Land and Overland - Omnibus

by Bob Shaw

  "And now let us be about the work with which the King has entrusted us."

  His closing words were far from being as inspirational as he would have liked, but a traditional speech delivered in high Kolcorronian would have seemed incongruous in the context of the strangest war in human history. In past conflicts the common man had always been emotionally involved—largely through fear of what an invading horde would do to his loved ones—but in this case most of the general populace were quite unaware of any threat. In a way it was an unreal war, a contest between rulers, where a few gladiators were thrown into the ring like tumbling dice to bring about an arbitrary decision, largely influenced by their ability to endure pain and deprivation, on the viability of a political idea. How was he to explain, justify and glorify that to a handful of hapless individuals who had been lured into the King's service, originally, by the prospect of steady pay and a soft life?

  Toller went to his own ship, giving the signal for the five other pilots to do likewise. He had chosen to fly a fortress midsection because it looked less airworthy than the closed endsections and its crew needed an extra boost to their confidence. A temporary floor had been installed a short distance below one rim, and on that were the crew stations and lockers containing various supplies.

  The centrally mounted burner was one which had served in the Migration and had been lying in Chakkell's stores for more than twenty years. Its main component was the trunk of a very young brakka tree which had been used in its entirety. On one side of the bulbous base was a small hopper filled with pikon, plus a valve which admitted the crystals to the combustion chamber under pneumatic pressure. On the other side a similar mechanism controlled the flow of halvell, and both valves were operated by a common lever. The passageways in the latter valve were slightly enlarged, automatically supplying the greater proportion of halvell which had proved best for sustained thrust.

  Because the section was lying on its side the floor was vertical and Toller had to lie on his back in his chair to operate the burner's controls. His sword, which he had not thought to discard, made the attitude all the more awkward. He pumped up the pneumatic reservoir, then signalled to the inflation supervisor that he was ready to begin burning. The fan crew ceased cranking and pulled their cumbersome machine and its nozzle aside.

  Toller advanced the control lever for about a second. There was a hissing roar as the power crystals combined, firing a burst of hot miglign gas into the balloon's gaping mouth. Satisfied with the burner's performance, he instigated a series of blasts—keeping them short to reduce the risk of heat damage to the balloon fabric—and the great envelope began to distend further and lift clear of the ground. The inflation crew raised it further by means of the four acceleration struts, which constituted the principal difference between the skyship and a craft designed for normal atmospheric flight. Now three-quarters full, the balloon sagged among the struts, the varnished linen skin pulsing and rippling like a giant lung.

  As it gradually rose to the vertical position the crew holding the balloon's crown lines came walking in and attached them to the section's load points, while others gently rotated the section until its axis was perpendicular. All at once the section was ready to take to the air, held down only by the pull of the men holding its trailing ropes. The remainder of the flight crew scaled its sides on projecting rungs and took their places.

  Toller nodded in satisfaction as he glanced along the line of craft and saw that the other crews had gone aboard in unison with his own. It was a departure from established Kolcorronian practice for a group of ships to take off simultaneously, but successful assembly of the fortresses in the weightless zone was going to depend on precision flying in close formation. Zavotle had decided that a mass take-off would help the pilots familiarise themselves with the technique, and also give an early indication of where problems could lie. There had been no time for trial ascents, and the crews would have to learn new skills under the tutelage of the severest and most unforgiving taskmaster of all.

  Having assured himself that the other five pilots were ready to fly, Toller waved to them and fired a prolonged burst to initiate the climb. The roar of the burner was magnified in the vast echo chamber of the balloon which now blotted out most of the sky, and at the end of the blast the handlers released their lines on command from the launch supervisor. As the ship began to drift vertically upwards, with no breeze to impart a lateral component to its motion, Toller stood up and looked over the rim of the section into the slowly receding parade ground. He picked out the compact form of liven Zavotle, easily distinguishable because of his prematurely white hair, and waved to him. Zavotle did not respond, but Toller knew he had been seen and that Zavotle was wishing he could exchange places rather than have another man put his ideas to the test.

  "Bring in the struts, sir?" The speaker was the rigger, Tipp Gotlon, a lanky gap-toothed youngster who was one of the few volunteers on the flight.

  Toller nodded and Gotlon began working his way around the circular deck, drawing in the free-hanging acceleration struts by their tethers and securing them to the rim. Mechanic Millyat Essedell, a competent-looking, bow-legged man with several years of Air Service experience, was not required to do anything at this stage of the flight, but he was crouched at his equipment locker, busily sorting and checking the tools. The midsection ships had three-man crews—as compared with five in the end-sections—because they were burdened with the extra weight of the armaments the fortresses would use against invaders.

  Satisfied that his companions were reliable, Toller directed all his attention into finding a burn ratio which would give a climb speed in the region of twenty-four miles an hour. He settled on a rhythm of four seconds on and twenty seconds off—well remembered from his first interplanetary crossing—and for the next ten minutes the pilots of the other ships practised keeping exactly level with him. They made a striking spectacle, being so huge and close, with every detail sharply etched in pure light, while the world gently sank into the blue haze of distance.

  The ships had become Toller's only reality.

  Looking down on the sketchy geometries of the city of Prad, he could feel little affinity with the place or its inhabitants. He had again become a creature of the sky, and his preoccupations were no longer those of mere land-locked beings. Affairs of state and the posturing of princes now mattered little in comparison with the condition of a rivet or the correct tensioning of a rope or even the strange ruminative sounds which a balloon would sometimes emit for no apparent reason.

  By the time the practice period had ended the squadron had attained a height of two miles and Toller gave the signal for a vertical dispersion to take place. The manoeuvre was carried out quickly and without mishap, changing the tight horizontal group into a loose stepped formation which could face the onset of night with little risk of collision.

  Toller had driven himself to the point of exhaustion before the take-off, sometimes getting only two hours sleep in a night, and it was during the enforced idleness of the ascent that his body claimed its due compensation. Even while operating the burner he would sometimes lapse into a torpor, counting off the rhythm by instinct, and much of his rest periods were spent in dozing and dreaming. Often when he awoke he genuinely had no idea where he was, and would gaze up at the patient, looming curvatures of the balloon in fear and confusion until he had deduced what it was and where it was taking him. At other times, especially at night when the meteors flickered continuously all around, he would not succeed in awakening fully and in his tranced condition imagined that he was on an ascent of long ago, in the company of men and women who had long since died or been turned into strangers by the processes of time, all of them voyaging into the future with varying degrees of trepidation and hope.

  The changing patterns of night and day enhanced his temporal disorientation. As the ascent continued Overland's night grew shorter and its littlenight expanded, slipping towards the equilibrium which would be attained midway between the si
ster planets, and Toller found himself almost losing track of the sequence. The surest measure of time's passing became the ship's altimeter—a simple device consisting of nothing more than a vertical scale, from the top of which a small weight was suspended by a delicate coiled spring. At the beginning of the flight the weight had been opposite the lowest mark on the scale, but as the climb continued and the pull of Overland's gravity diminished, the weight drifted upwards in a perfect analogue of the flight, a miniature ship sailing a miniature cosmos.

  Another reliable indicator of progress was the increasing coldness. On Toller's first ascent the crew had been surprised by the phenomenon and had been considerably distressed as a result, but now thickly quilted suits were available and the low temperatures were made tolerable. It was even possible, while seated close to the burner, to achieve a cosy, cocooned warmth—a condition which abetted Toller's persistent drowsiness, and in which he could spend hours staring into the darkening blue of the sky, at fierce stars scattered on overlapping whirlpools of light, at the splayed luminance of comets, and at Farland hanging in the distance like a green lantern.

  One of the most important problems facing the mission was that of recognising the exact centre of the weightless zone. Toller knew that in theory there was no actual zone of weightlessness, that it was a plane of zero thickness, and that a fortress positioned as little as ten yards to one side or the other would inevitably begin the long plunge to a planetary surface. It had been assumed, however, that reality would be more forgiving than absolute equations and would allow some leeway, no matter how slight.

  Toller's first job was to show that the assumption had been justified.

  The six ships had switched over to jet propulsion days earlier, when the lift generated by hot air had become negligible, but now their engines were silent as they hung in a gravitational no-man's-land. Toller found it eerie that the crews could communicate well with each other simply by shouting—although their voices seemed to be absorbed quickly in the surrounding immensities, they could in fact carry for hundreds of yards. For many minutes he had been busy with the device, invented by Zavotle, which was intended to show up any significant vertical motion of his ship. It consisted of a small pan containing a mixture of chemicals and tallow which gave off thick smoke when ignited, and a bellows-like attachment with a long nozzle. The machine made it possible to shoot out from the side of the ship tiny balls of smoke which retained their form and density for a surprisingly long time in the still air. Zavotle's idea was that the smoke, being no heavier than the surrounding atmosphere, would create stationary markers by which the ship's motion could be gauged. Basic though the system was, it seemed to be effective. Toller had forbidden Essedell and Gotlon to move in case they tilted the circular deck, and he had been sighting the smoke puffs along the line of the handrail for long enough to convince him there was no relative displacement.

  "I'd say we're holding," he shouted to Daas, pilot of the second midsection, who had been carrying out similar observations. "What say you?"

  "I agree, sir." Daas, barely visible as a swaddled figure at the rail of his ship, waved to supplement his message.

  Foreday had just begun and the sun was positioned "below" the six craft, close to the eastern rim of Overland. The upflung brilliance was illuminating the underside of the fortress sections, casting their shadows on the lower halves of the balloons, adding an unnatural and theatrical aspect to the scene. Toller suddenly became aware of a sense of elation as he surveyed the unearthly spectacle. He felt well-rested and strong after the brief hibernation of the ascent, ready to do battle in a new kind of arena, and within him was a peculiar sensation of such intensity that he was obliged to pause and analyse it.

  There seemed to be a core of lightness which had nothing to do with the zero gravity conditions, and from that core came varicoloured rays—the metaphor was too simple, but the only one available to him—characterised by feelings of joy, optimism, luck and potency, which infused every part of his mental and physical being. The overall effect was strange and at the same time oddly familiar, and it took him several seconds to identify it and realise that he felt young. No more than that, and no less—he felt young!

  An emotional reaction followed almost immediately.

  I suppose many would think it strange for happiness to come to a man at a time like this. He relaxed his grip on the handrail slightly, allowing his feet to drift upwards from the deck, and the dreaming disk of Overland, cupped in its slim crescent of brightness, came into view beneath the ship. This is why Gesalla compared me to Leddravohr. She senses the fulfilment I get when called upon to defend our people, but she is unable to share in it and therefore she becomes jealous. No doubt she is anxious about my safety, and that too prompts her to say things she later regrets in the privacy of the bedchamber…

  "I'm ready to go, sir." Gotlon's voice came from close behind Toller, calling him back into the practical universe. Toller brought his feet down on to the deck and turned to see that the young rigger, without awaiting the order, had donned his full personal flight kit. His lanky form was all but unrecognisable in the thick quilting of a skysuit, which included fur-lined gauntlets and boots. The lower half of his face was hidden by a woollen muffler, through which his breath emerged in white vapourings, and his form was further bulked out by a parachute pack and by the air jet unit strapped to his midriff.

  "Shall I go out now, sir?" Gotlon fingered the karabiner on the tether which was keeping him close to the ship's rail. "I'm ready."

  "I can see you are, but curb your impatience," Toller said. "There must be a full audience for your exploits."

  As well as being ambitious, Gotlon was one of those rare individuals who were totally without fear of heights, and Toller felt lucky to have found him in the short time available. The crews of the six fortress sections had been in the weightless zone long enough to start getting used to floating in the air like ptertha, but a huge psychological barrier had yet to be surmounted.

  Final assembly of the fortresses could not begin until it had been demonstrated that a man could untie himself, jump free of his ship and successfully return to it by means of his air jet. Although he had intellectual confidence in the hastily devised system, Toller was unashamedly relieved that he was not required to put it to the initial test. Once in reality, and many times since in nightmare, he had seen a man begin the 2,500-mile fall from the fringes of the central blue, at first moving so slowly that he seemed to be at rest, and then, as the gravitational yearning of the planet grew more insistent, dwindling and dwindling into the plunge which would last more than a day and end in death.

  Toller's lungs were labouring in the rarefied air, and he felt a stinging coldness inside his chest as he shouted the necessary orders to the other five pilots. While all crewmen were lining up at the rails of their ships their eyes were fixed on Gotlon. He waved to them like a child attracting his friend's attention before a daring playground stunt. Toller allowed him the breach of discipline in the interests of general morale.

  He scanned the five men in the nearest fortress end-section and with some difficulty, because of the all-enveloping skysuits, picked out Gnapperl, the sergeant who had been so vindictive in the matter of Oaslit Spennel's execution. Now ranked as an ordinary skyman, Gnapperl had not even tried to protest when Toller had selected him for the first mission, and had gone through his few days of training with a gloomy acceptance of his fate. It was not in Toller's nature to engineer another's death in cold blood, but Gnapperl had no way of knowing that and had become a very apprehensive and unhappy man—a state in which Toller was prepared to leave him indefinitely.

  "All right," he said to Gotlon when he judged the moment to be right. "You may now part company with us—but be sure to return."

  "Thank you, sir," Gotlon replied, with what Toller would have sworn was genuine pleasure and gratitude. He unclipped his line, raised himself by using his wrists until he was floating horizontally, then rolled over the rail a
nd kicked himself clear of the side, using more force than Toller would have done. A bright blue void opened between him and the ship, and from one of the other vessels came the sound of a man quietly retching.

  Gotlon slid away towards the stars, cradled in sunlight, gradually slowing as air resistance overcame his momentum, and by chance came to a halt in an upright position relative to those watching. Without pause, he twisted with an eel-like motion until he was facing away from the line of ships, and rapid movements of his right arm showed that he was pumping air into the propulsion unit. A few seconds later the hissing of the jet was faintly heard. At first it seemed to be having no effect, then it became apparent that he was indeed returning to his point of departure. His course was not perfectly true, and several times he had to glance back over his shoulder and adjust the direction of his air jet, but in a short time he was close enough to the ship to grasp the cane which Essedell was extending to him. Bracing his feet against the side, Essedell pulled on the cane and Gotlon came zooming in over the side like a man-shaped balloon.

  "Well done, Gotlon!" Toller reached out casually with his right hand to arrest the weightless figure, and was surprised to find his arm painfully driven back beyond its normal traverse. The impact spun him round, still clutching Gotlon, and it was several seconds before the two men were able to stabilise themselves by gripping partitions. Toller was puzzled over what had happened, but the mystery was displaced from his thoughts by an outbreak of cheering and shouting from the crews of the other ships.

  Toller had to acknowledge his own feelings of relief and reassurance. It was one thing to sit in a comfortable room in the palace and accept the pronouncements of clever men on the subject of celestial mechanics; but it was a different order of experience entirely to cast free of a ship and tread the thin air of the weightless zone, precariously balanced between two worlds, trusting one's life to little more than a set of blacksmith's bellows. But now he had seen it done! Having been performed once, the miracle was no longer a miracle. It had become part of the skyman's armoury of routine skills—and, importantly, had helped ease Toller's mind with regard to the ordeal which awaited him at the end of the mission.