of money to build starships, Nicklin thought, and you don't need to be the Gaseous Vertebrate to work out where the money is supposed to come from. He glanced about him warily, wondering how long it would be before the collectors got to work.

"I am not asking you to accept anything on blind faith," Montane went on, raising his voice to quell the sounds of protest. "I know only too well that faith is a very scarce commodity these days – so all I am asking you to do is to weigh up the evidence. The cold, hard, indisputable evidence. Consider, for example, the curious fact that Orbitsville's environment is so exactly suited to…"

The realisation that Corey Montane had to be certifiable, regardless of his rational manner, immediately caused Nicklin to lose all interest in what was being said. He shook his head, feeling oddly saddened, and was about to tap Zindee on the shoulder when she turned to him. She crooked a finger, signalling for him to bring his head down to her level.

"Jim," she whispered, "this is another load of male ox. I think we should head over to Mr Chickley's."

"Good idea!" Nicklin pressed his forefinger to his lips and began to do a cartoon-style sneaking-away-in-silence walk, circling each foot in the air twice before placing it on the ground. Zindee chortled into her cupped hand and fell in at his side, doing her own version of the walk. They had taken only a few grotesque paces when Nicklin noticed they were being observed at close range by a young woman. She was holding a wicker dish, which identified her as a member of Montane's collecting team, and her expression was one of mingled amusement and gentle reproof.

"Leaving us so soon?" she said in a low and pleasantly accented voice. "Have you not been touched by anything that Corey has said?"

Nicklin heard his mouth go into action at once. "It was all fascinating, truly fascinating, but we have some family business to attend to at the other side of town. My uncle is building himself a rock garden, you see, and he needs me to help him lift the…"

Embellishments to the basic lie – including a partial biography of the imaginary uncle – crowded into his mind, and he was selecting the most promising when, belatedly, his gaze focused on the woman.

He was totally unprepared for what happened next.

The astonishing reality of the woman flowed into him by way of his eyes, and in that instant – quite simply – he became a different person.

A major component of the starshell of emotion that burst inside him was straightforward physical lust. He wanted to go to bed with her, there and then. He craved to perform with her every act of passion that men and women had ever known and treasured as the means of giving and receiving pleasure. But there was much more to it than that. He also wanted to sleep with the woman, to experience the asexual delight of wakening beside her in the night, slipping his arm around her and nesting with her like spoons as he waited for sleep to return. He wanted to go shopping with her, to fend off doorstep salesmen together, to dab dust motes from each other's eyes, to find out what she thought of contemporary music and of the farming of trout, to discover how far she could run, what childhood ailments she had suffered, how good she was at crosswords…

This is serious, Nicklin thought strickenly. I'm supposed to be immune to this kind of irrationality.

He tried to decide what it was about her that had had such a devastating effect on him. She was about thirty, somewhere close to his own age, and he decided at once that she was not at all beautiful. Her face was squarish and unremarkable, with eyelids that seemed heavy and druggy; her mouth was wide, with an upper lip that was much fuller than the lower, almost as if it had been swollen by a blow. She was tall and black-haired, and her body – beneath the black sylkon blouse and taut black trousers – was slim and athletic, looking as though it had been pared down by exercise rather than dieting. She wore a flat black stetson instead of the standard coolie-style sun-hat, a flourish which indicated that the ensemble had been consciously chosen to create a certain effect. Nicklin was not sure what the effect was meant to be in terms of fashion, but he knew that for him it worked – the thought of unbuttoning the blouse actually made him feel weak at the knees.

"You must go and help your uncle, of course," the woman said, "but perhaps you'll come back and listen to Corey when you're not so pressed for time. He really has something of great importance to say."

"I'll certainly give it serious thought."

"That's wonderful. By the way, my name is Danea."

"Mine's Jim," Nicklin said, deeply thrilled by the realisation that there had been no need for the woman to give him her name. "Jim Nicklin, and I've just been thinking…"

He glanced at the people sitting and standing nearby, who were beginning to look around at him with curiosity or resentment because the conversation was an unwelcome distraction. He pointed at his ear and then at an area of trampled grass which was at a remove from the audience but still inside the ring of pole-mounted speakers which were relaying Montane's words to the outside world. Danea nodded and moved in the indicated direction on black, spike-heeled sandals. Nicklin grabbed at Zindee's hand and followed.

"That's better – there were too many decibels to compete against back there," he said when they stopped walking. "Look, I've been thinking things over. It'll soon be getting dark and there probably isn't enough time to get any useful work in on the rock garden. I think I'll just stay on here for a while and – " He paused, becoming aware that Zindee had gripped his wrist with both hands and was trying to drag him away.

"Jim," she whispered fiercely. "Jim!"

Danea looked down at her in a friendly manner. "Is this your daughter?"

"No!" Nicklin realised he had put too much emphasis into the denial. "No, I'm not married. This is my friend Zindee. We were going to have us a sundae – on the way to my uncle's place, that is."

"Hello, Zindee," Danea said. "Don't worry about getting that sundae. We all know how important sundaes are, and I'm sure Jim didn't mean that terrible thing he said about staying on here." She raised her gaze and her eyes locked with Nicklin's. "After all, he can come back here at any time."

"Yes." Nicklin nodded vigorously as, annoyingly, Zindee redoubled her efforts to pull him off his feet. "I'll do that. I'll certainly do that."

"Well, we'll see you then." Danea smiled at him, and he saw that her teeth were perfect, and that when she smiled the heaviness left her eyes, making them lively, star-centred and bold. The tremulous feeling returned to his knee joints. He raised his free hand in a farewell gesture and allowed Zindee to haul him away in the direction of Mr Chickley's ice-cream parlour.

"Why didn't you answer Danea when she said hello to you?" he demanded as soon as they had walked far enough to gain some privacy.

"You were doing enough talking for both of us," Zindee replied, the set of her tiny chin showing that she was furious with him. "And what was all that bullshit about an uncle and a rock garden?" The fact that she had not used her customary euphemism – male ox droppings – confirmed to Nicklin that he was really in trouble with her.

"You wouldn't understand," he said lamely.

"What I don't understand is why you tell lies all the time. What makes you do it, Jim?"

That's what I'd like to know, Nicklin thought, his cheeks beginning to grow hot with embarrassment. "You still haven't said why you were rude to Danea."

"She talked to me like I was a kid. Sundaes are important. Huh!"

Nicklin remained silent until they had reached the edge of the common, crossed Coach-and-Four Lane and taken up good window seats in Chickley's. The place was quite narrow, but it extended a long way back from the street and had a glittering chrome-and-glass counter right across the inner end. Fat Mr Chickley was proud of having designed the period decor himself, even though there was some uncertainty about which period he had been aiming at. Clumps of coloured neon strips broke out here and there among the pseudo-Victorian gaslights on the walls. There were only a few customers in the twin rows of booths, presumably because of the rival attraction of Montane's meeting.

While Zindee was up at the counter placing her complex order he took stock of himself and was not surprised to find that his hands were slightly unsteady. What had happened to him out there on the common? By inviting the woman to move to a quieter place he had, by his standards of behaviour, been making a pass at her – and he had never before behaved that way with a stranger. The unsettling thing, however, was that she had known he was making the pass and had continued to give him positive signals. No local woman would have responded to an advance from him in that way.

He was well aware that, as well as having the reputation of being ineffectual and eccentric, he was suspected of homosexuality by most people in Orangefield. He could have earned the esteem of many men, and probably of quite a few women, by being seen visiting certain homes in the town where the lady of the house had fallen back, so to speak, on an ancient means of earning a living. The main reason he had not given those houses any business was that he was an intensely private person, and did not like the idea of the town gossips knowing the exact dates on which he had found it necessary to relieve biological pressures. He therefore restricted himself to those occasions when he was over in Weston Bridge buying books or machine parts.

It was quite some coincidence, he decided, that the only woman ever to blitz him in such a way was also just about the first ever to respond encouragingly to his show of interest. As a result, there was nothing else in the world that he wanted more than to be with Danea. That was why he had lied about the rock garden in front of Zindee – she had ceased to register on his senses, she had effectively ceased to exist. And, right now, the thought that but for her intrusive presence he could still have been talking to Danea was inspiring him with resentment towards the child.

"Here we go," Zindee said, arriving at the table with two imposing confections in tall glasses balanced on a tray. "Just look at them! Feast your eyes, Jim! How's that for a vision of paradise?"

"Not bad."

"Not bad!" As she sat down it was apparent from Zindee's expression and manner that she had been restored to good humour. "Peasant! Philistine! Have you no appreciation for genuine works of art?"

"Perhaps not," Nicklin said, taking his spoon and tentatively probing a pale green area of his sundae.

"Who's being rude now?"

"Sorry." He was dully surprised to find that he was not at all sorry. Why don't you take yourself for a long walk and leave me in peace for a while?

"I know what's the matter with you." Zindee gave him a knowing smirk, the downy hair on her upper lip already blobbed with white. "I know what's eating our Jim."

"Do you?"

"He's in love! The poor guy's got the throbs for the Lady in Black."

"Eat your ice cream, Zindee," Nicklin said, eyeing her with growing dislike. "You're talking rubbish."

"Oh, no I'm not! I was watching you." Zindee popped a cherry into her mouth and chewed contemplatively. "She's got a good pair of headlights."

Nicklin felt he ought to tell Zindee off for using language unbecoming to a well-brought-up child, but her comment had rekindled his furnace. Now that he thought about it, Danea's breasts had been quite full in comparison to the slimness of her body, creating horizontal wrinkles in her sylkon blouse. And there was her smile! He was inclined to smile as little as possible, because when he did so his mouth curved too far up at the corners, giving him what he regarded as a goofy hayseed appearance. Danea's smile, however, was straight, and perhaps her mouth even turned down a little at the corners – a feature which Nicklin had always envied and regarded as a hallmark of mature and worldly sophistication. What was her surname? And was the heaviness of her eyes and possible bruising of the upper lip a sign that she had spent most of the previous night in strenuous sexual activity? With Montane? Nicklin had read that it was quite commonplace for leaders of quirky religious groups to bed the most attractive of their acolytes. Perhaps this particular group went in for sex in a big way, in rituals and so forth. Perhaps Danea had been doing it with everybody! If that were the case, he wanted his share of her – even if it meant joining her nutty religion…

A mental picture of Danea coupling promiscuously with all the men with whom she travelled filled Nicklin with a pang of desire, jealousy and outrage so powerful that it caused him to squirm in his seat. He should be with her at that very moment, instead of playing nursemaid to a precocious brat who insisted on clinging to him like a leech. Looking out above the half-length net curtain which gave Mr Chickley's window seats some privacy, Nicklin tried to see Danea, but the trees and shifting groups of townsfolk made it impossible.

"Jim, I've got an idea," Zindee said. "You don't really want your sundae, do you?"

"I guess not. I guess I'm not in the mood for an ice."

"That's the understatement of the century. Look, hows about you giving your sundae to me? I'll be able to eat the two of them – no problem – but it's bound to take me quite a while." Zindee spoke with the grave tones of a general laying out a major campaign. "That would give you time to nip back across the street and see if you can fix yourself a date with the Lady in Black. What do you say?"

"I … " Nicklin gazed at her with an up-welling of affection so strong that it was little short of adoration. "Are you sure you would be all right? Sitting here by yourself?"

Zindee shrugged. "What could happen to a girl in an ice-cream joint?"

He stood up, drummed a message of thanks with his fingers on the crown of her sun-hat, and hurried out into the street. As he crossed to the common he realised that, without actual sight of Danea to goad him to recklessness, his cursed timidity had returned in force. He had no idea of what to say to her and, perversely, he now wished he had remained with Zindee. A glance at the sky showed that the eastern edge of the sun was being clipped by the next advancing force bar. Night would arrive quite soon, and he felt he might recapture his surprising boldness under cover of darkness, but he would have been obliged to rejoin Zindee by then.

Breasting waves of sound from the loudspeakers, he walked towards the meeting. Montane was still delivering his dire warnings, but the message was no longer penetrating to Nicklin's brain. He circled around the listening crowd, the white marquee and all the associated vehicles three times, but was unable to see any sign of Danea.

Steeped in black, bitter disappointment – but at the same time feeling oddly relieved – he headed back towards Mr Chickley's. From the edge of the green he saw the small and indomitable figure of Zindee outlined by the peach-coloured lights which had just been switched on in the shop. She was busily working on the sundaes.

He smiled as he thought of how pleasant it was going to be, walking home with her and savouring her safe, undemanding companionship.

CHAPTER 5

"By our old standards," Corey Montane said, "we did quite well today."

His audience – some forty strong and composed solely of his own workers – made sounds of gratification, but in a subdued and tentative manner. It was highly unusual for Montane to call a general meeting so late in the day, and each of them knew that something serious was afoot. They were sitting in a tight group in a corner of the marquee. All the door flaps had been drawn shut and tied, and the only illumination came from a single overhead globe which served to emphasise the darkness in the shadowy reaches of the huge tent. The conspiratorial atmosphere was enhanced by the fact that Montane had positioned himself in the midst of his team and was speaking in a low voice, obviously determined that any strangers who might be lurking outside would not hear what he was saying.

"We took in almost six hundred orbs today," Montane went on. "And six hundred orbs is quite a creditable sum – by our old standards. The trouble is that our old standards no longer apply. They have lost all relevance. They are totally without meaning for us."

Montane paused, surveying his audience with sombre eyes. They were a mixed bag of men and women, and he loved them all. Some – like the electricians Petra Davies and old Jock Craig – had joined him in the knowledge that they had useful skills to offer; others had come along with no special aptitudes, but prepared to do or learn to do anything that was asked of them. What they had in common was their belief in his message, their loyalty and their trust.

And now it was required of him, in this grim hour, that he should put all those qualities to the test.

"You already know, from today's news, that the world has been moved to some alien part of the continuum, to a new location so remote that the astronomers cannot even find the Local Group – the twenty or more galaxies that made up our cosmic neighbourhood. The event is a vindication of all that I have told people in the last six years, but sadly, incredibly, they still do not believe. The blindness continues.

"But we are not blind. We know that the iron jaws of the Devil's trap have quivered and have now begun to snap shut!

"I have to admit that, all along, I have been much too complacent. It is now almost two centuries since the migrations to Orbitsville began. By human standards that is a long time, but to God it is the mere blink of an eye, and to the Devil it is the mere blink of an eye.

"I was lulled by those two centuries into thinking that the time scale was much more leisurely than it has proved to be. I began my mission with grand plans to raise the funding to build a fleet of starships. The money came in much more slowly than I had expected in those days of my naivety, but I was able to adapt to that. If the worst comes to the worst, I reassured myself, it will be enough for me to set up a foundation. I will be able to die content in the knowledge that a fleet will some day set sail towards the new Eden, even if I am not there to embark with it."

Montane gave his listeners a sad, rueful smile. "But today's news has changed all that, and it must change us. I am now prepared to settle for just one starship, one ark which will preserve the seeds of a new branch of humanity. It must be built with all possible speed. There may not even be enough time in which to complete the ship, but we must try. It is our only hope of salvation and therefore we must make the utmost effort.

"Until this day we have been content to gather money in small amounts, but now we have to change our ways. We have to put aside our morals, to stifle the voice of our consciences. In short, we have to do everything in our power to bring in that money, even if it means descending to methods which – in other circumstances – we would find repugnant.

"I hate to use words which are associated with some of the darkest episodes in human history – but, in this unique case, the end justifies the means."

There was a taut silence then Mace Winnick, a skeletal, shrunken-faced man who had done time in a correction clinic, cleared his throat. "Corey, are you talking about stealing?"

Montane shook his head. "No stealing. I rule it out, not on moral grounds, but because of the high probability of being caught."

There was another silence while his audience stared at Montane with speculative eyes, trying to assess the stranger that their leader had become. Dee Smethurst, the head cook – plump, pink and matronly, looking exactly as a cook should – raised her hand.

"You almost…" There was a pained look on her face. "You almost sound as if you would condone prostitution."

Montane carefully avoided looking anywhere near the women in the group – Danea Farthing, Christine McGivern and Audrey Lightfoot among them – who were physically equipped to earn good money by hustling. "I will condone prostitution, male or female, if it builds us that ship."

"Corey Montane!" Dee shot an outraged glance at those seated next to her and tightened her lips in a way which indicated that she would have a lot more to say at a later time.

It came to Montane that he was likely to lose some of his team as a result of the new rules of conduct, but that simply had to be accepted. His mission had been run too much on the lines of a mobile retreat for society's gentle drop-outs. The time had come to stop playing games, and anybody who was not prepared to commit every personal resource to the cause would have to be treated as dead wood.

"I should qualify my last remark," he added. "I am quite prepared to condone ordinary casual prostitution, but bringing in fifty or a hundred orbs a day – I am not conversant with the going rates – would only be a tiny step in the right direction. I would, however, applaud strategic prostitution, in which the client was induced to join or support our movement to the extent of selling up his or her possessions and donating the proceeds to our fund.

"It gives me no pleasure to speak to you in these terms – but our immortal souls are at stake. Nothing less than the future of the human race is at stake!"

Montane invited his listeners to join with him in open discussion, and he stayed with them for more than an hour while the tides of emotional debate raged back and forth. Finally, when he had become too tired to continue, he took his leave of them and walked back to his camper in the darkness. When he was inside the roomy vehicle he switched on no lights except for the small reading lamp at his desk. The warm glow from its toffee-coloured glass shade enabled him to prepare the pot of tea which he always drank before going to bed. His mind was racing, trying to assimilate all that had happened during the momentous day, but a sense of deep weariness told him he would have no trouble getting to sleep.

When he had finished the tea he undressed and brushed his teeth. He switched off the reading lamp and, on the way to bed, paused by the silver coffin which occupied the centre of the vehicle's living space.

Placing both hands on the cool metal, he closed his eyes and in a low voice said, "I'm sorry about the way things are working out, Milly – but some day we'll both be at peace."

CHAPTER 6

Nicklin stood behind the counter of his repair shop and gazed around him with a kind of sad astonishment. The morning was just like that of the previous day – sunny, clear, warm and invigorating. There had been a succession of such mornings recently, and he had luxuriated in every one of them, but today there was something dismally wrong. Not with the familiar surroundings and appurtenances of his life, but with his reaction to them.

Was it simply that he had had a poor night's sleep? He had lain awake for long periods, reliving his meeting with the Lady in Black, inventing different outcomes for the too-brief encounter. At times he had congratulated himself, with forced sincerity, on having escaped any entanglement with her; but for the most part he had become lost in vivid scenarios which ended with the two of them in bed together. During those episodes he had found himself with a raging, rock-hard erection which kept grinding itself into the mattress, seemingly of its own volition, while he cursed the criminal waste of his youth represented by his spending all the long nights alone.

He had had restless nights in the past, but had always welcomed the morning and the return of the bright, trustworthy realities of existence. On this morning, however, life was flat and boring. Not ordinarily flat and boring, but unbearably so. The things which used to interest him, no longer interested him. The cheerful environs of his repair shop and library now had all the appeal of a morgue, and the mere idea of having to retune even one more magnetic pulse motor was almost enough to make him sit down and weep.

What am I going to do, O Gaseous Vertebrate? he thought. I can't see how I'm going to get through a single day like this – let alone the next sixty years…

With an effort of will, he picked up the order book and checked on what work was pending. The first two items, logged in Maxy Millom's scrupulously legible writing, were a circular saw and a lawn-mower. Beside each was the legend 'MT', which meant that according to Maxy's initial diagnosis their motors needed to be retuned. It was work which Maxy could not even begin to learn because he had an almost superstitious fear of the way a faulty motor could release bursts of gyromagnetic energy, causing tools to leap off the bench like startled animals.

Nicklin had always regarded adjusting the semi-sentient paramag blocks of a motor, persuading them to deliver their energy pulses at precisely the right instant, as the most boring job ever invented – and that was when he was in a good mood. Today the prospect seemed dire. Wishing that the diffuseness of Orbitsville's population and the lack of universal engineering standards had not made repair-by-replacement unfeasible, he slammed the order book down.

At that moment the bleached-out stillness of the world beyond the window was disturbed by a moving flurry of dust near the bridge. It was Maxy Millom, late as usual, arriving for work on his old Bronco scooter. As he neared the shop, Maxy stood up on the machine's footrests and gave Nicklin a military-style salute. Maintaining the pose like a rider in a parade, he passed the window, slowing down all the while, and – as he had done perhaps a dozen times in the past – went straight into the tip of a rock about the size of a football projecting from the sun-baked clay. The scooter bucked and fell sideways, bearing Maxy to the ground with it. He jumped up swearing, kicked the scooter a couple of times to punish it for having obeyed the law of gravity, and retrieved his bright green sun-hat. Leaving the Bronco where it lay, he came towards the shop, walking grotesquely as he tried with both hands to extricate the seat of his pants from the cleft of his slabby behind.

Nicklin glowered at him with purest malevolence, wondering how anybody could be dim enough to stage the identical accident so often without learning to avoid it. Just think of it, he told himself, appalled, unless I do something really drastic Maxy and I could grow old together – with him gradually wearing that rock down to a frigging pebble.

"Good morrow, Jim," Maxy bellowed, grinning hugely, as he came into the shop. "Did you see that one? I nearly deballed myself."

I wish you had, Nicklin thought. "You're late again."

"Yeah." Maxy was totally unabashed. "Didn't get to bed till all hours last night. A couple of the boys and me went over to the travellin' show, just to see what sort of things was going on, then we went down to the White Spot for a few beers. Seen you at the show."

"I didn't see you."

"Naw, but I seen you, all right," Maxy said triumphantly. "You seemed to be doing okay for yourself. I was nearly going to butt in and tell snake-hips how she was wasting her time on you, and she oughta come along for a few beers with me and the boys, but my generations of good breeding stopped me."

It has just told me it thinks I'm a homosexual – to my face! – and I go on meekly standing here. "I'm sure Danea will be deeply disappointed when she hears what she missed," Nicklin said. "I'll break the news to her tonight – as gently as I can, of course. We mustn't have the poor woman bursting into tears."

"Are you saying you'll be seeing her tonight?"

"No, we've arranged to communicate by carrier pigeon! What do you think I'm saying? Of course I'm seeing her tonight."

Maxy hopped from one foot to the other, grinning in gleeful disbelief. "Is that a fact, Jim? You've got yourself a hot date? Me and the boys'll watch out for you – maybe pick up a few tips."

Knowing that Maxy, who had remarkably little to do in his spare time, was quite capable of maintaining surveillance on him for an entire evening, Nicklin shrugged and turned away. How was he going to get out of this one? Was he going to have to plead illness and stay home? Brooding on this new annoyance, he went to the square metre of work surface which was referred to as the kitchen, and began to brew coffee. Starting the job while Maxy was present would be interpreted as an invitation for him to share. That was not what he wanted, but it was much preferable to letting Maxy prepare the drinks. He had an unfortunate habit of handling the cups by putting two fingers deep inside them, even when they were full – fingers which if examined under a microscope, Nicklin was sure, would register as a seething mass of bacteria.

"Just what I need," Maxy said, following him. "Hey! Know who else I saw at the rent-a-freak last night?"

"No, but perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me."

Impervious to sarcasm, Maxy nodded vigorously. "A black man! 'Strewth, Jim – they've got a black geezer working for them! He's as black as … as…"

As your fingernails, Nicklin supplied mentally.

"…as your boot," Maxy concluded.

Although Nicklin did not want to encourage Maxy by showing any degree of interest, he was quite intrigued. He had seen only one black person in his entire life, and that had been when he was a child. Now he found it quite difficult to visualise a human being who had black skin.

The old Orbitsville syndrome again, he thought. So much for all that ancient stuff about the universal brotherhood of man! With living space equal to five billion Earths available, like had gone off into the wild green yonder with like. Nobody was going to hang around to be persecuted, discriminated against, tolerated or even cultivated by liberals merely because of having the wrong shade of epidermis or politics, speaking the wrong language or having wrong ideas about religion, having been born to the wrong parents or in one of the vast selection of wrong places. Regardless of all teachings and preachings, the ordinary Joe had decided it was best to be with his own…

"Anyway," Maxy said. "I've decided I don't like black people."

"That was quick." Nicklin took two plastic cups from the dispenser. "May I ask why?"

"They're too short-tempered, too touchy. Me and the boys was just standing there – friendly, like – looking at this guy, and all of a sudden, for no reason at all, he tells us to bog off." An indignant expression appeared on Maxy's tallowy face as he relived the incident in his mind. "I mean, if you can't just stand and look at somebody!"

"What's the world coming to? That's what I always say." Nicklin poured coffee into the two cups, picked up his own and moved to the front end of the shop. It was a vantage point which gave him a good view of the stream, the small bridge and the road. Beyond the building's wide eaves the sunlight was a silent, vertical torrent of platinum-coloured rays, hammering down on the bleached-out scene with almost tangible force. The world was embedded – preserved and hermetically sealed – in the clear rigid plastic of that light. Dayton, Ohio, where it was forever 1910. Nothing was ever going to happen in Orangefield, and he was going to be right there, through all of it. The thought was enough to make him want to sit down and weep. Dismayed to feel his lower lip give a preliminary tremble, he took a sip of his coffee and winced as the near-scalding fluid coursed down his throat.

Lost in his melancholia, Nicklin had been gazing at the approaching blue Unimot convertible for several seconds before he realised it was slowing down to stop at his place. It was lost to view behind the stand of whistle trees, reappeared and turned right, coming to a halt when its driver was confronted by the footbridge. A moment later the driver got out and Nicklin's heart gave a giddy lurch as he saw the woman. The woman.

She was no longer the Lady in Black, but was wearing a similar outfit – glistening blouse, slimfit pants, high-heel boots and flat stetson – in which the predominant colour was primrose. Glancing about her with evident interest, she came towards the shop. She was walking almost like a ballet dancer on stage, with one foot going down directly in front of the other in a way which emphasised the economical curvatures of thighs, calves and ankles.

Nicklin felt a cool prickling on his brow as he analysed the possibilities. The chances that she was coming to borrow a book or to have an eggbeater mended were just about zero – which meant that the visit was personal. Could it be – could it really be – that she wanted to take up where they had left off last night? But nothing actually happened between us last night, Nicklin reminded himself. It was all a product of my fevered imagination. This sort of thing only happens to me in the opening phases of an erotic dream.

He set his cup down, found the presence of mind to wink at Maxy, and went out of the shop without taking time to pick up his sun-hat. When the woman saw him advancing to meet her she gave him a smile which was so fleeting that it would have been possible to miss it, then her expression became severe.

"What happened to you last night?" she said abruptly.

"I … " Nicklin was lost for words. "What do you mean?"

"Jim, you know very well what I mean."

Her use of his first name excited and encouraged him. "I assure you, Danea, I don't know what you're talking about."

"At least you remember my name," she said, beginning to look mollified. "I suppose that's something, but don't think it lets you off the hook, Jim Nicklin. Why didn't you come back to see me last night, the way we arranged?"

Nicklin felt a gusher of pure joy shaking his intellectual landscape. It had not yet spumed up through him, but it was getting itself ready. This was the first part of an erotic dream, but it was a dream that was coming true – and all he needed to do was make the final check which would remove even the slightest possibility of his suffering a crushing humiliation or disappointment.

"Montane must have a dash of tax collector's blood in him if he lets you go drive all the way out of town for a couple of orbs," he said, forcing a grin. "Where's your collecting plate?"

"That isn't funny, Jim." Danea gazed at him seriously from under heavy eyelids. "This sort of thing has never happened to me before, and you're not making it any easier. You may be used to this, but I'm not."

"I'm not used to … Danea, there was nothing actually said last night."

"Do you think I don't know that?" she replied, her eyes holding steady on his, imploring. "Do you think I'm not quivering like a jelly over all the embarrassment I'll have to go through if I'm wrong?"

"You're not wrong," he said, entranced, taking one of her hands in his. The gusher was exploding up through the ground now, blasting all that remained of the old Jim Nicklin into the high blue.

"Thank God!" She smiled and moved her hand in such a way that his knuckles were pressed into her left breast. "I didn't sleep much last night, Jim – why didn't you come back to me?"

"I did go back. I left Zindee with her ice cream for a few minutes and went back to look for you."

"I was hiding in the marquee trying to calm myself down a little bit." Her breast, beneath the sylkon blouse, felt like bare flesh against the back of his hand. "Anyway, a couple of minutes wouldn't have been much use to us. I'm really hurting for you, Jim. I want you in me. Does that sound awful?"

"It sounds wonderful." The former Jim Nicklin would have been reduced to incoherence by the question, but the new version remained more or less in control of himself, doing his best to act like the cool roué Danea believed him to be. "I have an apartment above the library – let's go there."

"No!" Danea looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the workshop. "That horrible person – the one who was hanging around the meeting last night – is watching us. I'd never be able to relax if I knew he was near us … listening … Does he work for you?"

"In a manner of speaking." Nicklin glanced back at the window in which the open-mouthed figure of Maxy was posed like a statue. "Only the Gaseous Vertebrate knows why I keep him on. I could send him home."

Danea shook her head. "That would be too obvious."

"Do you want to wait till tonight?" Nicklin said, his joy beginning to cloud with anxiety. He knew with absolute certainty, because it was in the nature of such things, that if he let this opportunity slip away it would never return. Tonight was an aeon away in the future, and by the time it came Danea would have recovered her sanity, or started menstruating, or been called away to tend a sick aunt. Or he would have tripped over something and broken both his legs, or – worst of all – the Mr Hyde potion would have worn off and he would be in such a state of yellow-bellied funk that he would be unable to set foot outside the house.

"Let's go for a walk," Danea said, nodding in the direction of the low crest behind his premises. "What's on the other side of that hill?"

Thank you, thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, Nicklin chanted in his mind. "There's nothing over there," he said, keeping his voice calm. "No people, anyway. Just little hills and lots more little hills. It's just right for walking."

Danea gave him a conspiratorial smile. "Do you want to go in and fetch your hat?"

"No, the sun never bothers me much," he lied, unwilling to risk leaving her side for even a few seconds.

Conscious of still being gaped at by Maxy, he linked arms with Danea and walked with her towards the grassy crest. There was silence between them as they moved up the slope. Nicklin wondered if he should try to maintain a flow of sophisticated and tension-easing conversation, but perhaps there was no real need for words. In a lower corner of his vision he could see the buoyant cones of Danea's bosom – you were right, Zindee, good headlamps – and the easy, languorous, alternating movement of her slim thighs. And each time he reminded himself it was all really happening, and not part of a dream, his feet seemed to lose all contact with the ground. I'm walking on air, just as the cliché says. I want this to go on for ever. Love took its time in finding me, but when it finally got here it did the job in the classic across-a-crowded-room style, and I want this to go on for ever and ever…

As soon as they were over the ridge and out of sight of Nicklin's place and the few other buildings dotted along Cork Road, Danea turned to him and they kissed. The smell and the taste and the feel of her swamped his senses.

"Not here," she whispered gently. "It's too near to your place – that person might follow us."

Belatedly aware of having tried to sink with Danea to the ground, he said, "You're quite right – I wouldn't put it past him. There's a better spot over here."

He guided her around an egg-shaped hummock to its north side, from where endless green billows stretched to the up-curved horizon. Fringing the hill were clusters of bandannas which were just coming into full flower. The trailing red-and-orange blossoms which gave the shrub its name made a colourful outpost on the edge of the ocean of grass. One of the largest clumps had grown in a U-shape which was a good size to screen a recumbent couple and even provided some degree of protection against the sun. Nicklin had noticed the leafy boudoir on previous walks, and in his imagination – inspired by constant loneliness – had peopled it with lovers, never supposing that he would be one of them.

"How's this?" he said.

For an answer, Danea began to undress, her solemn brown eyes never leaving his. Nicklin stripped off in unison with her, throwing his clothes into the nook to form a makeshift blanket. As soon as both were naked they kissed once more – breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh.

Then they lay down together…

It might have been an hour – he had no means of judging the time – before Nicklin slowly spiralled back down into the mundane world. He was lying over Danea, but taking most of his weight on his elbows and knees, and was looking into her eyes. They were so close to his own that he was unable to focus on them. They registered as lambent brown-and-white blurs, lacking in detail, but in a little while he became aware that she was crying. He promptly rolled to the ground on his left side, disturbed by a lover's fears, and touched the cool transparent ribbons on her cheek.

"What's wrong, Danea?" he whispered. "You're not sorry, are you?"

She pressed her teeth down on her lower lip to stop its trembling. "I am sorry, but not about us. Not about this."

"What then?"

"Corey … The mission will be leaving Orangefield the day after tomorrow. I have to go with it, and that means…" She gave a sob and pressed her face into his shoulder. "I don't want to leave you, Jim. I don't want this to end."

"Does it have to?" Nicklin's consciousness, which had been totally absorbed with the present, suddenly reached out to the future and encountered – only hours ahead – a barrier of black jet, a dark wall where happiness ended and the old despairing solitude and futility began. "Do you have to leave? Couldn't you stay here with me?"

Danea shook her head and he felt her tears smearing on his skin. "I'm committed to the mission," she said in a muffled voice. "It's what I believe in, Jim. I can't forget all the vows I … Besides, I don't think I could stand living in a place like Orangefield."

"I've got news for you, Danea." Bolts of white lightning cleaved the landscape of Nicklin's mind. "I can't stand living in Orangefield either."

He felt her body go rigid. She raised her head and gave him several light kisses, dabbing his face with her tears.

"That's very sweet of you," she murmured. "I feel so very honoured that you would even consider leaving your home and everything you know and going out on the road with me. Is that what you meant, or am I…?"

"That's what I meant, and you know it."

She gave him a tremulous smile and gently nuzzled her pubis against his hip. "You're a lovely man, Jim, but there are things you don't know about."

"What sort of things?"

"Corey doesn't permit people to come along for the ride. We'd be swamped with fellow-travellers – in both senses – if he allowed that. Everyone who joins us has to be totally committed, and that means…" She tried to lower her head again, but he placed his hand on her brow, forcing her to continue looking at him.

"Go on," he said.

"It means selling everything you own … your home, your business, your insurance … everything … and donating all the proceeds to the mission."

"Is that all you're worried about?" Nicklin laughed with genuine relief. "Consider it done, little girl! Consider it done!"

All the heaviness disappeared from Danea's eyes. "Do you mean it, Jim? Do you really mean it? We could have a little camper all to ourselves – and you don't even have to marry me if you don't want to."

"I want to."

"We've got all the time in the world to talk about that," she said, raising herself to a sitting position, looking radiantly excited. She remained that way for a few seconds, then her expression became pensive.

Nicklin was more confident now, and no alarm bells rang for him. "What is it this time?"

"I've just thought of something." Her eyes were speculative and oddly watchful as they searched his face. "I don't know what the others, especially Corey, will think of me if I go back as bold as brass and tell them I'm moving in with a man I met only last night. That probably sounds silly to you, Jim. You're probably used to a procession of women going in and out of your bed – and you don't have to care one hoot what people say about it – but things are a bit different for me at the mission. It's all a bit straight-laced. It's all very old-fashioned, but I really value the respect of the people I work with there…"

Danea paused, looking self-conscious. "What a big speech! And I don't even know if what I said makes any kind of sense to you."

"I understand." Nicklin felt some disappointment, but he was already possessive towards Danea and the disappointment was more than offset by his learning that Montane's followers were not proponents of communal or even casual sex. "You're saying we can't start living together right off. I can handle that."

"Thank you, Jim, thank you!" She hugged him, pressing in hard with her breasts. "We'll only have to wait a little while after Corey accepts you. And we won't be apart all the time, my lovely horny darling – every now and then we'll be able to take ourselves for a little walk."

The inflection Danea put on the last word, the assignment to it of a special secret meaning, made Nicklin's throat close up painfully with sheer happiness. In future, when they were in the company of others, he or she would only have to suggest going for a "walk", and nobody else present would know what was meant, but he and Danea would know, and it would be more of the kind of ecstatic love-making they had just experienced. The world was a wonderful place in which to live – and how could he ever have thought that Danea was not beautiful?

While they were dressing he found a damp patch near the bottom edge of his shirt which made him wince as he crammed it under his belt. Danea laughed and told him he had only himself to blame for being so virile. After they were clothed again they remained in the lee of the bandanna for a minute while he tried to explain, with some guesswork here and there, how he would go about disposing of all his assets in a very short time. Danea looked embarrassed and asked him not to talk about such things until he was with Corey Montane. Nicklin loved her all the more because she so obviously wanted to keep their personal relationship uncontaminated by financial matters.

As they were walking back to his place, his arm around her shoulder and hers around his waist, a new thought occurred to him "If we're going to be married," he said lightly, "I suppose it would be only proper if I got to know your second name."

"You mean you took me into your love nest and you didn't even know my…!" She pushed him away from her with a scandalised laugh. "Farthing! My name is Farthing – I told you that last night."

"You didn't! I swear to you by the Gaseous Vertebrate that you didn't." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "At least, I don't think you did."

"You see! You're not even sure!" Danea came back to him and put her arms around his neck. "Tell me the truth, Jim – just how many women have you taken for a walk up here?"

"You're the only one," Nicklin protested, but was unable to resist allowing the claim to sound unconvincing. He was more flattered than he cared to admit by her repeated suggestions that he was a sexual conquistador. And if she happened to be impressed by men of wide experience there was no point in his going all out to change her opinion of him. Life was suddenly opening up in a big way. Now that he had been with Danea he could admit that the women of Orangefield, with their dismissive and condescending manner, had always given him a sense of sexual inadequacy. But the fault had been with them all along! They were small-towners, hidebound and limited by their Hicksville upbringing, whereas he was a natural cosmopolitan who could only be appreciated by other cosmopolitans.

As he walked in the sunlight with Danea's hip gently nudging his, he thought for a moment about the fact that he was on the point of selling up everything he owned, for no other reason than his desire to be with her. But he felt no doubts, no qualms, no apprehensions. He was going to rid himself of his shackles and become free to begin his real life.

"Tell me something," Danea said. "What is this Gaseous Vertebrate you keep mentioning? What do you mean?"

Nicklin was surprised. "I didn't realise that I … It's a name that somebody – one of the old German philosophers, I think – invented for God."

"God? It sounds strange. Not very respectful."

"It's meant to be the opposite of respectful. It's meant to express disbelief. The Bible claims that God made man in His own image. So, if we look like Him, He must look like us, and that means He has a backbone. But if He's a spirit – by definition a creature who has no weight – why does He need a backbone to support His weight?"

"Please do me a favour," Danea said, a barely noticeable wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. "Don't refer to God in that way when you're with Corey – I'm sure it would hurt his feelings."

Nicklin gave her a compliant nod, and – for no reason which could be isolated from the clamorous background of his thoughts – it came to him that there was something important, something very important, which he should have discussed with the woman he loved.

CHAPTER 7

An hour spent with the manager of the Orangefield branch of the Portal One Bank had left Nicklin emotionally exhausted. He was not sure why an interview with Dixon Figg should have that kind of an effect on him, but it always had, and he was glad to leave the hushed dove-grey offices of the bank and go for a restorative walk in Mumford Park.

Except in large cities, the profession of realtor had all but ceased to exist in the two centuries that man had been on Orbitsville. It was ironic, Nicklin often thought, that it was a surfeit of the very commodity they traded in which had practically forced real estate dealers out of existence. With entire continents available for nothing, clients willing to pay more than peanuts per hectare had become elusive.

The banks, ever ready to fill a commercial vacuum, had absorbed land management into their activities, and as a consequence Figg had a comprehensive knowledge of Nicklin's affairs. The thing which annoyed Nicklin was that Figg always treated him with barely hidden disapproval, even contempt, in spite of his sensible business practices, avoidance of debt, and an accumulation of some 40,000 orbs in his personal savings account. Figg was only reflecting the town's prejudices, Nicklin surmised, but surely it was incumbent upon the manager of a bank to be more civilised than the local stubblejaws.

On being told that Nicklin wanted to liquidate every one of his assets in preparation for leaving town in a couple of days, Dixon Figg's expression had gone from shock to outrage to deep suspicion in as many seconds. The display had cowed Nicklin so thoroughly that he had not dared to give the real reason for his drastic proposal. Instead he had launched into a series of lies about a cousin in Beachhead City who had presented him with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy into the family's ventilation engineering business. Under Figg's astute probing the structure of lies had become more complicated and increasingly shaky, until in the end – his intelligence roundly insulted – the banker had withdrawn into the hostile iciness with which he concluded the interview.

Now, walking amidst the greenery of the park, Nicklin was reproaching himself for not having been tough and cold with Figg. Tough, cold and – if necessary – brutal. When the questioning started he should have silenced Figg with the verbal equivalent of a broadsword. Perhaps he would do just that in the morning when he went to collect his underwritten draft for 82,000 orbs, but it was much more likely that he would be as ineffectual as ever. It was only when he was with Danea that the bold and positive side of his personality seemed to emerge, enhanced by the power of her feelings for him.

The realisation that he would soon be quitting oppressive Orangefield for ever, and going off into the unknown with her, gave his spirits a powerful boost, enabling him to drive the crabbed Mr Figg out of his thoughts. He strolled around the little park twice, breathing deeply and consciously relaxing, until it was almost time for his 11.00 a.m. appointment with Corey Montane. Leaving by the east gate, he walked the length of Telegraph Row, making good progress because there were few shoppers around at that drowsy time of day, the tail-end of the mid-morning lull. He emerged on Buckboard Lane, one of the boundaries of the common, which was comparatively free of vehicles and easy to get across.

The mission's marquee glowed like a snowdrift beyond the screen of trees. As he approached it he saw that the site, with its rectangular group of cars, campers and trailers, was almost deserted. Several men and women were sitting on the steps of the platform, talking earnestly among themselves, but he knew not to look for Danea among them. For reasons he had not fully understood, she had thought it best to remain out of sight until after his talk with Montane. The most convenient person to ask guidance from was a man who was leaning against a nearby tree, his head concealed beneath an enormous droop-rimmed straw sun-hat. His back was to Nicklin and he appeared to be eating a banapple.

"Hi, there!" Nicklin said. "Can you tell me where I might find Corey Montane?"

The man turned, smiling, and Nicklin saw that he was the black of whom Maxy had spoken. "No might about it! I can tell you where you will definitely find Corey."

"That's even better," Nicklin replied, smiling in return, and doing his best not to stare at the deeply pigmented skin of the man's face and hands.

"Over there. The silver job with no writing on the side."

"Thank you." Nicklin nodded and went in the indicated direction. He was pleased because the black man had treated him with amiable courtesy, as few locals would have done, and it reinforced his feeling that he was throwing his lot in with soulmates – travellers, cosmopolitans, people who had seen a thing or two.

As he neared the silver trailer, Corey Montane appeared in the open doorway and came on to the step to meet him. The first thing Nicklin noticed was that the impression of ordinariness he had projected from the stage was no longer present. It was his face that made the difference when Montane was seen at close range. The features were conventionally handsome and as clearly defined as those of a cartoon character. Nicklin, in spite of having no art training, felt he could have produced a recognisable lightning sketch of Montane. The regular features – ruler-straight nose and square chin, glossy dark hair coming to a widow's peak – would have taken just a few strokes of the charcoal. Only the eyes would have been difficult, impossible, even for a master portraitist. They were grey, deep-set and full of lively interest, but at the same time they seemed to be focused on some point very far beyond Nicklin. It was as if the mind behind them had weighed him up and found him to be of only transient interest. While Nicklin was there in the flesh that interest would be as complete and sympathetic as Montane could make it, but his true concern was with matters infinite and eternal.

Nicklin liked him immediately, and – against his expectations – felt considerable respect for him. "I'm Jim Nicklin," he said, extending his hand.

"Hello, Jim." Montane's handshake was firm and dry. "Danea has been telling me all about you. Would you like to come inside and have a cup of tea? We can talk better in the old bus and it's a lot cooler inside – at least it would be if the air conditioning was working properly."

"I can put it right for you," Nicklin said as he followed Montane into the vehicle. "It's probably just a matter of – " He broke off on seeing the long silvery box occupying the centre of the floor space.

Montane gave him an appraising, slightly amused glance. "Yes, it's just what it appears to be – a coffin. Temporary resting place for my wife. Didn't Danea tell you about my unusual domestic arrangement?"

"Ah … no."

"She probably didn't want you to think I was crazy." Montane nodded towards a cushioned bench, inviting Nicklin to be seated. "We run the mission on strictly democratic lines, you know. One of our principal rules is that accommodation has to be shared out equally, but although there's enough room in my vehicle for a few more people nobody ever suggests moving in. They pretend it's out of respect for me, but who would want to share with a casket? Especially one that was occupied…"

Nicklin tried to smile. "Not too many, I suppose."

"It's understandable, but my circumstances are far from being normal."

That has to be the understatement of the decade, Nicklin thought, an ambivalence creeping into his opinion of Montane. The initial instinctive respect was still there, but what man in his right mind toted his wife's dead body around everywhere he went? Or even anywhere he went? It was bound to be against some statute or other, and had it ever been possible to introduce effective law enforcement on the Big O – in place of the prevalent system of restrained anarchy – Montane would have been in trouble. Something else the man had said was causing tremors of unease far back in Nicklin's consciousness, but he had no time to identify it.

"This is a very big step you're contemplating," Montane commented as he began to prepare the tea. "You fully understand, I take it, that the money you transfer to the mission will be in the form of a donation?"

"What else could it be?"

"My point is that you won't be buying a holding in some kind of commercial enterprise – a starship construction company, let's say – a holding which you could dispose of at some future date should you wish to do so."

"You're saying I won't be able to get my money back."

"I'm saying precisely that." Montane set out two antique-looking china cups and saucers. "And the amount involved is bound to be quite large."

"Oh, well – in for an orb, in for a crescent," Nicklin said, immediately regretting his attempt at flippancy as he noted the seriousness of Montane's expression.

"There's a lot more than mere orbs and 'cents at stake here," Montane replied. "I'm very happy for Danea and you, of course, and I wish you every happiness together, but–"

"My feelings about her aren't going to change, and even if they did – which they aren't – I don't see that it would have any bearing on any financial agreement between you and me." Nicklin was surprised to hear himself speaking with a degree of forcefulness which he had rarely achieved before – especially with a stranger – and he tentatively identified the Danea effect again.

Montane halted in the act of opening a jar of milk capsules. "I apologise, Jim. I intended no slur on Danea or you. I accept that you love each other, although it was all rather sudden by my personal timetable, but will you give me a direct answer to a direct question?"

"Of course."

Montane set the jar down and turned to face Nicklin. "Are you a believer, Jim? Do you truly believe in God and in the message I bring to mankind on His behalf?"

"I … " Nicklin looked into the calmness of the grey eyes and for once in his life understood the futility of lying. He turned his head from side to side, slowly, once.

Unexpectedly, Montane gave him a broad smile. "If you had tried to fool me on that one, I'd have booted you out of here, Jim – regardless of how much money it cost the mission. I can only work with people I respect, and who respect me. Milk?"

"One," Nicklin said as Montane picked up the small jar. "I'm glad we cleared the air, but I'm a bit surprised."

"At my taking on a non-believer? These are very special times, Jim. Naturally, I would prefer it if everybody I came in contact with was a disciple of the Lord, but this is an imperfect world and I have to use any instrument that He sends in my direction. The mission will benefit in two ways from your joining us – firstly, from your generous donation to our funds; secondly, from your practical skills. Danea tells me you are an excellent engineer."

"Technician might be a better word, and only in a small way." Nicklin accepted a cup of tea, and as he sipped it the feeling that something was amiss returned to him. Was it that Danea had warned him about speaking of his atheism to Montane? She had indicated that Montane would be deeply displeased, but in the event the man had proved to be quite indifferent. She had also said that no "paying guests" were permitted to come along for the ride, and that too was incorrect. It appeared she was not as familiar with her leader's views as one might have expected…

"Well, I'm pleased to accept you into my team, and I'm sure you'll be a useful member regardless of whether we style you engineer or technician," Montane said. "And now we ought to sort out some necessary details – does it embarrass you to talk about money?"

"It's one of my favourite subjects."

"Good! Money is very important to us." Montane came to sit on an old adjustable chair opposite Nicklin, a move which brought him close to the metal coffin. He placed his cup and saucer on it while he angled the seat to a more comfortable position. As an avowed materialist, Nicklin tried not to show any reaction, but using a loved one's coffin as an occasional table struck him as being vaguely distasteful. Unfortunately for him, he also saw the little domestic absurdity as being very funny – especially for a religious leader – and he was not at all certain of being able to control his amusement.

"Milly would have liked being helpful around the place," Montane explained, apparently prompted by some kind of near-telepathy as he retrieved his tea. "This way we're still man and wife – if you see what I mean – until she is properly laid to rest."

"I quite understand," Nicklin muttered, staring fixedly into his cup and fighting the urge to laugh. Why, O Gaseous Vertebrate, does life never serve anything up to us absolutely straight? Why does every drama have to contain its element of the ludicrous? Why does every leader have to have a squeaky voice or a boil on his bum? Is it your way of hinting to us that everything might be part of a big joke?

"You're looking a bit pensive, son," Montane said. "Is there anything on your mind?"

"Nothing too weighty," Nicklin assured the older man. "Just odd thoughts about this and that. It isn't every day that a man begins a brand-new life, you know."

Although he had put just about everything he owned into the hands of the Portal One Bank, it took Nicklin longer than he had expected to vacate his premises. He kept finding last-minute jobs to do, personal minutiae to preserve or destroy, all kinds of trivial items which somehow could not be abandoned without leaving notes for future users. When he had arranged for Danea to pick him up at midday it had seemed that he was allowing ample time in which to pull out, but now a distinct undertone of panic was creeping into everything.

The weather had changed during the night. Opaque grey clouds had come sifting in from the west, and the breeze which had sprung up was strong enough to activate the whistle trees on the far bank of the stream. They had curled their leaves and were emitting a mournful, ruminative keening which reminded Nicklin of the sound effects in a bad melodrama. There had been no rain as yet, but the air felt cool, moist and heavy.

Luckily, this was one of the days on which Maxy Millom was not due to put in an appearance, so Nicklin was spared the interrogation which would have been inevitable. He had the pleasure of penning Maxy a note which informed him that he was no longer in employment, then he concentrated on the series of less rewarding chores.

Everywhere he went he was conscious of being observed by Zindee. She had been in bed and asleep the previous night when he had paid the Whites a courtesy call to let them know he was pulling out. He had told Cham and Nora practically nothing about his true motivations, but on the instant of hearing the news from her parents Zindee would have understood that it was all to do with Danea Farthing. She was out there somewhere as he worked, near by, covertly watching him while she weighed up the changes that were going to be wrought in her life. He very much wanted them to part as good friends, but there was little point in his going to the Whites' house and trying to speak to her – if everything was going to be all right Zindee would come to him.

Fifteen minutes before midday, magically, all the necessary chores had been completed. He made one last lour of his apartment, the library and the workshop, then locked the place up. He put the keys and all documents required by Mr Figg into a pocket, carried his single suitcase across the footbridge and set it on the ground to await Danea's arrival. Zindee was bound to realise that he was on the point of leaving, but she remained out of sight. The first of the rain began to fall, huge tumbling drops which popped audibly into the dust, and he took shelter under a tree.

A moment later a blue car appeared in the distance. Nicklin picked up his case, but dropped it immediately as he saw Zindee running towards him from the direction of a clump of tangle-weed. He knelt and took the impact of her body full on the chest as she threw her arms around his neck.

"Thanks, Zindee," he whispered. "Thanks for coming."

"You're going to miss my birthday party." Her voice was reproachful. "It's the day after tomorrow."

"I have to miss this one – and I'm sorry about that – but there'll be lots of other birthday parties."

"They're too far off."

"I promise I'll come back and see you." Hearing the car approaching, Nicklin reached into his pocket and brought out a memento he had found in a drawer a little earlier – a bronze Roman coin – and pressed it into Zindee's hand. "Don't spend it all in one shop."

She gave a reluctant little snort of amusement, rubbed a moist cheek against his own and backed out of his embrace.

Nicklin stood up, brushing dust from his knees. "Wait and say goodbye to Danea," he urged.

Zindee set her tiny chin and gave the blue car a venomous glance, then turned and ran towards home. Rain was dappling the back of her light orange T-shirt with tangerine. Nicklin stared thoughtfully at the swiftly departing figure until the car had rolled to a halt beside him. When he looked around Danea had slid the Unimot's roof into place and was smiling at him from the vehicle's shaded interior.

"Don't stand there in the rain," she called out. "Otherwise you'll take root."

Nicklin's new home was a camper whose interior was almost completely filled by eight bunk beds. His initial glimpse of the layout, which he found rather reminiscent of a submarine, had produced a pang of depression which he had fought off by thinking hard about Danea. He had told himself he could put up with any kind of discomfort for the sake of what lay ahead, but had known that his prospects of sleep on that first night were not good. He was too keyed up and had too many thoughts clamouring inside his skull. It had come as a pleasant surprise, therefore, when he had been asked to drive the camper and to take what was referred to as the dead dog shift – four hours starting at midnight. For some ill-defined reason he had expected to be left to his own devices for the first day or two, and he welcomed the opportunity to do something which was guaranteed to tire him out.

Now, sitting on his own at the camper's wheel, he was in the kind of bemused philosophical mood in which ideas can be examined without being analysed. Processions of them rolled through his uncritical mind, reflecting the events of the last three days, to mental commentaries no more penetrating than Isn't life weird? or You never know what to expect, do you? or I wish I was back in old Orangefield right now – just to see their faces or Here's one for the books!

Physically, he was surrounded by the Orbitsville nightland – hundreds of indigo and sapphire ribbons arching across the heavens, narrowing and merging into a prismatic glow above the polar horizon, while the world beneath was an ocean of purest blackness. The vehicles ahead of Nicklin were the only things visible in the darkness. Their lights gave them the semblance of ships, and their wakes were the random whorls and feathers which patterned the fused-earth road.

The spectacle soothed and uplifted Nicklin, but at the same time it reminded him that his happiness was only complete when Danea was at his side. The night would have been perfect had she been with him right there in the driving cabin, but he had seen surprisingly little of her during the day and now she was asleep in the camper she shared with six other women. She was reluctant to make too great a display of her feelings for him, he guessed. He could understand that kind of reticence, which had always been part of his own make-up, especially as it rendered all the more precious the secret things that had passed between them.

When he had got into the car beside Danea that morning she had leaned across to kiss him, and in doing so had placed her hand squarely on his crotch. The little act of familiarity, unseen by the rest of the universe, had spoken volumes to Nicklin, and he was totally secure in their mutual love. Ahead of him lay a future which was mysterious and unpredictable in many respects, but he was sure of the fulfilment that Danea and he would bring to each other. All that was required of him was some patience until they had their own private mobile home, and then…

He frowned as a quirk of memory brought into sharp focus something which had cropped up during the conversation with Montane that morning, and which had been a burr in Nicklin's subconscious ever since. One of the mission's principal rules, Montane had said, was that accommodation had to be shared out equally. There had been no mention of special exceptions, and – now that Nicklin thought of it – he had not noticed any vehicles which appeared to be given over to couples, or even groups of couples. Did that mean that he and Danea were to be the first to live as man and wife?

"Why not?" He spoke the question aloud as he reminded himself that this was a time of upheaval for Corey Montane and his followers. Big changes were supposed to have taken place in the cosmos and they were being mirrored by radical new policies within the itinerant community. He had those selfsame changes to thank for his being allowed to join the caravan and take up the life of a … vagabond. Having dredged up the old word, he savoured its archaic and romantic flavour.

Now that he thought of it, a large proportion of Orbitsville's population consisted of vagabonds. The people he was accustomed to meeting in everyday life had stopped travelling, but nobody knew how many others had kept on moving, spreading from the triple ring of portals into the green immensities of the Big O. They could have travelled a long way in two centuries – splitting up into more and more divergent tribes, each claiming its autonomy and moving onwards for reasons that seemed less and less important to outsiders.

Nicklin had seen the powerful divisive force at work even within his own limited compass. It was, for example, practically impossible to find in the Orangefield area families which did not have Anglo-Saxon surnames. Given a telescope of limitless light-gathering power and resolution, it would have been possible to aim the instrument at any of the dark bands of the night sky and pick out the city lights, the village lights – or even the campfires – of those who had found new reasons to draw apart from their neighbours. He had little doubt that somewhere up there were communities which had chosen to separate from the rest of mankind over disagreements about how to prepare food, or the number of letters in their alphabet, or whether their deities should be portrayed with or without navels.

And the distant glimmers would betoken not only the presence of humans. Alien races had discovered Orbitsville long before Vance Garamond's fugitive ship had come probing through the interstellar void. One of those vanished races had actually mustered the resources and sheer arrogance to try taking control of Orbitsville by sealing all but one of the 548 portals with diaphragms of steel. It had been an awesome attempt to monopolise the vastness of the Big O, and those who made it had flourished perhaps for millennia. But others had challenged their supremacy, unimaginable battles had been fought both inside and outside the great shell, and in the end there had been nobody left to claim victory.

What had happened, Nicklin wondered, to the descendants of those ancient, alien warriors? A few dozen extraterrestrial species – none related to any of the others – had been found in regions close to portals. The only traits they had in common were passivity and lack of curiosity, a willingness to go on for ever reinventing the steam engine, and Nicklin sometimes suspected that the same destiny was in store for humanity. The Orbitsville syndrome! The big question was: should he laugh or cry? Was it a matter for despair or rejoicing that the future promised to be an eternal Sunday afternoon?

The mood of gentle melancholia which had crept over him was suddenly dispersed by an unexpected event.

There were six vehicles ahead of the camper, and all the time he had been at the wheel they had maintained a fairly steady formation, the configuration of their lights changing only where the road dipped or turned. Now, however, brake warnings were staining the night with crimson and the line was compacting into an irregular group. Nicklin used his heel on the camper's single control pedal and brought the vehicle to a halt. Less than three hours of his shift had passed, so it was too soon for changeover, and as he descended from the cabin he surmised that somebody up front was having mechanical trouble.

The guess was proved wrong even before he had joined the knot of drivers who were standing by the lead vehicle. They were looking down at what seemed to be a luminous green tape which lay across the road and stretched off into the darkly mysterious grasslands on either side. As Nicklin approached the group he realised that the glowing strip was insubstantial. The surface of the road was giving off the green light, in a band about eight centimetres wide, but there was no evidence of any special pigment having been applied. It was as if the molecules of the rock-hard material had been agitated.

"That can't be a traffic marking." The speaker was a man whose name Nicklin had not yet memorised. "Not away out here, at the ass-end of nowhere."

"Specially as it goes all that way off the road," a tall woman said. The others in the group turned their heads from side to side, their eyes following the glowing strip until it faded into the distance.

"Perhaps it's a boundary … some kind of county line," put in Nibs Affleck. He had not been on a driving stint, but was among several people who had been resting and were now joining the company, holding coats around themselves to ward off the cold. Nicklin found himself scanning the dimly seen figures in search of Danea.

"That's not too likely, Nibs," the first speaker said. "Boundaries went out with the ark."

"Whatever it is, it has killed off the grass." The tall woman had switched on a flashlamp and was aiming it at the ground where the green strip angled away from the road. All vegetation rooted within the edges of the strip had turned white or pale gold, and was very obviously dead.

Nicklin conjured up an absurd picture of a little man pushing a sports field marker – one that was filled with powerful weedkiller instead of white paint – all the way around the interior of Orbitsville. A kind of Johnny Appleseed in reverse. Interested in having a closer look at the phenomenon, he stepped across the line and was startled to feel himself passing through a plane of spongy resistance. The effect was mild, rather like a momentary conflict of small magnets, but it produced an odd and slightly queasy sensation as it slid through his body. He moved back and forth several times, confirming that the intimate disturbance was real, and that it was limited to a plane which rose vertically from the glowing strip. Others noticed what he was doing and began similar experiments, some of them murmuring with surprise.

"Hey, Jim!" The tall .woman with the flashlight – he had seen her with Danea and now remembered her name as Christine McGivern – was standing near him. She was beckoning for him to draw even closer, and as he did so he was aware that she was straddling the green line and slowly moving her hips from side to side.

"This is fun," she whispered. "You can feel it touching you up."

"It's an ill wind," Nicklin muttered, trying to match Christine's disconcerting smile. He looked away from her and was relieved to see Corey Montane approaching the group. Montane had wrapped himself in a striped raincloak and his black hair was tousled, but neatly so, like that of an actor portraying a man freshly roused from his bed. Several men moved towards him to explain what had been found, and Nicklin hastily joined them.

"Would someone kindly fetch a spade?" Montane said, after examining the green strip. A short-handled emergency spade was handed to him almost immediately. He took it and made to lift some earth which was crossed by the luminosity, but red-nosed Nibs Affleck took the implement from him, with gentle insistence, and began to dig at a furious rate. Spectators shuffled back as their feet were bombarded with flying dirt, and within seconds Affleck had created a sizable hole.

"Thank you, Nibs," Montane said. "I think that's enough."

Affleck, who apparently had been prepared to dig until he collapsed, reluctantly moved away from the excavation. Nicklin, still trying to recover his equilibrium after the little encounter with Christine, was able to see into the hole and at once understood why Montane had wanted it dug.

The lime-green strip had not been broken by the digging. It now followed the precise contours of the excavation, glowing on the surface of the raw earth as though projected by a powerful optical device. It's a cross-section through that weird rubbery field, Nicklin thought. An effect that shows at the ground-air interface. I wonder if the field goes right down to the Orbitsville shell.

"This thing … this manifestation … must extend all the way down to the shell," Montane proclaimed without hesitation or signs of doubt, raising his voice for the benefit of individuals who were belatedly emerging from their campers to join the group. "My friends, this is a portent! We have been given yet another sign that Orbitsville is entering its final hour. The Devil's trap is closing!"

"Lord save us!" somebody cried out among the exclamations of alarm which arose from the assembly.

Montane seized on the emotional flux of the moment. "It is still within His power to do exactly that. Although the hour is perilously late, although we stand on the very brink of the abyss, God's mercy is infinite – and we may yet be saved. Let us bow our heads and pray to Him." Montane raised his hands, palms facing downwards, and those around him lowered their heads.

Nimble footwork, Corey, Nicklin thought, marvelling at the speed with which the preacher had reacted to and made use of the situation. Any old portent in a storm! While Montane was leading his followers in the improvised prayers, Nicklin renewed his search for Danea and was disappointed not to see her. The thought of Danea reminded him of her friend Christine, who was now standing chastely with the rest of the group. Suddenly he understood why he had been so taken aback by her conversational gambit, which had been somewhat indelicate to say the least of it. The conspiratorial whisper and the use of his first name had linked them together as a pair of freewheelers surrounded by prudes – but what had led her to that presumption about him, a man she had hardly even seen before?

The only explanation he could come up with was that Danea had been talking freely to Christine about matters which he regarded as private. Indeed, the word private came nowhere near to expressing his feelings – sacred would have been more appropriate. The notion of Danea and her friend giggling over confidences, especially if graphic sexual details were involved, brought a warm tingling to Nicklin's face.

Was it possible? Was it possible?

Standing there – in the complex patterns of light and darkness created by the enigmatic green-glowing strip, the ribbed Orbitsville sky, and the splashes of brilliance from vehicle headlamps – Nicklin felt totally alone, isolated from the group of strangers he had planned to espouse.

He turned away, walked slowly to his camper and climbed into the driving cabin. Sitting hunched over the wheel, he told himself he was thinking like a hypersensitive adolescent. It was all too easy for an introspective dreamer such as he to build fantasies based on nothing more than a misinterpreted word. All he needed was a little time alone with Danea. One smile from her, one sympathetic glance from those heavy-lidded eyes was all it would take to put everything in his universe to rights. But why had he seen so little of her since joining the mission? Why had she become so damned elusive?

A short time later the caravan was on the move again, and as Nicklin's vehicle crossed the lime-green strip he felt its magnetic pulse motor falter for just an instant. The power loss was so slight and so fleeting that only one attuned to such things by many years of experience would have noticed it.

Nicklin flicked his gaze over the dashboard instruments, frowning, then allowed his thoughts to drift back to problems which seemed infinitely more serious.

CHAPTER 8

Corey Montane was shivering with the cold by the time he got back to his own vehicle. When going out into the night he had put a raincape on over his pyjamas, expecting to be away from his bed for only a few minutes while the details of some mechanical problem were explained to him. He had not anticipated being shown new proof that the Devil was actively going about his evil work. The subsequent prayers for salvation had taken a considerable time, and during them the chill of the clear night air had seeped a long way into Montane's body. He felt as if his internal organs had grown cold and had slowed down in their various activities.

"Good night," he said to Gerl Kingsley, the hulking ex-farmer who was driving dead dog for him. "I'll see you when four o'clock comes round."

"Corey, why not let me handle the next shift as well?" Kingsley said, opening the camper's mid-section door for Montane. "You look real done out."

"Nice of you to say so!"

"I didn't mean to–" Kingsley slapped himself lightly on the forehead for lacking diplomacy. "What I meant to say was you're bound to be tired, and I'm as chirpy as a barrel of budgies. I could easy go on till eight or even tomorrow noon."

Montane smiled. "We all take our due turn."

"Yeah, but I won't sleep anyway. I got more energy than I know what to do with."

Looking up at the hugely indomitable man, Montane could easily accept the statement. It was one of his precepts that he did his share of all tasks, including the most menial, and it brought an ample reward in the form of devotion – such as Kingsley was showing at that moment – but he was tired and he had much to think about.

"Perhaps I could stand in for you sometime," he conceded reluctantly and in seconds Kingsley had bundled him, with a kind of respectful roughness, into the camper's warm interior. He locked the door, slipped out of his cape and steadied himself against the silver coffin as the vehicle began to move.

"I'm sorry about all this, Milly," he said, addressing his wife. "Satan never sleeps – so he's bound to disturb us during the night every now and then."

He tilted his head, waiting to see if Milly would reply, but there was no response from within the coffin and he went to his bed. Switching off the light, he made himself comfortable beneath the covers and turned his thoughts to the phenomenon of the glowing green line. His instinctive awareness of the Devil and all his moves told him the line was an evil manifestation, but it was hard to guess its exact purpose. It had to be an indication that the Orbitsville trap was closing, but what could be the function of a weak, spongy force field which produced green luminosity where earth and air met?

Montane craved to know how far the line extended around the shell. Were there others? Were they straight or curved, and did they form patterns? He could get some of the answers when the caravan reached the next town, now that new antennae were being run out into space to permit the re-establishment of radio and television communication between the portals. But having to wait a day was an annoyance, especially as the Evil One had chosen to increase the tempo of events.

Not for the first time, Montane found himself wishing he could understand why the transmission of signals on radio frequencies had always been impossible within the vast hollow sphere that was Orbitsville. The early explorers had noticed the effect within minutes of their arrival, but two centuries of subsequent research had failed to explain why the lower part of the electromagnetic spectrum was completely blanked out. Montane knew in his heart that it was more of the Evil One's scheming – perhaps intended to prevent Orbitsville's diverse inhabitants from forming a global society – but why? How, precisely, did the Devil benefit?

The question had troubled Montane for years, and it was the lack of any plausible answer which had discouraged him from bringing the subject into his preaching. It was not the only hidden card in the Devil's hand, and no doubt it would be played when the time was exactly right.

Besides, there were more immediate problems to be dealt with – including that of Jim Nicklin. Montane shifted uneasily in the bed, goaded by his conscience. Nicklin was a decent young man – intelligent yet naive, complicated yet unworldly – and what was being done to him was an undoubted sin. Danea Farthing had hooked and landed him like a skilled angler bringing in a salmon, but the sin was not really hers. She was only Montane's agent, and he in turn was acting on behalf of God. These were dire times, and no individual sacrifice was too great if it helped bring about the salvation of the human race.

Montane's problem was that, after all the philosophical arguments had been advanced and all the profound words spoken, an innocent man had – pursuing the angling metaphor – to be gutted like a fish.

And he, Corey Montane, was the one who would ultimately have to face up to those puzzled blue eyes. What would he say to Nicklin? What justification could he give? The Lord has made me a fisher of men? I was only obeying orders?

Montane twisted again beneath the covers, searching for the elusive position of comfort which might enable him to slip away into impartial sleep. He could only hope that the essential softness he had identified in Nicklin would lead to the forthcoming ordeal being a brief one. Nicklin was not the type of man to become violent, even on realising that he had just been fleeced of everything he owned. In all probability he would, after a short confrontation, wander off back to Orangefield as a sadder and wiser man, and endeavour to pick up the threads of his old life. Montane punched his pillow, trying to beat it into submission.

"Why are you torturing yourself over this thing?" Milly's voice, reaching him from the interior of the coffin, was compassionate, brimming with sympathy. "You know very well that you had no choice in the matter."

Montane gazed in the direction of the oblong casket, the dull sheen of which was discernible even in the near-darkness. "Yes, but will Jim Nicklin see it like that?"

"Darling, you did what you had to do."

"It's just that I feel so guilty," Montane replied, taking a deep, quavering breath. "And what makes it far worse is knowing in advance that young Nicklin will be so easy to deal with and get rid of. I'd feel better if I had to face some hard case who'd raise hell and start throwing things around."

"If Jim Nicklin was a hard case his money would still be in his own bank – not yours."

"I know that, I know that!" Montane realised he was beginning to sound irritable. "I'm sorry, Milly – it's just that things are … We're going to have to move to Beachhead and stay there, you know. Life's been too much of a holiday for us – cruising around the countryside – and there just isn't enough money in that. Neither of us likes living in a big city. In fact, we hate it. Things won't be easy for us."

"God didn't say things would be easy." His wife's voice now contained a hint of admonition, of the corrective forcefulness he so badly needed. "You've never had the future of mankind riding on your shoulders before."

"I … I suppose you're right, Milly – as always. Thank you." Montane closed his eyes, and within a very short time had drifted away into peaceful estuaries of sleep.

CHAPTER 9

When Nicklin squeezed into his bunk, shortly after the changeover at four, he did so with no expectations of sleep. Even had he been in the right frame of mind the conditions in the camper would not have been conducive to proper rest. All his life he had been accustomed to a spacious and comfortable bed in a room all to himself. He had surrendered those prerequisites of civilised existence for the privilege of lying down with Danea, the two of them nested like spoons, and holding her in his arms the whole night through. The contrast between that deferred bliss and what he had to put up with in the meantime was almost too great to contemplate.

Henty, the man due to take over the driving, had done a lot of resentful mumbling while getting ready, as though Nicklin had been in charge of the rota and had marked him down for the worst shift out of personal spite. The six other men had been disturbed to varying degrees by Henty's griping, and were making restless sounds and movements as the vehicle got back on the road. Seen in the patchy dimness, the twinned rows of double-decker bunks more than ever resembled the interior of a submarine, and Nicklin began to feel claustrophobic. To make matters worse, Henty – isolated in the separate driving cabin up front – seemed to be working off his bad temper by steering with unnecessary roughness.

All things considered, Nicklin's prospects of sleep were very poor, but in a remarkably short time he had entered the world of the dream.

The setting was in sunlit open air, and featured a small rounded hill whose slopes had been fashioned into a beautiful alpine garden. It was obvious that a great deal of loving and painstaking work had been poured into the construction of the garden. The rocky banks, underpinning for shoals of blossoms, contrived to look natural while at the same time their symmetry betrayed the handiwork of a master architect. Paths of meticulously fitted stone wound their way around the hill, beneath small archways and past numerous sculpted benches.

Apart from Nicklin himself, there were two characters in the dream. One was his mother, who in reality had died when he was seven; the other was the terrifying figure of a fox who walked upright on his hind legs and was as tall as a man. The fox wore antique clothing – a shabby frocked coat, a winged collar and a greasy cravat secured by a horseshoe pin – and for some reason Mrs Nicklin was blind to the fact that he was not another human being.

She was laughing with him, treating him like a close member of the family. Nicklin was a small boy cowering behind his mother's skirts, appalled by her inability to notice the fox's pointed yellow teeth, his Disney-animal nose – like a shiny black olive standing upright on the end of his snout, and his red-brown coloration, the essence of all that was fox.

For his part, the fox was playing up to Mrs Nicklin. He was grinning, nudging, telling little jokes, and every now and again his red-veined eyes glanced appreciatively and knowingly at little Jim. Isn't this the best laugh ever? the eyes seemed to gloat. Your mother doesn't know I'm a fox. And – best of all – she doesn't know I'm going to eat you up!

Little Jim's fear increased as he heard the fox proposing that it should take him for a walk through the alpine garden. There were many secluded corners in the garden, places where a fox could kill and devour a small boy without being disturbed in its work. And his fear became pure terror when he heard his mother welcoming the suggestion because she needed time to go shopping.

"It's not a man – it's a fox," he screamed, clinging to her thighs. "Can't you see it's a fox?"

His mother and the fox laughed together at the childish absurdity. Saliva dripped from the beast's yellow teeth.

"Don't be such a silly boy," his mother said, thrusting him forward with an adult's irresistible force. "Go along with your nice uncle and have a lovely time."

Betrayed, weeping, doomed – Jim was propelled into the fox's grasp. Its hand was hard and strong, covered with hairs which looked and felt like strands from a brown doormat. Jim's mother was already turning away, uncaring, as the fox dragged him towards the hill. In just a few seconds the fox and he were alone in one of the quiet places, where stone walls hid them from the rest of the world.

The fox wasted no time. It turned on him, its mouth yawning widely enough to engulf his head, so widely that he could see the pink uvula doing a funny little dance at the entrance to its throat.

That was what gave the game away – one Disney touch too many!

Jim had seen the fox before, or creatures rather like it, in dozens of half-remembered cartoons, and he knew it was only a drawing on a sheet of transparent plastic. He knew it had no ability to hurt him – and with that abrupt realisation the dream became a lucid one, giving him control over the course of events. Suddenly he was safe, and had power, enormous power which he could enjoy – just like Alice in the last chapter of the Wonderland book.

Taking a deep breath he bellowed, "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a cartoon!"

The force of the shout sent the fox reeling backwards, his face comically aghast and his hair blown into receding red-brown points. Giggling with glee, little Jim turned and sprinted away along the stone path. He had taken only a few bounding steps when the solid-seeming pavement opened up in front of him, forming a gaping black pit. As Jim went helplessly over the edge and began the downward plunge he realised that the beautiful little hill, so plentifully encrusted with stone, was hollow.

And the things waiting for him inside it had no place in children's cartoons…

Nicklin opened his eyes wide and stared at the underside of the bunk above. His first thought was: What the hell was all that about? The dream had not exactly been a nightmare – it had been too preposterous to ram the icy dagger of terror all the way through his guts – but it had been a disturbing one nevertheless. He had little or no time for historic Freudian theory, yet he had an uncomfortable feeling that the odd dream had been laden with symbolism. And it was quite remarkable how, after more than three centuries, the Disney style – his particular brand of anthropomorphism, which hinted at an underlying fear of all wild creatures – could still exercise such a powerful influence over the unconscious minds of children and adults alike.

It suddenly came to Nicklin that he was seeing the base of the bunk above in the meagre daylight which seeped through a tiny circular window. Furthermore, the camper had stopped moving and there were sounds of activity from outside. He put an eye to the window and saw that the caravan had come to a halt in what appeared to be a sports field. There was little in the way of facilities – just some forsaken goalposts, a scoreboard and a small pavilion. The roofs of a few dwellings could be seen above the somewhat scrawny hedge which marked the field's perimeter. In the distance the tops of several tall buildings projected up from layers of morning mist, slim pastel streaks against the sky. A star-like point of light glowed on one of them, trembling in the moist air, evidence that a photocast station was in operation.

Millennium City, Nicklin thought, sinking back on to his pillow as he identified the location. Where he came from the town was the butt of many jokes because of the discrepancy between its grand name and the red-grimed wasteland of open-cast bauxite mines, purification plants and railroad sidings. He was in no hurry to leave his bed for the privilege of seeing more of Millennium City or its inhabitants. Gentle snores from other bunks suggested to Nicklin that his new companions were of a like frame of mind.

He expected that they would all soon be rousted out to begin erecting the big marquee, but for the present he had the symbolism of the strange dream to think about. Why had a fox been part of the cast? Was it merely because of the menacing fox character in the half-remembered Disney version of Pinocchio? And what was the significance of that most implausible geographical feature – the hollow hill? Could it have represented the womb? Had it had something to do with his mother's presence? Nicklin had not dreamed of her in a long time, and it was strange that his unconscious mind had chosen to portray her as one who was prepared to hand him over to a monster. Monster … mons … mons veneris … Montane! Had Nicklin, in the dream, been handed over to and swallowed up by a small mountain – Montane? Had his mother, his betraying mother, represented Danea Farthing, whom he had only last night begun to suspect of…?

The whirlwind of confusing questions and simplistic, amateurish associations abruptly collapsed in Nicklin's mind, deprived of its motive power by the aridity of the real world. It was an objective fact that Danea had been avoiding him ever since he had joined the mission; and there was no doubt at all that she had been talking too freely to the tall one with the flashlight – what was her name? – Christine. Why had he not sought Danea out yesterday and forced the issue? Why, in the name of the Gaseous Vertebrate, had he delayed so long before deciding to confront Danea and get everything straight between them?

Feeling cold and sick, impelled by an urge to learn and verify the worst, Nicklin got out of his bunk. Ignoring the sonic shower cubicle, he pulled on the clothes he had worn the previous day and went out into the morning sunlight. The first thing he noticed was the marquee spread out over a large area of grass, but no work was actually being done to erect it. A number of people were gathered near the expanse of lazily rippling material, some of them arguing with each other.

As Nicklin was stepping down from the camper, two men and two women detached themselves from the larger group and strode towards the sports field's entrance. They were carrying suitcases and had some extra items of clothing slung over shoulders or arms. The leader was Dee Smethurst, the plump archetypal cook, whose face bore an expression of outrage.

"It's you I feel sorry for, mister," she said to Nicklin as she passed by. "I don't hold anything against you."

Her companions nodded, their sun-hats bobbing, and they went on their determined way before Nicklin could ask what the cook had meant. The driver of a taxi which was waiting beyond the field's single gate got out of his vehicle to greet them. Nicklin heard one of the four say something about a railroad station, confirming that he had just witnessed a small desertion among Montane's followers.

Puzzled, he took his own sun-hat out of his pocket, spread it into a circle and jammed it on to his head before walking towards the larger group. He now felt keyed up, yet cool and balanced, ready for anything – the epitome of the new urbane Jim Nicklin who had been too big for Orangefield to hold. The state of mind lasted until he saw Danea Farthing, and not one second longer.

She was dressed in black again, but with a circular skirt instead of pants, and the sight of the lean-hipped figure in among all the ordinary faceless people did peculiar things to Nicklin's pulse. The sensation of all resolve draining out of him was almost a physical one, evocative of childhood dismay on finding hot urine running down his legs. The Danea effect in reverse, he thought. What am I going to say to her?

He began to force a cold smile as he drew close to Danea, but felt his mouth curve up at the corners – giving him his old happy hayseed expression – and he settled for a look of calm seriousness. For one craven instant he hoped she would evade him, but her eyes met his without hesitation.

"There you are, Jim," she said smiling warmly. "Where have you been hiding yourself?"

He responded with a nod, less confident than ever, wondering if he was about to make a fool of himself because of an attack of lover's paranoia. "Can we talk?"

The men and women standing within earshot did not actually nudge each other, but an unmistakable frisson went through them, and their reaction saddened Nicklin. It was all the confirmation he needed.

"What do you want to talk about?" Danea enquired, with more brightness than was strictly necessary.

"Not here." He glanced around the others, taking in their frozen grins and casually averted eyes.

"I'm supposed to be helping here, but…" Danea shrugged and fell in beside him as he began walking towards the goalposts in an empty quarter of the field. "Well, how did you sleep last night? I heard we stopped for something out in the middle of nowhere, but I slept right through it, myself. Did you get up?"

"Didn't Christine tell you I was there?"

"What do you…? Why should she?"

The blue ribs of the Orbitsville sky pulsed at the edges of Nicklin's vision. "You and Christine tell each other everything, don't you?"

Danea wheeled on him immediately, all trace of heaviness gone from her eyes. "What the fuck is this all about?"

"Nothing," he said quietly. "I guess it's about nothing."

"Look, I'm sorry." Danea pressed the back of a hand to her forehead, slightly altering the tilt of her black stetson. "I don't usually talk like that – it's just that I've been so worried. I feel guilty about you, Jim. What happened between us … it was all a mistake."

Nicklin's throat closed up painfully, preventing him from speaking.

"I've no idea what could have happened to me," Danea went on. "I don't know what kind of impression I gave you."

Nicklin's memory stirred into action, restoring his power of speech. "You gave me the impression that we could live together in our own camper – but Montane told me that was never on the cards."

"Do you wear a recorder everywhere you go? Do you record every casual remark then pick it apart afterwards?"

"What?"

"Well let me tell you something for nothing, Mata Hari – I don't like being spied on by anybody, especially you!"

The sheer irrationality of the attack confounded Nicklin. "I think Mata Hari was a woman," he said automatically, and on the instant of speaking saw the verbal cudgel he had put into Danea's hands. Will she use it? Please, O Gaseous Vertebrate, don't let her sink that low. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and he watched in fascination as surprise, gratification and triumph flitted across her features.

"Do you think," she said, savouring every word, "I didn't know that?"

And there we have it, he thought. Danea, of all people, has no reason to doubt my sexuality – and yet something told her what to say. Something about me tells all of them what to say. When they want to put me down, or when the opposite is the case and they want to … Nicklin blinked as his thoughts led him unerringly to the solution of another little mystery, one which had been quietly but persistently tugging at an obscure corner of his mind.

On the morning Danea had driven out to his place, the morning he had ceased being an ugly duckling and had become a swan, she had referred time and time again to his prowess with women. It had been a keynote of her conversation. Tell me the truth, Jim – just how many women have you taken for a walk up here? Words spoken in tones of rueful admiration. Words spoken by a woman acknowledging her helplessness while under the spell of a charming roué. Words that throughout his adult life he had craved to hear!

Danea had known exactly what to say, because something about him always gave the game away. On the evening of that first meeting on Orangefield common she had looked at him, and had done a perfect cold reading on him, and known at once how to go about robbing him of everything he owned. Not only that – she had known how to make him enjoy being plucked and trussed and handed over to Montane. In the space of only a few hours he had gone from duckling to swan to oven-ready turkey, and had loved every moment of it!

"You're good, Danea," he said simply. "You're very good at what you do."

As he was turning away he thought he saw, perhaps for one fraction of a second, a stricken look in Danea's eyes, but if he had learned one lesson it was not to trust his judgement in such matters. That look had probably been manufactured just for his benefit – showing a master's painstaking attention to the very last and finest detail. Danea had made it clear what she really thought of him – and it had turned out to be much the same as what all other women thought of him – and the only important thing now was deciding what to do with the rest of his life.

He could never again face up to all the good burghers of Orangefield, even though it would have been so nice to be in Zindee's wise-beyond-her-years company once more; and he had no intention of staying on in Millennium City. The best plan might be to head for the anonymity of Beachhead, but he had no more than ten orbs in his pocket, not even enough for the rail fare. A murmur of voices reached Nicklin from the group by the marquee and his face began to burn as he guessed Danea had rejoined her friends, possibly to regale them with new details of how she had handled the simpleton from Orangefield.

He had to get away from the scene of his mortification as quickly as he possibly could. For that he needed some money, and the only source he could think of was Corey Montane. It was hard to think of a greater humiliation than going cap in hand to the sanctimonious Fagin who had cleaned him out, but if Montane wanted to go on with his man-of-God impersonation he might be willing to part with a hundred or two. Especially if he were threatened with trouble!

Nicklin tried to imagine himself bursting into Montane's camper with an iron bar in his hand, and his misery intensified as he realised how preposterous the notion was. Violence simply was not in his nature, no matter how much he might be provoked, and he could not even envisage going to the police or the local news media. Montane had been very careful to establish that there was no connection between Nicklin's personal relationship with Danea Farthing and his donation to the mission's funds. The most Nicklin could hope to achieve by kicking up a public rumpus would be to multiply the number of people who saw him as a prize ass.

As he was walking towards Montane's vehicle it occurred to him that, considering all that had happened to him, he was reacting more like an automaton than a human being. He was being a bit too civilised and passive, even for Jim Nicklin, but there was a strangeness somewhere deep inside him – an ineffable psychic tremor which hinted at emotional earthquakes to come. It was advisable for him to make what practical arrangements he could while the blessed numbness persisted.

Finding the middle door of Montane's camper open, he went up the steps and into the vehicle without preamble. Montane was sitting on the side bench, cup of tea in hand, watching a small television set which he had placed on his wife's coffin. Even though it could not have been more than five or six kilometres to the local photocast station, the image of a newsman was poor, thanks to mist in the intervening air. The sound quality was reasonable, however, and Montane seemed totally absorbed by what was being said.

He raised his free hand in a mute hello to Nicklin, then pointed at a chair, inviting him to sit down. Feeling that he had already been placed at a tactical disadvantage, Nicklin reluctantly lowered himself into the seat. His knees were almost touching the coffin, and as he gazed at the silvery surface he found himself speculating about its contents. Had the body of Milly Montane been specially treated to prevent decomposition? Or was he sitting right up against a box full of…? He aborted the thought with all possible speed and turned his attention to the newscast in which Montane was so engrossed.

"…stressed that they could only make an educated guess at this stage, because radio links between all portals have not yet been fully re-established," the announcer was saying. "It does appear, however, that the mysterious green lines are a global phenomenon. They have been reported in the vicinity of more than twenty portal cities, and experts who have been extrapolating the figures think that the lines are roughly 950 kilometres apart, all the way around the Orbitsville equator.

"The mind boggles, doesn't it? Mine certainly does, but a good boggle has never done anybody any harm – that's what I always say.

"We'll bring you more on that story later, but now we are returning to our panel discussion on the economic effects of what some scientists are already referring to as the Big Jump. With the portal communities now effectively cut off from each other, many manufacturing centres are denied access to their markets. If the present situation continues, the greatest growth industry of all time is likely to be the construction of interportal spaceships.

"With us to talk about the problem is Rick Renard, who has scarcely been off the air in the last few days, because – as you are no doubt aware – he is the owner of the Hawkshead, the starship which vanished while disembarking at Portal 36. Mr Renard is already forming a consortium for the design and building of…" Image and voice faded together as Montane reached out and switched off the television.

"Good morning, Jim," he said. "Tea?"

Nicklin continued staring into the lifeless grey screen, hardly aware that the other man had spoken. Something uncanny had happened to him while he was listening to the photocast, something outside all his previous experience. At the mention of Renard's name there had been a heaving – that was the only word he could apply to the sensation – in the deepest levels of his consciousness … a leviathan had stirred briefly in some black prehistoric swamp of his mind…

Renard! The name threw off expanding circular echoes of itself. Reynard! That means fox. But this fox doesn't want to eat small boys-he wants to build spaceships. The fox and the spaceship! It sounds like one of those cute pubs, and what has that got to do with…?

"Are you with me, Jim?" Montane said, giving him a quizzical look. "I'm offering you a cup of my best tea."

Nicklin made his eyes focus on Montane's face. "No tea for me, thanks – I need to talk to you."

"I'm always ready to listen." Montane went on very quickly, not giving Nicklin the chance to continue. "I was right about that green line we found last night. Remember I said it probably went all the way down to the shell? Well, according to the local news there are hundreds of the damned things – and they do go right down to the shell. I don't like it, Jim. This is the Devil's work. What did you want to talk about?"

Nicklin, still recovering his mental equilibrium, was not quite ready for the question. "I … I suppose I ought to congratulate you."

"Congratulate me?" Montane looked puzzled but very much at his ease. "On what?"

"On the neat and highly professional way you and one of your prostitutes stripped me of everything I owned." Nicklin was surprised to see the preacher's bright, penetrating eyes become cloudy and vague. He had not expected that much of a reaction from a professional.

"You're talking in riddles, son."

"I'm talking about the excellent job done on me by you and your prostitute."

Montane glanced uneasily at his wife's coffin. "We don't like that kind of talk in here."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Nicklin said, unable to resist the kind of sarcasm he normally disdained. "Pardon me for not measuring up to your high standards of behaviour."

"I gather," Montane said stonily, "that something has gone wrong between you and Danea."

"You gather correctly."

Montane sighed and shook his head, the picture of a man saddened by news he had expected but had hoped against the odds not to hear. "I'm really sorry about that, Jim – and, naturally, I'll give you what counsel I can – but you must understand that my workers' interpersonal relationships have nothing to do with me. And I made it clear to you, right at the outset, that any donation you chose to–"

"There's no need for you to worry yourself about that side of things," Nicklin cut in. "I fully accept the consequences of my own stupidity, and all I want to do now is get far away from here as fast as I can. I presume you won't mind letting me have a couple of hundred, just to get me started."

Montane frowned. "I can't do that, Jim."

Nicklin's jaw tried to sag. "All I'm asking is the rail fare to Beachhead City, and a bit more for a room!"

"I'm sorry," Montane replied, "I just don't have that kind of money."

"I know you don't have that kind of money." Nicklin was hardly able to believe what was happening. "My 82,000 orbs – that's the kind of money you have."

Montane gave him a patient little smile. "You don't seem to understand, Jim. It is God who owns that money now. You gave it to Him – and I could no more think of taking some of it back than I could of taking a life."

"Beautiful," Nicklin said bitterly. "That's really beautiful, Corey. You and Danea make a great team."

Montane appeared not to notice the insult. "What I could do – in fact, I'd be neglecting my Christian duty if I didn't do it – is let you have something out of my own pocket. Out of the housekeeping. I only have about thirty orbs, but you're welcome to all of it."

Too fucking kind, Nicklin thought, watching in disbelief as Montane stood up, set his cup aside and took a reproduction lacquered tea caddy down from the shelf over his cooking area. He opened the box, brought out three ten-orb bills and – with the air of a monarch conferring a knighthood – handed them to Nicklin.

"I'll always remember you for this," Nicklin said as he stood up and shoved the photo-pulsing rectangles into his hip pocket. Abruptly turning his back on Montane, he ducked out through the camper's door and stepped down on to the trampled grass. The group by the marquee had grown quite a bit larger, and it seemed to him that every face in it was turned in his direction. They were all set to gawp at him while he went to retrieve his few belongings from his locker, and no doubt when he reappeared with them everybody in the mission would be assembled to watch his departure.

He hesitated, his face throbbing hotly in tune with his heartbeat, and for a moment he actually considered walking straight on out of the field and away from the whole sorry mess. It might be worth abandoning his meagre possessions if doing so spared him any extra embarrassment. The pounding in his chest intensified, causing him to feel a little nauseated and light in the head, and there came a real fear that for the first time in his life he could be about to faint. He fought to regulate his breathing, to use the yoga technique for inducing serenity, and it was while he was standing there in the intrusive light of the morning sun that he became aware of something strange.

Behind him – in the shaded solitude of the camper – Corey Montane was speaking to someone.

"I'm sorry, my dear," Montane was saying. "As you heard, that young man had got himself worked up into quite an emotional state. The only way I could get rid of him was to give him some of your housekeeping money, but I'll see to it that you don't go short. I promise you he won't disturb us again, so let's finish our tea in peace, and then perhaps we'll pray together for a few minutes. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

Nicklin inhaled deeply, blinked at his surroundings as though seeing them for the first time, and began to smile.

A wearisome psychogenic burden was being lifted from his shoulders. He could feel mental fetters dissolving, chains falling away, prison doors opening … Metaphors abounded. The air he had drawn into his lungs retained all the pastel colours of dawn, and those colours were diffusing through his system, creating a nacreous glow, sparkling in his mind.

It's all a joke, he told himself. Thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, for reminding me that everything is just one big joke. Conceits such as embarrassment and humiliation are no longer valid as far as I am concerned. I repudiate them! Montane has my money, and there's nothing much I can do about it, but he can no longer simply face me down. Nobody can do that any more – especially not some silly old cool who lugs his belter half around in a tin box and chats to her over his corn flakes; especially not a bunch of heliumheads who believe the world is going to end next Tuesday…

Remembering he had an attentive audience in the group who were supposed to be erecting the marquee, Nicklin raised one hand and gave them a cheerful wave. His smile grew wider as he noted the uncertainty with which several of them returned the salute. He spun on the ball of his foot and went back into the camper. Montane, who had resumed his seat, looked up in some surprise – teacup in hand – and a look of priestly displeasure appeared on his face.

"Jim, I've been as generous to you as I possibly could," he said. "Is there any point in spinning this thing out?"

"I've been thinking the whole business over," Nicklin replied. "I've been thinking about what you said yesterday. You know – about how the mission could make good use of all my technical skills and that kind of stuff. What I've been thinking is that it's my Christian duty to stay on here with you … and Danea … and the rest of the gang."

Nicklin took the three ten-orb notes out of his pocket and, with a meaningful wink, placed them on top of the silver coffin.

"After all," he added, maintaining his cheerful smile, "I still have so much to give…"

CHAPTER 10

As soon as possible after the transit entered Beachhead City's central area Nicklin got out on to the crowded footpath. He knew by the route diagram that he was still three stages short of his actual destination – which was Garamond Park – but this was his first visit to Beachhead and he wanted to get the feel of the place, something which could best be done on foot. He fanned his sun-hat into a circle, placed it squarely on his head and began to walk.

The first thing he noticed, apart from the seemingly endless throng, was that the environment was much cleaner than he had expected. The shops and small offices on each side of the street looked fresh and well maintained, and the pavement was remarkably free of litter considering the number of people at large. Nicklin allowed himself a wry smile. As a dweller in a small town he had shared the common belief that all big cities were filthy, garbage-strewn places. Another Orangefield illusion which did not travel well!

After walking for only a few minutes he was also struck by the degree of specialisation that was possible for various retail outlets. There were stores which sold nothing but garden tools, or picture frames, or equipment for a single sport such as archery or subaquatics. That fact alone gave Nicklin the sense of being in a metropolis where the consumer population ran into millions. Another exotic note, to him, was the way in which prices were prefixed by the letter M, standing for monits or monetary units. Metagov had long ago decreed that a global economy – one which embraced every one of the cities strung out along Orbitsville's billion-kilometre equatorial band – could only operate on the basis of a universal currency which had a fixed value at all portals. The monit was therefore the city dwellers' exchange medium, while rural communities used the more homely orb, whose value fluctuated in accordance with local conditions. Notices displayed in the windows of some of the shops he passed informed Nicklin that Portal One hinterland orbs were worth 83.23 per cent of a monit, but as he had only a few bills in his pocket the pecuniary disadvantage meant little to him.

Attracted by the aromatic coolness wafting out of a bar, he went inside to quench his growing thirst with a glass of beer. The dim interior was devoid of clientele at that time of the morning. He went to the counter, behind which a young man and a woman were engrossed in a game of stacks, a simplified form of 3D chess. The man's gaze flicked towards Nicklin for an instant, but otherwise the pair did not acknowledge his presence.

It was a situation in which the old Jim Nicklin would have waited timidly for many minutes, scarcely daring to clear his throat in a bid for attention, but the new liberated Jim Nicklin was not so easily put off.

"Take a good look at me," he said in a loud voice. "I am what's known as a customer. You two are what's known as barkeeps, and – this may come as a great surprise to you – your function in this establishment is to serve customers with any drink they ask for, which in my case happens to be a beer."

The young man looked up from the game, dull-eyed, still digesting what Nicklin had said. "A beer?"

Nicklin nodded. "Yes, you must have heard of beer – it's that yellow frothy stuff that comes out of those pumps. Or perhaps you missed the relevant lecture at Barkeep Academy."

The man's brow wrinkled and he turned for enlightenment to his companion, who appeared to be the older and brighter of the pair. Lips compressed with resentment, she drew a beer and clumped it down in front of Nicklin. The head rocked and some of it slopped over the rim of the glass.

"Eighty cents," she said in a cold voice.

As Nicklin was setting a one-orb note on the counter he remembered with malicious satisfaction that it was worth only three cents above the price of the drink. "Keep the change," he said grandly. "Buy yourself something extra nice."

Feeling well pleased with himself, he carried his glass to the most distant corner of the room and sat at a table. It had taken the mission ten days to reach Beachhead, with stops at two intervening towns, and he had been pleasantly surprised when Montane had announced a short break. The arrival of the caravan at a small town usually generated enough interest to guarantee an audience, but it had scarcely been noticed by the incurious citizens of Beachhead, and Montane needed some time in which to advertise his presence.

Grateful for the chance to be his own master for a while, Nicklin had grabbed his twenty-orb allowance – quaintly described by Montane as a stipend – and had bolted into the city. Visiting the famous Portal One to view the stars for the first time was at the top of his list of priorities, but he also had to have a period of quiet contemplation. The cool, deserted bar was ideal for that purpose, and as he sipped his beer – freed of the continuous pressure of other personalities – he could feel himself beginning to relax. So much had happened in such a short time that he felt rather like a curio collector who had acquired many pieces on a single buying trip and now desperately wanted a lull in which to study and catalogue them.

There was Danea Farthing, for instance – one of the most curious curios of the lot…

Nicklin's mouth quirked into its U-shaped smile as in his mind he went over the first encounter with her after his road-to-Damascus brainstorm outside Montane's camper.

He strolled towards the group by the marquee, enjoying being the focus of their attention, and Danea – as though sensing some vital change in him – drew closer to her tall friend, Christine McGivern. He gave Christine an amiable and salacious wink, then addressed himself to Danea.

"I'm sorry about getting a bit prickly a while ago," he said. "You see, I never paid so much to get laid before, and I was sort of expecting – for that kind of money – to get a few repeat performances."

Christine gave a delighted gasp, but the colour drained from Danea's face.

"I see now that it wouldn't be good business for you to issue season tickets – not when you're humping for the Lord," Nicklin went on. "But I would like some more. Nothing too fancy, you understand – just straight stuff. How much would you charge a regular customer?"

Danea's mouth opened silently several times, then she pushed her way through the circle of listeners and ran off in the direction of her camper.

"Would a hundred orbs a shot be all right?" Nicklin called after her. "I don't mind saving up my stipend." Putting on a look of honest puzzlement, he faced his audience, most of whom were gazing at him with shock or growing resentment. "Is Danea upset about something? I wonder what could have upset her. I hope it wasn't something I said."

"You shouldn't ought've talked to Danea like that," Nibs Affleck muttered. His blue-red dipso's nose was gleaming with sweat, and he appeared to be full of righteous anger, the most dangerous kind.

"Really?" Nicklin enquired mildly. "What's so awful about having a little business discussion?"

Affleck moved towards him, his breastbone thrusting forward like the prow of a boat, but those next to him grabbed his arms and pulled him back. With a reproachful glance at Nicklin, he shrugged off his restraints, walked to the flat expanse of the marquee and began tugging on the guy ropes. The rest of the erection crew eagerly joined in the work, and in a few seconds Nicklin found himself alone with Christine.

"Well, hello," she said warmly, with a look that was both amused and speculative.

He met her gaze directly. "Are you doing anything special tonight?"

"I don't know – how special can you make it?"

"We'll get away from here for an hour or two and have a few drinks," he said. "Then I'll show you my prospectus."

The incident had been a definite high point in his brand-new life, Nicklin decided, marred only by the odd way in which Danea had caved in so easily. Corey Montane had spoken to him about it afterwards, trying to make the point that the mission observed certain standards of propriety, but in spite of much frowning and piercing with the eyes he had appeared ineffectual. That was because his position was basically untenable – like that of someone who was trying to-run a genteel brothel and had no contingency plans for dealing with the unpleasant customers who were bound to show up now and again. What he should have done was to employ a couple of his largest disciples to work Nicklin over with iron bars and dump him in a convenient alley. But Montane, having branched out into a line of business for which he had no vocation, was caught in a trap of his own making.

Now that Nicklin was considering the matter, he could see that Montane had not even been much shakes in his former role as a simple roving evangelist. Lacking the personal flair for attracting large sums of money, he had compounded his problem by surrounding himself with a bunch of society's drop-outs, most of whom were liabilities rather than assets. About the only thing they had in common was the belief that Orbitsville was the Devil's lobster pot, and that Montane was going to get them out of it and lead them to a new Eden.

Nicklin smiled again as he toyed with the notion. It was his ingrained scepticism which had created a barrier between him and the other members of the mission in the first place. Quite a few of them, Christine being a good example, were only vaguely religious in their outlook, but their unshakable faith in Montane's word tended to distance them from unbelievers. The barrier had rapidly solidified itself into a rampart after Nicklin had adopted his new persona – or had it adopted him? – but he had no complaints on that score. He had never been accepted by society in general; now the non-acceptance was under his own terms, and that was a much better arrangement.

Suddenly impatient to get on with the business of the day, he finished his beer and walked towards the door. "I'm leaving you now," he called out to the couple behind the bar, giving them a genial wave. The venomous look it drew from the woman gladdened his heart as he went out to join the crowds in the street.

Although he was seeing Garamond Park in person for the first time, the place had an air of familiarity to Nicklin. The wandering groups of sightseers, the vivid botanical displays, the trees which partially screened the lustrous city buildings – television had turned all of these into visual clichés. Nevertheless, Nicklin felt a pang of excitement as he came in view of the portal itself.

It registered on the eye as a circular black lake, about a kilometre in diameter, which was surrounded by sloping lime-green lawns. Clustered on its nearer edge were low mounds of masonry which were all that remained of fortifications built by the enigmatic Primers, who had dominated Orbitsville many thousands of years before mankind's arrival. At the far side of the aperture were the passenger buildings and warehouses of the space terminal. In the distance they still looked fully functional, even though the great starship docking cradles – which should have projected into the void beneath them – had been conjured out of existence.

The single new element in the scene was a group of mobile laboratories at the eastern side of the portal, close to the old Metagov observation post. They had been cordoned off from the public and the immediate area was a profusion of cables, crates, trolleys and gantries. Metal frameworks were clamped on the rim of the aperture, their lower halves extending down into the black, making it easy for spacesuited technicians to force their way in and out through the diaphragm field which retained Orbitsville's air.

Something really has happened on the Outside, Nicklin thought, otherwise there wouldn't be all this fuss.

The realisation was accompanied by the special feeling of wonderment which comes when a concept which has been held in intellectual probation is finally accepted. Now totally beguiled by the prospect of actually seeing the stars, the alien stars which were the subject of so much controversy, he walked towards the night-black portal. Picking his way among family groups who were having picnic snacks on the grass, he reached the place where the path skirting the portal broadened into a small semicircular plaza.

At its focus, standing on the very rim of space, was the famous Garamond statue. Although it was the most over-publicised object in the globe, he paused before the heroic bronze which depicted a man clad in a vacuum suit of a design which had been in service two centuries earlier. The spaceman, helmet in one hand, was shading his eyes from the sun's vertical rays with his free hand while he scanned the horizon. On the statue's granite base was a plaque inscribed with three words:

VANCE GARAMOND, EXPLORER

Nicklin flinched as a wash of coloured light flooded into his eyes. It was accompanied by the sound of a gentle sexless voice, and he realised that a multi-lingual information beam projected from the statue's plinth had centred itself on his face. Scarcely without delay, a computer had – by interpreting his optical response to subliminal signals – deduced that English was his first language.

…of a large fleet of exploration ships owned and operated by Starflight Incorporated, the historic company which at that time had a monopoly of space travel, the voice murmured with the disturbing intimacy of precisely beamed sound. The Bissendorf was under the command of Captain…

Images of a triple-hulled starship, as seen from space, had begun to fill Nicklin's vision, but he moved away from the statue and broke the beam contact. He had no need of a potted refresher course in Orbitsville's early history, especially at this particular moment, when he had only to take a few paces to see the universe spread out at his feet. Aware of feeling like a child about to unwrap a long-awaited gift, he moved away from the plaza and the immobilised tourists with their rapt expressions and blindly gazing eyes. Others in brightly coloured holiday clothing were leaning on the low balustrade which rimmed the portal, strung out like birds on a line. He walked past them to reach an uncrowded section, then placed his elbows on the rail and looked down at the stars.

His initial impression was that something had gone wrong. The blackness below him seemed quite unrelieved at first, and it was only when his eyes began to adjust that he was able to discern a sprinkling of faint-glowing specks. Disappointed, feeling that he had somehow been cheated, he glanced at the other spectators. They were staring into the portal with every appearance of being fascinated. Some were pointing out items of special interest to companions or children. Perhaps it's all in the way you focus your eyes, he thought. After all, some people can't adjust to the old stereo viewers, and others can never see fine rain.

He looked down again, blinking, trying to perform unwonted tricks with his optical 'muscles, but no luminous splendours emerged from the blackness. The universe continued to register on his vision as nothing more than a meagre scattering of dim points of light. He raised his eyes a little and tried looking further afield, but towards the centre of the portal the timid stars were completely invisible, hidden by the mirages which shimmered on the surface of the diaphragm field.

He turned away from the rail and walked slowly along the perimeter path, feeling slightly depressed and lost for something to do. At intervals along the path there were observation booths with hoods which curved down into the portal. He guessed that inside one of them, shielded from the brilliance of the sun, it would be possible to get a much better view of the cosmic environment, but there were long lines of would-be spectators waiting at all the booths. In any case, all he could expect to see was brighter specks of light and more of them. It hardly seemed worth the trouble.

I must admit that you really had me going for a while, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he thought ruefully. But now that I've peeped at the universe I do believe that it, too, is all part of the Big Joke. And what next? Why, I think the most sensible thing to do right now would be to bugger off somewhere and have another beer…

By late afternoon Nicklin was beginning to tire of exploring Beachhead City on foot. The beneficial effect of the eight or so glasses of beer he had consumed during his wanderings was wearing off, giving way to a drowsy apathy. He had never expected to develop any attachment for his cramped new sleeping quarters, but now he yearned to squeeze himself into the bunk bed and simply lose consciousness.

Drawing on his sketchy knowledge of the city centre, he headed in a direction he believed would let him intercept the transit to Cinnamon Brow, where the mission was stationed. He was walking past a window display of 3D television sets when the row of solid images abruptly changed. In place of graphs showing some kind of production figures there appeared the head and shoulders of a pink-faced, well-padded man who was giving the world a confident smile. A slight prominence of his teeth seemed to add aggressiveness to his expression.

I know that face, Nicklin thought, his memory stirring. The spaceship man … Rick Renard … Renard … Reynard!

Nicklin's stride faltered as into his mind there flashed the likeness of the Fox from Disney's Pinocchio – toothy, slavering, menacing, nose like a shiny black olive perched on the end of his snout. The dream! That damned dream with the fox in man's clothing and the garden which covered a hollow hill. What had it to do with spaceships? Nicklin experienced a coolness along his spine as the leviathan heaved once more in the black swamps of his subconscious. For one pounding instant he seemed on the verge of understanding the whole bizarre scenario, then there came the maddening sensation which accompanies the escape of elusive memories, the sense of a door slamming in the mind just as the grinning quarry slips through to the other side.

Irritated by the incident and hoping he was not going to become obsessive about it, Nicklin went on his way, growing more tired with every step.

Darkness had slid across the world by the time he got back to the mission, and although he was still weary he now wanted something to eat before bed. He had gone all day without food, mainly because his miserly allowance would not have covered the cost of a decent meal.

The site was a vacant section in the kind of area where low-cost housing struggled for territorial control against light engineering units and anonymous storage buildings. How Montane selected such places and got authorisation to use them was something Nicklin had yet to learn, and he cursed the general lack of amenities as he stumbled across the rutted ground with little more than the luminosity from the ribbed sky to guide him. Why had Montane never learned that it paid to think big? Or that money attracts money? The mission should have taken over the biggest and most prestigious stadium in the city, and made a show of installing its workers in the best hotels. That way – quite apart from matters of high finance – Nicklin could have had a first-class meal before retiring to bed, instead of the uninspiring stodge served up by Carlos Kempson, the so-called cook who had replaced Dee Smethurst.

When he reached the marquee and its retinue of vehicles he discovered that Kempson's trailer – which had been dubbed the chuck-up wagon – was locked. Mildly annoyed, he glanced about him and became aware that someone was speaking inside the marquee, although its interior lighting was not switched on. He walked to the entrance, looked inside and discovered that Montane was quietly addressing a group of his followers. They were sitting in the front two rows of one section, illuminated only by a single portable lamp. Montane had not gone up on the stage, but was standing on the flattened grass just in front of his audience. To Nicklin the scene looked oddly furtive, reminiscent of a meeting of early Christians in pagan Rome.

"…much more serious than I thought it was," Montane was saying. He paused as Nicklin entered the marquee, and some of his listeners looked around to see what had caused the interruption. A few made noises which indicated that they regarded Nicklin's presence as an intrusion, but Montane silenced them with a damping movement of his hands.

"Come and join us, Jim," he said. "This is a ways-and-means session, and God knows we need all the fresh ideas we can get, regardless of the source."

Choosing not to be offended by the last words of the sentence, Nicklin – his curiosity aroused – advanced along the left aisle. As he neared the group he saw that Danea Farthing was sitting in the second row. He sidled into the third row, sat down directly behind her and blew gently on the back of her neck.

"Hello, darling," he whispered. "I got back from town as soon as I could – I hope you didn't miss me too much."

Her only response was to hunch her shoulders and lean forward to distance herself from him. Smiling with malicious satisfaction, Nicklin made himself at ease and directed his gaze towards Montane.

"For the benefit of anyone who has come in late," Montane went on, a certain dryness in his voice showing that he wanted Nicklin's full attention, "we are discussing an extremely serious new setback in our plans for the future.

"As you all know, eleven or twelve days ago – when this globe we inhabit made what people have begun to refer to as the Big Jump – Orbitsville lost contact with everything that had previously existed outside the shell. That included all the interstellar ships which were either approaching Orbitsville or were already docked outside all the portals.

"At the time, I saw no reason to be concerned over the disappearance, because it had never been my intention to buy a fully operative vessel. Even a ship nearing the end of its certification would have cost something in the region of two million monits – a price which was far outside our limited resources. I should say at this point that none of you is to blame for our not having built up the necessary funds. You have all worked hard, and the fault lies entirely in the way I directed your efforts."

Corey, old son, them is the truest words you ever spoke, Nicklin thought, but a murmur of disagreement arose from the audience. Montane – a homely figure in his short-sleeved tan shirt and off-the-peg slacks – swallowed visibly and nodded in gratification. Nicklin, realising the man was under a considerable degree of stress, began to sense that what he was hearing was no ordinary pep talk.

"Some time ago I chose what seemed a reasonable alternative, under the circumstances," Montane continued. "I contacted a leading repair yard, right here in Beachhead, and took an option on an obsolescent Type 93 passenger ship. Apparently its owners had put it into land-dock for a major overhaul, but had gone out of business before the work was completed.

"It was not the ideal ship for our needs, but the asking price was only three-quarters of a million, plus approximately another 200,000 for completing the refurbishment. We haven't got all the money yet, but I had hopes of reaching the target before next winter."

All you needed was a few more heliumheads like me. Nicklin shifted impatiently in his chair. So what happened next?

"But I have to report to you that today when I contacted the brokers concerned – Mather and Czubek – I was informed that my contract had been cancelled. It seems that I was a few days late with one of my interim payments, and that was all the excuse they needed. In normal circumstances a slight delay with an instalment would have been neither here nor there, but ever since the Big Jump circumstances have been very far from normal.

"It turns out that a huge consortium has been formed with the object of re-establishing interportal trade in the shortest possible time. The members of this consortium are buying up all available spacecraft – interstellar ships included – and, as far as I can determine, money is no object with them. We are in a sellers' market, I was told today, and the laws of supply and demand have pushed the price of our ship up to more than three million monits.

"There you have it, my friends." Montane's voice, which up to that point had been well under his control, hoarsened into something like a sob. "I … I don't know what to do next. The Devil is laughing at us tonight … and I simply don't know what to do next."

A man in the front row spoke up. "You can't blame yourself, Corey – for three million they'd have found some way to break the contract."

"Yes, but on top of everything else I've lost the deposit I put down."

"How much was it?"

Montane gave a wan smile. "The deposit was a hundred big ones."

Nicklin noticed the atypical use of slang, albeit ancient slang, and knew that Montane was trying to be casual, as a way of dealing with a desperate sense of guilt. There was a general gasp of dismay at the news of the loss, but Nicklin had turned his thoughts to the central issue – was Montane about to abandon his pathetic attempt to become a new Saviour?

Unexpectedly, he found little to savour in the idea. He expected to quit the mission some time in the nearish future and find a job with decent pay and prospects, but he still despised Montane and Danea, and craved a chance to revenge himself on them. What had just happened to Montane was clearly a major disaster, but it had not been personally and visibly inflicted by Nicklin. Therefore it did not count for much in the revenge stakes.

As for Danea – he had devised a special super-duper all-singing, all-dancing scheme of vengeance for her, one which would bring him complete satisfaction in every sense of the word. The plan was to amass a good sum of money – the how of it was not clear to him yet – but he wanted so much cash that neither she nor her bumbling Svengali would in all conscience (great word!) be able to refuse it on behalf of the Lord. She would be obliged to prostitute herself for him again, and when that happened he would make use of that splendid body as it had never been made use of before. If she was going to play the role of temple prostitute, priestess-whore, he was going to be the most ardent worshipper in the land. It was a consummation devoutly to be wished, and when the happy day came he was going to fuck her and humiliate her and fuck her again and make her sorry she had ever…

Hold on! he told himself in near-panic as fury geysered through him. You've got to play it cool. Icy cold, in fact. They won't hate you properly unless you are seen to be chilly and emotionless, inhuman and implacable…

In the front row the electrician Petra Davies raised her hand to ask a question. "Corey, could we not appeal directly to the boss men in this consortium? When they hear that we are a religious organisation–"

"That's right," a man cut in. "Or maybe we could just rent the ship from them for a while. After all, we only want to make one trip in it – then they could have it back."

Montane shook his head. "It's a good idea, but I very much doubt that these people would be in sympathy with our objectives. In fact, I'm sure they wouldn't. The head of the consortium is a man called Rick Renard…"

The remainder of the sentence was lost to Nicklin. He was already in a mental turmoil when the mention of Renard caused a veritable explosion in the depths of his subconscious, a psychic detonation which hurled a shrapnel of tumbling memory fragments up into the forefront of his mind. Renard … Reynard! He had had an uncle by the name of Reynard. Not an uncle – Reynard had been his mother's uncle. A great-uncle. As a small child he had been deeply afraid of his great-uncle Reynard, because his mother had a habit of referring to him as a wily old fox, and little Jimmy Nicklin had been convinced that Reynard really had the ability to turn himself into a fox when nobody else was around. Jimmy knew in his heart that if he were ever left on his own with great-uncle Reynard the dreadful transformation would take place, and that Reynard the Fox would eat him all up. Luckily, great-uncle Reynard was a rare visitor to the Nicklin home, because his job as a land surveyor took him to distant places. And it was from one of those remote locations that he had sent little Jimmy a certain picture postcard…

"Corey, I've got some interesting news for you," Nicklin called out, his heart pounding as he rose to his feet. "I know where there's a spaceship – a spaceship you can have for next to nothing!"

CHAPTER 11

"All right, Jim – why all the secrecy?" Montane said. "I don't like the idea of keeping all the others in the dark, not at this sad stage of our enterprise."

The door of his camper was closed, the toffee-shaded lamp was creating a mellow glow, and the tea requisites were laid out on the ready-made table formed by Milly Montane's coffin. The two men were sitting on the side bench, their knees almost touching, and Nicklin – his tiredness having completely vanished – was luxuriating in the atmosphere of seclusion and comparative comfort.

"We have to talk about my fee," he said, "and I felt it would be better if we did that in private."

"Fee? You expect a fee?"

Nicklin smiled. "Of course! Nothing in this life comes free, Corey – you should have learned that by this time."

Montane studied his face. "Do you want your money back?"

"Possibly. I'm not sure yet. I might be prepared to go on treating it as an investment in Montane Enterprises Inc."

"You seem to be enjoying yourself," Montane said, pouring out two cups of tea.

"I'm having the time of my life," Nicklin assured him.

"I'm glad somebody's having a good time. Very well, Jim – tell me what you want. Let's hear it."

Nicklin sipped from his cup before speaking, deliberately prolonging the moment. "Leaving the question of my money to one side for the present, I want a new job. No more driving in the middle of the night, no more clearing of thistles. I think the title of Executive Vice-President might suit me."

"A grand title wouldn't have any meaning around here," Montane said with a thin smile.

"It would for me. And in keeping with my new status I would expect my stipend to be increased. In fact, I expect unlimited drawing facilities – although naturally I wouldn't abuse the privilege. My needs are modest."

"Go on," Montane said, still with his bitter smile.

"And I want a camper all to myself." Nicklin made a show of delicately inhaling the aromatic vapour from his tea. "When I say I want it all to myself, I'm referring to the living space. There would, of course, be drivers provided for my exclusive use. And when we get to our permanent headquarters I want really good hotel accommodation."

"I'm beginning to enjoy myself too – just taking in your performance," Montane said. "You still haven't told me where this mythical spaceship is."

"I'm coming to that," Nicklin replied, his pulse increasing in speed and power. "There's just one more thing."

"And that is…?

"Danea Farthing," Nicklin said casually. "I want Danea Farthing."

Montane's smile vanished and he abruptly set his cup down, slopping tea into the saucer. "Get out of here, Jim – and never come back. Go on! Get out right now!"

Nicklin settled himself more comfortably on the bench. "A spaceship, Corey. A guaranteed way of getting out of Orbitsville before the trap closes. An open ticket to New Eden. God has entrusted you with the task of leading His children to safety, and He has given you licence to employ any means within your power. You explained all that stuff to me not so long ago, sitting right here on this bench, the day you were telling me how I had been well and truly shafted. Surely you can't have forgotten so soon?"

"You are the filthiest…" Montane closed his eyes, his face the colour of tallow. "Danea Farthing is a human being."

"I should hope so," Nicklin said with a grin. "There's nothing kinky about me."

"Spare me your diseased humour. I repeat, Danea is a human being."

"She was for sale then," Nicklin said in a voice from which all traces of humour had fled. "So she ought to be for sale now. Have a quiet word with her, there's a good chap."

Still with his eyes shut, Montane clenched his hands and sat without speaking for ten or more seconds, then – unexpectedly – he relaxed and raised his eyelids. His gaze was mild and unperturbed once more.

"I was praying," he explained. "I was communing with the Lord."

"Did He commune back at you?"

"He reminded me that I have only your word for it about this ship. It may no longer exist, for all I know, or it may never have existed. He counselled me to stay my anger."

Nicklin nodded thoughtfully. "Verily, He hath counselled you well. Hey, that sort of lingo must be catching!"

"So how about it, Jim?" Montane replied, no longer allowing himself to be baited.

"How about my fee?"

"I think I have ceased to believe that you can deliver a ship, but I confess to being curious about whatever kind of story you have dreamed up." Montane was now speaking in his customary rectorial manner, apparently satisfied that he had gained the advantage in what had become a verbal duel. "Therefore, I have few misgivings in agreeing to your terms."

"Wise man," Nicklin said.

"I'm expecting this to be good, Jim." Montane's expression was calm as he retrieved his cup and removed some drips from the bottom of it with his fingers. "So go ahead and astonish me – where is this spaceship that can be obtained for next to nothing?"

Nettled by Montane's change of attitude, Nicklin ignored an inner voice which warned him that he might be rushing ahead too fast. "It's buried near a small town within a few thousand kilometres of Beachhead."

"Buried!" Montane guffawed in disbelief. "Are you trying to tell me that somebody hauled an interstellar ship thousands of kilometres into the hinterland … and then buried it?"

"Well, he didn't dig a hole in the ground and drop it in there. He covered it with tonnes of earth and rocks."

"Why?"

"It was intended to be a memorial," Nicklin said, wondering how he had got into a defensive posture. "Something like a mausoleum. As I remember it, there was a rich man with a young wife who wanted to be a space flier. He bought her a ship of her very own and she promptly got herself killed in it in some kind of freak accident. So he paid to have the ship transported to his home estate and he made it into a tomb for her. He decided that it didn't look right, however, and I can't say I blame him – a space-going ship would look a bit odd sitting in anybody's back yard. Luckily, his hobby was gardening, so he had the ship landscaped – I suppose that's the best way to put it – and, as far as I know, he pottered around it quite happily for the rest of his natural.

"A touching little story, don't you think?"

"Obviously you think it's very funny."

Montane's gaze flickered towards his wife's coffin as he spoke, and Nicklin experienced a pang of happiness as the significance of the involuntary glance dawned on him. He had been slightly worried about how Montane might react to the bizarre tale of a millionaire's folly, but he had completely overlooked the parallel in the two men's lives. Blind chance, otherwise known as the Gaseous Vertebrate, had rendered Montane soft, receptive and vulnerable. Bless you, Corey, he thought, I had forgotten that anybody who lugs his old lady around in a tin box would be inclined to sympathise with the notion of a metal Taj Mahal.

"I don't think it's the slightest bit funny," he said in overly solemn tones. "It's just that I tend to hide my emotions under a veneer of flippancy." He was rewarded by a momentary flash of loathing in Montane's eyes, a signal that the preacher's defences had again been penetrated.

"What is this man's name?" Montane said.

"I can't remember."

"Where is the spaceship?"

"I can't quite remember that, either," Nicklin replied. "All I can say right now is that it's near a town in the PI region."

Montane sniffed. "You can't remember much, can you? How did you get this story into your head in the first place?"

"When I was a kid I had a great-uncle, name of Reynard Nicklin, who travelled a lot because he was a surveyor or a cartographer or something like that. He sent me a holocard of the tomb once, and promised to take me there some day. Very pretty and colourful it was – an ornamental garden completely covering this little hill – but I guess I would have forgotten all about it if it hadn't been for the weird background note. That must have made quite an impression on me, because I've had spooky subterranean rumblings about it all day. And tonight at the meeting … suddenly … there it was!"

"Just a minute," Montane said, frowning, "you got the holocard when you were a child? This story about creating a mausoleum … How long ago did it all happen?"

Nicklin shrugged. "Fifty, sixty years ago … perhaps even a hundred … Who knows?"

"You've been wasting my time!" Montane exhaled forcibly, showing exasperation, and his voice hardened. "I sat here and endured your blasphemies and obscenities, and your sheer–"

"Take it easy," Nicklin cut in. "What's the matter?"

"Rust! That's what's the matter – there'll be nothing left of your damned ship by this time."

Nicklin smiled his happy hayseed smile, keeping his mouth in its cheerful U-shape until Montane took heed of his expression and gave him a questioning look.

"They were still constructing spaceships out of the old electronsated alloys in those days," Nicklin said soothingly. "That was before the Earth-Orbitsville trade petered out and the shipyards had to cut back on costs. No, Corey, there won't be much rust or any other kind of corrosion for you to worry your head about. At least, not in the pressure hull, the internal structure and the major components. There might be some problems with all the minor bits and pieces, but even there…

"I mean, if you decided to use a spaceship as a ready-made casket you'd make certain the whole thing was properly sealed up, wouldn't you? You'd hardly want your nearest and dearest to get mildew. And you definitely wouldn't want bugs crawling up her."

Montane set his cup back in the saucer again, this time with exaggerated care, and when he spoke each word was the splintering of a human bone. "I never thought I'd hear myself say this to any man, but if you speak like that about my wife – ever again – I'll kill you, Jim. I swear I'll kill you."

"I'm shocked at you," Nicklin said comfortably. "That was a terrible thing to say to a fellow human being."

"I wouldn't have said it to a human being."

"I'm immune to insults now, Corey. I'm immune to everything."

"Then you must be very unhappy."

"On the contrary," Nicklin said, maintaining his smile. "I've found the secret of complete happiness. Do you want to know what it is? I'll tell you anyway. At all times you keep just one thought uppermost in your mind – that everybody is a piece of shit."

"Does that include yourself?"

"Especially yourself, old son – that's the whole point! It would ruin the Big Joke if you didn't include yourself."

Montane shook his head, the movements slow, tired, barely perceptible. "Let's get back to the buried spaceship – where is it?"

"That's something else I can't remember, but I've an idea the letter A crops up two or three times in the name of the town," Nicklin said, wondering if he should compel the preacher to put details of their new arrangement on to tape or paper. "I might be able to find it by going through a PI gazetteer, but even without the name we have enough information."

"That's what I was thinking," Montane said, giving him a sly glance. "I could find it by myself now."

"Yes, but Renard's people could get there faster – if I tipped them off."

"The ship may not even be available," Montane countered. "There may be descendants who treat it like a shrine."

"The facts we have suggest that the lady died, as they used to say, without issue."

"There could be other relatives. Perhaps they unearthed the ship years ago and sold it for scrap."

"I've already thought of that." Nicklin concealed the lie as expertly as he could. Christ, he thought, the old boy has a point there – I should have kept my mouth shut until I'd done some detective work on my own. "But the scrap value would hardly cover the excavation and haulage costs."

"And there's always the possibility that your memory has tricked you over the location," Montane said, now apparently enjoying himself. "It's going to be ages before interportal flights are commercially available again – so if it turns out that the town isn't in the PI region I don't see how we can get to it."

"This conversation is starting to lose all its sparkle – and I'm starving." In spite of himself, Nicklin was impressed by the other man's mental resilience, and he was fast becoming angry with himself for having played all his trump cards so early on in the game. The really smart thing to do would have been to take his time, to consolidate his ground step by step. He should have verified the existence and availability of the ship, then he should have found a way to acquire ownership, by bringing in a third party if necessary. Then, and only then – when he was in a safe position to dictate all the terms – would it have been safe to talk business with Montane.

So what had gone wrong with his sense of judgement? Nicklin writhed inwardly as he answered his own question. It had been the Danea effect again. The fevered visions of inflicting revenge on her, the lurid and penis-stirring images of debauching the Bitch in Black, had robbed him of all caution and common sense. In short, he had behaved like a mindless creature with a whiff of pheromones in its nostrils, and the full price of his stupidity remained to be discovered.

"If you're really hungry I could have Carlos bring a tray in here," Montane said.

A pleasingly tasteless line sprang into Nicklin's mind at the idea of eating off Milly Montane's coffin … My wife says the dinner's on her … but Montane was touchy about dead wife jokes and had sounded genuinely dangerous over the last one. The objective was to earn his undying hatred, not to be killed by him.

"No need to put old Carlos to all that trouble," Nicklin said. "I daresay I can wait a while longer."

"Very well, but if all this works out – and you do take up your 'executive' position – you may have to get used to grabbing food while you have the chance."

"So you're not going to renege on our deal."

"I'm a man of my word, Jim, and the truth is that you're likely to be of more value to the cause now than you were when you joined us. That's what I call irony," Montane stood up and went forward to the shelf which supported his video set. "I'm going to see if I can call up a good PI gazetteer on this thing and then we'll find out if it jogs your memory. There's no point in wasting any more time."

"I agree," Nicklin said, then became concerned about giving the impression of turning soft and compliant again. "But the job was only part of my professional fee. Remember?"

Montane spoke abstractedly, concentrating his attention on the video's command panel. "If you're talking about Danea, you have to remember something. I told you the first day we met that Danea Farthing is a private individual – any personal relationship she may have had with you has nothing to do with me or this mission."

He's sticking it to me, Nicklin thought in dismay. He is really sticking it to me! This is what I get for letting my dick rule my head. A crazy old coot, who thinks he's Moses MkII and has conversations with his wife's corpse, is running rings around me!

"Correct me if I misheard you," he said bitterly, "but I thought you said something about being a man of your word."

"My vows to God take precedence over everything else."

"How convenient!"

"You must try to be consistent, Jim." Montane was still stooped over the video set, apparently finding complexity in its simplified controls, but his words were very much to the point. "A few minutes ago you were happy with the idea that God had given me licence to procure women. If that were the case, He would positively encourage me to commit a minor sin like lying now and again – as long as it served His cause."

Thing's can't go on like this, Nicklin told himself, his fingernails biting deeply into the heels of his hands. There are going to be big changes around here.

He had no idea of how accurate his prediction would prove to be…

PART TWO:
THE HAMMER FALLS

CHAPTER 12

The rifle had roughly the same lines as an old-fashioned sporting weapon, but for the most part its appearance was an exercise in cosmetics and nostalgia. Its stock looked like polished wood and was designed to fit snugly into the user's shoulder, although firing produced no recoil; it was operated by a conventionally styled trigger, although a simple button might have been more appropriate for the unleashing of bolts of ultralaser energy. It had an effective range of three kilometres in dry, clear weather; and a computerised smartscope guaranteed impressive accuracy, even in the hands of a total novice.

A perfect killing machine, beautiful in its own way, the rifle looked incongruous among the frayed umbrellas in the antique hall-stand. Nicklin gazed thoughtfully at it for a few seconds, knowing he was supposed to take it outside with him, then he shook his head. On several previous occasions he had slung the weapon on his shoulder when going out to the hill, and each time had felt like an overgrown child playing frontiersmen or soldiers. He took his old sun-hat from a peg on the hall-stand, squared it on his head and – leaving the double doors wide open – went out of the huge house.

The Fugaccia mansion had become a ready-made headquarters for the mission, though not through Montane's free choice. Ves Fugaccia's heirs lived a hundred kilometres to the east, in a well-developed part of the region, and had never taken any interest in the unmanageable property perched right on the edge of civilisation. They had, however, a good nose for business, and on sensing the obsessive nature of Montane's interest they had flatly refused his offer to buy the buried ship and take it off their hands. That would have been a betrayal of their grandfather's trust, they had said. Good Roman Catholics could never acquiesce in the desecration of a loved one's tomb, they had said. But, somehow, their group conscience had allowed them to contemplate selling the Altamura estate in its entirety; and – when their lawyers had thrice succeeded in jacking up the price – their religious and family scruples had vanished altogether.

Directly above Nicklin the sun had just emerged from a nightband, and the day was still cool in spite of being intensely bright. Before him was what had once been the garden fronting the Fugaccia mansion. Now it was a daunting tangle of overgrown shrubs, many of which had been smothered by riotous wild plants, vines and native grasses. In some places the vegetation rose into mounds whose general shape only hinted at what lay beneath – here a summerhouse or an arch, there a fountain or a belvedere. At one point the head of a classical marble statue of a woman raised itself above the leafy ferment, the blank orbs of the eyes contemplating the chaos of greenery in apparent sorrow.

Beyond the ruins of the garden was a small, rounded, man-made hill. It was vividly outlined against a scenic backdrop in which grasslands, lakes and enigmatic forests sifted and tapered through each other, creating horizontal designs which grew slimmer and slimmer until, misted by distance, they merged into ranges of remote grey-blue mountains. Striking though the general panorama was, Nicklin had eyes only for the small hill in the foreground – because the ship was cocooned inside it.

He had just finished breakfast, but he knew, despite the earliness of the hour, that Montane and big Gerl Kingsley were somewhere on the hill, already hard at work with picks and spades. Power tools had been purchased, and at that very moment were on their way from Beachhead with the main body of the caravan, but Montane was unable to hold himself in check. Ownership of the Fugaccia estate had passed into his hands four days earlier, and since then the monkey had been on his back. He had to see the ship for himself. Not until he had actually touched its metal skin would he be able to relax in the knowledge that the greatest hurdle of all was safely behind him.

Picking his way along the path that had been hewn through the wilderness, Nicklin smiled as he recalled Montane's antics of the recent past. The preacher had actually broken down and wept on hearing that the ship was an unmodified Type 83.

"Why!" he had said to Nicklin, blinking at him through lenses of tears. "You want to know why! Because, you smirking great idiot, it's one of the Explorer class!"

It had taken a few seconds for the significance of the statement to penetrate Nicklin's mind. To him the flight to New Eden was a preposterous fantasy, one which had no hope of being realised, and he had given no thought to the practicalities involved. Had he considered the matter he would have seen at once that, while the crossing of hundreds of light years of interstellar void could be accomplished routinely, dropping down through the final hundred kilometres to achieve landfall gave rise to unusual problems.

The great majority of spaceships constructed in the previous two centuries were designed to ply between Earth and Orbitsville – from the parking orbits of the former to the docking cradles of the latter – and therefore had no provision for transferring personnel to and from the surface of an unprepared world.

Montane had always anticipated the difficulty and expense of equipping his starship with a pinnace, and now – suddenly and unexpectedly – the problem had ceased to exist. "It's an omen, Jim," he had said. "This is the Lord's way of telling me not to despair, that He is still tending His flock."

The sheer irrationality of that proposition had dissuaded Nicklin from trying to argue. The Lord, it seemed, had not tended very hard in the case of Apryl Fugaccia. A penniless hairdresser of Scandinavian stock, she had professionally met the elderly billionaire, Ves Fugaccia, in a Beachhead salon. He had been captivated by the newly minted gold of her Nordic good looks, and she had been equally drawn by the prospect of wealth and limitless opportunities for travel and adventure. She must have counted herself among the luckiest people in the universe when, on their first wedding anniversary, Fugaccia had granted her dearest wish by presenting her with a starship of her very own. Only a comparative handful of exploration craft had been built – the Orbitsville syndrome had seen to that – and the enormous expense involved had been yet another proof of her husband's boundless love. So infatuated had Apryl been with the notion of becoming a planetary first-footer that she had sneaked on board her new toy while it was land-docked at Portal 9, and had donned her HESS (Hostile Environment Survival Suit) without first mastering the intricacies of its breathing-gas regulatory system. Her body had been found in the left-hand seat of the pinnace's cockpit.

How Montane could construe such a pathetic sequence of events as evidence of the existence of a caring Almighty was a source of puzzlement to Nicklin. To him it was a prank worthy of that greatest of all tricksters, the Gaseous Vertebrate, but he had refrained from making any comment, and had continued quite happily with his duties as second-in-command of the mission. For the present those duties consisted of little more than living with Montane and Kingsley in the decaying Fugaccia mansion and waiting for the rest of the team to arrive.

In particular, he was waiting for the arrival of Danea Farthing. He had devised a new plan for dealing with her, one which would take time to put into effect, but which had the merit of promising to make her humiliation – when it finally came – all the more complete.

The thought, enlivened his stride as he reached the base of the hill and began to climb. Clearing a way through the vegetation had been easier here because the hill was plentifully endowed with stone steps and paths, exactly as in his dream. He wound his way to the crest on meticulously fitted hexagonal paving and found Montane and Kingsley standing in a broad but shallow excavation which was the result of their combined labours.

Its floor resembled streaky brown glass copiously studded with nodules of grey and white, reminding Nicklin of a gigantic slab of nut candy. The discovery of the fused-earth and rock carapace below the topsoil had bothered Montane at first, because it delayed his progress, but he had been consoled by the thought of the excellent protection it afforded the ship. Seventy years would have been a long time for any metal artefact – even one constructed from electron-sated alloys – to resist the chemical ravages of damp earth.

"Good morning, navvies," Nicklin called out. "How are the calluses today?"

Montane looked up from the drawing he was studying and responded to the greeting in amicable tones. He had been in Nicklin's company almost continuously for three months, while they were finding Ves Fugaccia's heirs and negotiating the purchase of the property, and understood that the best way to preserve their enmity was to masquerade as friends. Kingsley, the huge ex-farmer, who had no time for such strategies, confined himself to giving Nicklin a barely audible grunt.

"You're an engineer," Montane said, beckoning to Nicklin. "Take a look at this drawing and tell me what you think."

"I used to fix egg-beaters," Nicklin replied. "Spaceships are a bit out of my line."

"Take a look at the drawing!"

Nicklin shrugged and did as ordered. The photocopy paper was old and creased, but the original drawing had been even older – a fact which was obvious from the numerous wrinkles and smudges which had been reproduced along with the linework and text. It had been issued by the Nissan-Vickers company of Birkenhead, England, and showed the three principal elevations of a spaceship. The ship had the classical Starflight configuration – three equal cylinders joined together in parallel, with one projecting forward by almost half its length – but it was distinguishable from a standard vessel because of the pinnace. Needle-nosed and streamlined, shaped by a different set of operational requirements, the pinnace was slung in its flying attitude beneath the central main cylinder.

The title box of the layout established it as the general arrangement of the Explorer-class vessel Liscard, but it had been used as the basis for a later and entirely different kind of drawing. Superimposed on the flawless computer graphics of the original were hand-drawn outlines, obviously the work of a landscaping contractor, depicting the rounded earthwork which now covered the starship. Clustered about each of the elevations were thumbnail sketches giving details of path and wall construction, and there were notes about the plants to be sown in various areas.

"Apparently Fugaccia wasn't much of a one for keeping records," Montane said. "This was the only drawing available, and I was lucky to get it."

"You should have it framed."

Montane indicated a pencil mark he had made on the side view of the hill, directly above the nose of the ship. "I'd say this is where we are – what do you say?"

"You might be right, but until we get some fairly acc – " Nicklin paused and looked again at the drawing. "Corey, this thing doesn't even tell you which way is north!"

"So?"

"So we might be standing above the arse end of the ship."

"Oh!" Montane looked abashed for a moment, then his face brightened. "All the more reason to shift dirt, my boy – get yourself a spade and start digging."

With the arrival of machine tools imminent it was pointless to squander muscle power, Nicklin knew, but arguing with Montane in his present state of mind would have been even more futile. Besides, the formerly slight bulge above his belt had become quite noticeable during three months of inactivity, and a spell of hard work would do him no harm at all. He looked about him, wondering if he could find a legitimate task which would be less of a bore than digging, then seized a pick and began to demolish a low stone wall.

The invasive vegetation had been unable to find many good footholds here, and he was able to work without too much hindrance from vines. There was a kind of black satisfaction in obliterating another man's patient craftsmanship, in being an instrument of disorder, and he found it easy to lose himself in the repetitive physical effort. And as he worked he was very much aware of being in a borderland.

Four kilometres to the east was the town of Altamura, its buildings visible as a sparse scatter of confetti in the green immensity that was Orbitsville. It had been founded more than a hundred years earlier by a batch of settlers from southern Italy – a hard-working people who had fully expected their new home to become a prosperous regional centre as the tide of immigration rolled on past it. But actuality and the dream had not coincided; the successive waves of settlers had never materialised. In fact, the well-delineated edge of civilisation had receded slightly, leaving Altamura in a no man's land between the known and the unknown.

There had been no particular reason for men and women to turn back from the area. It had simply happened that way. The tracts of land to the west of Altamura – which Nicklin could survey each time he raised his head – were every bit as rich and inviting as any other part of the Big O, but the mathematics of chaos had dictated that the outward surge of humanity would falter and lose impetus just there.

"There are too many places to go, and not enough folks to go to them," the Fugaccias' local agent had said philosophically, giving his summation in a strong Italian accent. "That's why the town has been slowly dying ever since it was born – a pure demographic fluke."

A talkative man, one who obviously relished storytelling, he had gone on to paint a hectically coloured picture of life in that part of the frontier.

"Mind you, that doesn't mean there's nobody west of the Irsina river. Some pretty weird characters have headed out that way from time to time. Some of them were pure misfits – sort of hermits by trade, if you know what I mean – but quite a few had the police on their tails when they went.

"They're still out there. Maybe some have banded together, maybe some are raising their own broods in their own way. Sometimes you see smoke in the distance … sometimes you find a cow or a sheep with its hind legs missing … sometimes you find a man or a woman, or even a child – unfortunates that have had very bad things done to them…

"That's why people around here carry weapons when they go far out of town – and I advise you to do the same."

Recalling the agent's words, Nicklin found it difficult to reconcile them with the prehistoric peacefulness of high summer which lay over the surrounding land. Intellect told him that Orbitsville had to have a darker aspect, that where all men were free to live as they pleased some would choose paths whose very existence was denied by anyone who wanted to go on treasuring his night's sleep.

On the positive side, however, was the fact that he had lived for more than thirty years without once encountering the really bad stuff, the moral equivalent of anti-matter. Oh yes, people were shit – that much he had proved – but in general they stopped short of stuff like torture, murder and cannibalism. There was no reason to suppose that the sprinkling of heliumheads, eccentrics and downright crazies who undoubtedly formed part of the population of the Altamura area were any worse than their equivalents in Orangefield county.

Having attuned himself once more to the bright sanity of the morning, Nicklin worked steadily until he had dismantled about ten metres of wall, then he began levering up the paving slabs of the adjoining path. The work was arduous but satisfying in its own way, and he was surprised to note that two hours had passed when Montane called a break for refreshments.

Nicklin would have walked back down to the house to eat, but Kingsley opened a coolbag and produced bulbs of iced tea, sandwiches and a selection of fruit. Glad to have been spared the journey, Nicklin seated himself on a pile of rubble and joined in the simple meal. The cold tea, which had never been one of his favourite drinks, tasted better than he would have believed possible.

"I think I could take to this life of simple toil," he said, after slaking his thirst .

"I'm pleased to hear it." Montane, now in the role of jovial foreman, nudged Kingsley with his elbow. "You stayed in bed so long we were beginning to think you had died."

Kingsley guffawed, spilling particles of bread from the corners of his mouth.

"I was monitoring the news for you, Corey. I know how you like to be kept informed of all the…" Nicklin paused as he suddenly remembered an item which had come in that morning on the audio line from Altamura, one he knew would be of genuine interest to the preacher. "There's been a new development about the green lines."

Montane eyed him intently. "Yes?"

"It's connected with the fields. You know, the vertical force fields above the lines?"

"Yes, yes – go on, Jim."

"Well, it turns out they aren't as inert as they seemed," Nicklin said. "Apparently they weaken the molecular lattice in any piece of material they pass through. It happens very gradually, but some buildings in … in Lomza, P83, I think it is … are starting to split in half. The buildings straddle one of the lines, and it's gradually chopping them in half – roof beams, walls, floors, foundations, everything. It's acting as if it was a very weak valency cutter."

"My enemy never rests." Montane went on chewing a piece of banapple, but he was doing it mechanically now, no longer tasting the fruit. Completing the purchase of the ship had relieved him of a burden of anxiety, and he had since been enjoying a relaxed but active life in the open air. He had actually grown younger in appearance during the unplanned break, but within the last few seconds the weight of the years had come down on him again, hard.

Good job I didn't remember the news about the lines earlier, Nicklin congratulated himself. This way the old boy's digestive juices have been stopped in their tracks. Or should I say tracts?

"Aw, come on, Corey," he said, "you can't put everything down to Old Nick. Wouldn't it be more like his style to chop buildings up suddenly and let them crash down on people?"

Montane gave him a sombre stare. "I don't know what's in the Devil's mind – he's playing a very subtle game – but I do know that when it's over none of us will be laughing. And that goes for you, too."

"I wouldn't dream of laughing," Nicklin said, belying his words with a faint smile.

"You'd better not," Kingsley warned, jabbing in Nicklin's direction with a forefinger which resembled a gnarled billet of wood. "You start laughing at Corey – I'll break bits off your skeleton."

"Go on with your lunch, Gerl." Montane soothed the giant by patting him on the knee, and a certain dryness in his voice showed that he was recovering his equilibrium. "I'll give you the nod when I want bits broken off Jim's skeleton."

End of conversation, Nicklin thought, again obliged to acknowledge the older man's mental wiriness. To show that he regarded Montane's tactic as unsporting, he shifted position until he was sitting with his back to the others, facing down the western slope of the hill. There was no wall or fence to mark the limit of the Fugaccia estate – the foot of the hill shelved into scrub which was punctuated with anvil trees, and beyond that Orbitsville went on for ever.

Allowing his thoughts to return to Danea Farthing and his plans for her, Nicklin wondered how long it would be before the rest of the mission arrived. He and Montane had flown out from Beachhead to New Taranto, whose airport was the nearest to Altamura, and the whole journey had taken only a day. Gerl Kingsley had set off at the same time in Montane's camper and had completed the trip in five days, but to do so he must have driven like a maniac and almost without sleep. Nicklin had derived quite a bit of amusement from trying to decide whether the big man's haste had been inspired by loyalty to his boss, or by a disinclination to spend many nights alone with Milly Montane and her metal coffin. (Your wife's a nice woman, boss – but she's permanently canned.)

All the other vehicles had remained at the base camp in Beachhead until four days ago, when Montane had wired the news that all was well. They would be proceeding at the speed of the slowest member, with proper rest halts, and it was hard to predict their time of arrival.

Deciding not to squander his mental energy on the matter, Nicklin was gazing around him in boredom when he saw something faintly peculiar happen.

A few paces down the slope from him was a group of yellow flowers, much resembling tulips, and while he was looking directly at them the head of one of the flowers detached itself from its stalk and dropped to the ground.

With little else to occupy his mind, he wondered idly if such events were commonplace in the botanical world. Orbitsville had many varieties of insects, some with bizarre feeding habits, but surely any bug intent on devouring a plant would tackle it from the bottom. Could there be a type which had a taste for petals only, and which first dragged them back to the nest?

As he was tiring of the speculation there occurred a second strange event – a humming, rushing sound close to his left ear, a brief and fluttery agitation of the air. He told himself that it must have been a hornet, but there had been a disturbing hint of power to the sound, and in that instant a preposterous idea was born in his mind.

"Corey," he said quietly, "this may sound like one of my jokes – but I think we're being shot at."

"Shot at!" Kingsley tilted his head back and roared with laughter. The fact that his mouth was wide open possibly saved his life, for the bullet which might have shattered his skull passed cleanly through both his cheeks. He clapped a hand to the bloody, star-shaped exit wound and pitched sideways to the ground.

Nicklin gaped at him, thunderstruck, then realised he was still sitting upright. He hastily bellied down behind the heaps of rubble, losing his sun-hat in the process, fear masked by self-loathing – he had been imbecilic enough to risk death rather than make a chump of himself by needlessly diving for cover. He looked towards Montane, who had also dropped to the ground, and found the preacher staring at him in wide-eyed accusation. Nicklin understood the terror-logic perfectly – he was the one who had talked of shooting, therefore he had caused it to happen.

What next? What the holy fuck do we do next? The questions were a flurry of drum-beats in his mind. I know! Kingsley will take command of the situation and save us all! Good old Gerl is big and tough and he has farmed wild country all his life and he's probably been shot at hundreds of times and he probably thinks no more of a little bullet wound than he does of a mosquito…

The thought foundered as Nicklin belatedly became aware of Kingsley's condition. The big man was lying on his side and blood was literally pumping out of his mouth. His tongue was protruding and, although it was swathed in gouting crimson, Nicklin could see enough to tell him that it had been ploughed almost in half. He could also see that good old Gerl was not going to take command of any situation, and his feeling of helplessness increased.

"The rifle," Montane whispered. "Where's the rifle?"

"It's back in the house."

"You should have brought it." Montane's face was stern. "You were told to carry it everywhere."

Absurdly, Nicklin's fear was displaced by indignation. "You came out first! You and your pal should have–"

His words were lost in the sound of a new bullet strike. This time the slug, having glanced off a nearby rock, howled like a demented being as it flailed the warm air. Nicklin, who had never been close to a ricochet before, was appalled by its sheer ferocity.

"Go and get the rifle," Montane commanded, breaking the ensuing silence.

"But you can't stay up here," Nicklin said preparing to crawl away.

"I'll bring Gerl as fast as I – " Montane made an angrily impatient gesture. "For God's sake, man, get the rifle!"

Nicklin nodded and slithered down on to the bared expanse of fused earth. At the far side of it he rose to his feet and ran down the only clear path, bounding recklessly where there were flights of steps. In seconds he had reached level ground and was sprinting towards the colonnaded facade of the house.

Can this really be happening to me? he wondered, his mind distancing itself from bodily turmoil. Who's out there doing the shooting? Does somebody really want to kill us, or is it just a hunting trip gone wrong, a few drunks taking potshots at anything that moves for the pure bloody hell of it?

The thought reminded Nicklin that there had been no audible reports from the unseen weaponry. It meant that whoever was out there was using tail-burning ammunition – in effect, miniature rocket projectiles which in spite of dubious accuracy were favoured by some hunters because there was no muzzle blast to frighten off their prey.

Nicklin's mind seized on the new thought, somehow managing to find a glimmer of reassurance in it. The worst of the trouble might already be over if a couple of liquored-up hunters were responsible. Having had their bit of fun, they could easily have developed cold feet and retreated into the bush. The idea took on a life of its own, isolating Nicklin from normal time, expanding its solitary theme into a monotonous fugue. Oh yes, things were bad. There was no denying that things were bad – especially after what had happened to poor Gerl – but they weren't all that bad. After all, nobody had been killed. Gerl's face was in a hell of a mess, one had to admit that, but nobody had actually been killed…

A subjective aeon had passed by the time Nicklin lunged up the broad steps of the house, through the open doors and into the shade of the entrance hall. I probably won't even have to use this, he chanted to himself as he snatched the rifle out of the antique oak stand. Even in that moment of extremity the machine-lover in him appreciated the weapon's lightness.

He ran back outside to the sunshine, shaded his eyes and scanned the hillside, fully expecting to see Montane and Kingsley working their way down the slope. There was no sign of them, no movement anywhere. The scene had a slumbrous Sunday afternoon look about it, a Monet landscape quality which Nicklin found quite astonishing. Forcing his mind to deal with real time again, he was even more astonished to realise that only forty or fifty seconds could have passed since he began his dash from the hilltop.

That was a very brief period indeed, no time at all, for somebody who had to tend a wounded man, or for hunters moving tentatively under cover. He started running once more, seeming to swoop above the ground like a low-flying bird. The wilderness of the garden flicked past him, the contrived slope of the hill sank behind him – then he was back on the rubbled centre stage of the drama. Montane was kneeling beside Kingsley, helping him to wad a handkerchief into his mouth, but otherwise nothing had changed during Nicklin's absence. He bent as low as he could, scurried forward and threw himself into a prone position close to Montane.

"Well?" he breathed. "Well?"

"It's still going on."

"You're sure?"

"I saw dust." Montane gave Nicklin an expectant look, a look which ended his naive hopes of remaining little more than an observer.

"In that case … " He slid the rifle to the top of the low bank of earth and pebbles, then slowly raised his head behind the weapon, wondering how much he would know about the event if his brain were to be pulped by a miniature rocket. His life continued. The land lay silent beneath the high sun, a pulsing blaze of tall grass, brushwood and flat-topped trees, betraying no enemy presence.

He moved his head slightly, bringing his eyes into the focus zone of the rifle's smartscope, and at once the scene changed. There was no magnified but curtailed image, as would have been produced by a traditional lens system. Instead, as the scope analysed and edited a superhuman range of frequencies, projecting the result directly on to his retinas, Nicklin saw a glare-free representation of all that lay before him. In that strange, colour-adjusted universe – seen through bright blue cross-hairs – leafy matter was almost transparent. And clearly visible among gauzy stands of ghost-grass were two human figures, glowing with a neon pinkness. They were down on their stomachs, wriggling towards the hill with a snaky lateral motion, their breath feathering up like smoke signals. Not far behind them was a tree whose thick trunk, opaque to the smartscope, seemed to be emitting little smoke signals of its own.

The machine-lover, the game-player in Nicklin took immediate control of his mind and body. He moved the intersection of the cross-hairs on to the nearer of the crawling figures and squeezed the trigger. A breath of heat touched his forehead and the figure abruptly lost its human outlines, becoming a shapeless smear which was further blurred by swirls of luminous pink vapour. A second later, its arrival delayed by the intervening two hundred metres, came a dull, soggy thud-thud.

The knowledge that he had heard a man's internal organs and torso exploding would have appalled Nicklin had he been in a normal state of mind, but the game was on – and the cross-hairs were already centring themselves on the second figure. He squeezed the trigger again, and this time – amid the blotch of destruction – he actually glimpsed the target's ribcage snapping wide open like some spring-loaded mechanical device.

"Do you think you hit anything?" Montane had appeared at Nicklin's side, and his eyes – inefficient biological organs – were blindly scanning the innocent, sun-drenched scene.

"Oh, yes," Nicklin assured him. "I hit something."

Montane gave him a worried glance. "Maybe we should go down there and–"

"Wait!" Nicklin, still under the spell of the smartscope, had transferred all his attention to the vicinity of the tree. Flickers of pink brilliance informed him that the person who had been standing behind the trunk was now running away and attempting to keep the tree in between him and the dealer of death. But almost at once he was forced to detour around a shrub and, long hair streaming, came fully into Nicklin's inhuman view. The cross-hairs quartered his back on the instant and Nicklin's trigger finger made the appropriate response. The fleeing figure disintegrated, shedding an arm which spun off to one side like a broken propeller.

An unexpected blow on his shoulder startled Nicklin, recalling him to the real world.

"Why did you do that?" Montane's face was distorted, accusing. "There was no need for that."

"Why did I–!" Nicklin pointed at Gerl Kingsley, who had risen to his knees and was fingering a pronged whitish object which was emerging from the bloody hole in his cheek. "Ask him if there was any need for it!"

"For God's sake, the man was running away!"

"Yeah, to fetch the rest of his clan! What the fuck's the matter with you, Corey? Are you tired of living? Is it all getting too much for you?" The physical after-effects of Nicklin's sprint down the hill and back, seemingly held in abeyance to make him a steady gun platform, suddenly began to manifest themselves. His breathing became harsh and rapid, and a salty froth thickened in his mouth.

"You don't know what the man was going to do," Montane said, shaking his head.

"Perhaps he remembered he'd left the bath water running," Nicklin suggested, putting on his smile. Did I kill three men? Did I really and truly vaporise three men?

"You can joke? How can you joke?"

"It's easy," Nicklin said, determined to brook no more questions – from without or within. "All you have to do is remember that everybody is a piece of shit."

"We have to get Gerl to a doctor," Montane said, after a pause.

He turned away, but before doing so he gave Nicklin a prolonged look. His eyes betrayed no hatred, which was something Nicklin had expected and could have savoured. Instead, they showed simple contempt.

CHAPTER 13

The coming of autumn had brought many changes, not least in the appearance of the hill itself. Once a perfect ovoid, it had been deprived of its entire upper half, like a gargantuan boiled egg which somebody had chosen to cut open from the side. The lower half was hidden beneath slopes of scree made up of masonry, rubble, clay and jagged fragments of the fused-earth shell. Projecting from the shambles was the entire main cylinder of the Liscard, complete with the toy-like pinnace slung under the nose section. The hull of the mother ship, copiously stained with ochreous mineral deposits, was obscured in places by scaffolding, plastic weather screens and banks of ladders.

Digging through to the ship had taken much longer than Montane or anybody else connected with the project had originally anticipated. On breaking through the outer shell they had quickly penetrated about a metre of compacted fill – only to encounter a second shell, also of vitrified earth. Montane had curbed his natural impatience with the consoling thought that his ship had been superbly protected during its seventy years of incarceration, but even he had been taken aback by the discovery of a third carapace.

It appeared that the disconsolate Ves Fugaccia had been determined to make his young bride's tomb as inviolable as that of an ancient Egyptian princess. The third shell had proved to be the innermost – with nothing inside it but clean sand – but even then there were further obstacles to entering the ship. All three doors on the upper surface of the cylinder were found to have been welded along the whole length of the seams. Unwilling to have them mutilated by cutting gear, Montane had waited until the side doors of the cylinder were uncovered – and those, too, had been welded.

As Nicklin climbed towards the ship, in the pale lemon sunlight of autumn, he could see that one of the side doors was finally being breached. A valency cutter would have been too fierce and indiscriminate in its action, therefore old-fashioned oxy-acetylene was being employed in the hope of persuading the weld metal to come away without excessive damage to the adjacent structure. Showers of yellow sparks were occasionally visible through the screen of men and women who had stopped work to watch the operation.

The size of the group of spectators was a reminder to Nicklin of another change that had come about, one that he had never envisaged. Soon after the upper section of the Liscard had been uncovered, journalists had taken an interest in the proceedings and had begun visiting the site by light aircraft and helicopter. The resultant publicity had attracted quite a few enquiries from people who, swayed by Montane's message, either wanted to work with him or to reserve places for themselves and their families on the flight to New Eden. A fair proportion of them had been prepared, as Nicklin had done, to liquidate all their assets to buy into the project.

One of the earliest had been Scott Hepworth, a physicist from the Garamond Institute, who had arrived at the site one morning on foot, having walked all the way out from Altamura. Montane and Nicklin had been sitting on the front steps of the mansion arguing about the purchase of laundry equipment, when the plump man in his sixties – red-faced and sweating – had approached them…

"Mr Montane?" the stranger said. "My name is Scott Hepworth, I'm a top-class physicist, and I want to work for you."

"Everybody calls me Corey," Montane replied, with the wry smile – now familiar to Nicklin – which established him as the humblest of democrats. "And this is Jim Nicklin. Would you like to sit with us for a while?"

"Thank you." Hepworth nodded to Nicklin as he seated himself, took out a handkerchief and began to wipe his neck. "I think I'm a bit too old for hiking around in this heat."

Montane looked sympathetic. "Would you like some tea?"

"Tea!" A look of distaste appeared on Hepworth's roundly padded face. "The kind of thirst I have can only be quenched with gin and tonic. Any lesser brew would be an insult to the taste buds which have served me loyally for more years than I care to remember. I don't suppose you–"

"I don't believe in strong liquor," Montane said.

Nicklin, who had been prepared to dislike the newcomer, largely because of his overbearing approach, decided not to be too hasty. Many another man – the former Jim Nicklin included – when courting a prospective employer would have pretended to love tea, but Hepworth had come straight out and said he was a boozer. Terrible interview technique, but it indicated that he was his own man.

Discreetly studying Hepworth, Nicklin was interested to note that he did not look anything like a senior scientist at a university which was famed for conservatism and stuffiness. His lightweight suit was cheap and ill-fitting. It was not a case of it being "well-worn but of good cut" – the hackneyed old novelistic phrase which showed that a character had the right sort of background but had "fallen into straitened circumstances". This suit had started out shoddy, and had not improved with time. It was complemented by a rumpled shirt and comprehensively scuffed sandals.

Scott Hepworth was something of an oddball, Nicklin decided, and as such ought to be encouraged. "I've got some gin in my room," he said, rising to his feet. "Ice and a slice of lime?"

"All the trimmings, my boy," Hepworth said, looking deeply grateful.

Rewarded by a disapproving glance from Montane, Nicklin hurried to his room to prepare the drink. He was not particularly fond of gin, having bought it because it was easier to transport from town than beer, but he mixed himself a large one as well, knowing that it would further annoy Montane. He returned to the front steps in time to hear Montane ask the visitor why he had quit the Garamond.

"It wasn't through choice," Hepworth replied easily. "I got thrown out." As if there might be some doubt about his meaning, he added, "I was forcibly ejected. Given the boot."

Now positively warming to the man, Nicklin winked as he handed him a dewed glass. Hepworth took it eagerly, but, instead of drinking immediately, held it under his nose and breathed deeply of the aroma.

"May I ask why the university saw fit to dispense with your services?" Montane said, the stilted wording and coolness of their delivery showing that he was far from being impressed by Hepworth.

"I had an argument – some might call it a stand-up fight – with the head of my department." Hepworth smiled into his drink as though enjoying pleasant memories. "He's been trying to show me the door for quite a long time, and I finally gave him a good excuse."

"What was the argument about?"

"I stumbled on some evidence that Orbitsville has jumped into a different universe, but Professor Phair disagreed with my interpretation."

"A different universe!" Montane stiffened visibly. "Is this something new? We've already been told that the whole globe has moved."

"Yes, but not so far." Hepworth took an appreciative sip of his gin before going on. "I'm not talking about some kind of warp-transfer into a distant part of the familiar old continuum. I'm saying we jumped into an entirely different continuum – an anti-matter universe where time is reversed."

"But – " Montane glanced helplessly at Nicklin.

"It's a beautiful idea," Nicklin said, vaguely aware of once having discussed a similar notion with Zindee White, "but what about these starships they're starting to use on interportal runs? Shouldn't the ions they scoop up just blow them apart?"

Hepworth shook his head. "I see you've already done some thinking on this, but in your scenario the ships wouldn't be able to operate at all. If they were familiar hadronic-matter starships which had been popped into an anti-matter universe, their scoop fields would repel the surrounding anti-matter particles. What I'm saying is that our beloved Orbitsville and everything on it – present company included – has been flipped over in the process of being translated into a different universe. We have also been hurled about forty billion years backwards in time, but leave that aside for the moment. My main point is that we are composed of anti-matter now; our ships are composed of anti-matter now – so everything works exactly as before."

"In that case," Nicklin said, fighting off bemusement, "there wouldn't be any way to detect the change."

"That's what I would probably have said – before last week." Hepworth drank again, more deeply this time. "For the last three years, on and off, I've been trying to design an ultra-sensitive flow meter for use in liquid oxygen. It had to have a self-contained source of electrons, so I decided to use radioactive cobalt. There were all kinds of design complications, which I won't go into because they're so boring, but cobalt 60 was great for the job, because the nuclei spray more electrons out of their south poles than from their north pole's.

"Normally they cancel each other out, but if you cool the stuff right down you can use magnetism to align a lot of the atoms – and you get a blob of metal which shoots more electrons out of one end than out of the other."

Hepworth paused, eyes alert and twinkling, to scan his listeners' faces. "Does any of this ring a bell? A school bell, perhaps."

Nicklin, anxious to make Montane feel dim by comparison, ransacked his memory. "Wasn't there a famous experiment with cobalt 60…back on Earth … three or four hundred years ago?"

"There was indeed!" Hepworth said. "The one which proved that the universe is not symmetrical! Perhaps that gives you an inkling of how I felt last week when I hauled my flow meter out of a locker, where it had languished for the best part of a year, and discovered that my little electron beam was going the wrong way!"

Nicklin's mind balked at the implications of what he had just been told. "Perhaps you set the equipment up wrong."

"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 impossible 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.

More than ever, to Nicklin's eyes, the ship looked quite incapable of flight, but he felt for it the special passion that some men and women can develop for a machine which was designed for a difficult task and has the potential to carry it out superbly.

The love affair had begun inauspiciously.

When the excavators bared the twin drive cylinders, upon which the ship had rested during its long incarceration, they discovered that Ves Fugaccia had made a mistake of the kind to which obsessive monument builders had been prone throughout history. In his determination to make his wife's tomb impregnable he had swathed it with layer after massive layer of defences – and the combined weight of them had split the ferro-concrete foundation upon which the great edifice was constructed. In addition, somebody had forgotten to seal off the ventilators, purging ducts and drain tubes which had been opened for the ship's overhaul in land-dock.

The apertures were comparatively tiny, almost invisible in the expanses of impermeable pressure hull, but they had been like six-lane highways for the myriads of fungal, crawling and slithering life-forms which existed in Orbitsville's fertile soil.

When Montane's workers opened the doors leading from the central cylinder into the engine cylinders they entered a dank and unwholesome netherworld. It was a jungle of tendrils and threads emanating from huge, pallid, fronded growths – some of them oozing in decay – among which there lived vast populations of things which moved on many legs or no legs at all. For seventy years they had fought among themselves for control of that dark microcosm, squirming armies of them disputing the principality of a fuse box or the kingdom of a transformer housing. They were united, however, in their dislike for the giant invaders from the world of light, and they demonstrated the fact with every means at their disposal.

It took many days for the humans to reclaim and fumigate the drive cylinders, and much longer for the fetid smell – a hint of which Nicklin had picked up when he first entered the ship – to be totally eliminated. And, inevitably, the machinery and equipment in the cylinders had suffered during the alien occupation. Some of the damage had been caused by dampness, but anything soft – insulation, seal materials, vibration mounts and the like – had disappeared into a multitude of tiny digestive systems.

Corey Montane had been appalled by visions of the consequent delay and expense; but the machine-lover in Nicklin had commiserated with the ship itself. I'll make you well again, he had promised it, conceiving an alluring plan to comprehend every scientific and engineering principle, to master every system, to learn every part number, and use the knowledge to restore the patient, uncomplaining entity that was the ship to a state of good health.

It was a grandiose project, one which very few would have undertaken, but it had kept him sane during the heartbreaking year on the road. He had built up a library of manufacturers' manuals in book, disk and tape form, and had eased the frustration of each new delay in the journey by telephoning orders for components which could be installed on the move. He had been aided in diverse ways by Scott Hepworth, who had imparted relevant knowledge in exchange for gin, and by Gerl Kingsley, who had thrown his muscular power into physically demanding tasks that a man could not accomplish on his own.

Now that the Tara was safely docked on the rim of Portal One the main restoration work was beginning. Nicklin and Hepworth had made a joint decision that every aspect of it could be handled by existing mission personnel, working under their guidance. Montane had been happy to accept that arrangement because it was likely to be the most economical. Moving the ship to Beachhead – an undertaking which had involved building temporary bridges in some places – had cost a fortune, and his financial resources were not unlimited.

The Tara was classed as an exploration vessel, and therefore had not been designed to carry large numbers of passengers, but it had the same major dimensions as all other ships of the 5M general type. The ubiquitous 5M label showed that the Tara's three cylinders had an external radius of five metres – and therefore would accept a vast range of standardised off-the-shelf components, including diaphragm decks. At present it had only eight such decks – the minimum legal requirement for stiffening the central cylinder – but the plan was to fit many more at a spacing of two metres, thus making twenty-five available for passenger accommodation.

On that basis, it seemed that the maximum complement for the New Eden flight would be in the region of "two hundred souls", as Montane had put it. Nicklin – for whom it was all a kind of a game, an academic exercise – had suggested that, for straightforward biological considerations, all but a few of the souls should be housed in the bodies of nubile women. Montane had given him the expected lecture on the need to preserve moral standards, making it clear that he wanted to sign up only young married couples with a proven record of church-going.

He had reverted to being secretive about his corporate finances, but Nicklin had picked up enough clues to let him know that the preconditions imposed by Montane were limiting the mission's revenue. There were quite a few eccentric individuals around who were prepared to hand over large sums to secure places on the much-publicised expedition, but only a small minority of them fully matched Montane's stringent requirements.

The argument had reminded Nicklin of a basic fact which at times could slip his memory – that Corey Montane was an irrational being. He was not a religious maniac in the usual sense of the term; he was a certifiably insane person whose delusions simply happened to have a religious theme. His Ordinary Joe dress and general demeanour made it possible to forget about the coffin-cum-teatable, about the consultations with the corpse that lay within, about the deeply seated megalomania, about the lunatic goal towards which his entire life was directed.

It was difficult to imagine anything more ludicrous than the latest revelation – that Montane seemed to visualise the first landing on an unknown planet as something akin to an exclusive Youth For Christ adventure holiday, with air-beds and leaflets on how to erect the perimeter fence.

It was easy to ridicule the preacher and his crazy ideas, but crazy ideas sometimes had a way of translating themselves into reality. The massive, ungainly structure beyond the office window was proof of that. As he watched the snow sifting down over the mountainous triple hull, Nicklin experienced a strange, cool moment of unease. It was preposterous, he knew, but was a day going to come – was it really going to come? – when that grimy feature of the landscape would slide down into the portal and, like a seal entering water, be transformed by its new environment into a creature of confidence and surging power? Was it really going to bore through the blackness towards dim and irrelevant points of light? And might people die as a result? He was committed to restoring the Tara to its former magnificence, but purely as a machine – a fascinating toy – and ideally it would then be placed on static display, in a drowsy museum of technology, so that visitors could wonder at the polish and perfection of every component. It was oddly disconcerting to think that the results of his hobbyist enthusiasm and toil might end up in a decaying orbit around some remote planet, or – just as likely – drifting into infinity.

I'll tell you something for nothing, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he thought. If she ever does head off into the wild black yonder, yours truly will be at home in his favourite armchair, feet up and glass in hand, watching the big event on television…

"When is this man going to get here?" Hepworth demanded, coming to stand at the window.

"You should ask Corey that." Nicklin glanced sideways, and as always his eyes triangulated of their own accord on the enormous blackhead at the side of Hepworth's nose.

"I wouldn't like to interrupt him, just to ask what's the hold-up with our distinguished visitor."

"The weather is probably delaying him a little," Montane said unconcernedly, without looking up from his desk. "Try to be a little more patient."

"Yes, and try not to fidget as much – you're like a pair of infants," added Ropp Voorsanger, Montane's accountant and legal adviser, from his position at the next desk. Voorsanger was a narrow-headed, narrow-faced man who was about thirty and looked twenty years older. He was also a lay preacher, which probably had something to do with his recruitment to the mission, but he was less tolerant and more severe than Montane in his manner. He had no time at all for either Nicklin or Hepworth.

"I do beg your pardon," Hepworth said to Voorsanger, his plump features showing indignation, "but there is work waiting for me in the ship. Real work! Not the sort of unproductive crap that you occupy your time with."

Nicklin suppressed a smile, knowing that the real work Hepworth had in mind was his hourly tot of gin. His original hope that the untidy and verbose physicist would make a good colleague had been realised. In spite of the heavy drinking, Hepworth never became muzzy or unwilling to pull his weight, and Nicklin made a point of backing him in every dispute.

"That's right, Corey," he said. "Scott and I have things to do, and–"

"And I'm tired of sending out search parties for you," Montane cut in. "No, I want the both of you here when Renard arrives. I want you to hear what he has to say, so just try to relax." He raised his head and looked significantly at Hepworth. "Why don't you have a cup of tea?"

Nicklin would have been interested in Hepworth's reply, but at that moment he saw a coloured blur moving behind the translucent screen which separated Montane's office from the next. It meant that Danea Farthing had returned from one of the field trips which took her all over the PI area, and which kept her away from Beachhead for weeks at a time. Trying not to be obtrusive, he walked quickly to the connecting door and slid it open.

"Well?" Danea paused in the act of taking off her snow-dappled cape. She was wearing a belted suit of cobalt blue shot silk which clung expensively to her slim-hipped figure. Her heavy-lidded eyes regarded him with minimal interest, as though he were a piece of furniture.

"Very well, thanks." he said. "And you?"

"I didn't mean that – what do you want?"

"Who says I have to want anything?" I want you, you cold bitch, because you're the best-looking woman in the universe – and you owe me! "I just thought I'd say hello, and welcome you back to the office."

"Very kind of you." Danea stood quite still, making no move to hang up her cape, obviously waiting for him to leave.

"Have you come straight from the airport?"

"Yes."

"Long flight?"

"Yes."

"How about relaxing with a couple of drinks and a good lunch?"

"I've already arranged to do that, with a friend," Danea said, still not moving. "He's calling for me at noon."

"That's nice." Montane composed a rueful smile. "I just thought I'd ask."

Danea made no response, so he nodded to her and backed out of the small office, sliding the door shut between them. As soon as he was screened from her sight he allowed his sad little smile to develop into the full happy hayseed grin. A casual observer would probably have said that he had been well and truly frozen out, but he had picked up two signs of what he regarded as encouragement. During the exchange Danea had stood with the cape held to her throat, unconsciously – and revealingly – shielding her body from him. That was a Freudian give-away if ever he had seen one. Also, there had been no need, no need at all, for her to disclose that her lunch appointment was with another man. You're getting there, Jim lad, Nicklin told himself with calm satisfaction. It's taking a hell of a long time-but you'll get to her one fine day-and when you do…

"That didn't last long," Hepworth said cheerfully when Nicklin rejoined him at the window. "Take the advice of an old hand at this kind of thing and give up gracefully – it's obvious the woman wants nothing to do with you."

"You don't understand," Nicklin replied, not pleased by the comment. How could anybody with a blackhead the size of a dinner plate claim to be an expert on women?

"Did you ask her out to lunch?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"She already has a date. With a man."

Hepworth nodded. "Probably Rowan Meeks. She met him through the books."

Nicklin would have preferred not to talk about Danea, but the cryptic reference had aroused his curiosity. "What books?"

"The talking variety. Danea spends a lot of her spare time putting books on tape for blind people. Apparently she has a very good voice for that sort of thing." Hepworth paused and gave Nicklin a quizzical look. "Didn't you know?"

"How would I know?"

"There you have it!" Hepworth said triumphantly. "You'll never get anywhere with a woman unless you're interested in her as a complete human being. The trouble with you, Jim, is that you're interested in only one thing – and it shows."

I wasn't always like that, and where did it…? Nicklin interrupted the thought, angry at being required to defend himself. If this keeps up there's going to be talk about the care and feeding of blackheads.

"I had an idea that blind people used reading machines," he said, offering a conversational lure which was likely to inspire one of Hepworth's impromptu lecturettes.

"Voice synthesisers are still no good for literary readings, and, the way things have turned out, it looks as if they never will be," Hepworth said, happily seizing on the topic. "It's the old Orbitsville syndrome again. It's more than three hundred years since the first synthesisers were tried out, and you'd think they should have been perfected in all that time. But … but…where's the motive? The great machine of science and technology has slipped a few cogs and will go on slipping cogs because we allow it to do so.

"Why? Because, on a crowded, polluted and thoroughly kneed-in-the-groin Earth, science and technology promised that one day everything would be put to rights, that one day there would be a perfect world for everybody to enjoy. That's what attracted the funding, that's where the motivation came from. But now the promise has been forgotten – both by the promisers and the promisees. We've got our perfect world. We've got millions of them, in fact.

"Orbitsville handed them to us on the proverbial plate, so scientific and technological progress has pretty well come to a halt. Research is only carried out by 'eggheads' who have a personal interest in it, and, even when they do come up with something that has a lot of practical potential, it can't be developed because the kind of concentrated industrial base they need simply isn't there.

"There are quite a few people," Hepworth added portentously, "who would argue that Orbitsville hasn't done the human race any favours."

"You're beginning to sound like you-know-who," Nicklin said, nodding towards Montane, who was still busy at his desk.

"You-know-who is doing some of the right things for all the wrong reasons."

Nicklin was surprised. "You mean you want to get away from Orbitsville before the Devil presses the button?"

"No, I just want to get away from Orbitsville," Hepworth said placidly. "I want to see what an anti-matter planet looks like. Nobody but Corey has any intention of going to one, so I'm going to go with him."

"But…" Nicklin shook his head in disbelief. "You're saying that if the Tara actually manages to take off you'll be on board?"

"Jim, why do you think I joined this preposterous outfit? It wasn't for the miserable stipend that Corey doles out to us, I can assure you. That barely covers my tonic water, let alone the necessary. The only reason I'm here is that, as a paid-up member of the mission, I'm guaranteed a place on the ship when the big day comes."

A pained expression appeared on Hepworth's face. "I wish I hadn't mentioned drink. My thirst pangs were quite bearable until I mentioned the stuff."

"Too bad," Nicklin said abstractedly, still assimilating the news that Hepworth actually planned to journey off into nothingness on the Tara. He had tacitly assumed that, like him, the physicist was only hitching a ride on the Nowhere Express, standing on the footplate and preparing to jump clear in his own good time. Also, the subject of the anti-matter universe had cropped up again. To Nicklin, all the talk of Region One and Region Two universes, and of reversed time and electron-spraying isotopes, was merely a game of words – but it was transpiring that, to Hepworth, all these things were as real as his next glass of gin or the whistle trees which on a windy day mourned the passing of summer.

Not for the first time, Nicklin found himself wondering about the ingredient which perhaps had been left out of his mental make-up. For him reality had always comprised those things which directly affected his daily life and immediate well-being. Everything else was relegated to quasi-reality or total abstraction; thus he had always felt himself to be at a comfortable remove from those strange individuals who could dedicate their lives to shining principles or die for great causes. Life was complicated enough and tricky enough as it was. On a lesser scale, it had always been a matter for self-congratulation that he was immune to mysticism and superstition and religion. Scott Hepworth shared the same materialistic outlook, and yet here he was, ready to gamble his life on a desperate plunge into black emptiness, merely because he was curious about the electrical charge of sub-atomic particles. As a motive for risking death, there was not much to choose between it and Montane's bizarre fantasising.

"Explain just one thing to me, Scott," he said. "What difference does it make to anybody if it turns out that–"

He broke off as the outer door of the office slid open to admit a man and a woman. Nicklin at once recognised Rick Renard, whose ostentatious style of dress made him a focal point for the drab room, but although the woman's face seemed familiar there was a delay before he remembered having seen her on television. It had been in the Whites' living room, all that time ago, on the day Orbitsville was supposed to have made its Big Jump. That had also been the day Corey Montane and his entourage had come to town and Nicklin's private world had made a Big Jump of its own. In his mind he could hear Zindee White's voice: Her name is Silvia London.

"I've always wanted to be in London," he said under his breath, his eyes taking in the woman's full-bosomed figure, the voluptuous lines of which alerted his sexual instincts in spite of being modestly swathed in a charcoal grey coatdress. His amatory bouts with Christine McGivern were becoming too perfunctory and he had a hankering for something fresh.

Hepworth leaned closer to him. "What was that?"

"I think our presence is required, don't you?" Nicklin moved towards Montane and Voorsanger to become part of the little group which welcomed the visitors. Renard introduced the woman as his wife, a fact which in Nicklin's eyes added a certain spice to her appeal.

"I'm sorry we're late," Renard went on when the formalities had been completed, smiling in the oddly challenging manner which Nicklin had noticed before, even via television, and which rendered the apology meaningless.

Montane nodded. "The weather…"

"No, the snow didn't hold me back at all, but when I got here I couldn't resist having a stroll around the outside of your ship," Renard said. "It doesn't look much, does it?"

"It looks good to me," Nicklin said quickly.

Renard smiled directly at him. "I doubt if you're qualified to adjudicate."

"Adjudication runs in my family," Nicklin replied. "Why, I learned to adjudicate at my mother's knee." And I adjudicate that you need a good kick up the balls, you arrogant bastard. He smiled in return as he projected the thought with all the vehemence he could muster, but the only outcome of the telepathic attempt was a flicker of satisfaction in Renard's blue eyes.

"Why don't we sit down and talk in comfort?" Montane cut in. He gestured towards the cheap table, used mainly for in-office meals, which was the only piece of furniture at all suitable for a conference.

"Why not?" The amusement in Renard's eyes grew more evident as the chair he had selected emitted a metallic protest when he sat down.

For one instant Nicklin wished that Montane had not been so miserly over renting office space and equipment. Then it came to him that he was being lured into a personality duel. Renard was a man for whom every meeting had to be a skirmish, and every relationship a contest. I'm not playing that game, he thought, his antagonism towards Renard fading. He glanced at Renard's wife and caught a hint of what seemed to be resignation and embarrassment in her expression. She doesn't think much of it as a spectator sport, either – perhaps she's in the market for a little diversion. He moved quickly to ensure getting a seat next to Silvia at the table.

"I have another appointment this morning, so let's get on with what we have to do," Renard said to Montane. "I'm ready to give you four million monits for the ship as she sits. Your team can walk out and mine will walk in, and you won't even have to turn off the lights."

"Rick, I have already told you that the Tara isn't for sale," Montane replied. He was impressively cool, Nicklin thought, for someone who was refusing to become a millionaire.

"If you're planning to hold on, waiting for the price to go up, you're making a mistake." Renard was equally emotionless. "An interstellar ramjet isn't really suitable for interportal work, so the offer is a generous one."

"Perhaps, but I'm not interested."

"It won't be all that long before the first of the new short-range jobs start coming off the line – and when that happens the value of your old tub will drop."

Montane sighed. "I hate to appear discourteous, Rick, but you're not the only person whose diary is full – so let's not waste each other's time. The Tara is not for sale. All right?"

"I can only offer you the jam – I can't force you to eat it." Unperturbed, Renard leaned back in his seat, drawing more creaks from it.

"Now that we've got my dietary preferences out of the way," Montane said drily, "what was the other proposal you had in mind?"

"How many target stars have you selected?"

"Eight within a thousand light years."

"Good prospects?"

"I'm assured that they are very good." Montane glanced expectantly at Scott Hepworth.

"Omnirad analyses from the Garamond Institute show that three of them have an eighty per cent probability of yielding an Earth-type planet," Hepworth said in his grandest tones.

Renard raised his eyebrows, looking unexpectedly boyish in his surprise. "That's better than you would have got back home, isn't it?"

Nicklin, who had been taking heady draughts of Silvia's perfume, renewed his interest in the conversation as he realised that "back home" meant a different universe. The use of the phrase showed that Renard, hard-headed and materialistic as they come, had accepted the Big Jump hypothesis. Furthermore, he evidently saw the ethereal never-never land of the astrophysicists and cosmologists as a place where it was possible to turn a profit.

"It's a lot better," Hepworth said. "Worlds for the picking, you might say."

Renard addressed Montane again. "We can still do a deal. Let me put two or three scientific people on the ship, plus a spare flight crew to bring it back when you have finished with it – and you can still have the four million."

Corey, this is the proverbial offer you can't refuse, Nicklin thought, and almost winced as he saw Montane's patient smile of rejection.

"My conscience wouldn't allow me to go along with that," Montane said. "It would mean denying places to some of my own people. You must realise that I'm answerable to God in this matter."

"All right, I tell you what we'll do," Renard said. "When the ship gets back here I'll lease it out to you for a second round trip. That way you'll be saving two lots of souls."

Montane's smile became more patient, more condescending. "The Tara will make one flight, and only one flight. There will be no time for another. No second chance."

"Who told you that?"

"God."

"God?" The sheer incredulity in Renard's voice betrayed the first tiny crack in his composure.

Nicklin turned away in amusement – Renard probably ate hard-nosed business tycoons for breakfast, but he had never dealt with a deranged preacher whose chief adviser was a dead woman in a box. He discovered that Renard's wife was looking directly at him.

"Could I trouble someone for a hot drink?" she whispered.

"Coffee?"

"I could whip up some tea," he replied, also whispering, pleased by the unexpected opportunity to separate her from the others.

"Tea would be fine."

"I'll join you in a cup." He flicked a glance towards Montane and Renard as he left his seat. "This could go on a long time."

"I was beginning to get that impression." She stood up and walked with him to the cupboard at the far end of the office where the meagre refreshment supply was kept. This is good, Nicklin told himself. Things are going well, but Scott was right in what he said. The trick is not to be too direct. Show an interest in the woman as a rounded human being (and this one certainly qualifies on that score). Ask her about her beliefs and hobbies and dreams, and all that stuff…

As he was spooning tea out of Montane's antique caddy he tilted his head, frowned a little and said, "I think I've seen you on television. Was your name London?"

"It still is," Silvia replied. "I kept my previous name when I married Rick."

"I thought I was right."

"Perhaps you picked up some of the transmissions from Portal 36 on the day when … when everything changed." Something seemed to happen in Silvia's brown eyes as she spoke. It was a swift and fleeting change, the wind brushing the surface of a deep lake, but it was enough to persuade Nicklin that the events at Portal 36 should be left alone.

"Perhaps," he said, "but I'm thinking more of … Was it called the Anima Mundi Foundation?"

"Yes!" Silvia's face was animated, suddenly made younger. "Are you interested in Karal London's work?"

Nicklin spurred his memory and it did not fail him. "On the survival of the personality after physical death? Fascinating subject."

"It's the most important subject of all. Have you attended any of the Foundation's seminars or seen any of the publications?"

"No – I've been out in the sticks for the last year or so, and I didn't have much chance to…"

Silvia touched his arm. "But you're familiar with the basics of mindon science?"

"I never quite got to grips with it," Nicklin said cautiously as he set out two cups.

"But it's all so beautifully simple!" Silvia continued, still keeping her voice low, but speaking with a fervent rapidity. "The mindon is a class of particle which was postulated a long time ago, but its existence wasn't finally proved until last year. Thanks to Karal's work we now know that mind is a universal property of matter, and that even elementary particles are endowed with it to some degree…"

Nicklin went on preparing the tea, nodding occasionally and awaiting his chance to divert Silvia on to more personal matters. Having led off with claims he had trouble accepting, she progressed – in tones of utter conviction – to something called "mental space" in which there existed mindon duplicates of human brains.

He found himself growing bemused under the bombardment of mystical ideas expressed in the jargon of nuclear physics, and still the right conversational opening failed to arrive. What in hell is going wrong with everybody today? he wondered as he filled the two cups. Ami the only person in the whole world who is still anchored in reality?

"…shows that a personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and therefore it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain's complex physical organisation in order to develop." Silvia eyed him intently. "You can see that, can't you?"

Nicklin moved her cup a centimetre closer to her. "Do you take milk?"

She ignored the tea, her gaze hunting across his face. "I really would like to hear what you think."

"I think the whole concept is very impressive," he said. His original dreams of hotel bedroom afternoons with Silvia were fading by the minute, and a disagreement at this stage could put paid to them altogether.

"Impressive." Silvia nodded to show her awareness of the word's ambivalence. "All right – what bothers you most?"

Amazed by how far the conversation had deviated from the one he had visualised, Nicklin said, "I guess it was all that stuff about how a personality is created. If, as you say, all matter has a mindon component – and all that's needed for a personality to be conjured into existence is physical complexity – then you don't need to bring in any biological–"

"Jim!" Corey Montane's intrusive voice was thorned with impatience. "Bring your tea to the table, will you?"

Nicklin put on a rueful expression. "I have to slide over there and do some work – but I'd like to go on with this."

"I'd like that, too," Silvia said. "We can talk some more after the meeting."

He smiled, keeping his eyes on hers. "That's not what I meant."

Her expression remained unchanged for a moment, and he realised she had plunged so deeply into her special realm of metaphysics that she was having genuine difficulty in getting back to the mundane world. But when it came her reaction was unequivocal.

"You said you had to slide back to your work – so why don't you do that?" She turned away from him to pick up her teacup.

Nicklin was unwilling to be dismissed so easily. "I was only checking. No harm in checking."

"Do people like you never get bored with themselves?"

"I could ask you the same question," he said pleasantly as he moved away to rejoin the group at the table. He found that events had moved quickly during his absence. Renard had apparently shelved the idea of acquiring the Tara, and had assumed the role of broker for every type of component.

"I understand from Corey," he said, "that you're in the market for a couple of dozen 5M decks."

"That's about right." Nicklin was careful not to show any enthusiasm. "We're thinking of putting in perhaps another twenty-five."

"I've got them."

"What price?"

"Oh…" Renard closed his eyes for a second, pretending to make a calculation. "Let's say thirty-thousand. Monits, that is – not orbs."

Nicklin ignored the implication that he was a country boy and unaccustomed to global currency. The price was much less than he had expected from a business shark like Renard, and he began to look around for a catch.

"What condition are they in?"

"Unused," Renard said comfortably. "They're pretty old, of course, but unused. Most of them are still in the plastic skins."

Nicklin saw Montane and Voorsanger exchange congratulatory glances, and his conviction that something was wrong with Renard's offer grew stronger. He went over the figures again in his mind, and suddenly he understood the cat-and-mouse game that Renard was playing. The bastard! he thought with reluctant admiration. He's even more of a shit than I gave him credit for!

"Well, Rick," Montane said, "on that basis I believe we can go ahead and–"

"Before you go too far," Nicklin cut in, "ask Mr Renard if thirty-thousand is the unit price."

Montane frowned at him, then gaped at Renard. "But that would make it … three-quarters of a million for twenty-five old decks!"

"We're in what's commonly referred to as a sellers' market," Renard said, his lips twitching in amusement.

Nicklin smiled to let Renard see that he too had enjoyed the bit of fun. "All the same, Rick," he said, "don't you think it's going just a teensy-weensy bit far to try selling old decks for three times the price of new ones?"

"Their value has escalated. Most of the new decks disappeared when the exterior stockyards vanished, and my associates have bought up any that were left sitting around the land-docks."

"In that case I'll use older ones," Montane said doggedly, staring down at his desk.

"We've got most of those, too." Renard slowly shook his head, as though in commiseration. "Interportal trade must be restored as quickly as possible, you see, for the good of society. We have to get those ships out there as soon as we can, even if it means taking short-cuts in the manufacture."

"In that case," Montane said, rising to his feet, "I'll use the old decks you rejected or missed. I'll dig them out of the ground in scrapyards, if necessary, and I'll glue them together with spit." His voice had developed a kind of magisterial power. "No human agency will stand in the way of the Tara being completed – and I promise you that in the name of God."

"You'll need all the help He can give you to get flight certification," Renard murmured.

Montane stared at him in loathing. "Why don't you–? Why don't you–?"

"Allow me," Nicklin came in, turning to give Renard a contented smile. "Corey is a man of the cloth and that makes it difficult for him to express certain sentiments – but it's my guess that he wants you to fuck off."

The mocking gleam in Renard's eyes abruptly faded and he turned back to Montane. "You should choose your colleagues with a bit more discretion."

"My colleague's language has grown increasingly vile ever since I met him," Montane said. "It's something I usually deplore – but not on this occasion."

"I've wasted too much time here as it is," Renard said, getting up from his seat. He beckoned to Silvia, who had already set her teacup down, and they walked in silence to the exit.

Nicklin continued gazing wistfully after Silvia until the door had slid shut behind her. "It's the wife I always feel sorry for."

"I noticed you feeling sorry for her," Hepworth said in jovial reproof. "You were trying it on, weren't you?"

"That woman deserves something better out of life than Rick Renard."

Hepworth chuckled. "And obviously you didn't measure up."

"Do we have to put up with this kind of talk?" Voorsanger said to Montane, his elongated face registering disgust. "It seems to me that things have taken a bad enough turn without our having to listen to smut."

"Ropp is quite right." Montane directed a sombre stare at Nicklin and Hepworth.

"I thought we dealt with Mr Renard rather well," Nicklin said. "You in particular, chief. I was quite proud of you at the end." He was still speaking in a flippant manner, and it was only after the words were out that he realised he actually meant them. Montane, crazy or not, had stood up for his principles and beliefs against a rich and powerful opponent.

"The fact is," Montane replied quietly, "that completing the Tara is going to take a lot longer than we expected – and I have a feeling there may not be enough time."

CHAPTER 15

Obtaining a new job had proved much easier than Nicklin had expected.

Yip & Wrigley was a new company which had been formed to enter the booming market in medium-sized interportal freighters, and – unusually – had decided to locate its manufacturing facility in Beachhead. Traditionally, Orbitsville had relied on Earth for spaceship production. It had only a few yards with manufacturing capability, and they were sited in Dalton, the great industrial conurbation at P12. Beachhead had always been a spaceport, with limited repair and maintenance facilities, and as a consequence had no pool of the kind of expertise Yip & Wrigley needed.

Tommy Yip, the company's president, had at first been concerned over Nicklin's lack of formal engineering qualifications, and then – as a fellow machine-lover – had been impressed by his practical skills and computer-like ability to carry hundreds of component specifications in his memory. As a consequence, Nicklin had been offered a senior position in engineering management – title and responsibilities yet to be defined – and was expected to take it up as soon as he had disengaged from Corey Montane.

He had mixed feelings as he entered the portal complex on foot and saw the massive triple hull of the Tara. It was a fresh, breezy morning in early spring and the ship's skin, now immaculate, was gleaming with the coppery lustre which was peculiar to electron-sated metals. The rakish, crimson-and-white shape of the pinnace was in place underneath the nose section, and the Tara gave the impression of being ready to go among the stars.

It was difficult for Nicklin to accept that more than two years had passed since the ship, moribund and begrimed, had been hauled into place at the rim of the portal. He had laboured unceasingly during that time, refusing even the shortest vacations, surrendering much that made up normal existence to his private obsession. In many respects he had been like a general waging a bitter campaign against enemies who continually changed their positions and tactics.

Major structural elements – such as diaphragm decks and bulkheads – had been only part of his remit. There had been the thousands of minor components, ranging from stair treads and handrails to storage racks; and the multitudinous systems relating to everything from ventilation to waste disposal. A starship was a machine for keeping hundreds of human beings alive in a hostile environment, and the complexities of that machine were almost endless.

At every stage of procuration the work had been hampered by the unseen forces of Renard's consortium. At the blackest times Nicklin had felt a paranoid certainty that Renard was personally and vindictively blocking his progress, but on the whole he had accepted that the Tara was an incidental casualty of the consortium's activities. The real opponent was the immutable law of supply and demand, with some backing from an ancient foe which had been known to engineers since the dawn of technology, and which they had dubbed Murphy's Law.

Nicklin had often been obliged to accept parts intended for a slightly different mark of vessel, and which should have been very easily adapted. But in many cases, as though malign and leering gremlins were responsible, the chance shaping of a flange or the placing of a single stud had been all that was required to trigger vast series of time-consuming modifications. The mission's little army of workers had at times been required to operate a three-shift system, and under Nicklin's close supervision had developed an impressive range of manual skills.

Scott Hepworth had faced parallel difficulties with the Tara's drive machinery, on occasion having to employ specialists from outside, but in the end – after more than two years of dedicated effort – the work had been completed.

The bird is ready to fly, Nicklin thought as he walked in the prism of shade cast by his sun-hat. The only trouble is that nobody is going to open the cage.

Reaching the main ramp leading up to the ship's passenger cylinder, he paused as he saw Lan Huertas descending to ground level. Huertas, the mission's solitary black man, had been the first person to speak to Nicklin on the fateful day of his induction in Orangefield. He was also the one, making no bones about his personal dislike, who now spoke to him least.

"Good morning, my old buddy, my old chum!" Nicklin spoke cheerfully, following his policy of irritating Huertas with a show of effusive friendliness. "How are you this morning?"

"Okay," Huertas muttered, attempting to slide past.

"I'm really glad to hear that," Nicklin said. "Tell me, my old cobber, is Corey in the ship?"

"Hotel."

"I'm indebted to you." Nicklin gave Huertas a comradely punch on the shoulder and turned away in the direction of the Firstfooter Hotel. The Firstfooter, having depended almost entirely on spaceport traffic, had been in serious financial trouble since the Big Jump, and its management had been happy to give special concessions on the small amount of business Montane brought its way. It accommodated a few families of his pilgrims, mostly from outlying parts of the PI region, who had come to Beachhead without waiting to be given a departure date.

Nicklin had seen them wandering around Garamond Park in a group, the children delighting in the unprecedented holiday, the parents instinctively banding together to fend off their sense of belonging nowhere. He saw them as pathetic figures who had renounced their stake in one world and would remain in a limbo of irrelevance until they reached another. He felt no concern for the adults, on the grounds that anybody who was so crazy as to give everything away because of a religious fad deserved little sympathy. You never should beggar yourself unless it's for a really important and sensible reason – such as a snake-hipped woman telling you you're a good lay. But it was taking the joke a bit far, even for the Great Prankster himself, when the lives of small children were so profoundly distorted.

Nicklin sometimes wondered if Montane was totally immune to experiencing doubt on that issue. Hurling them off into the void towards some putative speck of dirt brought quite a new meaning to the phrase "suffer the little children". Their best hope for the future lay in the fact that the Tara had so little chance of ever setting out for New Eden – the Certification Wars, as Nicklin thought of them, were seeing to that.

Warned of the difficulties of getting operational clearance, Montane had carried out an astute move in making all his disciples into shareholders in a registered company. Legally they were now part-owners of the Tara, which meant that it had become a private rather than a public transport and therefore was subject to less rigorous controls. Such niceties seemed to be cutting little ice with the Space Transport Department inspectors, however.

Nicklin had seen Metagov officials arrive and depart in droves, most with the fixed prim expressions of bureaucrats who regarded the resurrected ship as a threat to their entire mode of existence. Their philosophy, as he had explained it to an uncomprehending Montane and Voorsanger, was that a bolt hole which had been drilled in situ by one worker was not as good as a bolt hole drilled by another worker in a properly licensed factory.

There were two ways out of the impasse, he had added. One was to resort to extensive bribery, at the highest and lowest levels; the other was to burn through the STD locks on the Tara's slideway and drop the ship through the aperture in the dead of night. Montane had treated both suggestions as bad jokes, and apparently was waiting for a divine intervention to enable him to set sail with his band of pilgrim fathers and pilgrim mothers-to-be.

This is definitely the right time to go, Nicklin thought as he walked away from the ship. I've done all that I set out to do – with the notable exception of Danea – and I'm ready for what the Gaseous Vertebrate has to offer next.

He came out of the port authority land through a deserted cargo entrance and crossed Lindstrom Boulevard. The crystal pyramid of the Firstfooter was on his right, its sloping aspects mirroring the pale blue archways of the Orbitsville sky. He had just turned in the direction of the hotel when he saw a tall young woman walking towards him. She was wearing a lime sun-hat and matching shorts-and-halter outfit which complemented her blonde hair and tanned skin. The overall effect was of confident, graceful good looks, but what drew Nicklin's attention was that she was smiling directly at him. There was also something about her which struck a mnemonic chord in his mind, and for a moment he wondered if she could be one of the many young prostitutes he had dallied with in the past two years.

"Jim!" she called out. "I was just coming to find you!"

He stared at her perfect, small-chinned face as she drew close and it was the look of recognition in her eyes which completed his own memories. "Zindee! Zindee White!"

She came to him with open arms and clung to him as they kissed. Even in the midst of his pleasurable surprise, he was aware of the pressure of her compact breasts and that she was kissing him full on the mouth, expertly and generously. This is good, he thought, as good as I've ever known it to be…

"Let me look at you," he said as they ended the embrace. "Why, the last time I saw you, you were a little girl!"

He had often heard adults use exactly the same words when confronted by a young person who had been transformed in a few years, but he was quite unable to improve on the formula. Biological magic had been at work on Zindee, and he could only stand in awe of the outcome. She was still the child he had known, but that component of her was overwhelmed by the sheer physical presence of a beautiful woman.

"I can't believe this," he said. "What age are you now?"

"Seventeen."

He shook his head. "I can't believe this! Zindee White!"

"You never wrote to me" she said reproachfully.

"I know, and I'm sorry. I didn't forget about you, but things have been happening."

"I heard about them. In any case, I couldn't have forgotten about you." She gave him an oddly shy smile and fingered a small bronze disk which was on a chain at her throat. He had taken it to be a medallion, but on closer inspection saw that it was an ancient coin.

"What are you doing in this part of the world?" he said.

"Family visit to the big smoke." She took her hand away from the coin for an instant looking saddened, and it occurred to him that either of her parents might have come to Beachhead to attend one of the large medical institutes.

"How are Cham and Nora these days?" he said.

"They're fine. We checked in at the Firstfooter about an hour ago, and the information centre flashed me where to find you." She looked beyond him towards the port area. "I was hoping to get there before you left."

"In other words, you only want me for my spaceship."

Zindee half-closed her eyes. "I wouldn't say that – but I've never even seen one before."

"Come on!"

They crossed the boulevard to the port authority gatehouse, where at Nicklin's request a uniformed guard issued Zindee with a visitor's pass in the form of a circular silver badge. As they walked arm-in-arm towards the ship, their sun-hats rubbing edges, Zindee explained that she was planning to take a general sciences course at the Denise Serra Memorial in East Beachhead, perhaps as a prelude to majoring in entomology. Her parents had come with her to combine a preliminary look at the college with a vacation.

"That's great news," Nicklin said. "If you're going to be living in Beachhead for two or three years we'll be able to see each other regularly."

Zindee's step faltered. "But … Aren't you going away?"

Her meaning eluded him for a moment, then he gave a surprised laugh. "Christ, no! Nothing, but nothing, would induce me to risk my valuable little ass on a trip to nowhere – especially with that bunch of heliumheads."

"I hadn't realised," Zindee said. "I thought you and–"

"Danea? The Bitch in Black? That never came to anything – not that it was anything to start off with."

"You sound bitter, Jim."

"Why should I be bitter? She got me out of Orangefield, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm a new man now, Zindee, my girl."

"I see."

Zindee began to bring him up to date on events and local characters in Orangefield, but in the main her words were passing him by. The distraction was the nearness of her lithe young body, the erotic effect of which was enhanced by memories of the special relationship which had long existed between them. Making love to Zindee would be quite unlike the casual coupling with strangers, the sexual diet to which he had never become fully accustomed. It would be warm, profoundly exciting and – above all – fulfilling. It was precisely what he needed at this turning point in his life, and it was a fabulous piece of good fortune that she had materialised out of the past at the perfect moment. Truly, the Gaseous Vertebrate was in a good mood.

"So that's what a starship looks like," Zindee breathed. "It's beautiful!"

"It's not bad," Nicklin agreed, running his gaze over the lustrous hull of the Tara, which was coming into view from behind a docks office building. "You should have seen the mess it was in a couple of years ago."

"And there's the portal itself! I can't wait to have my first look at the stars."

"They're nothing to get worked up about," he said. "Would you like to have a look around inside the ship?"

"Can I?" Zindee hugged his arm excitedly.

"You bet!" Again feeling the pressure of her breasts, he wondered if she knew what she was doing, then decided she knew exactly the effect the intimate contact would have. Everything about her told him she was sexually active, and now it was up to him to get things moving. He was twice her age, which might create a problem with the straight-laced Cham and Nora, but there were ways around such difficulties – especially for an old and trusted friend of the family. The idea that he might be able to lie down with the golden child-woman later that same day caused a slow blood-pounding throughout his body.

But don't rush your fences, he told himself. It all has to happen naturally. Slowly, naturally and inevitably…

"Can we go in right now?" Zindee said.

"Any time you…" Nicklin paused as he noticed a car with STD markings waiting near the foot of the main ramp. Scott Hepworth was standing beside it, talking to three men who looked like Metagov officials. The agitated movements of Hepworth's arms made it apparent that he was involved in some kind of argument. He turned abruptly and strode up the ramp, followed by the officials, and the four men disappeared into the dark rectangle of the main hatch.

"We'd better wait here for a few minutes," Nicklin said. "It's going to be a bit crowded inside for a while."

"Even in such a big ship?"

"Now that the fitting-out is finished there's only one gangplank to get around on. Besides, there's likely to be a lot of vile language floating about – not the sort of thing for an innocent maiden's ears."

Zindee stepped back from Nicklin and tilted her sun-hat, giving him a breathtaking smile. "Who says I'm innocent? Or even a maiden?"

Tonight, he vowed, resisting the urge to kiss her again. It has to be tonight.

"Zindee," he said, "I doubt if even a sophisticate like you is ready for Scott Hepworth."

"Why not?"

"He drinks too much, he eats too much, he's a slob, he tells lies, he wastes all his money, he has a filthy mind – in short, he has all the qualities I expect of a friend."

Zindee laughed. "What else do you like about him?"

Encouraged by her response, and knowing he had sufficient Hepworth anecdotes to pass a full hour if necessary, Nicklin described how and why the physicist had been thrown out of the Garamond Institute. "Any idiot can see the world in a grain of sand," he concluded, "but only Scott Hepworth could see another universe in a lump of metal."

Unexpectedly, Zindee looked thoughtful. "Is he supposed to be your scientific adviser?"

"We don't go in for formal titles, but … yes. Sort of. He's mainly concerned with the engines."

A scornful expression appeared on Zindee's face, making her look like the child Nicklin remembered. "I hope he knows more about engines than he does about physics."

"What do you mean?"

"Jim, even I know that the cobalt 60 experiment wouldn't show that Orbitsville had become part of an anti-matter time-reversed universe. Have you never heard of the CPT rule?"

Nicklin blinked. "Should I have?"

"Perhaps not," Zindee said, "but it states that where everything is reversed there's no way to detect the change. It also states that your friend made a balls of setting up his equipment."

"But he swears he had it right," Nicklin said. "According to Scott he came up with definite proof of the Big Jump."

"That's ox droppings, Jim."

He smiled on hearing one of Zindee's pet phrases and was reminded of her precocious ability to get things right. "Do you think all this stuff about a big jump is nonsense?"

"I don't know if it's nonsense or not. All I'm saying is that no amount of fiddling around with cobalt 60 or any other isotope will produce any evidence, one way or the other."

Nicklin considered the notion that the restoration work on the Tara's drive units had been governed by a man who was capable of making basic errors. Or, what was worse, the type of man who refused to acknowledge a mistake once it had been made. It was probably just as well for all concerned that the Metagov inspectorate was proving so stubborn over issuing any spaceworthiness documents for the ship.

"It's all academic, anyway – the Tara isn't going anywhere, in spite of all the news stories," he said, shrugging. "Do you want to walk to the front end and have a better look at the pinnace?"

"Yes, please." As they went closer to the black lake of the portal the morning breeze whipped Zindee's flimsy clothing against her body, making her look like a tawny creature from a sexist advertisement. Nicklin became aware that all the men within visual range were staring at her. You can't have any, folks, he gloated. It's all mine!

"It must be wonderful to fly in something like that," she said, holding her sunhat in place as she gazed up at the sleek aerodynamic form of the pinnace. Suspended in its flying attitude beneath the Tara's nose section, the little ship was quite close to the rim of the portal and the imagination could see it straining to glide forward and swoop down into its natural environment.

"The pinnace is worth a fortune by itself these days," Nicklin said. "If Corey ever gets enough sense to sell up and forget about his loony mission he'll be a rich man."

"You don't think much of him?"

"He's a bollock-brain." Nicklin amplified his statement by telling how Montane took his wife's body everywhere he went and had been overheard conversing with the corpse.

Zindee looked incredulous. "Have you been sniffing something, Jim?"

"It's the truth! The late Mrs Montane is locked up inside there at this very minute," Nicklin said, pointing at Montane's camper which was parked close to the ship. "Corey sleeps in there at night instead of bunking down in the hotel with the rest of us. And he uses the coffin as a tea table."

Zindee narrowed her eyes at him. "This is one of your stories – light?"

"Wrong! I quit trying to jolly people along years ago. I give them the facts dead straight, and if they don't like what they hear that's their problem, not mine."

"How's your popularity rating?"

"Everybody around here adores me," Nicklin said. "Specially this character." He nodded towards the lumbering figure of Gerl Kingsley, who was approaching from the direction of the First-looter, probably on one of the obscure errands he was always running for Montane. "Mind you, I did save his life."

Kingsley slowed down as he came near and gave Nicklin the terrible lopsided grin which was a legacy from the day a bullet had passed through his head. His eyes were firmly fixed on Zindee the whole time he was passing.

"I think he likes you as well," Nicklin commented. "And I can't say I blame him." He tried to slip his arm around Zindee's waist, but she moved out of his reach.

"How did you save his life?" she said.

"Marksmanship." He related the episode that had taken place in the quietness of the Altamura countryside one morning, in what now seemed a distant summer. The events had rarely surfaced in his mind during the intervening years, and as he spoke he could almost believe they were part of someone else's life. By the time he had finished describing the grim aftermath – his disposal of the remains – the narrative, even to him, had something of the quality of a fevered dream.

"In case you're thinking that was another Nicklin special," he melded, "I can assure you it all happened."

"I believe you," Zindee said. Her eyes were scrutinising his face and her expression was oddly intent, like that of a person searching for a valuable which had been lost or stolen.

Suddenly uncomfortable, he gestured towards the ship. "I wish Hepworth would get his backside out of there."

"I don't need to go inside."

"The old sod is bound to come out soon."

"Perhaps I'll walk over to the edge of the portal and…"

Zindee let the sentence go as her attention was drawn to a car which was drifting to a halt close by. It was a convertible with the top folded back. In it could be seen Danea Farthing with a man and woman and two children, obviously new arrivals being given their first look at the ship.

"Zindee's expression changed. "Isn't that…?"

"That's Danea, all right," Nicklin said. "Lock up the silver."

"I didn't realise she had so much style." Zindee's voice was appreciative as she took in Danea's tight-belted peacock blue silks and stetson-like sun-hat. She impulsively raised her hand and waved as Danea glanced in her direction. Nicklin, remembering the natural antagonism that Zindee had displayed towards the older woman on their first meeting, was surprised by the action.

"She has a style all of her own," he agreed, giving the words a private bitter connotation, as Danea said something to her charges and came towards Zindee. His reaction to the sight of the sleepy-lidded eyes, bruised-looking mouth and hipless easy-striding figure was the same as ever – a blend of hatred and unadulterated, knee-weakening desire. For three years she had eluded, fended off and frustrated him, displaying an adamantine side to her character which no amount of guile could undermine, and which – though it tortured him to admit it – had brought her total victory in their running battle.

"Hello," Danea said, her gaze solely on Zindee. "Suddenly I'm persuaded that all little girls should be fed on a diet of ice cream sundaes."

Zindee smiled. "You've got a good memory."

"For faces – I'm not so good on names."

"This is Zindee," Nicklin said, putting an arm around Zindee's shoulders in a proprietary manner which Danea would not be able to miss. "Zindee White."

"It's good to see you again, Zindee," Danea said. "You're not joining the ship, are you?"

"No."

"I thought not. We have one family of Whites, but they don't have any connections with Orangefield."

"I'm here on holiday with my parents," Zindee said.

"I wish you were joining us." Danea gave her a look of rueful warmth. "Time is running out for Orbitsville, you know. Corey Montane has told us that many times, and we all know in our hearts that he is right."

Nicklin squeezed Zindee's shoulder. "Corey Montane is the man who thinks he's married to a sardine."

"I have to go now," Danea said, still without looking in Nicklin's direction. "I wish you well, Zindee."

"What did you think of that performance?" Nicklin murmured in Zindee's ear as he watched Danea walk back to the group by her car. "That woman is, without doubt, the silliest and most–" He broke off, shocked, as Zindee pushed him away from her with surprising force.

"Keep off me," she snapped, her eyes flaring with white coronas of anger. "You're not making me part of your pathetic little game."

"Zindee!" He took a step towards her, but was halted by the look of contempt which was distorting and ageing her features. "Look, there's been a misunderstanding somewhere. Let's go back to my hotel room and–"

"Goodbye, Jim!" Zindee snatched the bronze coin from her throat, snapping its chain. "And here's something to remember me by!" She threw the coin to the ground at his feet, turned on her heel und walked quickly away.

"But – " Stupefied, he looked down at the coin and a dam seemed to burst in his memory. I gave her that – on the day I left Orangefield.

He picked the coin up, with the intention of running in pursuit of Zindee, and had taken a single step forward when silently – and with the abruptness of a door being slammed – the entire world turned black.

Nicklin gave an involuntary cry of fear as for one pounding moment he thought he had been struck blind. The blackness seemed so absolute – there were no street lights, no office lights, no vehicle lights, no floodlights surrounding the ship – that it had to come from within, and he was being punished for his transgressions. Then his eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and slowly, like a design emerging on a photographic plate, the delicate ribbed pattern of the night sky unfurled itself above him, spanning the horizons.

Nicklin looked up towards the zenith and saw that the sun was hidden behind one of the opaque bands whose progression across the heavens created day and night on Orbitsville.

His fear returned with renewed force as he realised that somehow – and for the first time in humanity's experience – Orbitsville had leaped from the brilliance of morning into the blackness of midnight.

CHAPTER 16

"You can see for yourselves that the trap is closing." Corey Montane's face was grey and haggard as he addressed the group of about twenty workers who had assembled in the mission's third-floor office. To Nicklin he seemed dejected and slightly irresolute, just when he needed to rally and inspire his followers.

"You don't need me to tell you that the Devil is rubbing his hands tonight," Montane went on. "We must get away from this cursed place very soon, my friends – otherwise it will be too late."

Nicklin listened to the message, and for the first time since he had known Montane, felt no urge to scoff. The glowing display of the office holoclock, apparently floating in the air near a wall, showed 12.06 – but the windows were jet black. In place of the usual midday panorama of sunlit buildings and distant hills there were the stacked, serried and scattered lights of Beachhead City at night.

Nicklin's body clock was telling him that something had gone terribly wrong with the natural order of things, but even more disturbing was the feeling that vast supernatural forces were at work. A mystical and superstitious element of his character – one he would have sworn did not exist – had been alerted, and it was whispering things he had no wish to hear. He had often tried to visualise the helplessness and despair experienced by someone caught in an earthquake. What must it be like, he had wondered, knowing there is no place to run to when the very ground has become your deadly enemy? Now he no longer had to imagine that sense of bleak futility. Where is there to hide when a great hand parts the curving blue canopy of the sky, displacing night and day, and its owner casts a baleful eye on all that lies below?

"How soon can we go, Corey?" a man called out. Nicklin glanced round and saw that the speaker was the electrician, Jock Craig.

"It has to be as soon as possible," Montane replied. "I'm going to the Space Transport Department when – " He broke off, looking surprised, as his words were lost in a rebellious outcry from at least half of his audience.

"Nobody cares about certificates at a time like this," Craig shouted, abandoning the slightly obsequious tone with which he usually addressed the preacher. "We should cut the locks and go right now!"

His words produced a widespread murmur of approval. Montane quelled the sound by the familiar trick of raising both his hands and making a damping movement. The gesture was not as effective as usual, however, and the ensuing silence was less than complete.

"Do I hear you properly, Jock?" Montane said. "Are you proposing that we should leave most of our brethren behind? Don't forget how many of them are still waiting at home all over Pi." He pointed at the communication panels, where columns of winking orange lights showed that dozens of callers were waiting to be answered. "What do we say to them? Do we tell them to go to the Devil?"

"It's better for some to be saved than none at all," Craig insisted, looking about him for support.

"I think we're all jumping the gun a little," Scott Hepworth cut in, booming, projecting his voice as though addressing a much larger audience. "We've seen one minor disturbance of the solar cage, and apart from that nothing has changed. Some kind of self-regulating mechanism could have been activated up there, something which routinely balances forces and adjusts the shadow pattern now and then. Don't forget we've been on Orbitsville for only two centuries, and that's no time at all in astronomical terms."

Hepworth's admonitory gaze swept around the assembly. "My advice is that we shouldn't panic."

There speaks the voice of cool reason, Nicklin thought. Trouble is that nobody believes a word of it – and that includes me.

"Scott is absolutely right," Montane said loudly, doing his utmost to reassert his authority. "We will begin calling in every one of our families, starting this very minute, but in the meantime I want…"

His voice faltered – hushed by a silent burst of light – as the daytime world in all its brilliance sprang into view beyond the office windows.

It materialised instantaneously, looking normal and serene and eternal, as though nothing out of the ordinary had ever taken place. Nicklin saw birds wheeling in the sunlit air, and flags stirring gently on the masts above the main passenger terminal. The scene remained pulsing on the eye for several seconds – during which nine the people in the room exchanged stricken, speculative glances with their neighbours – then it vanished into blackness again amidst a chorus of terrified shouts and screams.

Nicklin was one of those who gave an involuntary cry because, on the instant of the new advent of night, he felt the entire floor of the office drop away beneath his feet. He knew at once that the building was collapsing, and that he was about to plunge down into its ruins. Then his eyes confirmed the curious fact that the office, and everything in it, was still firmly in place. Ashen-faced men and women were clutching at the furniture for support, but – astonishingly – the building showed itself to be perfectly intact and undamaged. A moment later the floor resumed its pressure on the soles of his feet.

The sensations normally associated with space flight were alien to Nicklin; he had never even ventured on funfair parabola rides – but his mind was quick to concoct an explanation for what had happened.

"There has been a temporary loss of gravity," Hepworth shouted above the hubbub, confirming the worst suspicions of all those present. "That's all it was – a temporary loss of gravity … nothing to become too alarmed about."

Nicklin gaped at the physicist's untidy figure, wondering if he had any idea how ridiculous he looked and sounded while trying to pass off the loss of gravity as though it had been a minor occurrence like an interruption to the local electricity supply. Nothing like this had ever happened on Orbitsville before. Even the sudden switching of day into night, terrifying though it had been, had not created the same degree of visceral fear, because light was only light after all, and everybody knew how simple it was to flick it on and off. But gravity was different! You did not fuck around with gravity. Nobody had ever succeeded in tampering with it or modifying it in any way. When gravity vanished every man, woman and child immediately became a learned professor of physics with a deep understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, knowing that where something so basic to existence could go wrong existence itself was in the balance.

As though the Gaseous Vertebrate wanted to endorse and applaud Nicklin's thought processes, the sunlit world outside the office blazed into being once more, but only for the time it took Nicklin to snatch a breath, then there was night again. The effect was so similar to lightning, or perhaps a thermonuclear flash, that he winced in dread of the appalling detonation which had to follow. Instead there was a profound silence in which came a series of shorter appearances – day, night, day, night, day, night – a calendar month compressed into a dozen stroboscopic seconds. Once or twice during the staccato sequence gravity slackened its bonds, but not so completely as before – then it was all over. Peaceful night reigned outside. The ceiling lights reasserted themselves, shining calmly over the humdrum microcosm of the office and its cheap furniture and all the frightened people who had expected to die.

"My God," a woman said quietly, "this is the end of the world!"

It would be more correct to say that Orbitsville has become unstable, Nicklin mused. Of course, it comes to the same thing in the end…

Hepworth pounded a table with his fist. "Does anybody know where Megan Fleischer is?"

The mention of the pilot's name was all the catalyst that was needed to convert apprehension into action. Not much was said, there were few outward signs of mortal fear, but everybody began to move, to busy themselves, and Nicklin knew they shared the same objectives – to warn their relatives and friends, to gather up vital belongings, to get on board the ship as quickly as possible. He knew exactly what was going on inside their heads because, suddenly, he was one of them.

Orbitsville was home for countless millions of humans and for two hundred years it had been a good home. Its mountains and prairies and oceans appeared to have the permanence of old Earth, but there were few of its inhabitants who had not, at one time or another, felt a pang of uneasiness over the fact that the Big O was a bubble. It was the most insubstantial object imaginable – a film of enigmatic material with a circumference of almost a billion kilometres and a thickness of only eight centimetres.

Nicklin's life had been one of blissful unconcern about such matters. He had insulated himself from them, or had dismissed them along with other concepts he found difficulty in handling. Nevertheless, a simple distaste for the idea of living on the inner surface of a bubble was part of his primal subconscious. It was out in the open now. The time bomb had detonated, and he had entered a new mental state in which his actions were governed by the compulsion to get away from Orbitsville before the unimaginable happened.

In that land-locked, self-oriented condition his perceptions of what was going on around him became patchy and flawed, magnifying some events and diminishing others.

At one stage he was very much aware of Montane hovering on the fringes of the action, virtually ignored by most of his subordinates. Montane looked like a man on the verge of collapse. He gave the impression of being bewildered, of not quite believing the evidence of his senses. It occurred to Nicklin that he might never have accepted in his innermost self that this day would really arrive. Given the choice, he might have gone on and on until he died, making endless preparations to lead the escape from Orbitsville, delaying the actual event for increasingly trivial reasons.

In another disconnected fragment of time Nicklin found that he was standing at the telephone in a smaller office, with no clear idea of why he was there. He stared at the instrument for a few seconds, waiting for his hold on reality to improve, then told it to connect him to the Whites' room in the Firstfooter Hotel. Almost at once Cham White's red-gold head appeared at the set's projection focus. He was wearing the unnaturally polite smile of a man who has just been sentenced to death.

"Jim!" he said. "Jim Nicklin! What's happening, Jim?"

Nicklin shook his head impatiently "There's no time to talk about it. Do you want to get out?"

"Out?"

"Out of Orbitsville. On the ship. Do you want to go?"

At that moment sunlight washed through the room in which Nicklin was standing, showing that the banded pattern of the sky had shifted again. Cham's image, transmitted through a kilometre of cable, brightened simultaneously.

"I'm afraid, Jim," he said, his squirrel-brown eyes wide with shock.

"We're all afraid, for Christ's sake," Nicklin snapped, losing his temper. "That's why I'm asking you if you want to take off out of here. How about it?"

"Nora and I thought about it more than once. We used to look out for you on television, and I guess that put the idea into our heads, but we never took it seriously enough. We never dreamed it would come to this. We have no tickets or whatever we would need for–"

"The ship will be travelling half-empty," Nicklin cut in, amazed at Cham's Montane-like ability to waste time on senseless trivia. "Is Zindee with you?"

Cham glanced to his left. "She's in the bedroom with her mother."

"Get them both down to the ship," Nicklin said urgently. "I'm talking to you as a friend, Cham. Get them down to the ship – and do it right now. I'll wait for you at the foot of the main ramp. Have you got that?"

Cham nodded unhappily. "What should we pack?"

"Pack! If you wait around to pack anything you'll end up fucking well dead!" Nicklin shook his fist in Cham's face and his knuckles went into the image, causing it to swirl like coloured smoke. "Get to the ship right now – and don't let anybody stop you!"

He turned away from the telephone as the last sentence he had blurted out sank into his own consciousness. Other people would want to scramble on board the Tara in this extreme hour; people who had no connection with the mission; people for whom the enterprise had been nothing more than an extended piece of silly-season journalism – until the Big O's Day of Judgement had arrived.

Half the population of Beachhead will want to ride, Nicklin told himself. And they won't take no for an answer…

In another fragment of time's mosaic he found himself in the ill-ventilated room, across the corridor from the main office, where miscellaneous effects belonging to mission personnel were stored.

Opening his own locker with a thumbprint, he took out the radiation rifle, which had been a useless encumbrance since that far-off morning in Altamura. When the Fugaccia mansion was being vacated he had taken the weapon for no reason other than a feeling that such a dangerous artefact ought not to be left lying around, perhaps for inquisitive children to find. Now it no longer seemed an encumbrance. It looked functional and deadly – qualities which were entirely appropriate to the situation.

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, resumed 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 nose," 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!"

"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.

"We don't need to worry about traffic controllers, and we don't need to worry about traffic," Fleischer said, turning back to the console.

Nicklin watched in fascination as she moved her hands over the sloping surface, causing lanes, highways, townships of coloured lights to spring into existence. This was the first step in taking the ship out of Einstein's domain and into that realm of strangeness where Arthurian physics held sway. Nicklin knew, and only dimly understood, that in order for the ship to travel at multiples of the speed of light it would temporarily cease to exist as far as observers in the normal continuum were concerned.

The massive vessel and everything in it, including his own body, would be transformed into a cloud of particles with more affinity to tachyons than to normal matter. The mode of travel – which had once been described as "crooked accountancy applied to mass-energy transformations" – was magical in its effect. But before it could be brought into play the ship would have to reach a very high normal-space velocity, and there was nothing at all magical about how that velocity was achieved.

It was a product of greasy-overall engineering, spanner-and-screwdriver technology, involving a host of control systems – mechanical, electrical, hydraulic – among which a twentieth-century artificer would have felt reasonably at home. To begin the voyage proper, Megan Fleischer was activating the thermonuclear reactor and feeding power to the flux pumps, thereby unfurling the Tara's intangible wings. At the ship's present negligible rate of movement the scoops could do little more than complement the ion drive, but they would become increasingly effective as the speed built up.

"Here we go," Fleischer said after a few seconds, touching the master control pads.

Nicklin felt a slight but immediate increase in weight and was gripped by a numbing sense of wonder as he realised that the great metallic entity, upon which he had lavished three years of devotion, had ceased being an inert object and was stirring fully into life.

Fleischer switched camera channels and the star fields ahead of the ship blossomed in the main view screen. Perhaps a hundred major stars shone with a diamond-pure lustre against a dusting of fainter specks, creating a three-dimensional matrix which seemed to draw Nicklin's consciousness into it. I must have been blind, he thought as his gaze roved through the alien constellations. How did I fail to understand that we were all born for this?

"Not very good," Fleischer said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Not very good, at all."

Hepworth was beside her on the instant, scanning the console. "What do you mean?"

"It wasn't what I would call a clean start-up. The intake fields seemed a bit slow in establishing themselves."

"It happens in a hundredth of a second." Hepworth sounded relieved and irritated at the same time. "You can't judge it by sight."

"I've been a pilot for more than twenty years, and I can judge it by sight," Fleischer snapped. "Besides, that wasn't the only thing I didn't like – the left field wasn't a good shape when it opened up."

"What was wrong with it?"

"It looked a bit … flat."

Hepworth examined the glowing butterfly that was the intake field distribution diagram. "It looks fine to me."

"It looks all right now," Fleischer said stubbornly, "but I'm telling you it started off flat."

"It might have met a bit of resistance – God knows what sort of stuff is spewing out of Orbitsville." Hepworth patted the pilot's luxuriantly covered head. "I think you can safely leave the vacuum physics to me."

She twisted away from him. "Keep your hands to yourself, Mister Hepworth, or I'll bar you from this deck."

"Touchy, touch-eee!" Hepworth said jovially. He turned to look at Nicklin, enlisting support, his eyes rounded in a what-do-you-think-of-that? expression.

Nicklin gazed back at him unsympathetically, unable to think of anything but Zindee White's scathing comments on Hepworth's qualifications as a physicist. The little that Nicklin had seen of Megan Fleischer had persuaded him that she was a top-class professional pilot, a woman who knew exactly what she was talking about. It was quite possible that a fleeting irregularity in a scoop field was an insignificant event, just as Hepworth had said, but did he know as much about starship drives as he claimed? Montane, desperate for low-cost help, had taken him pretty much on trust…

"Something on your mind, Jim?" Hepworth's joviality had evaporated, and there was now something watchful and unpleasant in his expression.

Nicklin recalled the way in which Hepworth would become caustic and angry, and even threaten violence, when challenged on any technical or scientific point. It had happened on many occasions in the past three years, but this would be a particularly inconvenient time for a fresh performance.

"I've got plenty on my mind," he said, glancing at the view screens. "All this is a bit daunting."

Hepworth shook his head impatiently, refusing to be put off. "You're looking at me like I was something you'd just found in your soup – perhaps you think I don't know what I'm talking about."

"You must be nearly as jumpy as I am, Scott," Nicklin soothed. "You know I think you're the greatest living expert on everything."

"Don't patronise me, you country – " Hepworth broke off, staring in surprise at the companionway.

A bearded young man in the blue uniform of a spaceport guard had appeared on the ladder. He stared for a moment at the group by the console, raised one hand in a kind of apologetic greeting, then slowly sank from view again.

"This place is getting like a train station," Fleischer said irritably. "I can't have people wandering in here any time they feel like it."

"Quite right!" Montane, perhaps comforted by being given a minor administrative problem, appeared quite composed as he turned to Affleck. "I want you and Gerl to spell each other on the deck below this one. Nobody is to pass you – except those that are here now – unless I give you the word."

"Right, Corey." Affleck, looking gratified, immediately hurried to the ladder.

Montane directed a thin smile at Nicklin. "Jim, as you've decided to grace us with your company on this flight, I expect you to earn your rations. You can start right now by going through all the decks and finding out just how many outsiders have jumped on board. Make a list of their names and bring it to me and I'll decide what rooms we can put them in."

"Okay, Corey," Nicklin said, slightly surprised at how glad he was to see the improvement in the other man's state of mind.

"And tell them I'll want to speak to them in my room, individually, as soon as I have the time."

"Yessir, yessir!" Putting the uneasy confrontation with Hepworth to the back of his mind, Nicklin glanced once more at the main screen – wondering if Prospect One was even visible at that early stage of the flight – then made his way to the lower regions of the ship.

The hot shower felt even more luxurious than he had been anticipating.

He had slept for almost seven hours, disturbed only by occasional dreams of falling, and had risen from his bed feeling both hungry and filthy. The thought of breakfast was alluring, but he had decided it would be more enjoyable were he in a reasonably hygienic condition when he sat down to eat. He had descended through many levels to 24 Deck, where the laundry and shower rooms had been situated because of the ease of supplying hot water from the adjoining engine cylinders. He had washed his underpants and socks and had put them in one of the driers before going into a shower cubicle.

Now there was a blessed period in which he had nothing to do but let the needle sprays cleanse his body. Clothes were going to be quite a problem he realised as he relaxed in the tingling warmth, especially if the voyage were to last for months. Many of those on board the Tara had nothing other than what they had been wearing when the panic had gripped Beachhead City. The families who had managed to bring suitcases had thus become instant aristocrats, distinguished from their fellows by a wealth of fresh underwear.

Nicklin smiled as he tried to visualise how Montane would handle the situation. In an ideal Christian society the rich should share their goodies with the poor without even waiting to be asked, but the cynic in Nicklin suspected that things might not work out that way.

Luckily, Montane had been spared similar problems with the ultimate commodity, the one which really would have separated the haves from the have-nots. Imperishable food stores had been going on board for weeks, and any shortfall due to the hasty departure was more than compensated for by the Tara carrying only half the projected number of passengers.

Paid-up emigrants accounted for sixty-nine of the complement, and another twenty-six mission personnel had been able to join the ship in the dreadful last hour – the remainder being on home leave or simply out on casual errands. Nicklin's census had revealed, in addition to the Whites, the presence of three spaceport guards, plus a group of seven men and women who had happened to be working in the dock area at the crucial time.

The total came to 108, which meant that the Tara could, if necessary, extend the New Eden quest for as long as two years. Nicklin refused to think what would happen at the end of that time if no suitable world had been found. In the past he had felt some concern about the ultimate fate of the pilgrims, especially the children, but had avoided becoming too pessimistic. No matter how distant the ship might be when the decision to abandon the mission was taken it would always be possible to return to the starting place. The strange mathematics of supraluctic flight meant that all destinations in the universe were roughly equidistant and equally accessible – but there would be no point in the travellers returning home when all doors were barred against them.

A new and disturbing thought occurred to Nicklin as he absorbed the abundant warmth of the shower. It would be a grim irony, one of the Gaseous Vertebrate's finest pranks, if the disturbances in Orbitsville had been transient phenomena – incidental effects which had manifested themselves while the portals were preparing to close. If that were the case, daily life in places like Orangefield would already be returning to drowsy normality. The Orangefield Recorder would be preparing waggish editorials about the curious goings-on in the Big Smoke, couples would be strolling in Coach-and-Four Lane and there would be business as usual in the Victoria Hotel and Mr Chickley's orange-lit ice-cream parlour. And in a few years' time the very existence of portals would be a fading memory – and nobody would know about the ghost ship drifting in the void which began a short distance beneath their feet, beyond Orbitsville's impenetrable shell.

The unwelcome vision had the effect of suddenly making Nicklin feel trapped and claustrophobic. He stepped out of the cubicle and began towelling himself dry. The only other person in the washroom was Lan Huertas, who – as usual – refrained from speaking to him. Nicklin dressed in silence, ran a depilator over his chin and left the room.

A short distance up the ladder he began to wonder if the going was easier than it should have been. When he had gone to bed, at the beginning of the arbitrary "night" period, the ship's acceleration had been about .5G. Now it was, perhaps, slightly less, although it was difficult for a novice in such matters to say for sure whether his weight was a half or a third or a quarter of normal. Was this an indication that a genuine fault existed in the intake field generators? Or was it simply that the ship had entered a region in which the harvest of interstellar particles was poor?

The aroma of coffee drifting down from the canteen – or refectory, as Montane styled it – distracted him from the questions. He felt a pang of guilt-tinged pleasure as he recalled that the atrocious cook, Carlos Kempson, had been one of those left behind in Beachhead. One of the new pilgrims, a professional chef, had volunteered to run the canteen, thus making the prospect of a long voyage somewhat brighter.

The levels that Nicklin passed were quiet for the most part, the passengers having been requested to remain in their quarters until 09.00 hours, ship time. A few children were at play in the landing areas common to each deck's four suites, but they were unnaturally subdued. Resilient as the very young always were, they had not had time to adjust to the austere environment of plasboard partitions and arctic lighting.

On 10 Deck, three levels below the canteen, he heard a familiar voice and looked around to see Zindee White standing at the open door of a suite. She was talking to a teenage girl, presumably from adjacent quarters. Nicklin raised his hand in greeting, but before he could say anything Zindee had retreated out of his sight. The teenager gave him a quizzical look as he ascended through the deck above.

On reaching the canteen he saw half a dozen mission personnel – Danea Farthing and Gerl Kingsley among them – seated at one of the narrow tables. Kingsley produced one of his grotesque smiles on seeing Nicklin, but the others studiously ignored his arrival. The reception was of a kind to which he had become accustomed, and from which he usually derived perverse satisfaction. Normally he would have elbowed his way into the group and proceeded to dominate the conversation, but on this occasion the force of silent rejection was overwhelming.

He obtained a bulb of coffee from the dispenser and sat down alone. Something is happening, he thought as he sipped the hot liquid, and it started yesterday morning when Zindee ran away from me.

Like a drunk trying to reconstruct the events of the previous night's binge, he played the meeting with Zindee on the screen of memory, step by step and in considered slow motion. There was a stranger there … a stranger who looked and spoke like Jim Nicklin … a stranger who was Jim Nicklin as far as the rest of the world was concerned…

Isolated, mesmerised, appalled, Nicklin watched the intruder – the usurper of his body – go about his business, which was the pretence of being alive while in reality the essential spark of humanity had been quenched. Observing the encounter was a difficult and painful thing to do, because he had to accept that he and the stranger were as one, and that there could be no apportionment of responsibility or shame.

I was a dead man! I was a walking corpse … and Zindee came out of times that were lost … reminding me of the good that was lost … and how did I repay her?

Nicklin felt the hot pulsing of blood in his face as he watched the simulacrum act on his behalf and heard it speak the lines he had devised for it. The coffee bulb grew cold in his hand. An indeterminate time later he became aware that Danea – her eyes dark and thoughtful – was watching him from the other table. He averted his gaze, smiled the self-deprecating smile of one who wants people to believe he has just remembered an appointment, and left the canteen.

On the cramped landing he hesitated for a moment, with no particular objective in mind, then went up towards the control room. When he reached 3 Deck, easily distinguishable because of the pinnace tunnel, the red telltales on the locks told him that the doors to Montane's and Voorsanger's suites were bolted shut. Both men were probably still asleep – one in the company of his dead wife; the other deprived of the company of his living wife. Neat touch, O Gaseous Vertebrate!

On 2 Deck, which housed the pilot's private quarters, he found Nibs Affleck dutifully guarding the topmost section of the ladder. Affleck gave him a barely perceptible nod as he climbed past. Emerging in the control room he saw that two of the five seats were occupied by Hepworth and Fleischer. The main screen was again being fed by an aft-facing camera, but the view was no longer one of unrelieved darkness.

The ship had been under continuous acceleration for more than fifteen hours, allowing the camera to take in a large area of Orbitsville's shell – and the captured image had been transformed. Luminous green lines filled the entire screen in a pattern of complex curvatures which resembled interlocking flowers. The effect was that of a vast array of brilliantly glowing neon tubes laid out to the design of an artist working on a macroscopic scale. In the auxiliary screens the shining filigree spread away in every direction until, condensed by perspective, the lines merged to form horizons of cold green radiance.

"Quite a sight, eh Jim?" Hepworth turned in his seat to look up at Nicklin. He looked exhausted, as though he had not been to bed, but his face showed none of the animosity which had been there the night before.

"I've never seen anything like it," Nicklin said, grateful that the benign streak in the other man's nature had never allowed him to nurse a grudge. It was of some comfort to know that not quite everybody had been alienated by his malaise of the past three years.

"Yes, the old lady's putting on quite a show for us." Hepworth took a silver flask from his side pocket and offered it to Nicklin. "Drink?"

Nicklin glanced at Megan Fleischer and saw that she was in a deep sleep, although still sitting upright. "No, thanks."

"This is an unrepeatable offer, Jim – I haven't even got a bottle tucked away in my room. When this is finished we're on a strict diet of cocoa and carrot juice and similarly disgusting brews." A look of intense revulsion appeared on Hepworth's well-padded face. "Christ! I might even have to drink some of Corey's God-awful fucking tea!"

Nicklin chuckled and reached for the proffered flask. A drink of neat, warm gin was the last thing he wanted at that moment, but it represented friendship and that was something for which he had developed a craving. In the boozers' ethic the sharing of the last available drink was a symbol as potent as a wedding ring.

Here's to solidarity, he thought as he swallowed the flat and tepid spirit. For years there were just the two of us. Two disbelievers, two disciples of the Gaseous Vertebrate – the Lord of Chance – surrounded by an army of bible-thumpers. But we got the ship ready. Between us we got the ship ready…

"Have a seat," Hepworth said. "Her ladyship is in no condition to object."

"Okay." Nicklin handed the flask back as he sat down, his gaze returning to the fantastic glaring traceries of the main screen. "What do you think happened back there?"

Hepworth took a swig of gin. "Who knows? And, if you ask me, it isn't finished yet. I have this feeling in my water, Jim. It's totally unscientific, I know, but I have this feeling in my water that the show has only just started."

"I know what you mean." Nicklin was unable to take his eyes away from the screen. "Those lines must be really bright for us to see them at this range. I mean … how far are we away from Orbitsville?"

"Just over two miks. We passed the two-million mark a little while ago."

"I never thought this kind of thing would happen to me," Nicklin said. "James Nicklin – space traveller!"

Hoping he had achieved a natural-sounding change of subject, he tried to work out why the figure Hepworth quoted had drawn a cold feather along his spine. Fifteen hours at say 5G would be … His skill with mental calculation seemed to desert him as he realised that by this time the ship should have been on full gravity, its drive becoming more efficient as the build-up in speed allowed the intake fields to gather increasing amounts of reaction mass. The current acceleration felt more like a third or a quarter of the optimum, and there might have been fluctuations while he was asleep, causing the dreams of falling…

"Don't overload that walnut you use instead of a brain." Hepworth spoke in friendly tones and returned the flask to Nicklin, good evidence of his not being antagonised. "Under normal conditions we'd have been a lot farther out by this time."

"I … ah … didn't want to open my big mouth too soon."

"I know – you were being tactful." Hepworth gave him a quizzical look. "I never noticed you trying to be diplomatic before. What's the matter, Jim – are you sick?"

Nicklin tried to smile. "I have my off days. What were you saying about the engines?"

"About the engines? Nothing! Not a word! Not a peep, not a cheep! The engines are fine."

"But you said–"

"I said that under normal conditions the ship would be travelling a lot faster."

"So what's wrong?"

"Space itself is wrong," Hepworth said peacefully. "You must remember that we're in an anti-matter universe now, Jim. Some things are different here. It's too soon for me to say exactly what the differences are – it could be something to do with the density or distribution of interstellar dust, or it might be something more basic than that.

"If some nuclear interactions are different – as with cobalt 60 – then some of the ship's performance parameters might also be different. For instance, our intake fields might be slightly porous to anti-matter ions. I tell you, Jim – whole new areas for research are opening up all around us."

Nicklin took another drink of lukewarm gin.

I'm going to put all my trust in this man, he thought, repressing a grimace as the alcohol burned in his throat. I'm going to accept everything he says. I'm going to have total faith in him because nobody – not even the Great Prankster – would cast a hundred souls adrift in a ship that can't fly.

Again, there were dreams of falling.

In one of them the ship was in orbit around a green planet. The planet had no cloud markings, no oceans, no polar caps. It was a sphere of unrelieved colour – pantomime scenery green, children's paintbox green, remembered holiday green – too rich for normal vegetation. Megan Fleischer had come to Nicklin and confessed that she was unable to fly the pinnace. He had taken over for her, and now he was in the pilot's seat as the little craft plunged – buffeted by turbulent atmosphere – towards the virescent bauble. He glanced down at the controls and terror gripped him as he realised they were a meaningless array of levers and dials. He knew nothing about flying, nothing at all! What madness had made him think he could pilot any kind of spacecraft or aircraft? The poisonous green surface was rushing upwards, expanding, spinning in the windshield. He could see now that it was a swamp – heaving, bubbling, gloating. The pinnace was hurtling into it at many times the speed of sound.

And there was nothing he could do but wait to die…

On the following morning, the second day of the flight, Nicklin decided that the only way to survive a prolonged journey was by making himself genuinely useful. The simple disciplines of hard work had sustained him for the year in which the Tara had been dragged, inch by inch, from Altamura to Beachhead City, and the experience had taught him a valuable lesson.

"You can trust work," he announced to the emptiness of his room as he got out of bed and began to dress. "Work isn't fickle. Work never lets you down."

There was, he knew, a ready-made outlet for his particular abilities and knowledge. Jock Craig, the electrician, had a good record as a general handyman and had been promoted – in the vague way that Montane handled such things – to the post of "maintenance supervisor". The job would have required Craig to mend anything from a lighting switch to a ventilation fan, but he had been among those who failed to board the ship in time for the escape from Orbitsville.

Nothing had broken down at this early stage of the voyage, as far as Nicklin was aware, but there was one major item of housekeeping which cried out for his attention. The gangway which passed through every deck had been vital for mobility while the ship was lying on its side in dock. Now it was an encumbrance which hindered access to the single longitudinal ladder which ran the length of the ship – and it was time for it to go.

Within an hour Nicklin had eaten a solitary breakfast, sought out Montane and appointed himself maintenance supervisor in Craig's place.

The gangway was made of pressed metal in some places, and in others of simple wooden planks which still bore dusty footprints. Nicklin started at the upper end of the ship, removing sections, cutting them into convenient lengths and storing them in an empty room on 5 Deck. As he cleared each deck he checked that its sliding anti-fire hatch could be moved freely. The work was aided by the low gravity, but hampered by the number of people moving between levels. Having spent one ship day adjusting to their surroundings and getting used to the idea of being in space, the emigrants were beginning to establish the life patterns which might have to serve them for many months.

Looking along the ladder was, for Nicklin, like taking a core sample of the activities on the seriate decks. In the dwindling companionways he could see knots of men and women in conversation, while others progressed between the two public levels of the canteen and washrooms. Children were visible almost everywhere, establishing their hold on new territories or being harried by adults. At one stage there was a bible class going on below Nicklin, a committee meeting of some kind on his level and what seemed like a choir practice several floors above him.

Inconvenient though the continual traffic on the ladder was, he derived comfort from the abundant evidence that the human spirit was irrepressible. Many of the emigrants spoke to him in a friendly manner, some – having tapped into an information grapevine – expressing gratitude for the part he had played in getting the ship off the slideway. These men and women were obviously more in touch with the realities of their situation than his anti-religious prejudice had allowed him to expect, and the idea that they might form a viable colony on a new world gradually began to seem less preposterous.

Twice during the morning's work he saw Zindee White coming towards him. Unable to meet her eyes, he moved as far off the ladder as possible and kept his back turned while she was passing. On the first occasion he allowed himself to hope that she would speak and show some sign of forgiveness, but no contact was made. That's that, he told himself grimly. To use one of Corey's best clichés – I'm reaping what I sowed.

There was little to tax his mind in the dismantling of the gangway, but he gave the task full concentration, using the physical labour to ease the pressures of self-reproach and recrimination. Having shut everything but bolts, clamps and lashing ropes from his personal universe, he felt a dull sense of surprise when – some time later – he became aware of Nibs Affleck beckoning to him from higher up the ladder.

Making sure he was leaving nothing in a dangerous condition, he followed Affleck towards the control deck, trying to guess why he had been summoned. He knew that Megan Fleischer was deeply unhappy about the weak acceleration, and that she had been engaged in bitter arguments with Hepworth, but he had no responsibilities in that area. Perhaps Montane, increasingly concerned with the trivia of shipboard routine, wanted to discuss illumination levels or the canteen rota. Or, could it be … could it possibly be…?

Orbitsville!

Nicklin's premonition gave way to numb certainty as he entered the control room.

In spite of some magnification the main screen now depicted a much greater area of the Orbitsville shell, with the result that the pattern of green lines appeared to have become more intricate. There were hundreds of regularly spaced foci, generating sprays of interlocking curves, resembling flower petals, which confused and dazzled the eye. The vast design had not only increased greatly in brightness, but was now pulsing at a rate of about once a second. Each peak of brilliance washed through the control room, garishly outlining the high-backed seats and their occupants – Montane, Voorsanger, Fleischer and Hepworth.

"You're entitled to see this, Jim," Hepworth said without turning his head. "Something is going to happen."

Nicklin moved to stand behind Hepworth. "When did the pulsing start?"

"A couple of minutes ago – and it's speeding up."

Frozen, entranced, Nicklin stared at the living image as the tempo of light beats increased. It became an eye-stabbing frenzy, the intervals between the peaks lessening, shrinking to zero. And then the screen steadied at an intolerable level of brightness.

A second went by; two seconds; three seconds…

Scott was right, Nicklin thought, sick with apprehension, half-blinded by the glare. Something is going to happen.

…four seconds; five seconds…

The incredible filigree of green fire ceased to exist – and in its place there was a new pattern.

Blue-white crescents suddenly filled the entire screen. Row upon row, line upon line, layer upon layer. The largest were in the centre of the field of view, and outwards from them, graduating downwards in size to star-like points, there ran countless curving meridians of dwindling beads. The farther they were from the centre of the screen the fuller were the crescents. In their entirety they formed concentric gauzy spheres, depth leading to depth, at the centre of which was a small yellow sun.

Nicklin's gaze fixed on one of the largest of the side-lit globes, but long before he had brought it into perfect focus – identifying the blue and green variegations as oceans and continents – an inner voice had told him he was looking at a new-born planet.

Orbitsville – equal in area to millions of Earths – had become millions of Earths.

CHAPTER 19

The utter silence in the control room lasted for minutes, during which the image on the screen continued to evolve.

Unable to take his gaze off the spectacle, Nicklin groped his way around the empty seat beside Hepworth and sat down. As his eyes gradually recovered from the punishing overload of green light he began to take in more and more details of the fantastic scene and to interpret some of its elements.

He saw that the sun was not enclosed by the blackness of space. The multiple layers of planets in the foreground had prevented him from realising that the sun was at the centre of a pale blue disk. The circle of blue exhibited shifting moiré patterns of a paler shade, and – in spite of the alien nature of the visual setting – it looked achingly familiar.

"That's the sky," he breathed. "I mean … We're looking at the inside of Orbitsville."

"You're right." Hepworth sounded calm and emotionless, the scientist in him having displaced the merely human observer. "Feast your eyes on it while you can, my boy. You have slightly less than eighteen minutes – then it will disappear for ever."

"Eighteen minutes?" The precision of the term added to Nicklin's sense of awe. "How do you know that?"

"Well, it seems that the Orbitsville shell has been converted into smaller spheres, each about the size of a small planet." Hepworth glanced along the row of seats. "Are we in agreement on that one? Nobody wants to claim it's all an optical illusion?"

Fleischer nodded. Montane and Voorsanger, gaping at the screen, appeared not to have heard.

"I think we can assume that the conversion was universal and simultaneous," Hepworth went on, seizing the best opportunity he would ever have to deliver one of his impromptu lectures. "That feels right to me, if nothing else. The entire shell broke up all at once, and was converted into smaller spheres all at once – but we can't see it that way because Orbitsville was eighteen light minutes in diameter. For us, the conversion will appear to be progressive…"

Nicklin lost the sound of the physicist's voice as soon as he had, belatedly, worked out for himself what was happening. He watched in fascination as the blue disk expanded in the view screen, its edge appearing to dissolve and vaporise into a mist of planets. The disk, with its crazed pattern of day and night bands, was the sunlit interior of Orbitsville – but he knew that it no longer existed, that he was seeing it by virtue of light which had started on its journey while he was still in a lower part of the Tara, working on the gangway.

For the first time in his life, he began to get some inkling of Orbitsville's true size. The vast sphere had already met its enigmatic end, but by virtue of sheer immensity it was clinging to an illusory existence, reluctantly yielding up its substance at the speed of light.

To suffer a C-change, Nicklin marvelled, into something rich and strange…

The circle of striated blue expanded off the edges of the screen. Fleischer touched a camera control, dropping the magnification to zero, and the field of view was increased by a factor of ten. The circle continued its growth, spewing millions of new worlds in a silver fog at its rim, but the pace of enlargement slowed with the light front reaching the widest aspect of the shell. It was still racing across Orbitsville's doomed, dreaming landscapes – annihilating them at a rate of 300,000 kilometres a second – but, as the direction was nearly parallel to the watchers' line of sight, lateral change was temporarily minimised.

There was a period of near-stasis which lasted for more than a minute, then the azure circle began to shrink.

The contraction was barely perceptible at first, but in accordance with the laws of spherical geometry there was an acceleration – and an acceleration of acceleration. The blue circle dwindled fiercely, boiling itself away in a steam of planetary creation. In a final silent implosion it vanished behind the stellar corona.

The sun remained – unaffected and unchallenged – at the centre of a spherical cloud of new-born worlds.

Nicklin was frozen in his seat, breathing at only the shallowest level, staring at the incredibly beautiful display on the main screen. His mind was scoured out. He felt cold, chastened and uniquely privileged – as though the whole of Creation had been reprised especially for his benefit. He felt that he ought to speak – but what was there to say?

"My eyesight isn't what it used to be," Hepworth came in, "but those are planets, aren't they?"

Nicklin nodded, forcing his larynx into action. "They look like planets to me."

Montane emitted a hoarse sobbing sound. "They are not planets! It's all part of the Devil's trickery! It's an illusion."

"I thought we dealt with that notion at the start," Hepworth said, with a patience which conveyed impatience. "What we have just witnessed was the creation of millions of planets out of the material of the Orbitsville shell. The big question now, or one of the big questions, is – is everybody still alive on them?"

"Everybody has to be dead," Montane announced. "Everybody is – dead!"

Nicklin, who had thought his capacity for wonder exhausted, was freshly awed by Hepworth's imaginative power. "How? How could anybody possibly be alive after all that?"

"How me no hows," Hepworth replied. "I don't think we'll ever understand how it was done. But – and don't ask me to explain this either – to me it seems that the whole exercise would have been pointless unless life was preserved. Don't you see that?"

"I want to see that. I want to see that very much."

"How much magnification can you give it?" Hepworth said to Megan Fleischer. "A hundred?"

She nodded, fingers moving on a panel in the armrest of her seat. A tiny red circle appeared near the centre of the screen. It adjusted position slightly to enclose one of the glowing specks, then it began to expand, magnifying the contained area, progressively obliterating the rest of the screen. The object it enclosed was quickly revealed to be a black disk surrounded by a thin circle of brilliance.

"That one is too nearly in line with the sun," Hepworth said. "We're looking at its night side, but the halo demonstrates an important point – it has an atmosphere. It proves, to me anyway, that whoever dissolved Orbitsville had our best interests at heart."

"You're a fool," Montane whispered. "The Devil is our enemy."

"Go out to one side a bit," Hepworth said to the pilot.

The red circle immediately collapsed to its former size, moved to the left and centred itself on another mote of light. The process of magnification began again, and this time the target expanded to become a bright crescent which was – unmistakably – dappled with green and blue beneath the white curlicues of weather systems.

"There you are," Hepworth said triumphantly. "A prime piece of Orbitsville real estate, parcelled up a different way."

Nicklin's mind made a dizzy leap. "Will we be able to see cities?"

"Possibly, but the trick would be to find them." Hepworth made a sweeping gesture which took in the jewel-dusted margins of the screen outside the crimson circle. "What was the surface area of Orbitsville compared to, say, Earth? Wasn't it something like 650 million times bigger? If nothing has gone to waste, that means we have about 650 million new planets out there – and our little handful of cities would be fairly insignificant."

"I'll start a radio scan," Fleischer said. "It's a bit soon to expect–"

"Stop this!" Montane shouted, lurching to his feet, face contorted into a pale mask. "I'll listen to no more of this … blasphemous mouthing!"

"We're talking science now, Corey," Hepworth said calmly, kindly and with more than a hint of condescension. "Sooner or later you'll have to start dealing in the facts of the situation."

"Facts! I'll give you facts! Those are not real worlds-only God can create real worlds – and there are no cities. Every single soul we left behind has been claimed by the Evil One. They are all dead!"

Voorsanger shifted uneasily. "Just a minute, Corey. I'd like to hear what–"

"That man speaks for the Devil," Montane cut in, voice rising in pitch. "I'm warning you, Ropp, if you listen to him you will put your own immortal soul at risk."

"But if there's a chance that my wife is still alive!" Voorsanger paused, looking oddly shamefaced but stubborn, and when he spoke again he avoided Montane's gaze. "If there is any chance at all that Greta is still alive … and that all the others might still be alive … is it not our duty to turn back and try to find them?"

"But you saw what happened out there!" Montane's voice was cracking, becoming an articulated shriek. "How can you even–?"

He stopped speaking, mouth and eyes widening in shock. He clapped his right hand to his chest and at the same time pressed the left to his back in a sudden twisting movement, almost as if he had been transfixed by an invisible blade. His tongue flickered for a moment, snake-like, depositing saliva on each side of his chin. Affleck, who had been standing by the ladder, darted to Montane's side and lowered him into his seat.

"See what you done!" Affleck growled, switching a baleful stare between Voorsanger and Hepworth. "If Corey dies…"

"I'm not going to die, Nibs – it's all right." Montane took several deep breaths and, unexpectedly, produced a weak smile. "There's nothing for you to be alarmed about."

"Corey, you ought to lie down."

Montane squeezed Affleck's arm. "Just let me sit here, my good friend. I'm going to be fine, you'll see."

Affleck nodded uncertainly and backed away to his post by the ladder.

"I must apologise for my little display," Montane said, addressing the others, and now, in contrast to his previous hysteria, sounding gentle and reasonable. "I accused Scott of blasphemy, but I was the real blasphemer. I presumed to make myself the channel for God's divine wrath, and He sent me a little reminder that pride is a mortal sin."

The clichés are just the same, Nicklin thought in dismay, his mind diverted from external wonders, but this has to be a different man.

"Doctor Harding is with us," Voorsanger said. "I think I should ask him to come up here and–"

"Thank you, Ropp, but I assure you I am in no need of medical attention." Montane's eyes were bright and humorous as he looked at Hepworth. "Go on with what you were saying, Scott. I want to hear the scientist's view of the Devil's handiwork."

"It was all a bit speculative," Hepworth said, obviously in some doubt about the effects his words might have on Montane's state of mind.

"Don't be so modest! You were doing a wonderful job – laying down scientific laws that both Our Lord and the Devil have to obey. Go on with it, Scott – I really am interested." Montane, becoming aware of the saliva on his chin, drew the back of his sleeve across it, momentarily dragging his mouth out of shape.

The action was so atypical of the normally fastidious preacher that Nicklin felt a twinge of unease. Corey, are you in there? he thought. Or have we a stranger in our midst?

"All right, let's try to be as rational and unemotional as we possibly can," Hepworth said in a subdued voice which hinted that he too could be concerned about Montane's mental well-being. "Corey believes that Orbitsville was dissolved by the … um … Devil for the sole purpose of wiping out humanity, and I'm going to refer to that as the Malign Hypothesis. I disagree with him, so I'm going to champion the opposite point of view – the Benign Hypothesis.

"I have little doubt that the spheres we can see on our screens – all 650 million of them – are not 'real' planets in the normal astronomical sense. I would say that they are hollow shells, just as Orbitsville was a hollow shell; and I would say that their gravity is generated by the shell material, just as Orbitsville's gravity was generated."

"You're assuming that they have gravity in the first place," Montane cut in.

Hepworth nodded soberly. "That's right, Corey – I'm making that assumption."

"Just checking, just being scientific." Montane gave the others a conspiratorial grin which made Nicklin want to cringe away from him.

"To proceed," Hepworth said, "the Benign Hypothesis actually requires us to regard those artificial planets as being as durable as the 'real' variety, perhaps more so. We should also think of them as being ideal cradles for intelligent life – custom-designed, if you like, for our needs."

Nicklin tried to make the imaginative leap, and failed. "You're getting away from me, Scott," he said. "How … how can you possibly justify that?"

"It's implicit in the theory, Jim. It's implicit in the fact that the conditions in Orbitsville itself were so exactly what were needed for the human race to thrive and flourish. How often have we heard Corey advance the same argument, that it was no coincidence that Orbitsville drew us into it – like wasps being lured into a jar of honey?"

"You can't fall back on – " Nicklin glanced at Montane's avid, watchful face. "Are we talking science or religion?"

"Science, Jim. Science! Though I don't mind telling you I would love it if some kind of devil or demon or imp or fucking familiar were to materialise in here at this very moment." Hepworth palmed his brow. "I'd be more than happy – believe this – I'd be more than happy to sell my immortal soul for a bottle of gin. Or even a glass!"

"What about this hypothesis?" Nicklin said, beginning to feel impatient.

"As I said, there is every evidence of design. Look at the green lines. They weakened building materials, remember. I would say that was a warning for us to keep off them – because they were dangerous boundaries." Hepworth glanced at the awesome image on the main screen. "I wouldn't mind betting that all that was achieved without the loss of one human life. I know how preposterous that sounds, but for beings who have total control of every geometry, every dimension – possibly including time – it could be done."

Montane snickered. "When does the Good Fairy appear?"

Hepworth inclined his head thoughtfully, half-smiling. "That's as good a name as any for the entity who is in control out there. It fits in well with the name of the hypothesis. I like it, Corey – Good Fairy! Yes, I like it."

"You could abbreviate that a bit," Nicklin said, feeling slightly awkward, like a reticent person who has been forced into a public debate. He and the others had just witnessed the most stupendous event imaginable, and it seemed inappropriate for them to be engaging in a quiet philosophical discussion so soon afterwards.

"You mean God?" Hepworth blinked his disagreement. "It's hardly His style is it?"

"All right, can you tell us who the Good Fairy is, and what she's up to?"

"The Good Fairy is the entity who designed and constructed Orbitsville in the first place. She must be as far ahead of us in evolutionary terms as we are ahead of amoebae."

"I could have said something like that," Nicklin protested. "Scott, I hate to say this – but your theory doesn't seem to take us very far."

"Mr Hepworth, could I ask you about the benign part of it," Voorsanger said, his narrow face pale and intent. "What makes you think that my … that everybody we left behind is still alive?"

"Occam's razor. You don't do all that … you don't go to all the trouble of creating two-thirds of a billion new homes for privileged customers and then allow the customers to die. It simply wouldn't be logical."

"Logical! Oh dear, oh dear! Logical!" Montane leaned far back in his seat and smiled at the ceiling.

Nicklin noticed, with a return of his uneasiness, that the smile seemed to be off centre. An obscure heavy-dictionary term flickered in his mind – plaice-mouthed – together with a horror vision of Montane's facial tissues having turned into an inelastic dough, allowing his mouth to be permanently dragged out of place when he wiped it .Are we all going mad? Has the encounter with the Good Fairy been too much for us?

"I want to believe you, Mr Hepworth," Voorsanger said, his eyes fixed on Hepworth's face, pleading. "Do you think we could find the right … planet?"

"I don't see why not." Hepworth's grandiloquent manner was returning. "If Orbitsville's equatorial material has remained at an equivalent position in the world cloud – and it seems only logical that it should – then–"

"For Christ's sake, Scott," Nicklin cut in, raising his voice. "Don't get carried away! I can hear the wheels going round in your head. You're adding bits and pieces to your so-called theory as you go along."

Hepworth wheeled on him and Nicklin saw in his eyes the beginnings of the sudden rage that so often transformed him when his scientific authority was challenged. There was a moment of silent antagonism, then Hepworth's plump face relaxed. He stood up and slowly walked around the control console, taking up a position beside the main screen, like a teacher with a blackboard. The screen was still largely occupied by the image of the single planet.

Hepworth gave Megan Fleischer a perfunctory smile. "Would you please revert to the general view?"

The pilot's hand moved slightly and the planet vanished. The cloud of worlds again dominated the screen, enclosing the sun in a gauzily bejewelled sphere of impossible beauty.

"In your slightly rusticated and untutored way, you were actually making a valid philosophical point," Hepworth said in mild tones, looking directly at Nicklin. "There is a classic test which can be applied to any good scientific theory. You make a prediction based on that theory, and if the prediction comes true the theory is strengthened.

"Would you be more kindly disposed towards my brain-child if we went through that process? If I were to make a prediction, here and now, and if – as some of us might put it – the prophecy were to be fulfilled? Would that bring a smile back to that cherubic countenance of yours?"

"Don't make a banquet of it, Nicklin thought irritably, refusing even to nod.

"Very well," Hepworth went on, an actor enjoying the centre of the stage. "I will now stick my neck out and predict that these worlds … which have just been created by the Good Fairy … all 650 million of them … will soon disappear from our sight."

Fleischer sat up straighter. "How can you say a thing like that?"

The question reverberated in Nicklin's mind as he stared at Hepworth's jowled and silver-stubbled face. The physicist looked more disreputable than ever in his smudged and shoddy clothing. This was the scientist manqué, the man who had allowed gin to leach his brain to the extent that he could flunk on high-school basics, but whose imaginative power seemed to encompass galaxies, universes, infinities.

I'm listening to you, Scott, he thought, all animosity and scepticism gone. Say what you have to say – and I'll believe you.

"It's all built in to the Benign Hypothesis," Hepworth said, indicating the world cloud. "I don't need to tell anybody that these planets are not in orbit around the sun. If the cloud is in rotation, as Orbitsville was, planets in the equatorial band might be in orbit – but I don't think they are. The entire system is impossible in terms of our celestial mechanics. It should fly apart, but it won't, and that is because some force is keeping those planets in place – just as another unknown force kept Orbitsville stable."

Fleischer raised one hand a little, like a student in class. "It seems to me that you're advancing reasons for the planets not to disappear."

"Yes and no. I'm saying that they could remain exactly where they are – if the Good Fairy wanted things to be that way. But – and this is the nub of everything – what would have been the point in dissolving Orbitsville in the first place?" Hepworth spread his hands and looked at each of his listeners in turn.

"Essentially, very little has changed out there. Instead of one huge Orbitsville there are 650 million little ones – turned inside out, of course – but if things stay as they are life will quickly return to normal. The cries of wonder and alarm from ordinary people will soon die down, because that's the way ordinary people are. There will be a few adjustments to make, of course, and the annus mirabilis will excite historians, philosophers and scientific researchers for many centuries to come – but, in essence, everything will be pretty much the same as before."

Hepworth paused, apparently distracted from his grand theme by the discovery that his shirt had crept up over his bulging stomach. He spent a few seconds stuffing it back into his pants before fixing his audience with a sombre gaze.

"So, I put it to you," he said, "what would be the point in leaving all those brand-new planets where they are?"

"Perhaps there isn't any point," Nicklin said. "Perhaps that's just the way it's going to be."

"That's another line of thought – call it the Null Hypothesis – but I don't like it. I don't believe that the Good Fairy squanders her time and energy."

Nicklin found himself floundering in the onrush of new concepts. "All right – where will the planets go? And why will they go?"

"That isn't part of the bet," Hepworth said simply. "I can't explain the wheres and whys – all I'm saying is that the planets will be relocated. They may disappear suddenly, all at once; or the process may be a gradual one. For all we know it has already started–"

"It shouldn't be too hard to find out, provided our old planet-search programme can handle that many points," Fleischer said, beginning to address her main computer. "What we might be able to do is monitor say a one per cent sample, and then…" Her voice faded into an abstracted murmur as she became involved in the mathematics of the self-imposed problem.

Voorsanger glanced apprehensively at Montane before fixing his gaze on Hepworth. "All this is enough to start me questioning the whole purpose of this flight."

Hepworth nodded. "Are you saying we should go back?"

"I suppose…" Voorsanger glanced again at Montane and his face suddenly hardened. "Yes, that's what I'm saying."

"How about you, Jim?"

"How would I know?" Nicklin said, unable to suppress the feeling that it was monstrously unfair to ask him for a judgement on such a vast issue and with so little hard evidence available. "Besides, we're talking like a management committee again."

"All right, we'll ask the boss." Hepworth looked at Montane. "How about it, Corey?"

"You fools!" Still grinning, Montane continued to stare at the ceiling. "You poor fools!"

"I don't think Corey is quite ready to give us a considered opinion." Hepworth gave Affleck a meaningful look. "Nibs, why don't you see if you can find Doctor Harding and bring him up here? I think it would be for the best…"

Affleck shuffled his feet, looking tortured, then stepped on to the ladder and sank out of view.

Hepworth returned his attention to Nicklin. "How about it, Jim?

"How about you?" Nicklin said, putting off any kind of decision. "What do you say?"

Hepworth gave him a strange little smile. "It's a tough one – especially without suitable lubrication. There's so much to find out about this universe. I'd like to go on, and at the same time I'd like to go back."

"That's a lot of help," Nicklin said. "It seems to me that as you started the–"

"Gentlemen!" Megan Fleischer cut in. "Allow me to make up your minds for you – we have to turn back."

"At least there's no equivocation there," Hepworth said coldly. "Would you mind telling us how you arrived at such a firm conclusion?"

"I don't mind at all." Fleischer smiled in a way that signalled her dislike for the physicist. "This ship isn't fit to carry out an interstellar flight."

"What?" Hepworth's belligerence was immediate. "What are you talking about, woman?"

"I'm talking about the drive, man. We're losing the left intake field."

"Nonsense!"

Hepworth leaned over the control console, staring down at the field distribution display. Nicklin followed his line of sight and saw that the glowing butterfly had become noticeably asymmetric. He watched in chill fascination as, in the space of only a few seconds, the left wing – changing shape all the while – shrank to a writhing speck and finally blinked out of existence. In the same moment he felt a queasy upsurge in his stomach which told him the ship's acceleration had been sharply reduced. There followed a ringing silence which was broken by Fleischer.

"As commander of this vessel," she announced in clear, precise tones, "I have decided to abort the flight."

"You stupid bitch!" Hepworth shouted.

He turned and ran to the ladder, reaching it in two grotesque low-gravity bounds, and lowered himself through the deck opening. Several seconds went by before it dawned on Nicklin that Hepworth was on his way to the engine cylinders. Gripped by a sense of unreality, he stood up and looked at the others half-expecting to receive some guidance as to what he should do next. Fleischer and Voorsanger gave him blank stares; Montane continued to grin wetly at the ceiling.

Nicklin loped past them and sprang on to the ladder. He went down it in the normal manner for a short distance, then realised that the quickest way to proceed in the low-gravity conditions was by a controlled fall. He curled his fingers loosely on the stringers, took his feet off the rungs and allowed himself to drop.

The fall was gentle and easily controllable by tightening his grip. Far below him he could hear Hepworth bellowing at people using the ladder to get out of his way. On almost all the decks that Nicklin passed there were children to applaud his unorthodox descent. Some adults eyed him with less enthusiasm, and he knew they were experiencing the qualms that travellers had always felt on noticing a disturbance in shipboard routine. It occurred to him that they would feel considerably worse when they learned what the disturbance was all about. The future of the New Eden express was being threatened from without and within.

He caught up with Hepworth on 14 Deck, the first on which there was access to the engine cylinders. Hepworth had already tapped his authorisation code into the lock and was dragging the shielded door open.

"What do you want?" he demanded, scowling at Nicklin with the face of an enemy.

What's happening to us? Nicklin thought. "Scott, I'm with you. You're not the only one who sweated in here. Remember?"

Hepworth's brow cleared at once. "We've got a minor problem down here, Jim. That Fleischer woman would just love it if the whole drive complex packed up, but it isn't going to! I know exactly what's wrong – and I know exactly how to put it right."

"That's good," Nicklin said, unhappily remembering Hepworth's previous assertion that the weak acceleration was the result of unfavourable conditions outside the ship.

"It's the output gate control mechanisms," Hepworth said, stepping over the door's high threshold into the bleakly illuminated environment of the engine cylinders. "They were never right! I told Corey that from the start. The contractors who overhauled them were a bunch of know-nothings, but he wouldn't part with the money for a dependable job. Not Corey! And now that the inevitable has happened that bitch up above is trying to shift the blame on to me!"

Hepworth was moving towards the left output chamber as he spoke. Nicklin followed close behind, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. He had had little to do with the gates and their associated mechanisms, partly because they had been Hepworth's jealously guarded territory, but also because the gates themselves were blocks of ferro-molybdenum weighing in the region of 600 tonnes each. In spite of their enormous mass they had to be moved quickly, with three degrees of freedom, to direct the magnetic flux of the Tara's intake fields.

The support frames, controls, gears and resonance motors were heavy power engineering, and outside the scope of Nicklin's fields of expertise. He had always worked alone and had taken no interest in anything he was unable to lift without help. But in spite of his limited knowledge, as he trailed behind Hepworth through the inhuman environment of the engine cylinder, he found himself again experiencing doubts about the man's qualifications and practical experience.

What he had seen portrayed on the ship's control console had looked, to him, like a straightforward collapse of the left intake field. At a guess he would have said that a flux pump had developed one of the dozen or so faults to which such complex machines were prone. But he was relegated, condemned, to the role of bystander because of his cursed lack of relevant training. Could the field have withered in a way that, to the experienced eye, told of a failure in gate mechanisms?

Hepworth reached the massive bulkhead of the field emission chamber and, breathing heavily, began tapping the access code into the lock.

"Scott, what are you doing?" Nicklin grabbed Hepworth's upper arm. "You can't just walk in there!"

Hepworth angrily shook his arm free. "I know what I'm doing. The whole complex has shut down automatically."

"But you don't know what the residual level of motor activity is! There could be … I mean…"

Nicklin strove for the right form of warning, the formula with which to penetrate the shell of Hepworth's irrational fury. He knew a lot about magnetic pulse motors, and on a small scale had seen the havoc they could wreak when suddenly frustrated in their normal activities. For as long as five minutes after a serious breakdown they could emit bursts of gyromagnetic energy which, flitting through the vicinity like poltergeists, could invade metal objects and invest them with a pseudo-life of their own. He had seen cables writhing like snakes, and pliers leaping from workbenches with enough force to shatter windows. In those cases the kinetic force had been released by broken motors no larger than his fist – and the motors in the field emission chamber were the size of beer kegs.

"There's nothing wrong with the motors," Hepworth snapped. "The trouble is in the gate control rods, and I know exactly where."

"But at least look at the monitors and…" Nicklin gestured at the panel beside the door and his voice faded as he saw that all its dials and counters were inert.

"Somebody put the wrong fuses in that thing," Hepworth said defiantly. "It's a redundant piece of junk anyway."

"But you told Corey … you told us all that the work on your side of things was finished weeks ago! What else have you declared redundant around here?"

"All essential systems are functional."

Nicklin stared into the physicist's eyes and saw something there which terrified him. "Fleischer was right about you, wasn't she? You're not up to the job!"

The punch Hepworth threw was both clumsy and slow, but when Nicklin tried to avoid it his feet, lacking purchase in the low gravity, skidded out from under him. Hepworth's fist hit him squarely in the stomach as he went down. He landed on his back and slid into a tool rack. Mentally rather than physically shocked, he gripped the rack and drew himself to his feet as Hepworth was disappearing from his view in the emission chamber.

"Scott, I'm sorry," he called out. "Please don't go–"

His voice was lost amid a series of violent reports from within the chamber. Metal was striking on metal with a ferocity which punished Nicklin's ears and numbed his brain. The clamour went on for perhaps ten seconds, and somewhere in the heart of it he heard a different kind of sound. It was a softer impact, less strident than the others and with several elements – a crushing, a pulping, a gasp. The mechanical bedlam reached an awesome climax and then, quite abruptly, slackened off. In the ringing aftermath Nicklin could hear a single piece of metal bouncing, come to rest, vibrating – then there was total silence.

He remained where he was, petrified, staring at the baffle screen which prevented him from seeing far into the emission chamber. Gyromagnetic demons had been unleashed behind that screen, he knew, and he was not venturing into their lair until it was safe to do so. Five minutes, he thought. I'll give it a full five minutes from now – just to be safe…

He began counting the time on his wristwatch.

Don't get me wrong on this thing. I'm not actually saying that old Scott is dead. No, sir! He isn't making any noises – I'll grant you that – but that doesn't mean he's been defunctified, not by a long chalk. He could be cowering inside a locker, wondering what the hell happened. Perhaps he has filled those awful fucking baggy pants of his and is too ashamed to come out into the open. What a bloody scream that would be!

Almost two minutes had passed when there came a single loud clank from behind the screen.

"Scott?" Nicklin whispered. "Is that you, Scott?"

As if answering the query, the wrenches and screwdrivers in his pockets stirred into life, twisting and squirming like trapped animals. He gave a quavering moan as the rack upon which he was leaning shuddered and briefly became a discordant carillon, every tool on it clattering its individual note. But the agitation soon passed. His new fear evaporated as he realised that the gyromagnetic demons had, in their death throes, given birth to and sent forth a horde of mischievous kinetic imps.

Another nice touch, O Gaseous Vertebrate! You really had me going there for a moment. But there's just one minor point – does this mean that Scott is really dead? Extincticated? Exanimated? Kaputorised?

Two minutes further on Nicklin heard a faint sound to his right. He looked in that direction and saw a young man in the uniform of a spaceport guard. It was the same young man – obviously a restless and inquisitive type – who had earlier intruded on the control deck. He studied Nicklin's face for a long moment and then, without uttering a word, placed a finger vertically against his lips and retreated out of sight.

When five minutes had gone Nicklin advanced slowly to the door of the emission chamber. From the narrow space between the bulkhead and the baffle screen he could see part of a surreal world of grey metal masses, grey cabinets and twisted control rods, the whole accented with streaks of red here, and spots of red there.

When he moved to the end of the screen and looked around it the first thing he noticed, lying almost at his feet, was Hepworth's head. It had been untidily severed, very untidily severed, and the face was turned up to his.

Nicklin felt his own face become an equally contorted death mask, and his mind immediately ricocheted into the safe universe of the absurd and the irrelevant. Look at the blackhead at the side of his nose. Just look at the frigger! Maybe I should squeeze it out before anybody else sees him like this … do him a last favour … mark of respect…

Part of Nicklin's mind which still dealt in logic told him there should be a body close by. On the perimeter of his vision there was something which just might have qualified as a body, but he was unable to direct his gaze on to it. Groaning with each breath, he backed out of the emission chamber and went to the nearest commset. He spoke the pilot's number and her face immediately appeared on the screen.

"This is Jim Nicklin," he said.

"I can see that," Fleischer replied drily. "Well?"

"Is Doctor Harding up there?"

"Yes, he's looking at Corey. Why?"

"Scott is dead. Somebody has to … gather him up – and I can't do it." Nicklin took a deep, steadying breath. "Ask Doctor Harding if he would come down to 14 Deck right away. Tell him his professional services are required."

In times of crisis – Nicklin had discovered – small, familiar comforts assume an inestimable degree of importance. There was no potable alcohol in the ship's medical supplies, thanks to Montane's prohibition, but it had turned out that Jon Harding had a bottle of brandy in his personal kit. Harding was not the Tara's official medic – he was a paid-up pilgrim, accompanied by his wife and two children – who happened to be a general practitioner, and was standing in for the appointee, who had been a casualty of the sudden departure from Beachhead. He had prescribed and dispensed a large measure of brandy for Nicklin's condition of shock. Nicklin had almost wept with gratitude on being handed the well-filled bulb, and now he treasured it more than an orb of gold.

It was "night" time and, although the clamour of the previous hours had subsided, the ensuing silence was far from being restful. Too much had happened in too short a time. The passengers had been alarmed and confused by the news of Orbitsville's transformation – as was evidenced by the crowds which had formed around the television monitors on several decks. And then, in close succession, had come the cut in acceleration, Hepworth's sensational death, and the announcement that the Tara was turning back.

Voorsanger and Fleischer had gone on the general audio system to say that the ship was returning to investigate the world cloud at close range – which was a diplomatic understatement rather than an outright lie. They had emphasised that the return was a minor event and should be viewed in the context of what was scheduled to be a months-long voyage, but too many doubts and fears had been aroused in the passengers' collective consciousness. Danea Farthing, and a few others of the mission's long-term staff who were fully acquainted with the situation, had spent hours in counselling anxious parents – with only qualified success.

Nicklin could sense the icy apprehension which was abroad in the ship's lower decks. The chill of it was deep within him, and slow to disperse. He had never really enjoyed brandy in the past, but as he sat with Voorsanger and Fleischer in the control room each sip he took yielded nostalgic pleasure beyond description. He could imagine himself, were the right circumstances ever to return, devoting the rest of his life to the worship of the fiery spirit. That possibility, however, had begun to seem more remote than the stars.

Harding had done heroic work in removing Hepworth's remains from the emission chamber without help. The Tara, as a ship of the Explorer class, was capable of being flown by one person if necessary. Its designers had done their best to anticipate every adverse situation a small crew might have to face, but they had overlooked the possibility that, occasionally, the crew might become even smaller. There was no suitable storage space for dead bodies. The oversight had created problems for Harding, and he had solved them by sealing Hepworth's corpse in wrappings of plastic and transferring it to a free corner of the ship's deep freeze facility, thus enabling Nicklin to enter the emission chamber and prepare a damage report.

Nicklin had found that one of the gate positioning rods had failed, just as Hepworth had diagnosed. The broken rod had jumped its bearings, displaced other rods and damaged two servomotors – something Hepworth had not thought of and which had cost him his life. But the root cause of the trouble had been more fundamental.

The sequence of disaster had been triggered by flux pump coils burning out. Automatic cut-outs had been slow coming into action – another fault – with the result that for a split-second the left intake field had been wildly misshapen. And it had been the system's attempt at correcting the field distortion that had made impossible demands on the output gate controls.

Enter Nicklin and the doomed Hepworth from stage left…

Nicklin squirmed in his seat as he wondered how badly the drive complex in the right-hand cylinder might be affected by the gangrene of Hepworth's incompetence.

The ship as a whole was in good condition. The thermonuclear power unit could be trusted, because it was self-contained and designed to run for centuries. Much the same could be said for the short-range ion drivers, and Nicklin also had faith in anything for which he had been responsible. So there would be no structural failures and the Tara's passengers were assured of regenerated oxygen, ventilation, light, heat and water.

All of which meant that, should the ship fail to reach a safe haven, they would be reasonably comfortable while they starved to death.

Their lives depended on the trouble-free functioning of everything in the right-hand drive cylinder. And Nicklin could visualise the ghost of Hepworth down there at that very minute – bragging, boozing, issuing worthless guarantees, threatening violence to anyone who questioned his ability…

"I've just come from Corey's room," Voorsanger said. "He is still asleep and Jon says he'll probably stay that way for the next six or seven hours. I think that could be something of a blessing for all of us, don't you?"

"It's probably a blessing for him," Fleischer replied in a tired voice. "I don't see what difference it makes to the rest of us."

"Well … He's less likely to … ah … object too strenuously to our going back if he finds we're already well on the way."

"He can object all he wants," Fleischer said firmly. "I'm the commander of this vessel. I made the decision to return, and nothing will make me alter it."

Good for you! Nicklin thought, sympathising in full with the pilot. She was becoming increasingly terse and irritable, and he could see why. She was a professional who had somehow allowed the religious side of her nature to blind her to the fact that she was joining a company of fools. It had become apparent to Fleischer that her faith in Corey Montane was going to cost her plenty, possibly her life, and she felt deeply embittered as a result.

There's a good chance of the Gaseous Vertebrate gaining another convert here, Nicklin thought, allowing a few drops of brandy to float on to his tongue. We'll just have to see how it goes.

"The Lord will decide everything in the end," Voorsanger said, reproving the pilot for her lack of humility. "Anyway, it makes me feel better to know that we're on our way back."

"I'll probably feel the same way – when we actually begin travelling back."

"But you turned the ship ages ago!" Voorsanger pointed at the sun and its fantastic retinue of planets on the main screen. "That's a forward view, isn't it? It-says so underneath. Nought degrees! That means the camera is looking dead ahead, doesn't it?"

Nicklin smiled to himself as he took another minuscule sip of brandy, conserving the precious supply. Voorsanger was undoubtedly a good man with financial facts and figures, but it was obvious that he had not thought much about balancing the books in which the Tara's energy transactions were logged.

"Yes, I turned the ship around," Fleischer said with some show of impatience, "but we had been accelerating for roughly thirty hours at that point and were travelling away from the sun at more than 320 kilometres a second. The ship is now pointing its nose at the sun, and it thinks it's moving in that direction – but it's actually flying backwards.

"We're trying to discard speed, but with only half of the original thrust available it will take us about sixty hours just to come to a halt and we'll have covered more than fifty million kilometres. Then we can start heading back to the edge of the world cloud, but the return leg is going to take even longer than the outward one."

"I see," Voorsanger said gloomily. "I thought we'd be able to start the search quite soon … in a couple of days…"

Fleischer shook her head. "Eight days minimum. That's assuming nothing else goes wrong – and around here that's a pretty big assumption."

"I think we all realise that." Voorsanger gave Nicklin a disapproving glance. "I warned Corey about giving responsible posts to inebriates."

"You shouldn't speak ill of the dead," Nicklin said in a pious voice.

"When I said inebriates I was including you, though I must admit your friend was worse. I never met him when he didn't reek of alcohol – it's no wonder he wasn't fit for his job."

"The booze had nothing to do with it," Nicklin countered. "Scott could make even better cock-ups when he was cold sober – he had a natural flair for it."

Lovely epitaph, he added mentally, wondering when the emotional trauma associated with Hepworth's death was going to catch up on him. They had spent too many lonely bull sessions together, holed up on rainy nights in odd corners of the gutted ship, for him not to have pain in reserve. It was banked away for him, accruing interest. Before long he would become a pain millionaire.

"Always the jokes," Voorsanger said. "But they don't alter the fact that Hepworth has endangered the lives of a hundred men, women and children."

"Scott was a good man," Nicklin replied, provoked into a declaration he knew to be totally out of context and, in most people's eyes, indefensible.

"Scott was a male chauvinist dinosaur," Megan Fleischer came in, her voice so matter-of-fact that Nicklin, even in his weariness and mild intoxication, knew it had to herald something important.

"But I'll say this much for him," she went on, fingers at work on the computer panel. "He was absolutely right about those planets disappearing – the world cloud has started to thin out."

"There you are!" Nicklin was about to comment on the power of Hepworth's imagination when an unwanted new thought crept into his mind. "If Scott was right the cloud will disappear altogether."

"That's possible. It may even be probable."

"Can you say how long that would take?"

"Not really," Fleischer said, very much the cool professional. "I don't know how representative my sample is, and I have a feeling the computer is a little confused by points moving in behind other points, thus apparently reducing the real number. I'll have to refine things a bit more for it."

"Let's put it this way," Nicklin said, wondering if the pilot had chosen to tantalise him, "will it take longer than eight days?"

"The computer is saying thirty to forty days, so we ought to be all right." Fleischer's face was unreadable beneath its crown of luxuriant hair. "Though I have no idea what the margin of error is – and I am, of course, assuming that the planets are disappearing at a constant rate."

Thank you ever so bloody much for that last bit, Nicklin thought, fixing his gaze on the main screen. The gauzy sphere of the world cloud now had a new fascination for him, quite apart from its breathtaking beauty. He raised the drinks container to his lips and, no longer in the mood to conserve its comforts, jetted warm brandy into his throat until the bulb was empty.

A fresh element of uncertainty had been introduced to a situation which already had too many life-threatening variables. He stared at the world cloud, trying to force his perceptions into a radical new mode which would enable him to detect the Good Fairy at work – dispatching planet after planet after planet into the unknown.

All thought of sleep had deserted him, but in a short time his eyes and mind tired of the impossible task he had set for himself. It was warm and quiet in the control room, and it was possible to forget that he was inside a pneumatic bomb, hurtling through the interstellar void under doubtful control. His seat was unexpectedly comfortable, the brandy was exercising its benign influence, and he could have been in another time and place. This could have been Orangefield – drowsing in ageless security – preserved in the amber of distant summer afternoons…

He was awakened by a startled cry from Megan Fleischer.

He jerked upright, fully expecting to see that the gauze of the world cloud had dissolved into patches and threads, but the image on the main screen was exactly as before. To his left Voorsanger was struggling out of sleep, and Fleischer was knuckling her eyes while staring intently at pulsing lozenges on the console.

"There's somebody in the pinnace!" She clapped a hand to her forehead, no longer the imperturbable commander. "It's going! It's going!"

Nicklin twisted his way out of his seat and made a low-gravity swoop towards the ladder. He went down it at speed, but before he reached 2 Deck he saw that the floor plate had been slid into place, barring access to the deck below. He dropped to his knees, gripping the ladder with one hand and tugging at the plate with the other. There were no locks on the plate, but it moved only a centimetre or two and then stuck. He knew at once that it had been tied in place from underneath.

"Nibs!" he shouted. "Are you down there, Nibs? What the hell do you think you're doing?"

As if in answer to his questions a multiple tremor ran through both ladder and deck.

"The pinnace has gone." Fleischer's face had appeared above him in the control-room hatchway. "There was nothing I could do about it."

Nicklin pounded on the floor plate. "Nibs, if you don't move this plate out of the way I'll come down there and kill you." He thought for a moment about the contradictory nature of the threat and decided on a change of tack. "Mr Voorsanger wants to go down there. This is serious, Nibs."

A moment later he heard some fumbling from below. He was able to push the plate aside and saw Affleck standing at the open door to Montane's suite. The fire plate on 3 Deck had also been drawn over and lashed in place, sealing the level off from the lower regions of the ship. The rectangular shape of Milly Montane's coffin was projecting a short distance through the doorway, and the lid was missing.

Oh Christ, no! Nicklin thought as he lowered himself on to 3 Deck, with Fleischer and Voorsanger following from above. Nicklin halted and looked down into the coffin. It was empty, just as he had known it would be. The white satin lining was nested in the shape of a human being, and the depression was ringed with stains, like a contour map, the colours ranging from pale yellow to black. A sweet, sickly and faintly spicy smell – the pot-pourri of corruption – hung in the air.

"What's going on here?" Megan Fleischer demanded, pushing against Nicklin from behind.

He moved aside and gave her an unobstructed view of the coffin. She looked at it, turned back – face quite impassive – and pushed her way between Nicklin and Voorsanger to reach the ladder. She clung to it and began a harsh dry retching, measured and painful, regular as breathing.

She didn't know about the extra passenger, Nicklin realised. Welcome on board the good ship Lollipop, captain.

"None of you got no idea how it was with Corey and me," Affleck said defiantly, his nose purple against the unnatural pallor of the rest of his face. "I had to do what he told me to do. I owe my life to Corey."

"Not any more," Nicklin replied. The torrent of events in the past minute had numbed his mind – and the nearness of the obscenely yawning coffin was not helping matters – but it was dawning on him that none of the mishaps so far encountered by the New Eden pilgrims was in a class with the latest grim development.

Without the pinnace to ferry them to a safe landfall, the hundred-plus men, women and children on board the Tara were condemned to remain in space for the rest of their lives.

"If you ask me," he said to Affleck, still speaking like an automaton, "you and Corey can call it quits."

CHAPTER 20

Montane knew that he had to act quickly in the first few seconds after separation.

The passenger cylinder of the Tara was visible above him, its coppery curvatures glowing in the weak light of the Orbitsville sun. The mother ship was in retardation, which meant – thanks to the arithmetic of relative velocities – that it was trying to overtake the pinnace. There was a real danger of the little ship colliding with the front end of the giant's engine cylinders and then tumbling back along the sides to be engulfed in the invisible but lethal exhaust flare.

It was many years since Montane had done any kind of flying, but he had retained the instincts of a pilot. He slammed the throttle to the FULL POWER position and at the same time pushed the single control column forward.

The nose of the passenger cylinder immediately slid backwards and out of sight, while at the same time the view ahead of him underwent a dizzy change. The sun swam upwards and passed out of his field of view, and the vast cloud of pseudo-planets which surrounded it partook of the same motion. For a giddy moment the jewelled curtain streamed vertically, then it too was gone, and the blackness of space filled the cockpit's forward transparency.

Montane brought the control column back to the neutral position to prevent the pinnace continuing on a circular path which would have taken it through the Tara's exhaust. The star fields ahead of him obediently settled into place, steady and serene, and he knew that he was once again flying away from the deadly web which the Devil had spun around the sun.

God in his infinite mercy had laid the universe and all its riches out before him – and each one of the brilliant points ahead of his speeding craft held infinite promise for the future.

Montane began to laugh, and as he laughed the nightmare years were erased from his memory. He was a young man – what could have made him think otherwise? – and the optimism and potency of youth suffused every part of his body.

And the Lord had appointed him to the most glorious and fulfilling task imaginable.

"It won't always be easy for us," he said to his young bride. "We may have to face great hardships when we reach the New Eden, but we will overcome them as long as we preserve our faith in Him and our love for each other."

"I know that, my darling," Milly replied, smiling at him from the cockpit's left-hand seat.

The pearl silk bridal gown emphasised her slimness and utter femininity, but he knew she also had an inner strength which would enable her to overcome any adversity the years might bring. The gladness he felt at simply being near her was almost unbearable.

"I don't think I've ever seen you looking so lovely," he said, briefly touching her wrist.

She made no reply, but her smile grew wider.

CHAPTER 21

The idea that he had just been sentenced to death was strangely easy for Nicklin to accept.

He felt neither fear nor anger – just a kind of sad resignation, which might have been the result of emotional overload. A more likely explanation, he decided as he stood with the others on the landing of 3 Deck, was that he had known in his heart for some time that this moment was inevitable. It had been rolling towards him, down a narrow alleyway of time, ever since that sunny afternoon in Altamura when he had first met Scott Hepworth. It had been accelerating all along, gaining momentum from each unexpected new event – within the ship or in the cosmos beyond – and now its force was irresistible.

I'm turning into a fatalist, he thought. And just in time, too!

"Might as well get this thing out of the way," he said, putting his foot against the end of Milly Montane's coffin. He thrust hard, propelling the coffin into the suite, then he closed the door. "Might as well keep the place tidy."

"Corey must have gone mad," Voorsanger whispered.

"Nobody is going to argue with you on that one. I'd say that Corey parted company with us a long time ago."

"But where does he think he's going?"

"He's going where the rest of us are going, but he'll get there sooner," Nicklin said. "There's no food or water on the pinnace – and not much oxygen."

"Would somebody kindly … explain to me what's been going on here?" Fleischer was gulping as she spoke, fighting to control her stomach, and her forehead was dewed with sweat.

"Corey's wife died a long time ago, but he wouldn't allow her to be buried on Orbitsville." Nicklin, who had had years to get used to the bizarre story, was unable to imagine how it must sound to Fleischer, hearing it for the first time in such extreme circumstances. "I … ah … don't think he could stand the idea of taking her back to…"

"You're insane," the pilot whispered, her eyes wide with incredulity. "You're all insane!"

Don't look at me, lady, Nicklin thought, then it came to him that he had little grounds for indignation. "Maybe you're right," he said. "That would account for a lot."

"If only I'd known what I was letting myself in for," Fleischer said, dabbing her brow.

"Perhaps Corey will come back." Voorsanger's gaze travelled around the other faces, and his eyes seemed to plead with them. "The children…"

I wish you hadn't said that, Nicklin thought, his awareness suddenly expanding beyond his own concerns and prospects. There were many children among the pilgrims who had believed that Corey Montane was going to save their mortal bodies and immortal souls. The adults had made a serious blunder and would have to pay the forfeit, but the little ones – the innocents who had been given no say in the matter – were going to exit from their short lives in suffering and bewilderment.

There ought to be a law, Nicklin thought. Somebody should have made a law against this kind of thing. A long time ago.

The pain within him intensified as he faced the fact that Zindee White was also on board. She and her parents had placed their faith in another false prophet, and as a consequence…

His recriminations were interrupted by the faint sound of a male voice filtering through the hatchway above.

"The radio!" Megan Fleischer, who had been clinging to the ladder, took proper hold of it and rapidly climbed out of Nicklin's sight.

"That's Corey," Voorsanger said, his voice quavering with vindication and relief. "I knew he wouldn't desert us. I'm going to speak to him." He went to the ladder and drew himself up it close on the pilot's heels.

Nicklin edged past Affleck, who seemed dazed and quite unaware of the new development, and followed Voorsanger to the control room. By the time he stepped off the ladder Fleischer was in the central chair and busy with the communications panel. The voice on the radio grew louder and clearer.

"I repeat, this is spaceport control at Silver Plains, P202," it said. "We are picking up your autoscan transmission on the general band. Is there anybody there? Please respond immediately if you are receiving this signal. I repeat, this is the spaceport control centre at Silver Plains, P202."

"This is W-602874 answering your call, Silver Plains," Fleischer said, her voice harshened by the long bout of retching. "Are you receiving me?"

There was a delay of several seconds before the voice on the radio was heard again. "This is spaceport control at Silver Plains. We are picking up your autoscan transmission on the … " It went on to repeat the earlier message, almost word for word.

"They didn't hear you," Voorsanger said nervously.

"Give them time," Fleischer glanced at the communications panel. "They're calling at a range of roughly thirty-five million kilometres. Our radio signal is taking a couple of minutes to get there. And we'll have to wait as long again for a reply."

"At least there's somebody there to hear us," Nicklin said, still trying to grasp the full significance of what had happened. "This means that Scott was right. His Benign Hypothesis is working out better than he'll ever know."

"It may also be more benign that he'll ever know." The pilot smiled at Nicklin for the first time in their acquaintanceship. "If all the old spaceport facilities are still in existence – and that call suggests that they are – we ought to be able to get another pinnace. Perhaps several."

"That does sound … benign." Nicklin returned Fleischer's smile, tentatively, almost afraid to accept the priceless gift she was offering. "Did you say several?"

"There were four different types that I know of in the Hilversum Space Technology Centre at Portal 16."

"Operational?"

"I flew two of them last year," Fleischer said. "When I was adding the Explorer class to my general licence."

"So…"

"So, the new plan is to locate Hilversum among that lot." Fleischer, in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Hepworth, waved an arm at the image of the world cloud on the main screen. "It should be easy enough to do, as soon as they pick themselves up off the floor and get back on the air the way the people at Silver Plains have done.

"We then go into orbit around the Hilversum world; they shuttle us down to the ground; and what happens after that is up to the Lord."

"We can only beg for His guidance and protection," Voorsanger came in, his voice newly charged with religious fervour. "Now that Corey is no longer with us I think it falls on me to organise general prayers for our deliverance."

Nicklin opened his mouth to comment on Orbitsville's sudden change of status – from Devil's snare to safe harbour – then decided it would be the cheapest kind of sarcasm. The very word had once meant tearing at flesh, and he had gorged himself to the full in the past three years. Besides, he had run as fast as anybody when the portents had come and the end of the world had seemed at hand.

"I think you should wait for some hard information before you say anything down below," Fleischer said, after a pause.

"Of course, but are we going to have a four-minute delay every time we speak to someone back there?"

"No. When we finally reach standstill and are starting on the way back the delay will have gone up to about seven minutes."

"Isn't there something else you can do?" Voorsanger made a show of looking at his wristwatch. "How did we talk to Earth in the old days?"

Fleischer shook her head. "This ship has no tachyonic equipment."

"What?" Voorsanger turned to Nicklin with a look of reproach on his compressed features.

"You were the financial expert who decided it was too expensive," Nicklin said, amazed at how quickly Voorsanger, once he had persuaded himself that death was no longer imminent, had reverted to the role of tetchy business expert for whom a wasted second was a wasted fortune. "Besides, the Tara wasn't supposed to need anything like tachyonics – the plan was to get out of Orbitsville and keep on going."

"The plan was also to have a ship that was capable of–"

Voorsanger broke off as the radio speakers gave a preliminary click.

"This is Silver Plains," the same male voice said. "We are receiving you, W-602874. Can you confirm that you are the Explorer-class vessel Tara? We have you listed as land-docked at Pi for overhaul and modifications. Over."

"Tara confirmed," Fleischer said at once. "We got out of Pi just before … things started to happen. One of our drive units has failed and we are currently retarding in preparation for return to any available port. We have also lost our auxiliary craft. Repeat, we have lost our auxiliary craft. Can you arrange for the retrieval of approximately one hundred passengers from parking orbit? Over."

"That's the big question," Nicklin said as Fleischer relaxed back into her chair. "Is Silver Plains likely to have anything which could help?"

"We can only hope and pray. We don't even know what happened when the portals closed up, do we? If it was a simple iris-type process you would expect that any ships which were in exterior docking cradles would have been shut out of Orbitsville. Then when Orbitsville dissolved and – how do you put it? – all the geometries were reversed, all those ships would have wound up inside their respective new planets. Is that how it seems to you?"

"I hadn't even thought about that part of it," Nicklin replied. "I wonder if everybody got out of them."

"There was enough time – for ships that were actually in the cradles." The pilot, rapidly regaining her professional composure, sounded almost casual. "But there must have been a few ships in transit between portals at the time. I'd like to know what happened to them. Even if they were somehow, by some kind of miracle, injected into orbit around new planets – how will the people on board get down to the surface?

"Ships with a surface-to-space capability are rare birds – as we very well know – and those that may still be available will only be on planets which happen to have spaceports. Even on the equatorial band that could be as few as one in a hundred." Fleischer's voice became abstracted, fading almost to inaudibility as she developed the line of thought.

"I wonder how far Hepworth's Good Fairy is prepared to go to preserve human lives. I mean, how good is she at detail planning?"

Another good question, Nicklin thought, realising that even the qualified optimism he had begun to feel over the fate of the Tara had been ill-considered and premature. Fleischer had said that there were four pinnaces at P16, but there was a strong probability that all four had been in exterior cradles when the portal closed. In that case it was possible, as she had suggested, that they were now inside Hilversum's brand-new custom-built world.

It all came down to the fact – an echo of Montane's oft-repeated warning – that everything had been made too easy for the inhabitants of Orbitsville. The great shell had been rotating at a rate which meant that the portals in the equatorial band had a velocity exactly equal to that of a ship which was in orbit around the sun. That had made embarking and disembarking through a portal extremely simple. It had also made it pointless for an ordinary commercial spacecraft to carry the equivalent of an ocean liner's lifeboat.

Lifeboat, Nicklin mused. LIFEboat. The character who thought up that name knew exactly what he…

He lost track of the thought as the radio speakers gave their preliminary click well in advance of the four-minute interval which had been anticipated.

"This is spaceport control at Hilversum, formerly Portal 16," a male voice said tentatively. "We are receiving an autoscan transmission. Please identify yourself. Over."

"He sounds more scared than we are." Fleischer gave the others a wry smile which warmed Nicklin towards her. "I wonder who he thinks is calling."

"Answer the man," Voorsanger said impatiently.

"This is spacecraft W-602874 answering your call, Hilversum. Are you receiving me? Over." Fleischer glanced at the communications panel then settled back in her chair. "That's the call I was hoping for. We'll soon know how we stand."

Voorsanger moved into the chair beside her. "How long will it take?"

"Hilversum is farther away along the equator. The range is nearly seventy-five miks this time, so the round-trip delay will be over eight minutes."

"That's too long," Voorsanger said in sepulchral tones. "We should have been tachyonic."

"I can wait eight minutes. Every reply we get increases our chances of getting out of this alive – and I'm hoping to raise a hundred spaceports in the next few hours. If two of them are functioning there's no reason every port there is shouldn't come on the air."

As he listened to the pilot Nicklin felt a growing respect for her tough-minded style of thinking. Whereas he was allowing himself to swing between optimism and despair, she appeared to be holding steady, concentrating her experience, talent and mental energies on maximising their chances of survival. There had been 207 portals on Orbitsville's equator, virtually all of them developed as spaceports, and they represented a vast reserve of hardware and manpower which could be tapped to bring the Tara in from the cold.

The big battalions are on our side, he thought. Now, if only I could forget about… He tried to fend off a secondary thought, but it was coming with too much speed, too much power. If only I could forget about the time limit. The world cloud is thinning out – just the way Blackhead Hepworth said it would. The new planets are going somewhere, and – according to the Benign Hypothesis – it's somewhere good. And if we don't get ourselves bedded down on one of them pretty damn quick it's going to be lonely out here…

He tried not to think about the prospects for all those on board the Tara if the ship were to be left in orbit around a barren sun. The food would last two years, but would anybody in his right mind want to hang on right to the end, in a drifting tomb in which the dead were beginning to outnumber the living? And in which the taboos against cannibalism were outmoded? It would be better to steer the ship into the sun long before that unimaginable degree of horror was attained, but even that would result in protracted and agonising deaths for the little ones. The best plan might be to override all the safety mechanisms and vent the ship, thus ensuring that suffering was kept to a minimum.

Nicklin, suddenly beset by feelings of suffocation, pulled air deeply into his lungs and wrenched his thoughts on to a different course. He was grateful to discover that Voorsanger had asked Fleischer about the procedures for putting the ship into parking orbit about a planet and transferring its company to the surface. The subject was life-oriented, and he poured his consciousness into it, managing to lose track of the minutes until – with heart-stopping abruptness – the speakers again emitted their now-familiar preliminary click.

"This is space traffic control at Amsterdam, formerly based on P3," a woman's voice said. "We are receiving your autoscan signal on the general band. Please identify yourself. Over."

"Things are looking up," Fleischer said calmly.

She was reaching towards the communications panel when the speakers were activated yet again. This time the call was from Peking P205. Nicklin listened in a kind of pleasurable bemusement as Fleischer dealt with the two new contacts. The family of communities on Orbitsville's equator had survived the dissolution, and were reaching out across space to gather in their prodigals and strays. The only appropriate response was to acknowledge hope – anything else would be a betrayal of the human spirit.

Within moments of Fleischer having sent identification messages there came a second response from Hilversum.

"Hilversum calling in answer to your query, Tara," the man's voice said, "we have two Type-II pinnaces in land dock. Both have transfer facilities compatible with the Explorer class, and both can be operational within three or four days. We foresee no difficulty in evacuating one hundred personnel, so set your mind at rest on that score. We will get you out of there, and that is a promise, but before I end this transmission I have another message for you."

There was a brief pause – during which Nicklin, Fleischer and Voorsanger exchanged looks of surmise – then a different male voice was heard.

"Tara, this is Cavan Gomery. I'm head of the astronomical section here at STC. I want to back up everything my colleague has just said – all you have to do is get into orbit and we'll take care of the rest. In the mean time, I'm asking for your assistance with another problem.

"You don't need to be told that something very big has happened to Orbitsville, but you may not know that the residual planets are reducing in number. We don't even know how to begin explaining this, but we need as much data as we can get to help us put a handle on the problem – and you are in a unique position in that respect.

"Can you send us a wide-angle, general view of the residual sphere? We need a good picture from you, and we need it for as long as possible to help us make the best computer predictions about the rate of disappearance.

"I will stand by for your answer. Over."

For the remainder of the "night" period Nicklin watched and listened as Fleischer dealt with an increasing volume of radio traffic – each new contact adding to the proof of Hepworth's Benign Hypothesis.

Eventually calls were coming in from spaceports which identified themselves with P numbers in the region of 100. Those calls, originating on the far side of the world cloud, were subject to a forty-minute delay in responses – a chastening reminder of the scale upon which Orbitsville had been built. As the electronic babel built up to a level where Fleischer had to institute computer procedures to impose order, it came to Nicklin that what he was hearing represented only a tiny fraction of the newly created worlds which filled the main screen.

Radio communications had never been possible within the Orbitsville shell, and therefore only those planets which happened to have former spaceports had a voice in the new congress. A far greater number had library access to the relevant technology, and Nicklin had no doubt they were hastily building the equipment which would allow them to speak to their neighbours in the close-packed sky. He also had no doubt that they would be seeking some kind of reassurance.

That was the common factor in all communications being received by the Tara. The radio messages, beneath the terseness and jargon, gave a composite picture of a civilisation which had been jarred out of its age-old complacency. Nicklin had been so preoccupied with his own traumatic experiences that he had spared no thought for the vast majority of humanity who had been going about their humdrum daily lives when the transformation had come. But the voices on the control-room radio gave him an inkling of what it had been like to live through the ultimate bad dream.

There had been the distortions of the sky patterns, the terrifying fluctuations of gravity, the sudden alternations between day and night, culminating in stroboscopic frenzies which stopped the heart and suspended reason.

Then had come the … snap.

For some it had been followed by a new kind of daytime, with once-familiar landscapes rearranged and the sun wildly displaced from its normal position at the zenith. For others there had come a new kind of night, with the glowing archways of the heavens replaced by millions of blue brilliants, shimmering in every design the eye wished to impose on them. And for those on the extreme edge of the world cloud there had been the first experience of night as their forebears on Earth had known it – a direct look into the spangled blackness of interstellar space.

As well as responding to the Tara's distress, those on the spaceport worlds were communicating with each other, symbolically huddling together in the face of the unknown, seeking answers to questions which could not even have been formulated a day earlier. What had happened? Why had it happened? What was going to happen next? Were the new planets being relocated by some kind of dimensional sorcery, or were they simply ceasing to exist? Were all the planets going to disappear, or would the thinning-out process eventually stop and leave a handful of worlds in stable orbits?

For those on board the Tara, there was a set of questions in a special category of urgency: how rapidly was the world cloud dispersing? Were the disappearances evenly diffused through the cloud, or were there zonal effects which had not yet been detected? Was the dispersal taking place at a uniform rate, or was it accelerating?

In short – what were the chances of the ship reaching the safety of Hilversum before that planet blinked out of existence?

Try as he might, in spite of all his resolves to think positively and hopefully, Nicklin was unable to keep that particular question from dominating his mind.

Effectively, he lived on the control deck, leaving it as infrequently and for as short a time as possible.

On the second night of retardation, when all the lower decks were dim and quiet, he went down to the canteen to have a coffee, and was surprised to find Danea Farthing sitting at a table in the otherwise empty room. He knew she had been working flat out all day, relaying explanatory messages from Fleischer to worried families, trying to convey to them something of the pilot's stoic optimism.

It was a task Nicklin did not envy. Little had actually been put into words, as far as he knew, but a number of the pilgrims bitterly regretted ever having heard of Corey Montane, and their feelings of resentment and betrayal were close to the surface. In particular, Nicklin dreaded having to face the Whites – but for his intervention in their lives they would still be in Beachhead City, which now seemed a haven of security.

On entering the canteen he drew a bulb of hot coffee from the dispenser. His first instinct was to leave with it in silence, but he became aware that Danea was watching him with the enigmatic and moody-eyed intentness he had noticed earlier. He decided, with some misgivings, to risk her resumption of full hostilities.

"On your own, I see," he said, taking a seat nearby. "I suppose you miss Christine." The words were out before he could do anything about it, and he was immediately appalled by his ineptitude. He had begun with a banality, and had swiftly progressed to tactlessness.

"I think you have more reason to miss her than I have," Danea said mildly.

Nicklin lowered his gaze and stared at the coffee bulb as his cheeks began to tingle with embarrassment. Why had he not left the canteen while the going was good? To stand up and depart now would be the action of a complete bumpkin, and yet to remain would only increase his discomfiture.

"What's happening up above?" Danea's voice was neutral. "Any new developments?"

"The planets are all developing polar caps," Nicklin said, grateful for the new conversational opportunity. "You know – caps of frost or snow at their north and south poles. It makes them look like all those old pictures of Earth."

"That's interesting, but it isn't what I meant."

"We still don't know how fast they're disappearing. But some pretty good telescopes and computers are working on it." Nicklin sipped his drink. "I think we'll get an answer soon."

"That's good." Danea smiled in a way that revealed utter weariness and her heavy-lidded eyes locked with his. "Are you sorry you left Orangefield?"

What sort of a question is that? Nicklin thought, floundering. That question could mean anything!

"Danea, I – " He was reaching out to touch her hand when there came the sound of someone on the ladder.

"I'm glad somebody else can't sleep – do you mind if I join the party?" The speaker was the blond, bearded young man in spaceport uniform, the same man that Nicklin had encountered before and who seemed to spend most of his time wandering around the ship. Without waiting for a reply he took a drinks bulb from the dispenser and sat down beside Danea.

"Jim, have you met Per Bosshardt?" she said.

"Hi, Jim!" Bosshardt smiled broadly. "We keep seeing each other around – at odd times."

Nicklin nodded. "Yes, we do."

"I've got fifty-two pals with me to liven up the party," Bosshardt said, producing a deck of cards from his breast pocket. "How about a game?"

"I'm sorry," Nicklin said, rising to his feet. "I have to get back to the control room now."

"Too bad." Bosshardt gave him a genial wave. "See you around, Jim!"

Nicklin glanced back into the canteen as he was stepping on to the ladder. Bosshardt was already dealing cards which, because of the minimal gravity, were skittering all over the table. Danea was laughing delightedly as she trapped some of the fleeting rectangles with her forearms.

"Are you sorry you left Orangefield?" Nicklin muttered to himself as he climbed through the higher levels of the ship. "What kind of a question is that?"

As the night wore on it occurred to Nicklin that he would probably feel better were he to sleep in his bunk instead of dozing in the seat beside Megan Fleischer. The circumstances of his existence were unnatural enough without his failing to take proper rest – but he had a compulsion to remain close to the main screen at all times. The image of the world cloud, beautiful in its symmetry, was his past, present and future. It gave the impression of being serene and eternal, but that was only because of the limitations of human perception. The Good Fairy was at work in the cloud, deciding the fate of entire planetary populations at the rate of perhaps hundreds in every passing second, and Nicklin felt that if he stared hard enough and long enough he might find evidence of her design.

Billions of human beings on those newly created and ephemeral worlds were deeply apprehensive about the future. The prospect of being magicked out of the normal continuum – perhaps of ceasing to exist at all – was a terrifying one; but it was a sad commentary on the plight of those on board the Tara that they were praying to be part of that final disposition. A plunge into the unknowable was infinitely preferable to the alternative facing those who had been lured into joining the New Eden express.

Adding to Nicklin's sense of helplessness was the fact that, in spite of all appearances, the ship was actually flying backwards. It was aimed at the world cloud, its drive unit was thrusting it in the direction of the world cloud, but such was the speed previously attained that – two drawn-out days after entering retardation – the Tara was still receding from its goal.

"There's no point in fuming about it," Fleischer had told him. "Personally, I thank God for every hour that the drive keeps on functioning."

I suppose that's one way to cheer yourself up, Nicklin had thought, tiredly wondering if he would be able to recognise the moment at which the ship eventually came to a standstill and began the return flight proper. It was decelerating continuously, which was why he had a certain amount of weight, but there had to come the instant of turnaround, during which the ship – by definition – would not be moving at all. If it was not moving at all, neither accelerating nor decelerating, it would have to cease generating gravity even though the drive had not been shut down.

But that doesn't sound right. I must be too dog-tired to think properly. I'll just have to go over it again…

He struggled out of sleep to the uneasy awareness that something had altered in the ambience of the control deck.

It took him a few bleary seconds to identify the change – the level of noise from the communications system had fallen. His uneasiness increased as he realised that the sounds of radio traffic had been diminishing for some time. Ever since Fleischer had been forced to computerise and regulate the flood of incoming calls, the speakers had been emitting a near-continuous series of code signals between actual messages. Now, however, they were quite silent.

Nicklin sat up straighter and glanced across the other chairs. Voorsanger was absent, but Fleischer was frozen in an attitude of utter concentration, staring at the image of the world cloud. Nicklin's heart lurched as he noted the pilot's expression.

"What's happening?" he cried. "Is there – "

She silenced him by raising one hand while she addressed the communications panel with the other.

"…is definite," a man's voice was saying. "We've got it! The residual sphere is being stripped from the outside. There are five skim-off bands – call them whatever you like – two in the northern hemisphere, two in the southern, and one very close to the equator. All the bands are widening rapidly, God help us! There is no way of predicting how long it will be before this station is…"

The silence in the control room became total.

Nicklin focused his gaze on the world cloud, and – now that he knew exactly where to look – he could see evidence of the Good Fairy's handiwork. There was a subtle, twinkling agitation along the equator. But in essence it was the opposite of twinkling. It was a disturbance in a motionless pattern caused by the progressive disappearance of tiny light sources.

The world cloud was visibly being unwound … like a vast ball of wool … into nothingness.

"They've gone," Fleischer said in the voice of a timid child. "The spaceports have all gone."

"We don't need spaceports," Nicklin shouted, refusing to play the game of logic. "We can keep on going! We can go into orbit around any fucking planet!"

"What good would that do? If we can never land?"

"It would be better than being left out … here!"

"Perhaps you're right." Fleischer nodded as she considered the proposition, and then – incredibly – her face lit up with perverse triumph as she saw how to refute it.

"The trouble is, Mr Nicklin, that we can't reach any – as you put it – fucking planet. Things have changed for the worse out there. The disappearances speeded up while you were asleep … and they're still speeding up … and within a matter of hours there'll be no planets left – fucking or otherwise!"

CHAPTER 22

There was a peculiar rightness about what he was doing now, Nicklin decided.

For a period of some twelve hours he had sat in the control room, mesmerised, watching the world cloud disappear at an ever-increasing rate. In the beginning the process had been almost imperceptible, then a darkening sparsity had become noticeable in five widening strips. The effect had added to the awful beauty of the spectacle, giving the cloud the semblance of a pointillist painting of one gigantic banded planet. After that the dissolution had become all too apparent, as swath after swath thinned out into a blackness through which remote stars were beginning to show. At some point in the progression the Tara had finally discarded its outward velocity and begun the painfully slow return, but nobody in the control room had noticed its change of status. It had been impossible for the watchers to do anything but watch. Even their ability to think seemed to have been suspended as the discrete entity which had once been Orbitsville was reduced to filmy wisps, to fast-fading strands of gossamer, and finally to nothing. Nothing at all. The 650-million new-born worlds had been dematerialised, and only a small sun remained, the lone source of light and heat in a region of emptiness which extended for many light years all around.

What comes next? Nicklin had thought numbly. Where do we go from here?

What had come next, within a matter of seconds, was an intercom message for Nicklin from a woman who had been bathing her children in the communal washrooms on 24 Deck. She was angry because the water temperature in the showers had become erratic, and she wanted the fault corrected without delay. She also wanted to know why Nicklin spent all his time lounging around on the control deck instead of attending to his duties.

The reminder that life would make its quotidian demands until the very end had come as a blessing to Nicklin. He had left the seclusion of the control room immediately, and now – a man with an important mission – he was working his way down through the most populated levels of the ship. Because the Tara was carrying only half of its projected complement, the passengers had largely been free to decide where they would be accommodated, and the majority – obeying their instincts – had chosen the forward section, as far as possible from the engine cylinders.

By the time he reached 14 Deck, the first to give access to the engine cylinders, the sounds of human activity were fading above him. He continued his downward drift, fingers barely touching the stringers of the ladder, and was passing 17 Deck when, almost of their own accord, his hands clamped on the dural bars, bringing him to an abrupt halt. There followed a moment of total confusion, then he realised what had caused the autonomous reaction.

A short distance to his right, in the curving primary wall of the passenger cylinder, there was a door leading into the adjacent engine cylinder.

To someone not so well acquainted with the metallic bones and guts and nerves of the Tara the sight of that door would have had little or no significance, but for Nicklin it came as a psychic hammer blow – because he knew there was no engine access door on 17 Deck.

He froze in place on the ladder, looking around him. The rest of the small landing was exactly as it should have been. Behind him there were two doors leading into passenger suites, and stencilled signs clearly proclaimed that he was on what he knew to be 17 Deck. He had no need of the signs to tell him where he was – the surrounding rivet and weld patterns would have been enough – but he was confronted by an engine access door where no engine access door had any right to exist.

The door was real. He could see scratches on the green paint. He could see smudges on the nine white tablets of the lock's keyboard. The door was real!

"This is a dream," he said aloud, relieved at having explained the inexplicable. "This is one of those cognisant dreams, and to prove it–"

He punched the edge of the deck beside him with careless force and gasped as pain swept back through his nervous system from the point of impact. He looked at his knuckles and saw that patches of skin had been curled back. Tiny lentils of blood were appearing on the subcutaneous tissue.

There was no doubt that he was wide-awake – and the engine access door was still in place.

My memory for numbers has gone haywire, he extemporised as he stepped off the ladder and went to the door. A little molecule of the grey stuff has flipped or sprung a leak or whatever it is they do when they're starting to wear out. You always could reach the engines from 17 Deck. The fact that I don't remember it that way is neither here nor there, and to prove it…

He tapped the admittance number into the lock – 8949823 – and smiled as he heard the lock solenoid operating. Still got a few numbers left! He slowly pushed the door open and found himself looking into an enclosed space not much larger than a telephone kiosk. The arrangement was wrong, absolutely and totally wrong for the Tara, but he was now committed to proving to himself that wrong was right, and he stepped over the high threshold with a certain amount of brashness.

As the door sighed shut behind him he saw another door in the left-hand wall, and beside it was a small niche of the type which normally held fire-fighting equipment. In the niche was a body-curved flask of silver, upon which somebody had enamelled the words: DRINK ME. The lettering was excessively ornate and Nicklin grinned as he recognised Scott Hepworth's handiwork.

So you forgot about one of your stashes, you boozy old sod!

Still amused, he picked the flask up. It felt warm, and when he shook it he heard and felt the sloshing of a small amount of liquid. On impulse he removed the cap and took a drink of what proved to be tepid gin.

A real Hepworth special, that was. He loved his geneva zvtk fresh tonic and all the trimmings, but when necessary he would take it any way it came. As some playwright or other put it – when the mood was on him he would drink it out of a sore. I bet old Scott would be turning in his plastic wrapper if he knew he had missed this last drop.

There's just one thing I don't understand, though.

How come the gin is still warm?

Moving like a man in a dream, filled with premonitions that he was doing the wrong thing, Nicklin opened the inner door. Beyond it was a dimly lit space which seemed too large to be contained within the five-metre radius of the engine cylinder. Nicklin went in, allowing the door to close behind him. Above the door was a single bulkhead light casting a wan glow over a semicircle of empty deck. That was wrong, too, because most of the space within the cylinder should have been taken up by massive engine components. He tried to see beyond the vague boundary of illumination, but the outer darkness was impenetrable. An air current tugged momentarily at his hair and clothing, and it seemed sweet and pure, as though he were standing at the edge of a midnight plain.

After a few seconds a figure appeared in the darkness, coming towards him, and he groaned aloud – cowering back with knuckles pressed to his mouth – as he saw that it was Scott Hepworth.

"Good man, you found my medicine!" Hepworth said, taking the flask from Nicklin's inert fingers. "Where did I leave it?"

Nicklin groaned again as Hepworth raised the flask to his lips and took a drink. His neck seemed intact beneath his rumpled collar, but as he swallowed a clear fluid welled out through the front of his shirt.

"Go away," Nicklin mumbled through his knuckles. "You're dead!"

"Don't be so plebeian in your thinking, my boy," Hepworth said jovially. "Do I look dead?"

Nicklin studied the apparition before him and saw that it was perfect in every detail, from the smudged shoddiness of the clothing to the blue-rimmed blackhead at the side of the nose. "Get away from me, Scott," he pleaded. "I can't look at you."

"Very well – but I must say I'm deeply disappointed in you, Jim." Hepworth began to back off into the darkness. "I could have helped you with what's coming next. There are others waiting to meet you, and I could have helped you deal with them…"

As the Hepworth thing faded out of sight Nicklin grabbed the door handle and twisted hard. It refused to turn, just as he had expected, and now two other figures were approaching. One was Corey Montane – grinning a wet, lop-sided grin – and the other was a pretty young woman who looked quite wholesome and normal, except that the handle of a kitchen knife was protruding from her chest. The knife was moving in tune with her heart beats.

"Milly and I are happy now, Jim," Montane said, slipping his arm around the woman's waist. "And I want you to know that you can be happy, too. All you have to do is–"

"You're dead too!" Nicklin shouted. "Don't come near me! You're dead, and you're trying to make me think that I'm dead as well, but I'm still alive and this is only a dream!"

Montane and his wife exchanged concerned glances, all the while moving closer to him. "I hate to see you like this, Jim," Montane said. "And it's all so unnecessary. All you have to do is listen to–"

"Fuck off!" Nicklin screamed, covering his eyes.

He remained that way for as long as he dared, afraid that the two dreadful beings were stealthily closing in, bringing their sympathetic faces closer to his. But when he lowered his hands Montane and his wife had gone. The surrounding darkness was intact again, except that he could now see farther into it and his former impression of standing on a vast plain was reinforced. In the spurious, half-perceived distance there was the hint of an enormous presence, black curvatures imposed on blackness. Could it be a hill, a mountain of obsidian, repelling the light of unseen stars?

What have I done to deserve this? Nicklin asked himself, making another futile attempt to open the bulkhead door.

"I'll tell you what you've done," a familiar and yet unidentifiable voice said from just beyond the pool of tallowy light. "You have filled your head with negative thoughts and false concepts, little Jimmy Nicklin – and now you must suffer as a result."

"Who are you?" Nicklin quavered, sickened by a new premonition. "And why do you call me Jimmy? Nobody has called me Jimmy since–"

"Since you were a little boy, isn't that right?" The towering shape of Nicklin's great-uncle Reynard advanced into the cone of dismal light.

Nicklin cringed as he saw that this was not the figure of the scarcely-remembered real Uncle Reynard. This was the fearsome Uncle Reynard of the dream. This was the terrifying shape that his mother had insisted on treating as a perfectly acceptable human being in spite of the fact that it was over two metres tall, had spiky red-brown fur, feral yellow eyes, and a long snout surmounted by a Disney-animal nose which resembled a shiny black olive. And, as had happened before, recognition robbed the animated image of its oppressive power.

"You can't frighten me," Nicklin challenged.

"And why should anybody be frightened of a fine, handsome fellow like me?" the fox said, preening in his nineteenth-century wing collar and patched frock coat. "I fully understand why you wanted nothing to do with those other characters – especially the woman! Did you see the knife? – Ugh!" A look of revulsion passed over the fox's stylised features. "Between ourselves, Jimmy, you did the right thing in getting rid of that lot."

"I'm getting rid of you as well," Nicklin said. "You don't exist!"

"What a peculiar thing to say!" The fox cast a worried glance over his shoulder, then gave a laugh which exposed all his pointed teeth. "You wouldn't be able to talk to me if I didn't exist. It stands to reason, doesn't it? You see, this is mental space – and mental entities are just as real here as physical entities. You remember what you were told about mental space, don't you?"

Nicklin shook his head. "I wouldn't allow you to exist in any kind of space."

"Don't do this to me, Jimmy." Uncle Reynard glanced back into the darkness again, spraying cartoon-style droplets of sweat into the air from his forehead. "I can help you with what's coming next. You've got to have your interview with Gee-Vee, and I can–"

"Go away!"

The fox took a step backwards, his entire body beginning to ripple, and suddenly he was a thin, balding, unhappy looking man of about forty. Nicklin felt a stirring.of old memories. The creature before him purported to be his real Uncle Reynard.

"You can frig off too," Nicklin said.

"Don't do this to me, Jimmy," the creature pleaded. "All right, perhaps I was a bit too friendly with your mother after your old man died. Maybe you felt sort of betrayed – and I can't say as I blame you – but that's all in the past. You're a grown man now, Jimmy, and you must know how it is when a healthy young woman is–"

"Go away!"

"Let me explain something very important to you, Jimmy," the creature said in an urgent whisper. "You think this is all a dream – but it isn't! You're in mental space now, Jimmy. You must remember what you were told that day in the Beachhead office by Silvia London. You remember her, don't you? The one with the big knockers? Well, everything she said was absolutely true!"

Nicklin frowned. "That would mean you have an independent existence of your own, and that I can't harm you."

"Yes, but I'm not a true mindon entity." The creature shot a quick look behind itself, in the direction of the mountainous presence which might or might not exist in the blackness, and its disconsolate expression turned into one of purest misery. "Your real Uncle Reynard is somewhere else in this continuum. The only reason I exist at all is that I'm a projection of part of your childhood personality, and if you start interfering with things–"

"You mean – if I grow up."

"You grew up years ago, Jimmy." The creature produced a shifty, ingratiating smile. "You grew up great! The way you exploded those three ape men in Altamura was a treat to watch. Specially the third one, when he thought he was getting away. And then there's the Farthing bitch. I'll tell you something for nothing, Jimmy – she's sorry she ever got on the wrong side of you. If you went to her right now you could–"

"Go!" Nicklin commanded, his entire consciousness given over to hatred. "Cease to exist!"

The creature gave a snarl of fury. Its face began to flow … extruding a bestial snout, teeth becoming fangs … but before the metamorphosis could be completed the entire apparition shimmered out of existence.

Nicklin was left alone, but not alone. Beyond the cone of sickly light, far out across the half-perceived plain, an enormous shape was moving. In the absence of spatial referents it could indeed have been as large as a mountain, but it also – was this possible? – might have had a human configuration. What was the name of that statue? The one of the man sitting with his fist pressed against his forehead?

Jim Nicklin, the entity said, its voice a silent thunder between Nicklin's temples, the time has come for us to speak to each other.

"I don't want to," Nicklin quavered, amazed by his ability to emit any kind of sound. "I don't want anything to do with you."

That is not true. You know you could not have gone on for much longer as you were.

Nicklin pressed his back against the metal doorframe – his sole remaining contact with the universe of rationality. "Who are you?"

Come on now, Jim! You know perfectly well who I am.

"How … how could I?"

Because you have communed with me many times throughout your adult life.

"Communed? I've never been a believer. The only deity I ever acknowledged was … the Gaseous Vertebrate!"

Well done, Jim.

"But that's impossible! You're just a sort of a private joke. I mean, I invented you!"

No, Jim – I invented you.

Somehow Nicklin managed to resuscitate the argumentative side of his character. "I'm sorry, but I can't go along with that," he said. "It doesn't even make dream-sense to me."

You always have to make things difficult. I simply wanted to personalise myself for your benefit. Your conception of the Gaseous Vertebrate … the Supreme Prankster … is as near as you have come to visualising a higher order of being.

"I meant him as an analogue of blind chance."

Yes, but you personalised him.

"Nevertheless, it's wrong to think of you as the Gaseous Vertebrate?"

It doesn't have to be wrong.

"Are you claiming to be God?"

I am not claiming to be God – but you may think of me that way, if you please.

"This could go on and on. I prefer Gaseous Vertebrate."

So, after much circumlocution, you are back where you started – I am the Gaseous Vertebrate.

"Are you also the Good Fairy? Did you create the artefact I knew as Orbitsville?"

At last you have asked a sensible question, one to which I can give a sensible answer. No, I did not create Orbitsville.

"Have you any objections to telling me who did?"

I have no objections at all, Jim. I am willing to provide all the knowledge you are capable of assimilating. Your mind is part of my mind at this unique moment in cosmic history. The only limits to the amount of knowledge you may gain are the limits of your own mentality.

"Did you say my mind is part of your mind?"

Let's have no rhetorical questions, Jim. You know what I said.

"But it's important to me. There are little questions as well as big questions. For instance, I would like to know why I am not afraid. I have wandered into a surrealist nightmare, and I have witnessed horrors–"

The horrors were of your own devising.

"All right, but I'm alone in what might easily be a Dali landscape with what might easily be a black statue the size of a mountain … and yet I am not afraid. Why is that?"

You are in mental space now. You exist as a mindon entity – and, as such, you are immune to all the fears which trouble a carnate being.

"I see. So that's why I can hold a conversation with a sentient black skyscraper."

There is no conversation. For the moment your mind has been encompassed by and united with my mind. You must take what you can, and make of it what you will.

"Very well then – who built Orbitsville?"

Orbitsville was devised and constructed by beings who are more highly evolved than humans. In their one direct encounter with humans they chose to call themselves Ultans. That is as good a name as any.

"Why did the Ultans construct Orbitsville?"

They did so in an attempt to alter the fate of the entire cosmos. A few of your fellow human beings have already discovered that mind is a component of matter. And it is not a minor component. In some regards it is even more significant than gravity, because its attractive force is sufficient to close the universe. Gravitation alone could not do that.

"I remember that woman … Rick Renard's wife … trying to tell me something like this."

Yes, but she was more concerned with an incidental effect – the continuance of personality after physical death. The true importance of the class of particles known as mindons lies in their cohesive power. Without the mindon/graviton component an expanding universe would continue to expand for ever. One of your fellow humans, with quite a poetical turn of mind, has stated that it is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

"I don't see what this has to do with Orbitsville."

The history of the cosmos could be described as a series of Big Bangs and Big Squeezes, to use the inelegant phraseology of which your scientists are so fond. At the instant of each Big Bang two universes are created – one composed of normal matter and going forward in time; the other composed of anti-matter and going backwards in time. Both universes expand to their limits, then the contraction begins, and eventually, when time has run its circular course, they are reunited and the stage is set for a new Big Bang. You will, of course, appreciate that terms such as matter and anti-matter are completely subjective.

"I'm not stupid."

There are some complications – such as tachyon and anti-tachyon universes – which I do not intend to trouble you with at this juncture.

"Very kind," Nicklin said. "Go on."

At the instant of the last Big Bang – which I believe to have been the eighteenth in the Grand Sequence – two symmetrical universes were created, as had always happened before. But their evolution did not follow the established pattern. A great asymmetry developed because – for reasons which have not made themselves apparent – intelligent life failed to evolve anywhere in the Region 2 universe.

Under those circumstances, without mindon cohesion, the Region 2 universe was destined to go on dispersing for ever – and without the contribution of its matter the nature of the next Big Bang will be radically altered. And as a consequence, the cycle of cosmic renewal will be disrupted.

Some Ultans viewed that prospect with disfavour on philosophical grounds – and they took steps to correct the great imbalance.

"They built Orbitsville!"

Yes.

"It was a mind collector! And that explains the Big Jump – Orbitsville was relocated in the anti-matter universe! When the Ultans were ready they simply moved it!"

The situation was more complex than that, because other Ultans – also motivated by philosophical considerations – opposed any meddling with the course of nature. But, basically, you are correct.

"And was that all it took to change the future of an entire universe? I'm not used to thinking on this kind of scale, but the effect of one sphere seems – to say the least of it – disproportionate."

More than one sphere was constructed, Jim. To be sure of capturing a viable stock the Ultans placed similar instruments in every galaxy of the Region I universe. Each galaxy, depending on its size, was given anywhere from eight to forty of the spheres, all of them in localities favourable to the development of intelligent life. Your race's discovery of the one you refer to as Orbitsville was not entirely fortuitous.

"But there are at least a hundred billion galaxies!" Even in his discorporate form Nicklin was humbled by the sudden insight into the extent of the Ultans' efforts to influence the shape of the space-time continuum itself. "And if you multiply that number–"

Do not concern yourself with the mathematics – suffice it to say that the Ultans pursued their misguided ambition on such a large scale that my brothers and I were obliged to move against them.

"But is it not too late? I saw Orbitsville being dissolved into millions of planets, and I saw them all disappear. If they have been dispersed all over the galaxy…"

I intervened. The new planets have indeed been dispersed – but it was done under my direction. They have been seeded into the Region I galaxy from which Orbitsville came.

A new question was beginning to form somewhere in the depths of Nicklin's mind, but he shied away from it. "They've gone back?"

Yes, Jim. You see, the Ultans were wrong to impose their will, their necessarily limited view, upon the natural ordering of Totality. The imbalance between Regions 1 and 2 in the present cycle heralds great change – that is quite true – but change is the instrument of evolution. Resistance to change is wrong. Totality must be free to evolve.

"Will the Ultans be … punished?"

They will be advised and watched, but they will not be harmed. My brothers and I partake of Life, and we serve Life. The Ethic requires us to do everything in our power to ensure that no mind units are lost as a result of our actions.

"Is that why you are here? Is that why you are speaking to me?"

As I said earlier, the dialogue is entirely within your own consciousness. It is part of your private reaction to the fact that your mind is encompassed by mine while I am transferring your ship back to the Region I universe. You are interpreting the experience in your own way – for others it will be different.

"Do you mean that for them it's a religious experience? They're seeing what they believe to be God?"

They're seeing what they believe – just as you are seeing what you believe.

The question which had earlier formed itself in a part of Nicklin's consciousness tried to obtrude once more, and once more he was unable to deal with it. "Are we all going to live?"

Yes, Jim – I have plucked your little ship out of the body of my stillborn brother, and I have placed it on the surface of an eminently hospitable world in your home galaxy. You are all going to live.

"Thank you, thank you." Nicklin began to feel an unaccountable sense of urgency. "Is our time together coming to an end?"

There is no time as you understand it in mental space. In one version of reality the transfer has taken a billionth of a billionth of a second; in another version of reality it has taken forty billion years.

"But the dialogue is drawing to a close."

You are reaching your limits.

"There is just one more question. Please! I must know the answer."

Across the midnight plain the dark presence seemed to stir slightly. I am listening.

"Who are you?"

But you no longer have any need to ask that question. The half-perceived entity was definitely moving now, growing taller, preparing to depart. You KNOW who I am, don't you, Jim?

"Yes," Nicklin murmured, the vessel that was his mind at last filled to brimming. "I know who you are."

CHAPTER 23

The six Curlew aircraft of Woolston Skyways were ranged in line, waiting to carry their separate loads of passengers to the regional centre of Rushport. Curlews had been chosen because of their ability to operate from unprepared grass strips. Each would take a maximum of ten people on the two-hour hop to Rushport, where they would then be put on an airliner for the 8,ooo-kilometre flight to Beachhead City.

Behind the Curlews were three smaller and faster jets belonging to the news agencies which had been first to get their people to the scene. Looming over the aircraft, making them look like toy miniatures, was the burnished coppery hull of the Tara. And beyond the ship was a lake which stretched to the horizon, its waters sewn with diamond-fire by the low morning sun.

No matter how old he lived to be, Nicklin had decided, he would never get used to a sun which traversed the sky. On the previous evening, scant hours after the Tara's return, he had watched the first sunset of his life, unable to take his eyes off the searing disk as it slid below the horizon. Like many others of the dazed and bemused pilgrims, he had spent most of the night in the open, staring at new constellations and waiting for the sun to reappear. Even though he had known in advance that it had to show itself on the opposite side of the world, the fact that it actually did so filled him with a profound wondering. The confirmation that he now lived on the outside of a sphere had come as a quasi-religious experience for one accustomed to the insularity of Orbitsville. He felt exhilarated, and dangerously exposed to the vastness of the universe, a micro-organism clinging to the surface of a ball that was hurtling through unpredictable space.

And in keeping with the diminutive size of the new world in comparison to Orbitsville, the pace of human affairs seemed to have speeded up to match the flickering, inertia-less activities of creatures whose cosmos is a drop of water…

In one instant the Tara had been drifting in deep space; in the next it had been resting on a sunlit, grassy plain.

The ship's clocks showed no lapse of time, but every individual on board – children included – had recollections of a time outside of time. From what Nicklin could gather, the common experience – unlike his own – had been a brief and wordless communion with a benign deity, one who was shrouded in white light, rendered invisible by mingling glories.

They had emerged from it as essentially the same people, with all their previous beliefs confirmed beyond all doubt. The first thing Ropp Voorsanger had done was to lead the entire company out on to the lush grass and conduct a service of thanksgiving. And never in human history could there have been a congregation so united in its unshakeable faith. After all, they had been part of a general and undeniable miracle. They had been lost, and now they were saved, and their salvation had come about through a Divine Intervention. They had been justified, as no others had ever been justified, in sending up their cry of Hallelujah!

Nicklin's experience had been unique, because he had been necessarily transformed. He had come out of it with a new set of beliefs which required him to revise his internal model of reality. Thereafter he had to acknowledge the existence of a supreme being. Giving it the name of God, or the Good Fairy, or the Gaseous Vertebrate made no difference to the central, essential fact that he could no longer live his life as a sceptic.

While waiting, alone beneath the stars, he had wondered if the impact on his personality could have been any greater had he been persuaded to accept the existence of the Judaic God – and not of the ultimate, non-mystical Personality.

You KNOW who I am, the Personality had said, and the uncanny thing was that Nicklin had been prepared long in advance for the revelation. He had almost reached the truth that grey wintry morning in the Beachhead office when Silvia London had preached that all matter had a mindon component, and that all that was needed for the development of an immortal personality was the existence of a sufficiently complex physical organisation, such as the human brain.

Nicklin had begun to argue that if physical complexity was all that was needed to conjure a mind into existence there was, in principle, no need to insist on a biological element. It should have been possible for any sufficiently complex organisation to develop an intelligent personality. And, taking that argument to its logical conclusion, what better candidate could there be – in the category of complex, multi-component physical structures – than a galaxy?

The concept of an intelligent galaxy was hardly new – scientific visionaries such as Firsoff had advanced it as far back as the middle of the twentieth century.

But to be confronted with the actuality!

Years would pass, Nicklin knew, before he could hope to assimilate the knowledge that he shared the stage of eternity with beings like the Ultans, so advanced and so powerful that they could presume to remodel the entire scheme of creation to their own desires. And that – as far beyond the Ultans as the Ultans were beyond humans – were what he might think of as the Galactians. They were unimaginable, incomprehensible entities, yet so life-oriented that they could concern themselves with the welfare of individual mind units.

Nicklin had to admit the remote possibility that the Tara had been positioned where it was because of some vague and tenuous paraphysical decree that matter would be drawn to its own point of origin on the old Orbitsville shell. But his new instincts told him that the Personality – which had referred to an inert Region 2 galaxy as its "stillborn brother" – had made a conscious and personal decision in the matter.

The implication was that all mind units were uniquely and individually important. They were all immortal, and would all partake in a grand scheme of evolution and assimilation which would lead to the ultimate convergence of Life. The further implication, for those receptive to it, was that no life had ever been wasted, and that…

"Good morning, Jim!" The speaker was Cham White. He and Nora had climbed the hummock which Nicklin had chosen as a vantage point, and both were breathing heavily from the exertion. "What are you doing up here?"

Nicklin waved a greeting. "It's a good place to think."

"You have more than most of us to think about, haven't you, Jim?" Nora said, a smile appearing on her gold-freckled face. "I seem to remember that you were quite the atheist in the old days."

Nicklin nodded. "As you say, Nora – I have a lot to think about."

"We came up to bid you goodbye for the time being," Cham said. "We're heading back to Beachhead and then Orangefield as soon as possible."

"You don't feel like staying on here and helping Voorsanger to found his new Holy City?"

"It was an inspiring sermon he gave this morning." Cham fingered his grimy trousers with a look of humorous distaste. "But I think I'll wait until the first hotels have been built and the plumbing put in."

"Cham White!" Nora dug him with her elbow. "That's an affront to the Lord."

"These pants are an affront to everybody – I can't wait to get changed into something decent."

"I'm off!" Nora shook Nicklin's hand, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and started down the slope.

Cham waited until she was some distance off. "Jim, I don't know what happened between you and Zindee, and I don't want to know," he said quickly. "But I have a feeling she'd like to speak to you before we leave. Will you come down and say goodbye to her?"

Nicklin's heart began to pound. "Of course, Cham."

He walked beside Cham, his eyes scanning the various centres of activity. Lines were forming near each of the Curlews, but quite a few families had elected to remain with the Tara for the time being, and children belonging to them were darting excitedly between knots of adults. Journalists were wandering about with cameras, and civic officials from Rushport – including welfare people and a few police – were also going about duties which only they seemed to understand. The fluttery beat of an approaching helicopter added to the impression that the randomly chosen patch of open countryside had become a focus of interest for the rest of the world.

Radio communications had never been possible on the old Orbitsville, but Fleischer had been able to call up the Beachhead spaceport without any difficulty – and it was apparent that what she had said had caused a sensation, even on a world whose inhabitants should have been sated with wonders. It was just as Hepworth had predicted, Nicklin thought. Astronomical marvels were all very well for those who were interested in that kind of thing, but a hundred people magically returning from the dead was genuine, honest-to-God news.

He forgot about the overall picture as he picked out the green-clad figure of Zindee standing alone close to an orange-splashed bandanna shrub. Before Nicklin could move to prevent him, Cham veered away from his side – no doubt being tactful – leaving him to approach Zindee on his own. As he drew near she eyed him with a strangely intent speculation which, inexplicably, reminded him of his last meeting with Danea.

"Hello, Zindee," he said awkwardly. "I hear you're going home."

"Yes." Her eyes hunted over his face. "Back to Orangefield, for a while."

"That's good," he said, unable to meet her gaze. "Ah … I have to go now, Zindee. Ropp needs me on the ship."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why does Mr Voorsanger need you on the ship?"

"Well, you see … " He strove to find a good, plausible reason for leaving. "The ship was never intended to sit on soft ground like this. When it's in the horizontal attitude it's supposed to sit on six special cradles below the major hard points. The way things are now the soft ground is pushing on the skin and distorting the sub-frames, and that could cause pressure leaks and all kinds of–"

He broke off, nonplussed, as Zindee gave a delighted laugh.

"That's a load of male ox," she accused. "You're a liar, Jim Nicklin! That was one of your stories! You made it all up out of your head!"

"Well…" He looked into her eyes, judged his worth by what he saw there, and felt something which he could only describe as a return of joy. "Perhaps you're right."

Zindee stopped laughing. "What happened to you, Jim?"

"I … " He spread his hands, helplessly. "I lost my way, Zindee. That's about all I can say."

"It's enough." She came close, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. The pressure of her slim body against his was pleasantly asexual, and in her hair he detected the childhood smell of clean perspiration. He hugged her for a long moment, then stepped back, searched in a pocket and brought out the old coin which had once hung around her neck.

"Will you have this back?" he said.

"I was going to ask you for it." As she was accepting the coin the propellers on one of the nearby Curlews began to turn. "It looks like they'll be taking off soon, Jim – you'd better move quickly."

"Move?"

"Yes, move! Danea's plane will be going in a couple of minutes. Are you just going to stand there and let her fly off to Beachhead on her own?"

He followed the direction of her gaze and saw Danea in the knot of people waiting by the nearest aircraft. Beside her in the group was the uniformed figure of Per Bosshardt.

"She may not be on her own," Nicklin said, wondering if he had caught Danea looking in his direction.

"Go over there and find out." Zindee's small chin had the determined set he remembered so well from her earliest days. "Jim Nicklin, if you don't do something I'll never speak to you again. Get yourself over there!"

"All right, all right." He walked slowly across the intervening grass, blood pounding in his ears, and stopped when he was about ten paces away from the group, unable to think of what he might say. Danea eyed him from under her flat black sombrero, but did not move. Standing close to her, Bosshardt gave him an easy, slightly interrogative smile.

"Danea," Nicklin said desperately, "I need to talk."

He waited, not moving, knowing that everything was in the balance. If Danea invited him to go closer, so that he would have to talk within earshot of the others, there would be no real point in his doing it. In the shade of the sombrero her face was utterly beautiful, and as unreadable as ever. Several seconds dragged by, then she left the line and came towards him.

"What do you want to talk about?" she said, heavy-lidded eyes cool and only slightly inquisitive.

His mind went blank. "What are you going to do in Beachhead?"

"For a while – nothing. I need a holiday."

"We all need a holiday," he said, trying to smile. "We've been through a lot."

"Yes."

"Well … Perhaps I'll see you in Beachhead some time."

"Perhaps." Danea glanced back towards the watchful group by the aircraft. "The plane is ready to go."

"Yes." Nicklin took a deep unsteady breath as he realised that no other moment in his life would have the same karma potential as this one. "Don't go on the plane, Danea. Not today."

Her eyes widened. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I don't give a damn about the money. I'm saying I'm sorry for all the things I said in the past and for the way I treated you. I'm saying I don't want you to leave. I'm saying I love you, Danea."

"That isn't enough, Jim." Her voice was low, tremulous.

"What else is there?"

"That morning in Orangefield … when I went out to your place…"

"Yes?"

"Do you believe … do you really believe that I loved you that day? If you have any doubts, Jim … if you have even the slightest lingering trace of a doubt … we'll never be any good for each other."

"I believe," he replied fervently, blinking to clear his vision. "I swear–"

"Don't swear," she murmured, placing one finger vertically against his lips. "You've said it – and that's all I had to hear."

She moved into his arms, and as they embraced he became aware that they were being watched by dozens of people on all sides.

"We're making a spectacle of ourselves," he whispered. "How about going for a walk?"

Later, as they lay together – surrounded by a blaze of bandanna shrubs – they talked about their plans for all the years that lay ahead.

"Even though Corey is dead, the work he started looks like going on and on," Danea said dreamily. "I like the idea of founding a new kind of city here – with the Tara as a kind of centre piece – and there'll be so much to do."

"It would make a good memorial." Nicklin cast his mind back over the previous three years. "I used to disagree with just about everything Corey said, but – and this is the weird bit – I see now that he was absolutely right. It was all in the choice of words. He used the vocabulary of religion, and I would have preferred the vocabulary of science, but he knew that Orbitsville was a trap…a dead end…"

"You've changed, Jim." Danea raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him. "On the ship … when it happened … did you see God? Just like the rest of us?"

Should I tell a lie? Nicklin thought. If I can accept the idea of an intelligent galaxy – simply because it is a structure of sufficient complexity to exist as a mindon personality, what do I say about the entire universe? Is it not the ultimate structure? Is it not, therefore, the ultimate mindon personality?

Is it not … therefore … worthy of the name of God?

"I saw what everybody else saw," he said to his loved one, and he smiled as he spoke. "Would I tell you a lie?"

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Orbitsville
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen

Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Orbitsville Judgement

PART ONE: THE HAMMER RISES

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART TWO: THE HAMMER FALLS

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART THREE: THE SCHEME SHATTERS

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23