by Bob Shaw
“Have to,” the man said, tapping himself on the chest. “Lungs won’t take the cold any more — otherwise I’d save myself the price of a plane ticket. Bloody robbery, that’s what it is.”
Hasson nodded agreement as he walked back to the lounge with his new companion. Personal flying was both easy and cheap, and with the advent of the counter-gravity harness conventional aviation had fallen into an abrupt decline. At first it had been simply a matter of economics, then the skies had become too clustered with people — millions of liberated, mobile, foolhardy, uncontrollable people — for aircraft to operate safely, except in strictly policed corridors. The formerly lucrative passenger traffic across the North Atlantic had been replaced by cargo planes carrying handfuls of passengers on sparse schedules, and the cost per head had risen accordingly.
Rejoining the other passengers, Hasson leaned that the older man’s name was Dawlish and that he was on the way to Montreal to visit an ailing cousin, possibly in the hope of inheriting some money. Hasson conversed with him for ten minutes, reassured by the sense of calmness that was spreading radially through his system as the Serenix capsules began to do their work. His knowledge that the feeling was artificially induced made it nonetheless precious, and by the time the launch arrived to take the passengers on Flight Bo162 out to the plane he was experiencing a muted euphoria.
He sat near the front during the ride across choppy water to reach the flying boat, feeling a pleasurable excitement at the thought of spending three months abroad. The boat looked prehistoric, with grills over the turbine intakes and armour plating on the airfoil leading edges, but now Hasson had some confidence in the looming machine’s ability to take him anywhere in the world. He climbed on board — inhaling the distinctive aroma of engine oil, brine-soaked rope and hot food — and got a window seat near the rear of the passenger compartment. Dawlish sat down opposite him with his back to the movable partition which allowed the cargo space to be expanded or contracted as required.
“Good machines these,” Dawlish said, looking knowledgeable. “Based on the Thirties Empire boat design. Very interesting story to them.”
As Hasson half-expected, Dawlish launched into a discourse an the romance of the flying boat, a rambling account which took in its disappearance from world aviation in the Fifties because of the difficulty of pressurising the hull for the high-altitude operation demanded by jet engines, its reappearance in the 21st Century when, of necessity, all aircraft had to fly low and slow.
At another time he might have been bored or irritated, but on this occasion Dawlish was performing a useful function and Hasson concentrated gratefully on the flow of words while the boat’s four engines were being started and it was taxied round into the wind. In spite of the capsules he felt a pang of unease as the take-off run seemed to go on for ever, culminating in a thunderous hammering of wave-tops on the underside of the keel, but all at once the noise ceased and the boat was in rock-steady flight. Hasson looked at the solidity of the deck beneath his feet and felt safe.
“… monopropellant turbines would work just as well at altitude,” Dawlish was saying, “but if you fly low anybody you run into is likely to be reasonably soft and the shielding will stand the impact. Just imagine hitting a frozen body at nearly a thousand kilometres an hour! The Titanic wouldn’t be …” Dawlish broke off and touched Hasson’s knee. “I’m sorry, lad — I shouldn’t be talking about that sort of thing.”
“I’m all right,” Hasson said sleepily, making the belated discovery that for a man in his exhausted state four Serenix capsules had been too much. “You go right ahead. Get it out of your system.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” Hasson sincerely wished to be diplomatic, but it had become difficult to perceive shades of meaning in his own words. “You seem to know a lot about flying.”
Apparently annoyed at Hasson’s tone, Dawlish glanced around him from below sagging eyelids. “Of course, this isn’t real flying. Cloud-running, that’s the thing! You don’t know what real flying is until you’ve strapped on a harness and gone up five hundred, six hundred metres with nothing under your feet but thin air. I only wish I could tell you what it’s like.”
“That would be …” Hasson abandoned the attempt to speak as the conscious world tilted ponderously away from him.
He was three thousand metres above Birmingham, as high as it was possible to go without special heavy-duty suit heaters, at the centre of a sphere of milky radiance created by his flares… a short distance away from him the body of his dead partner, Lloyd Inglis, floated upright on height-maintenance power, performing a strange aerial shuffle … and, just beyond the range of the flares, Lloyd’s murderer was waiting in ambush…
There was no human sound as the attack began — only the growing rush of air as the two men’s CG harnesses cancelled each other’s fields, allowing then to drop like stones.,.
It took a minute for them to fall three thousand metres — a hideous, soul-withering minute in which the howl of the terminal velocity wind, was the blast from the chimneys of hell. During that minute the low-level commuter lanes, glowing like a galaxy with the personal lights of tens of thousands of fliers, expanded hungrily beneath him, opening like a carnivorous flower. During that minute, pain and shock robbed him of the powers of thought, and his mind was further obliterated by the obscene grinding of the psychotic killer’s body against his own…
And then — when it was so late, when it was so desperately late — came the successful disengagement, the breaking free, followed by the futile upward drag of his harness … and the impact … the ghastly impact with the round… the shattering of bone, and the explosive bursting of spinal discs.
Hasson opened his eyes and blinked uncomprehendingly at a world of sky-bright windows, curved ceiling panels, luggage racks, and the subdued pulsing of aero engines. I’m in an aircraft he thought. What am I doing in an aircraft. He sat upright, groggy as a boxer recovering from a knockout blow, and saw that Dawlish had fallen asleep in the seat opposite him, a micro- reader still clasped in one blue-knuckled hand. The realisation he had been unconscious for some time was accompanied by a rush of memories and he rediscovered the fact that he was on his way to Canada, faced with the challenge of a new identity and a new way of life.
The prospect was daunting, but not as daunting as the idea of meeting the challenge in his present condition of drug-fuddled incapacity, held up by a psychotropic crutch. He waited for a few minutes, breathing deeply, then got to his feet and walked to the toilet at the forward end of the passenger compartment. The soundproofing within the toilet was not as good as in the rest of the aircraft, and for a moment he was disconcerted by the pounding of atmospheric fists on the skin of the hull, but he braced himself against the partition and took the medicine dispenser from his pocket. He wrenched the top off it and, without giving himself time for second thoughts, poured a steam of green-and- gold capsules into the toilet bowl.
By the time he got back to his seat he was woozy again, ready to fall asleep, but he had the spare satisfaction that always came from refusing to compromise. He was not the Robert Hasson he used to be, or had imagined himself to be. He felt incomplete, wounded, flawed — but his future was his own personal property, and there was to be no side-stepping of any problems it would bring.
two
Technical difficulties had dosed the transcontinental air corridor west of Regina, so Hasson completed his journey by rail.
It was mid-morning when he reached Edmonton, and on stepping down from the train he was immediately struck by the coldness of the sun-glittering air which washed around him like the waters of a mountain stream. In his previous experience such temperatures allied with brilliant sunshine had only been encountered when patrolling high above the Pennines on a spring morning. For an instant he was flying again, dangerously poised, with a flight of gulls twinkling like stars far below, and the weakness returned to his knees. He looked around the rail station, anchoring hi
mself to the ground, taking in details of his surroundings. The platform extended a long way beyond the girdered roof, dipping into hard-packed snow which was criss-crossed with tyre tracks. City buildings formed a blocky palisade against the snowfields he could sense to the north. Hasson, wondering how he was going to recognise his escort, examined the people nearest to him. The men seemed huge and dauntingly jovial, many of them dressed in reddish tartan jackets as though conforming to tourists” preconceived notions of how Canadians should look.
Hasson, suddenly feeling overwhelmed and afraid, picked up his cases and moved towards the station exit. As he did so an almost handsome, olive-skinned man with a pencil-line moustache and exceptionally bright eyes came towards him, hands extended. The stranger’s expression of friendliness and pleasure was so intense that Hasson moved out of his way, fearful of perhaps obstructing a family reunion. He glanced back over his shoulder and was surprised to find there was nobody close behind him.
“Rob I” The stranger gripped both of Hasson’s shoulders. “Rob Hasson I It’s great to see you again. Really great!”
“I …” Hasson gazed into the varnish-coloured eyes which stared back at him with such intemperate affection and was forced to the conclusion that this was his Canadian host, Al Werry. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Come on, Rob — you look like you could do with a drink.” Werry took the cases from Hasson’s unresisting fingers and set off with them towards the exit barrier. “I’ve got a bottle of scotch in the car outside — and guess what.”
“It’s your favourite. Lockhart’s.”
Hasson was taken aback. “Thanks, but how did you…?”
“That was quite a night we had in that pub — you know the one about ten minutes along the highway from Air Police HQ. What was it called?”
“I can’t remember.”
“The Haywain.” Werry supplied. “You were drinking Lockhart whisky. Lloyd Inglis was on vodka, and I was learning to drink your Boddington’s ale. What a night!” Werry reached a sleek-looking car which had a city crest on its side, opened its trunk and began loading the four cases, thus giving Hasson a moment in which to think. He had the vaguest memory of an occasion seven or eight years earlier when he had became involved with providing hospitality for a group of Canadian police officers, but every detail of the evening was lost to him. Now it was obvious that Werry had been one of the visitors and he felt both embarrassed and alarmed by the other man’s ability to recall an unimportant event with such clarity.
“Hop in there, Rob, and we’ll shake this place — I want to get you to Tripletree in time for lunch. May is cooking up moose steaks for us, and I’ll bet you never tasted moose.” While he was speaking Werry slipped out of his overcoat, folded it carefully and placed it on the car’s rear seat. His chocolate-brown uniform, which carried the insignia of a city reeve, was crisply immaculate and when he sat down he spent some time smoothing the cloth of the tunic behind him to prevent it being wrinkled by the driving seat. Hasson opened the passenger door and got in, taking equal care to ensure that his spine was straight and well supported in the lumbar region.
“Here’s what you need,” Werry said, taking a flat bottle from a dash compartment and handing it to Hasson. He smiled indulgently, showing square healthy teeth.
“Thanks.” Hasson dutifully accepted the bottle and took a swig from it, noticing as he tilted his head that there was a police style counter-gravity harness flying suit lying on the rear seat beside Werry’s coat. The neat spirit tasted warmish, flat and unnaturally strong, but he pretended to savour it, a task which became Herculean when it seared into one of the mouth ulcers which had been troubling him for weeks.
“You hold on to that — it’s more’n an hour’s run to Tripletree.” Werry spun up the car’s turbine as he spoke and a few seconds later they were surging into a northbound traffic stream. As the car emerged from among the downtown buildings expanses of blue sky became visible and Hasson saw above him a fantastic complex of aerial highways. The bilaser images looked real but not real — curves, ramps, straights, trumpet-shaped entrances and exits, all apparently carved from coloured gelatine and bannered across the sky to guide and control the flux of individual fliers whose business brought them into the city. Thousands of dark specks moved along the insubstantial ducts, like the representation of a gas flow in a physics text.
“Pretty, isn’t it? Some system!” Werry leaned forward, peering upwards with enthusiasm.
“Very nice.” Hasson tried to find a comfortable posture in the car’s too pliant upholstery as he studied the three-dimensional pastel-coloured projections. Similar traffic control techniques had been tried in Britain back in the days when there still had been hope of reserving some territory for conventional aircraft, but they had been abandoned as too costly and too complicated. With million of individuals airborne above a small island, many of them highly resistant to discipline, it had been found most expedient to go for a simple arrangement of columnar route markers with bands of colour at different altitudes. The most basic bilaser installations could cope with the task of projecting the solid-seeming columns, and they had a further advantage in that they left the aerial environment looking comparatively uncluttered. To Hasson’s eyes, the confection hovering above Edmonton resembled the entrails of some vast semi- transparent mollusc.
“You feeling all right, Rob?” Werry said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Hasson shook his head. “I’ve been travelling too long, that’s…”
“They told me you got yourself all smashed up.”
“Just a broken skeleton,” Hasson said, modifying an old joke. “How much did they tell you, anyway?”
“Not much. It’s better that way, I guess. I’m telling everybody you’re my cousin from England, that your name’s Robert Haldane, that you’re an insurance salesman and you’re convalescing from a bad car smash.”
“It sounds plausible enough.”
“I hope so,” Werry drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, signalling his dissatisfaction. “It’s a funny sort of set-up, though. With England having separate air police, I mean. I never thought you’d get mixed up with big-time organised crime.”
“It was just the way things worked out. Lloyd Inglis and I were busting a gang of young angels, and when Lloyd got killed the…” Hasson broke off as the car swerved slightly. “I’m sorry. Didn’t they say?”
“I didn’t know Lloyd was dead.”
“I can’t take it myself yet.” Hasson stared at the road ahead, which was like a black canal banked with snow. “One of the gang was the son of a mob chief who was buying up respectability as if it was developed land, and the boy was carrying papers which were going to wipe out his old man’s investment. It’s a long story, and complicated …” Hasson, tired of talking, hoped he had said enough to satisfy Werry’s professional curiosity.
“Okay, let’s forget all that sort of stuff, cousin.” Werry smiled and gave Hasson an exaggerated wink. “All I want is for you to relax and get yourself built up again. You’re goin” to have the time of your life in the next three months. Believe me.”
“I do.” Hasson glanced discreetly, gratefully, at his new companion. Werry’s body was hard and flat, with a buoyant curvature to the muscles which suggested a natural strength carefully maintained by exercise. He seemed to take an ingenuous pleasure in the perfection of his uniform, something which combined with his Latin-American looks to give him the aura of a swaggering young colonel in a revolutionary republic. Even his handling of the car — slightly aggressive, slightly flamboyant — spoke of a man who was perfectly at home in his environment, taking up its challenges with a zestful confidence. Hasson, envious of the other man’s intact and gleaming psychological armour, wondered how it had been possible for him to forget his first meeting with Werry.
“By the way,” Werry said, “I didn’t tell the folks at home — that’s May and Ginny, and my boy Theo — anything about you. Anything apart
from the official story, that is. Thought it better just to keep things to ourselves. It’s simpler that way.”
“You’re probably right.” Hasson mulled over the new information for a moment. “Didn’t your wife think it a bit odd when you produced a brand-new cousin out of thin air?”
“May isn’t my wife — not yet anyway. Sybil left me about a year ago, May and her mother only moved in last month, so it’s all right — I could have cousins all over the world, for all they know.”
“I see.” Hasson felt a throb of unease at the prospect of having to meet and cohabit with three more strangers, and it came to him once again that he had joined the ranks of life’s walking wounded. The car was now speeding along a straight highway which cut through immensities of sun-blinding snow. He fumbled in his breast pocket, produced a pair of darkened glasses and put them on, glad of the barrier they set up against the pressures of an unmanageable universe. He shifted to an easier position in his seat, cradling the unwanted bottle of whisky, and tried to come to terms with the new Robert Hasson.
The deceptively commonplace term “nervous breakdown’, he had discovered, was a catch-all for a host of devasting mental and physical symptoms — but the knowledge that he was suffering from a classical and curable illness did nothing to alleviate those symptoms. No matter how often he told himself he would be back to normal in the not too distant future, his depressions and fears remained implacable enemies, swift to strike, tenacious, slow to relinquish their grip. In his own case, he appeared to have regressed emotionally to relive the turmoils of adolescence.
His father, Desmond Hasson, had been a West Country village storekeeper driven by circumstances to work in the city, and had never even begun to adapt to his new surroundings. Naive, awkward, pathologically shy, he had lived out the life of a hopeless exile a mere two hundred kilometres from his birthplace, bound by the rigidity of his outlook, always whispering when in public lest the difference in his accent should draw curious glances. His marriage to a tough-minded city girl had served only to let the incomprehensible strangeness of the world of factories and office blocks invade his home, and he had become perpetually reserved and uncommunicative. It had come as a bitter disappointment to him to find that his son responded naturally and easily to an ur- ban environment, and for some years he had done his best to correct what he regarded as a serious character defect. There had been the long, uninformative walks in the country (Desmond Hasson knew surprisingly little about the world of nature he espoused); the futile hours of fishing in polluted streams; the boredom of enforced labour in a vegetable garden. Young Rob Hasson had disliked all of those things, but the real psychological marks had been caused by his father’s attempts to mould his essential nature.