A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  Casting that peculiar mind back to the time of her arrival in Londeac and Toth, its capital, after the cataclysmic events that accompanied the collapse of Payne Roelt’s reign of terror and the formation of an entirely new Tamlaghtan government, sans Princess Bronwyn, she recalled the excitement she had felt at watching Professor Wittenoom’s great project develop. Although rocketry was not remotely connected with his field of study, in his rôle as Director of the Academy he supported the work with unbounded enthusiasm. It was the first project that required the concerted and unified efforts of almost every department of research that the Academy supported. The interest and support of the pretty and popular princess, whom King Felix adored, no less so for the guilt he felt, was no end of help when the project crept ever further past its original deadline, when funds began to be stretched thin and whenever the budget had to be recast, which was being done more and more often.

  The professor had explained to her shortly after her arrival what he and his associates at the Academy hoped to accomplish. The rocket was being built in a half-dozen separate sections, one atop the other. Each approximately eighteen-foot by twenty-foot section consisted of a closely-packed bundle of 168 solid-fuel rockets. Developed with scarcely any alteration from the military rockets used so successfully in the siege on Blavek Palace, each was 13.8 feet long and over a foot in diameter. They were arranged in concentric rows, each interior circle slightly higher than the outer one so that each hexagonal unit had a low raised cone (or, more correctly, a five-sided pyramid) on its upper surface and a matching conical depression on its lower. Each of these concentric rows was held in place by a light metal webbing. The rockets were designed to be fired in order, starting from the outside and progressing inwards. While firing, their thrust would hold them in place. Once exhausted, the rockets and their restraining sheath would fall away. Once all of the rockets of one section had been used up, those of the section above it would begin firing. This would continue until all 840 rockets had been expended and the required, almost unimaginable speed of 35,500 feet per second had been achieved.

  Five of the six sections of the complete vehicle were identical. The sixth and uppermost comprised the passenger compartment which had its own battery of propulsors (450 medium-sized rockets and two tiers each of 600 small units). The compartment proper was a gumdrop-shaped capsule equipped with padded couches and quartz-plugged portholes, as well as supplies and equipment for controlling the spacecraft. At the moment the life compartment was still under construction in the old dirigible balloon shed at the opposite end of the park.

  Altogether, the completely assembled compound rocket would weigh some 1,000 tons. As it sat there, in the midst of the disarray and débris of its construction, it looked more like some sort of war memorial, solid, unmoving and unmovable, rather than a device that its inventors promised would be able to fly away from the planet like some monstrous bullet. Not for the first time Bronwyn thought that Wittenoom and his scientists were mad and it was only the almost unqualified trust she had in them, or at least in Wittenoom, that kept her from allowing her excitement from dissolving into doubting faithlessness. It was that her trust was only almost unqualified that maintained an actively wary skepticism she did her best not to allow the professor to perceive.

  Bronwyn turned from the window. The professor was still talking, his disembodied voice lending an uncannily anthropomorphic effect to the mechanism, and Bronwyn lazily picked up the thread of his monologue. She had long since learned that it was not at all necessary to listen to every word the scientist said, and she could instead dip in and sample at will and at random from the almost unending stream of words and not lose the sense of what was being said.

  “ . . . had despaired,” the professor was saying, “of obtaining sufficient funds to complete the interplanetary vehicle. A frustrating prospect to face at this late date. However, the Academy’s astronomers pointed out to your uncle that not only is the breakup of the moon interesting, from a purely abstract point of view, but that it presents a clear and present danger . . . ”

  “Danger? What danger? Danger of what?”

  “Pieces of the moon falling onto the earth. You forget, Bronwyn, how big even the small moon is. It only appears little because it’s so far away and because the other moon is so much bigger. In reality, what you think of as the ‘little’ moon is quite a large object. Although it only subtends an angle of something less than a quarter of a degree in the sky . . . less than the size of a pfennig held at arm’s length . . . you must not forget that it is also some 350,000 miles away. That quarter degree therefore translates into an object 1,500 miles in diameter. That’s one-fifth the diameter of the earth, representing a sphere composed of 1,167,150,000 cubic miles of solid rock. Not, I dare say, something that we’d want falling around our heads.”

  “No, I don’t imagine so.”

  “Well, it’s already begun. There have been reports of increased numbers of aerolites and just this morning I received a telegram reporting the fall of a monster meteorite in the middle of Ibraila.”

  “Good,” said Bronwyn, who had no love for that particular nation. “It didn’t happen to drop on Spondula, I suppose?”

  “No, I don’t believe so. It narrowly missed a small village, though.”

  “Too bad.”

  “That it missed the village?”

  “That it missed Spondula. Anyway, I suppose you think that these meteors are pieces of the moon?”

  “Exactly! And we can expect a lot more of them if it does indeed break up.”

  “I can see where the possibility of a rock the size of a small mountain falling on one would give one pause for reflection on the arbitrariness of nature.”

  “It would indeed, and the possibility is not all that remote. Fortunately, we’ve just been promised not only the funds necessary for finishing the rocket, but enough more to enable us to complete it well ahead of our original schedule.”

  “But, Professor, even if you succeed in discovering why the moon is falling apart, what could you conceivably do about it?”

  “How would I know? That’s entirely outside my field.”

  Bronwyn strolled to the pond that lay on the periphery of the park, where she often enjoyed watching the swans whose home it was. There was one black swan that drifted among his snowy compatriots like a lone storm cloud in a sunny sky; like a gunboat among a flotilla of yachts. The Academy’s scientists had named him Blackie, which they had thought enormously clever.

  The day was a bright one in late spring and Bronwyn could feel the sun on her skin as it penetrated the light fabric of her gaily-patterned cotton frock. She sat on the cool, close-cropped grass by the water’s edge, hugging her long legs, her firm, square chin resting on her knees. After much relunctance, she had finally adopted the current fashion of going stockingless in the spring and summer, at least when dressed casually. Even though her skirt covered her prolonged legs to a point somewhat lower than mid calf, she still felt self-consciously overexposed, a relic of her puritan upbringing. She thought it vaguely indecent to see her toes brazenly revealed at the end of her sandals, wriggling with an abandon she seldom felt herself. These inhibitions were not a little mitigated by the congenial caresses of warm sun and faint breeze on her skin. She had recently begun to allow her hair to again grow long and it was now just greater than shoulder length; as she looked down into the water, it was as from within a terra cotta grotto. The grotto smelled of sandlewood soap. Even though she was sitting in the open, within plain sight of one or two hundred people, depending upon how many cared to notice and who one chose to count, she felt as though she were hidden within that fragrant grotto, invisible as a sigh, a daydream or a heartbeat. Blackie cruised by like a patrolling ironclad, trailing blue ripples like silken pennants.

  Here I go, feeling lonely again; how can I be so damned maudlin? Can nothing go so right for me that I cannot eventually find some fault with it? There’s not a reason in the world why I shouldn’t be as hap
py as anyone has any right to be. Maybe more so. It just seems that some part of me is convinced that somewhere in all of this contentment there’s a scab and that if I pick at it enough I’ll discover the original wound underneath.

  She sighed and wondered where Gyven was. She had been seeing him less and less often and, as was her wont, outwardly vilified him for his inattention while inwardly wondering what she had done to drive him away. It was becoming habitual to assume that the blame must fall on her broad shoulders: an old habit to which she had not reverted for a very long time, a remnant of days in the old palace at Blavek where she had grown up, trained as carefully and callously as a kind of human bonsai. There she had been assiduously and meticulously molded to fit her traditional place in the world, the rôle of royal princess, an occupation that required little in the way of intelligence, talent or competence: a perfect woman in the eyes of Musrum. At the same time she was forced to watch her brother Ferenc, the future king, inept both morally and intellectually, treated with the deference and attention she knew in her heart she deserved and that he received solely by virtue of his sex and birthdate. Her natural contrariness and conceit had acted to protect her from completely absorbing and sharing in a generally accepted image of herself that was both degraded and degrading, much in the same way that a duck’s oily feathers shed water from its body, but a dozen and a half years of relentless indoctrination nevertheless had its inevitable effect, wearing down even her adamantine ego as surely as the waves will erode a cliff face, or drop of detergent will sink a duck. Even today, years after she had fled her homeland, many of the old ingrained uncertainties would periodically resurface, like malarial fevers, popping up to disturb the placid surface of her ego like fetid bubbles of methane percolating from the decaying vegetation at the bottom of a pond.

  It would be nice to have had Gyven around when she was feeling like this; he was as solid as a rock, predictable, safe and secure. He made her fears and shakey self-esteem seem trivial and inconsequential; they shattered against his rocky flanks like breaking waves. But as she compared herself to an ocean, it never occured to her that a sea had no need for its shores, whose only purpose was confinement. She never equated the thundering of breakers with the sound of a prisoner beating against the door of her cell.

  Gyven’s interest in travel had waned once he and the princess had arrived in Londeac. She had supposed that anyone who had spent the first thirty-odd years of his life buried in a cavern would be anxious and curious to see what the outside world was like. Certainly, at first, Gyven seemed to be fascinated with every aspect and variety of the continent’s landscapes. But it was as though his world gradually inverted upon him; he developed more of a claustromania than an agoraphobia. He grew ever more taken with visiting caves, grottoes, basements, cellars, quarries and excavations and, eventually, mines, tunnels and caissons.His great knowledge of geology and mineralogy was sought out and appreciated by the engineers involved and the sudden demand for his advice as an expert consultant was his plausible and reasonable excuse for accepting every one of their invitations.

  His visits to Toth and the palace became infrequent; when he was home he was distracted, dreamy, incommunicative. He seemed only aware of Bronwyn when she made love to him . . . which she came to realize was just another manifestation of that invisible, mysterious impediment: she had for a long time been having sex with him; she wasn’t certain exactly when they had ceased making love.

  Gyven had been gone now for an entire month, his longest absence yet and the first during which she had no idea where he had gone. He had merely disappeared one morning and there had been no word since. The disturbing thought was that she had begun to wonder if she even missed him. And if she did, did she miss him, or did she just miss his solidity, as a ship might miss its anchor? Never did she give even so much as a passing thought to returning to her homeland. Within days of her abdication, in fact, before the last of Tamlaght disappeared beyond the horizon, as her ship anxiously steamed for Londeac, the armies of Crotoy poured unhindered across the northern border and occupied that relatively uninhabited quarter. A desultory kind of war was now being raged in which the small, poorly-equipped, -supplied and -trained Crotoyan army was faced only by the already ravaged and weary people of Tamlaght, something like a normally inocuous disease being able to overcome a dibilitated body. The results of Payne Roelt’s reign of terror had already depressed the princess enough and she had no particular desire to see her country and its people even further devastated. The answer that seemed perfectly adequate to her was to turn her back on the whole unpleasant mess.

  There was the sound of a gong and one of the swans honked either in reply or in protest. It was the signal that the luncheon hour had arrived and the workers were allowed to take their break. She sighed again, stood and stretched. She was a very tall young woman, a little over twenty years old, who when stretched as she was at full length could easily let her fingertips touch a point (had there been one available) considerably more than eight feet over her head. She was inordinately leggy (the professor had once calculated that they comprised 57% of her total length), as sleek and supple as a strand of kelp, with the hydrodynamic streamlining of an eel or barracuda. She had a lean, pale face that was home to eyes as metallic green as a pair of bottle flies. Except in coloring and some more or less minor physical details, she greatly resembled at least as a general type her friend Rykkla Woxen, perhaps in the same way a greyhound resembles a coyote. Like Rykkla, the princess was abnormally tall, snakily athletic (undeservedly so, for unlike Rykkla she loathed physical exercise), with an aquiline nose set as firmly as a dolmen in an angular, bony face. The net effect was rather sharp and hawkish. Her mouth was wide, with perhaps just the slightest hint of an overbite making her smile radiantly toothy. Her hair was mahogany, a helmet of corroded iron, counterpointed by a porcelain coloring that ranged from the palest, most translucent tints in her skin to the most luminous hues in her hair, in short, if Rykkla was a work in oils she was a study in watercolor. Her complexion was like a pitcher of cream into which a single drop of blood has fallen. But where Rykkla was as graceful in everything she did as a heron in flight, Bronwyn was as awkward and clumsy as one on land.

  The good eye of an agéd gardener, weeding the flower beds on the far side of the pond, was caught by the figure of the princess, backlit by the brilliant sun, her pale yellow dress transformed into an illuminated nimbus, a lambent vapor that surrounded the bifurcated silhouette of the slim, swaying body, much like a bar of white-hot iron might be swathed in swirling, incandescent gasses. The gardener, who had long ago believed himself beyond the age for such yearnings, swallowed hard against the sudden, unfamiliar, long-forgotten lump that rose in his throat, the stirring of his few unexpectedly surviving, nearly-atrophied hormones. He watched, unmoving, almost unbreathing, as Bronwyn turned and with long, lazy strides drifted back toward the Academy, her rhythmic figure sleepily undulating like the prayerful cobra. The gardener retired his tools and went home early that day, not certain if he were happier or unhappier than he had been in a very long time, but his once cozy little hovel had never before looked so hollow and lonely.

  The shed where the life compartment was being constructed was a barn-like structure with a completely open and unobstructed interior. The capsule itself sat in the middle of the vast expanse of wooden floor, surrounded by a confused welter of shop tools, benches and construction materials, to say nothing of two or three dozen workmen and technicians. Its squat, domed shape stood several feet higher than Bronwyn’s head, while the hexagonal power unit that would eventually be attached to its lower part was separately under construction to one side.

  Where the main rocket was hexagonal in cross-section, the life compartment had a circular base; all of its curves were designed, the professor had explained, to withstand the pressure of its internal atmosphere once it reached the vacuum of outer space. The upper third of the dome was pierced by a ring of small circular deadlights and midway dow
n the side was a larger circular manhole that would eventually be plugged by a substantial semipermanent hatchcover. Beneath was a second smaller manhole that would allow ingress and egress once in an airless environment.

  When she stepped through the wide doorway of the hangar, open against the rising heat of the day, she was greeted by the shop foreman, an engineer named Petro Zirconis. Perhaps of all the scientists at the Academy, Zirconis was the most passionate about the imminent launch of the giant rocket; he devoted himself to its construction with the zealousness normally devoted by the faithful to the erection of a temple, which perhaps he was and it was. A small, compactly-built man, with a large nose and popeyes and a nervous, distracted air, as though he were perpetually afraid he was missing the gist of some joke, he welcomed Bronwyn with earnestness and a quick, tentative half-chuckle, just in case her reply might have been a funny one.

  “It looks nearly finished, Petro,” she said.

  “It is, Princess, it is,” he replied in a hushed tone. “The Work is almost complete.”

  “Wittenoom will be ready to launch in just a week or so, I think, judging from how well things seem to be going.”

  “Yes, yes,” Zirconis muttered, already disinterested in the conversation. He drifted away from the girl and resumed his interrupted work which, at the moment, was the discussion of some complex point or another with one of the engineering draftsmen, who had a sheaf of rolled-up paper tubes under one arm. Bronwyn wandered unhindered over to the capsule. A short wooden ladder had been placed against the inwardly sloping surface, its top reaching the larger manhole; she mounted it and poked her head into the space vessel’s interior. It was garishly illuminated by an electric light, which revealed a confused welter of open gridworks, structural members, festoons of wire, cables and piping, interim wooden planking and almost nothing that made much sense to her.