Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  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 promot
ing 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.