James P Hogan
Inherit The Stars
Giant Series #1
To the memory of my Father
prologue
He became aware of consciousness returning.
Instinctively his mind recoiled, as if by some effort of will he
could arrest the relentless flow of seconds that separated
non-awareness from awareness and return again to the timeless
oblivion in which the agony of total exhaustion was unknown and
unknowable.
The hammer that had threatened to burst from his chest was now
quiet. The rivers of sweat that had drained with his strength from
every hollow of his body were now turned cold. His limbs had turned
to lead. The gasping of his lungs had returned once more to a slow
and even rhythm. It sounded loud in the close confines of his
helmet.
He tried to remember how many had died. Their release was final;
for him there was no release. How much longer could he go on? What
was the point? Would there be anyone left alive at Gorda anyway?
"Gorda. . . ? Gorda. . . ?"
His mental defenses could shield him from reality no longer.
"Must get to Gorda!"
He opened his eyes. A billion unblinking stars stared back without
interest. When he tried to move, his body refused to respond, as if
trying to prolong to the utmost its last precious moments of rest.
He took a deep breath and, clenching his teeth at the pain that
instantly racked again through every fiber of his body, forced
himself away from the rock and into a sitting position. A wave of
nausea swept over him. His head sagged forward and struck the
inside of his visor. The nausea passed.
He groaned aloud.
"Feeling better, then, soldier?" The voice came clearly through the
speaker inside his helmet. "Sun's getting low. We gotta be moving."
He lifted his head and slowly scanned the nightmare wilderness of
scorched rock and ash-gray dust that confronted him.
"Whe-" The sound choked in his throat. He swallowed, licked his
lips, and tried again. "Where are you?"
"To your right, up on the rise just past that small cliff that juts
out-the one with the big boulders underneath."
He turned his head and after some seconds detected a bright blue
patch against the ink-black sky. It seemed blurred and far away. He
blinked and strained his eyes again, forcing his brain to
coordinate with his vision. The blue patch resolved itself into the
figure of the tireless Koriel, clad in a heavy-duty combat suit.
"I see you." After a pause: "Anything?"
"It's fairly flat on the other side of the rise-should be easier
going for a while. Gets rockier farther on. Come have a look."
He inched his arms upward to find purchase on the rock behind, then
braced them to thrust his weight forward over his legs. His knees
trembled. His face contorted as he fought to concentrate his
remaining strength into his protesting thighs. Already his heart
was pumping again, his lungs heaving. The effort evaporated and he
fell back against the rock. His labored breathing rasped over
Koriel's radio.
"Finished. . . Can't move. .
The blue figure on the skyline turned.
"Aw, what kinda talk's that? This is the last stretch. We're there,
buddy-we're there."
"No-no good. . . Had it. . ." Koriel waited a few seconds.
"I'm coming back down."
"No-you go on. Someone's got to make it."
No response.
"Koriel . . .
He looked back at where the figure had stood, but already it had
disappeared below the intervening rocks and was out of the line of
transmission. A minute or two later the figure emerged from behind
the nearby boulders, covering the ground in long, effortless
bounds. The bounds broke into a walk as Koriel approached the
hunched form clad in red.
"C'mon, soldier, on your feet now. There's people back there
depending on us."
He felt himself gripped below his arm and raised irresistibly, as
if some of Koriel's limitless reserves of strength were pouring
into him. For a while his head swam and he leaned with the top of
his visor resting on the giant's shoulder insignia.
"Okay," he managed at last. "Let's go."
Hour after hour the thin snake of footprints, two pinpoints of
color at its head, wound its way westward across the wilderness
amid steadily lengthening shadows. He marched as if in a trance,
beyond feeling pain, beyond feeling exhaustion-beyond feeling
anything. The skyline never seemed to change; soon he could no
longer look at it. Instead, he began picking out the next prominent
boulder or crag, and counting off the paces until they reached it.
"Two hundred and thirteen less to go." And then he repeated it over
again. . . and again. . . and again. The rocks marched by in slow,
endless, indifferent procession. Every step became a separate
triumph of will-a deliberate, conscious effort to drive one foot
yet one more pace beyond the last. When he faltered, Koriel was
there to catch his arm; when he fell, Koriel was always there to
haul him up. Koriel never tired.
At last they stopped. They were standing in a gorge perhaps a
quarter mile wide, below one of the lines of low, broken cliffs
that flanked it on either side. He collapsed on the nearest
boulder. Koriel stood a few paces ahead surveying the landscape.
The line of crags immediately above them was interrupted by a
notch, which marked the point where a steep and narrow cleft
tumbled down to break into the wall of the main gorge. From the
bottom of the cleft, a mound of accumulated rubble and rock debris
led down about fifty feet to blend with the floor of the gorge not
far from where they stood. Koriel stretched out an arm to point up
beyond the cleft.
"Gorda will be roughly that way," he said without turning. "Our
best way would be up and onto that ridge. If we stay on the flat
and go around the long way, it'll be too far. What d'you say?" The
other stared up in mute despair. The rockfall, funneling up toward
the mouth of the cleft, looked like a mountain. In the distance
beyond towered the ridge, jagged and white in the glare of the sun.
It was impossible.
Koriel allowed his doubts no time to take root. Somehow-slipping,
sliding, stumbling, and falling-they reached the entrance to the
cleft. Beyond it, the walls narrowed and curved around to the left,
cutting off the view of the gorge below from where they had come.
They climbed higher. Around them, sheets of raw reflected sunlight
and bottomless pits of shadow met in knife-edges across rocks
shattered at a thousand crazy angles. His brain ceased to ex
tract the concepts of shape and form from the insane geometry of
grew and shrank and merged and whirled in a frenzy of visual
cacophony.
His face crashed against his visor as his helmet thudded into the
dust. Koriel hoisted him to his feet.
"You can do it. We'll see Gorda from the ridge. It'll be all
downhill from there. . . ."
But the figure in red sank slowly to its knees and folded over. The
head inside the helmet shook weakly from side to side. As Koriel
watched, the conscious part of his mind at last accepted the
inescapable logic that the parts beneath consciousness already
knew. He took a deep breath and looked about him.
Not far below, they had passed a hole, about five feet across, cut
into the base of one of the rock walls. It looked like the remnant
of some forgotten excavation-maybe a preliminary digging left by a
mining survey. The giant stooped, and grasping the harness that
secured the backpack to the now insensible figure at his feet,
dragged the body back down the slope to the hole. It was about ten
feet deep inside. Working quickly, Koriel arranged a lamp to
reflect a low light off the walls and roof. Then he removed the
rations from his companion's pack, laid the figure back against the
rear wall as comfortably as he could, and placed the food
containers within easy reach. Just as he was finishing, the eyes
behind the visor ifickered open.
"You'll be fine here for a while." The usual gruffness was gone
from Koriel's voice. "I'll have the rescue boys back from Gorda
before you know it."
The figure in red raised a feeble arm. Just a whisper came through.
"You-you tried. . . . Nobody could have. . ." Koriel clasped the
gauntlet with both hands.
"Mustn't give up. That's no good. You just have to hang on a
while." Inside his helmet the granite cheeks were wet. He backed to
the entrance and made a final salute. "So long, soldier." And then
he was gone.
Outside he built a small cairn of stones to mark the position of
the hole. He would mark the trail to Gorda with such cairns. At
last he straightened up and turned defiantly to face the desolation
surrounding him. The rocks seemed to scream down in soundless
laughing mockery. The stars above remained unmoved. Koriel glowered
up at the cleft, rising up toward the tiers of crags and terraces
that guarded the ridge, still soaring in the distance. His lips
curled back to show his teeth.
"So-it's just you and me now, is it?" he snarled at the Universe.
"Okay, you bastard-let's see you take this round!"
With his legs driving like slow pistons, he attacked the ever
steepening slope.
chapter one
Accompanied by a mild but powerful whine, a gigantic silver torpedo
rose slowly upward to hang two thousand feet above the sugar-cube
huddle of central London. Over three hundred yards long, it spread
at the tail into a slim delta topped by two sharply swept fins. For
a while the ship hovered, as if savoring the air of its newfound
freedom, its nose swinging smoothly around to seek the north. At
last, with the sound growing, imperceptibly at first but with
steadily increasing speed, it began to slide forward and upward. At
ten thousand feet its engines erupted into full power, hurling the
suborbital skyliner eagerly toward the fringes of space. Sitting in
row thirty-one of C deck was Dr. Victor Hunt, head of Theoretical
Studies at the Metadyne Nucleonic Instrument Company of Reading,
Berkshire-itself a subsidiary of the mammoth Intercontinental Data
and Control Corporation, headquartered at Portland, Oregon, USA. He
absently surveyed the diminishing view of Hendon that crawled
across the cabin wall-display screen and tried again to fit some
kind of explanation to the events of the last few days.
His experiments with matter-antimatter particle extinctions had
been progressing well. Forsyth-Scott had followed Hunt's reports
with evident interest and therefore knew that the tests were
progressing well. That made it all the more strange for him to call
Hunt to his office one morning to ask him simply to drop everything
and get over to IDCC Portland as quickly as could be arranged. From
the managing director's tone and manner it had been obvious that
the request was couched as such mainly for reasons of politeness;
in reality this was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had no
say in the matter.
To Hunt's questions, Forsyth-Scott had stated quite frankly that he
didn't know what it was that made Hunt's immediate presence at IDCC
so imperative. The previous evening he had received a videocall
from Felix Borlan, the president of IDCC, who had told him that as
a matter of priority he required the only working prototype of the
scope prepared for immediate shipment to the USA and an
installation team ready to go with it. Also, he had insisted that
Hunt personally come over for an indefinite period to take charge
of some project involving the scope, which could not wait. For
Hunt's benefit, Forsyth-Scott had replayed Borlan's call on his
desk display and allowed him to verify for himself that
Forsyth-Scott in turn was acting under a thinly disguised
directive. Even stranger, Borlan too had seemed unable to say
precisely what it was that the instrument and its inventor were
needed for.
The Trimagniscope, developed as a consequence of a two-year
investigation by Hunt into certain aspects of neutrino physics,
promised to be perhaps the most successful venture ever undertaken
by the company. Hunt had established that a neutrino beam that
passed through a solid object underwent certain interactions in the
close vicinity of atomic nuclei, which produced measurable changes
in the transmitted output. By raster scanning an object with a trio
of synchronized, intersecting beams, he had devised a method of
extracting enough information to generate a 3-D color hologram,
visually indistinguishable from the original solid. Moreover, since
the beams scanned right through, it was almost as easy to conjure
up views of the inside as of the out. These capabilities, combined
with that of high-power magnification that was also inherent in the
method, yielded possibilities not even remotely approached by
anything else on the market. From quantitative cell metabolism and
bionics, through neurosurgery, metallurgy, crystallography, and
molecular electronics, to engineering inspection and quality
control, the applications were endless. Inquiries were pouring in
and shares were soaring. Removing the prototype and its originator
to the USA-totally disrupting carefully planned production and
marketing schedules-bordered on the catastrophic. Borlan knew this
as well as anybody. The more Hunt turned these things over in his
mind, the less plausible the various possible explanations that had
at first occurred to him seemed, and the more convinced he became
that whatever the answer turned out to be, it woul
d be found to lie
far beyond even Felix Borlan and IDCC.
His thoughts were interrupted by a voice issuing from somewhere in
the general direction of the cabin roof.
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Mason
speaking. I would like to welcome you aboard this Boeing 1017 on
behalf of British Airways. We are now in level flight at our
cruising altitude of fifty-two miles, speed 3,160 knots. Our course
is thirty-five degrees west of true north, and the coast is now
below with Liverpool five miles to starboard. Passengers are free
to leave their seats. The bars are open and drinks and snacks are
being served. We are due to arrive in San Francisco at ten
thirty-eight hours local time; that's one hour and fifty minutes
from now. I would like to remind you that it is necessary to be
seated when we begin our descent in one hour and thirty-five
minutes time. A warning will sound ten minutes before descent
commences and again at five minutes. We trust you will enjoy your
journey. Thank you."
The captain signed himself off with a click, which was drowned out
as the regulars made their customary scramble for the vi-phone
booths.
In the seat next to Hunt, Rob Gray, Metadyne's chief of
Experimental Engineering, sat with an open briefcase resting on his
knees. He studied the information being displayed on the screen
built into its lid.
"A regular flight to Portland takes off fifteen minutes after we
get in," he announced. "That's a bit tight. Next one's not for over
four hours. What d'you reckon?" He punctuated the question with a
sideways look and raised eyebrows.
Hunt pulled a face. "I'm not arsing about in Frisco for four hours.
Book us an Avis jet-we'll fly ourselves up."
"That's what I thought."
Gray played the mini keyboard below the screen to summon an index,
consulted it briefly, then touched another key to display a
directory. Selecting a number from one of the columns, he mouthed
it silently to himself as he tapped it in. A copy of the number
appeared near the bottom of the screen with a request for him to
confirm. He pressed the Y button. The screen went blank for a few
seconds and then exploded into a whirlpool of color, which
Giant Series 01 - Inherit the Stars Page 1