by Bob Shaw
"But we are not blind. We know that the iron jaws of the Devil's trap have quivered and have now begun to snap shut!
"I have to admit that, all along, I have been much too complacent. It is now almost two centuries since the migrations to Orbitsville began. By human standards that is a long time, but to God it is the mere blink of an eye, and to the Devil it is the mere blink of an eye.
"I was lulled by those two centuries into thinking that the time scale was much more leisurely than it has proved to be. I began my mission with grand plans to raise the funding to build a fleet of starships. The money came in much more slowly than I had expected in those days of my naivety, but I was able to adapt to that. If the worst comes to the worst, I reassured myself, it will be enough for me to set up a foundation. I will be able to die content in the knowledge that a fleet will some day set sail towards the new Eden, even if I am not there to embark with it."
Montane gave his listeners a sad, rueful smile. "But today's news has changed all that, and it must change us. I am now prepared to settle for just one starship, one ark which will preserve the seeds of a new branch of humanity. It must be built with all possible speed. There may not even be enough time in which to complete the ship, but we must try. It is our only hope of salvation and therefore we must make the utmost effort.
"Until this day we have been content to gather money in small amounts, but now we have to change our ways. We have to put aside our morals, to stifle the voice of our consciences. In short, we have to do everything in our power to bring in that money, even if it means descending to methods which – in other circumstances – we would find repugnant.
"I hate to use words which are associated with some of the darkest episodes in human history – but, in this unique case, the end justifies the means."
There was a taut silence then Mace Winnick, a skeletal, shrunken-faced man who had done time in a correction clinic, cleared his throat. "Corey, are you talking about stealing?"
Montane shook his head. "No stealing. I rule it out, not on moral grounds, but because of the high probability of being caught."
There was another silence while his audience stared at Montane with speculative eyes, trying to assess the stranger that their leader had become. Dee Smethurst, the head cook – plump, pink and matronly, looking exactly as a cook should – raised her hand.
"You almost…" There was a pained look on her face. "You almost sound as if you would condone prostitution."
Montane carefully avoided looking anywhere near the women in the group – Danea Farthing, Christine McGivern and Audrey Lightfoot among them – who were physically equipped to earn good money by hustling. "I will condone prostitution, male or female, if it builds us that ship."
"Corey Montane!" Dee shot an outraged glance at those seated next to her and tightened her lips in a way which indicated that she would have a lot more to say at a later time.
It came to Montane that he was likely to lose some of his team as a result of the new rules of conduct, but that simply had to be accepted. His mission had been run too much on the lines of a mobile retreat for society's gentle drop-outs. The time had come to stop playing games, and anybody who was not prepared to commit every personal resource to the cause would have to be treated as dead wood.
"I should qualify my last remark," he added. "I am quite prepared to condone ordinary casual prostitution, but bringing in fifty or a hundred orbs a day – I am not conversant with the going rates – would only be a tiny step in the right direction. I would, however, applaud strategic prostitution, in which the client was induced to join or support our movement to the extent of selling up his or her possessions and donating the proceeds to our fund.
"It gives me no pleasure to speak to you in these terms – but our immortal souls are at stake. Nothing less than the future of the human race is at stake!"
Montane invited his listeners to join with him in open discussion, and he stayed with them for more than an hour while the tides of emotional debate raged back and forth. Finally, when he had become too tired to continue, he took his leave of them and walked back to his camper in the darkness. When he was inside the roomy vehicle he switched on no lights except for the small reading lamp at his desk. The warm glow from its toffee-coloured glass shade enabled him to prepare the pot of tea which he always drank before going to bed. His mind was racing, trying to assimilate all that had happened during the momentous day, but a sense of deep weariness told him he would have no trouble getting to sleep.
When he had finished the tea he undressed and brushed his teeth. He switched off the reading lamp and, on the way to bed, paused by the silver coffin which occupied the centre of the vehicle's living space.
Placing both hands on the cool metal, he closed his eyes and in a low voice said, "I'm sorry about the way things are working out, Milly – but some day we'll both be at peace."
CHAPTER 6
Nicklin stood behind the counter of his repair shop and gazed around him with a kind of sad astonishment. The morning was just like that of the previous day – sunny, clear, warm and invigorating. There had been a succession of such mornings recently, and he had luxuriated in every one of them, but today there was something dismally wrong. Not with the familiar surroundings and appurtenances of his life, but with his reaction to them.
Was it simply that he had had a poor night's sleep? He had lain awake for long periods, reliving his meeting with the Lady in Black, inventing different outcomes for the too-brief encounter. At times he had congratulated himself, with forced sincerity, on having escaped any entanglement with her; but for the most part he had become lost in vivid scenarios which ended with the two of them in bed together. During those episodes he had found himself with a raging, rock-hard erection which kept grinding itself into the mattress, seemingly of its own volition, while he cursed the criminal waste of his youth represented by his spending all the long nights alone.
He had had restless nights in the past, but had always welcomed the morning and the return of the bright, trustworthy realities of existence. On this morning, however, life was flat and boring. Not ordinarily flat and boring, but unbearably so. The things which used to interest him, no longer interested him. The cheerful environs of his repair shop and library now had all the appeal of a morgue, and the mere idea of having to retune even one more magnetic pulse motor was almost enough to make him sit down and weep.
What am I going to do, O Gaseous Vertebrate? he thought. I can't see how I'm going to get through a single day like this – let alone the next sixty years…
With an effort of will, he picked up the order book and checked on what work was pending. The first two items, logged in Maxy Millom's scrupulously legible writing, were a circular saw and a lawn-mower. Beside each was the legend 'MT', which meant that according to Maxy's initial diagnosis their motors needed to be retuned. It was work which Maxy could not even begin to learn because he had an almost superstitious fear of the way a faulty motor could release bursts of gyromagnetic energy, causing tools to leap off the bench like startled animals.
Nicklin had always regarded adjusting the semi-sentient paramag blocks of a motor, persuading them to deliver their energy pulses at precisely the right instant, as the most boring job ever invented – and that was when he was in a good mood. Today the prospect seemed dire. Wishing that the diffuseness of Orbitsville's population and the lack of universal engineering standards had not made repair-by-replacement unfeasible, he slammed the order book down.
At that moment the bleached-out stillness of the world beyond the window was disturbed by a moving flurry of dust near the bridge. It was Maxy Millom, late as usual, arriving for work on his old Bronco scooter. As he neared the shop, Maxy stood up on the machine's footrests and gave Nicklin a military-style salute. Maintaining the pose like a rider in a parade, he passed the window, slowing down all the while, and – as he had done perhaps a dozen times in the past – went straight into the tip of a rock about the size of a football projecting f
rom the sun-baked clay. The scooter bucked and fell sideways, bearing Maxy to the ground with it. He jumped up swearing, kicked the scooter a couple of times to punish it for having obeyed the law of gravity, and retrieved his bright green sun-hat. Leaving the Bronco where it lay, he came towards the shop, walking grotesquely as he tried with both hands to extricate the seat of his pants from the cleft of his slabby behind.
Nicklin glowered at him with purest malevolence, wondering how anybody could be dim enough to stage the identical accident so often without learning to avoid it. Just think of it, he told himself, appalled, unless I do something really drastic Maxy and I could grow old together – with him gradually wearing that rock down to a frigging pebble.
"Good morrow, Jim," Maxy bellowed, grinning hugely, as he came into the shop. "Did you see that one? I nearly deballed myself."
I wish you had, Nicklin thought. "You're late again."
"Yeah." Maxy was totally unabashed. "Didn't get to bed till all hours last night. A couple of the boys and me went over to the travellin' show, just to see what sort of things was going on, then we went down to the White Spot for a few beers. Seen you at the show."
"I didn't see you."
"Naw, but I seen you, all right," Maxy said triumphantly. "You seemed to be doing okay for yourself. I was nearly going to butt in and tell snake-hips how she was wasting her time on you, and she oughta come along for a few beers with me and the boys, but my generations of good breeding stopped me."
It has just told me it thinks I'm a homosexual – to my face! – and I go on meekly standing here. "I'm sure Danea will be deeply disappointed when she hears what she missed," Nicklin said. "I'll break the news to her tonight – as gently as I can, of course. We mustn't have the poor woman bursting into tears."
"Are you saying you'll be seeing her tonight?"
"No, we've arranged to communicate by carrier pigeon! What do you think I'm saying? Of course I'm seeing her tonight."
Maxy hopped from one foot to the other, grinning in gleeful disbelief. "Is that a fact, Jim? You've got yourself a hot date? Me and the boys'll watch out for you – maybe pick up a few tips."
Knowing that Maxy, who had remarkably little to do in his spare time, was quite capable of maintaining surveillance on him for an entire evening, Nicklin shrugged and turned away. How was he going to get out of this one? Was he going to have to plead illness and stay home? Brooding on this new annoyance, he went to the square metre of work surface which was referred to as the kitchen, and began to brew coffee. Starting the job while Maxy was present would be interpreted as an invitation for him to share. That was not what he wanted, but it was much preferable to letting Maxy prepare the drinks. He had an unfortunate habit of handling the cups by putting two fingers deep inside them, even when they were full – fingers which if examined under a microscope, Nicklin was sure, would register as a seething mass of bacteria.
"Just what I need," Maxy said, following him. "Hey! Know who else I saw at the rent-a-freak last night?"
"No, but perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me."
Impervious to sarcasm, Maxy nodded vigorously. "A black man! 'Strewth, Jim – they've got a black geezer working for them! He's as black as … as…"
As your fingernails, Nicklin supplied mentally.
"…as your boot," Maxy concluded.
Although Nicklin did not want to encourage Maxy by showing any degree of interest, he was quite intrigued. He had seen only one black person in his entire life, and that had been when he was a child. Now he found it quite difficult to visualise a human being who had black skin.
The old Orbitsville syndrome again, he thought. So much for all that ancient stuff about the universal brotherhood of man! With living space equal to five billion Earths available, like had gone off into the wild green yonder with like. Nobody was going to hang around to be persecuted, discriminated against, tolerated or even cultivated by liberals merely because of having the wrong shade of epidermis or politics, speaking the wrong language or having wrong ideas about religion, having been born to the wrong parents or in one of the vast selection of wrong places. Regardless of all teachings and preachings, the ordinary Joe had decided it was best to be with his own…
"Anyway," Maxy said. "I've decided I don't like black people."
"That was quick." Nicklin took two plastic cups from the dispenser. "May I ask why?"
"They're too short-tempered, too touchy. Me and the boys was just standing there – friendly, like – looking at this guy, and all of a sudden, for no reason at all, he tells us to bog off." An indignant expression appeared on Maxy's tallowy face as he relived the incident in his mind. "I mean, if you can't just stand and look at somebody!"
"What's the world coming to? That's what I always say." Nicklin poured coffee into the two cups, picked up his own and moved to the front end of the shop. It was a vantage point which gave him a good view of the stream, the small bridge and the road. Beyond the building's wide eaves the sunlight was a silent, vertical torrent of platinum-coloured rays, hammering down on the bleached-out scene with almost tangible force. The world was embedded – preserved and hermetically sealed – in the clear rigid plastic of that light. Dayton, Ohio, where it was forever 1910. Nothing was ever going to happen in Orangefield, and he was going to be right there, through all of it. The thought was enough to make him want to sit down and weep. Dismayed to feel his lower lip give a preliminary tremble, he took a sip of his coffee and winced as the near-scalding fluid coursed down his throat.
Lost in his melancholia, Nicklin had been gazing at the approaching blue Unimot convertible for several seconds before he realised it was slowing down to stop at his place. It was lost to view behind the stand of whistle trees, reappeared and turned right, coming to a halt when its driver was confronted by the footbridge. A moment later the driver got out and Nicklin's heart gave a giddy lurch as he saw the woman. The woman.
She was no longer the Lady in Black, but was wearing a similar outfit – glistening blouse, slimfit pants, high-heel boots and flat stetson – in which the predominant colour was primrose. Glancing about her with evident interest, she came towards the shop. She was walking almost like a ballet dancer on stage, with one foot going down directly in front of the other in a way which emphasised the economical curvatures of thighs, calves and ankles.
Nicklin felt a cool prickling on his brow as he analysed the possibilities. The chances that she was coming to borrow a book or to have an eggbeater mended were just about zero – which meant that the visit was personal. Could it be – could it really be – that she wanted to take up where they had left off last night? But nothing actually happened between us last night, Nicklin reminded himself. It was all a product of my fevered imagination. This sort of thing only happens to me in the opening phases of an erotic dream.
He set his cup down, found the presence of mind to wink at Maxy, and went out of the shop without taking time to pick up his sun-hat. When the woman saw him advancing to meet her she gave him a smile which was so fleeting that it would have been possible to miss it, then her expression became severe.
"What happened to you last night?" she said abruptly.
"I … " Nicklin was lost for words. "What do you mean?"
"Jim, you know very well what I mean."
Her use of his first name excited and encouraged him. "I assure you, Danea, I don't know what you're talking about."
"At least you remember my name," she said, beginning to look mollified. "I suppose that's something, but don't think it lets you off the hook, Jim Nicklin. Why didn't you come back to see me last night, the way we arranged?"
Nicklin felt a gusher of pure joy shaking his intellectual landscape. It had not yet spumed up through him, but it was getting itself ready. This was the first part of an erotic dream, but it was a dream that was coming true – and all he needed to do was make the final check which would remove even the slightest possibility of his suffering a crushing humiliation or disappointment.
"Montane must have a dash of tax collector's blood in him if he lets you go drive all the way out of town for a couple of orbs," he said, forcing a grin. "Where's your collecting plate?"
"That isn't funny, Jim." Danea gazed at him seriously from under heavy eyelids. "This sort of thing has never happened to me before, and you're not making it any easier. You may be used to this, but I'm not."
"I'm not used to … Danea, there was nothing actually said last night."
"Do you think I don't know that?" she replied, her eyes holding steady on his, imploring. "Do you think I'm not quivering like a jelly over all the embarrassment I'll have to go through if I'm wrong?"
"You're not wrong," he said, entranced, taking one of her hands in his. The gusher was exploding up through the ground now, blasting all that remained of the old Jim Nicklin into the high blue.
"Thank God!" She smiled and moved her hand in such a way that his knuckles were pressed into her left breast. "I didn't sleep much last night, Jim – why didn't you come back to me?"
"I did go back. I left Zindee with her ice cream for a few minutes and went back to look for you."
"I was hiding in the marquee trying to calm myself down a little bit." Her breast, beneath the sylkon blouse, felt like bare flesh against the back of his hand. "Anyway, a couple of minutes wouldn't have been much use to us. I'm really hurting for you, Jim. I want you in me. Does that sound awful?"
"It sounds wonderful." The former Jim Nicklin would have been reduced to incoherence by the question, but the new version remained more or less in control of himself, doing his best to act like the cool roué Danea believed him to be. "I have an apartment above the library – let's go there."