by Bob Shaw
“I’m trying to,? Napier said, ”but the Bissendorf isn’t a sailing ship tied up in a harbour. A man who is able to come and go unofficially must have some organization behind him. It makes me think Shrapnel had contacts in Starflight.“
“Let’s have some whisky,” Garamond suggested. “We’re both getting too old for this type of work.”
* * *
Even before it was denied the light and heat of its own sun, the outer planet of the Pengelly’s Star system had been a bleak, sterile place.
Less than half the size of Earth, and completely devoid of atmosphere, it was a ball of rock and dust which patrolled a lonely orbit so far out that its parent sun appeared as little more than a bright star casting barely perceptible shadows in an inert landscape. And when that sun vanished it made very little difference to the planet. Its surface became a little colder and a little darker, but the cooling stresses were not great enough to cause anything as spectacular as movements of the crust. Nothing stirred in the blackness, except for infrequent puffs of dust from meteor strikes, and the uneventful millennia continued to drag by as they had always done.
* * *
Using its radar fans like the feelers of a giant insect, the Bissendorf groped its way into orbit around the invisible sphere which was the dead world.
The ship was in the form of three equal cylinders joined together, with the central one projecting forward from the other two by almost half its length. The command deck, administrative and technical levels, living quarters and workshops were contained in the central cylinder. This exposed position meant the inhabited regions of the vessel could have been subjected to an intense bombardment during high speed flight, when — due to the ship’s own velocity — even stationary motes of interstellar dust registered as fantastically energetic particles. The problem had been solved by using the same magnetic deflection techniques which guided the particles into the ramjet’s thermonuclear reactors. Both the Bissendorf’s flux pumps shaped their magnetic lines of force into the form of a protective shield around which the charged particles flowed harmlessly into the engines.
An inherent disadvantage of the system was that a starship could never coast at high speed — with the flux pumps closed down the crew would quickly have been fried in self-induced radiation. Communications with a ship which was under way were also precluded, and under these conditions even radar sensing could not be employed. The approach to the dark planet had been made at modest interplanetary speeds, however, and the Bissendorf was able to proceed by using its main drive in short bursts, between which it was possible to run position checks. Because it was designed for exploration work in unknown planetary systems, the vessel was further equipped with conventional nuclear thrusters and a limited amount of stored reaction mass which gave it extra capability for close manoeuvring. The task of slipping into stable orbit was therefore accomplished quickly and efficiently, even though the target planet remained invisible to the Bissendorf’s crew.
It took only one pass to enable the long-range sensors and recording banks to answer all of Garamond’s questions.
“This is pretty disappointing,” Sammy Yamoto said as he examined the glowing numerals and symbols of the preliminary analysis. “The planet has no atmosphere now and appears never to have had one at any time in its past. Its surface is completely barren. I was hoping for the remains of some kind of plant life which would have told us whether the radiation from the primary was cut off suddenly or over a period of years.”
Chief Science Officer O’Hagan said, “We can still do a lot with samples of dust and rock from the surface.”
Yamoto nodded without enthusiasm. “I guess so, but botanical evidence would have been so precise. So nice. With nothing but inorganic evidence we’re going to have margins of error of what? A thousand years or more?”
“On an astronomical timescale that’s not bad.”
“It’s not bad, but it’s not…”
“Is it the opinion of the group,” Garamond put in, “that a manned descent is still worth while?”
O’Hagan glanced around the other science officers who were anchored close to the information display, then shook his head. “At this stage it would be enough to drop a robolander and take three or four cores. Somebody can always come back if the cores prove to be of exceptional interest, but I don’t hold out much hope.”
“Right — it’s decided we send down one probe.” Garamond used his end-of-meeting voice. “Get it down there and back again as quickly as possible, and include flares and holorecording gear in the package — I want to be able to present certain people with visible evidence.”
Denise Serra, the physicist, raised her eyebrows. “I heard the Starflight Information Bureau was propagating some fantasy about a beautiful civilization being snuffed out in its prime, but I didn’t believe it. I mean, who would swallow an idea like that?”
“You’d be surprised,” Garamond told her ruefully. “I’ve been learning that there are different kinds of naivety. We’re subject to one kind — it’s an occupational hazard associated with spending half your life cut off from the big scene — but there are others just as dangerous.”
“That may be so, but to believe that the Clowns created Orbitsville!”
“Genuine belief isn’t required — the story is only a formula which allows certain manipulations to be carried out. We all know the square root of minus one is an unreal quantity, and yet we’ve all used it when it suited us to do so. Same thing.”
Denise’s eyes twinkled. “It isn’t the same.”
“I know, but my statement was an example of the general class of thing we were talking about.”
“Neat footwork.” Denise laughed outright and, for no reason which was immediately apparent to him, Garamond suddenly became aware of how much he enjoyed simply looking at her. He had accepted the phrase ‘easy on the eyes’ as pure metaphor but now was surprised to discover that letting his gaze rest on the physicist’s pale sensitive face actually produced a soothing sensation in his eyes. The phenomenon entranced and then disturbed him. When the meeting broke up he went to his own quarters and devoted several hours to his principal spare-time occupation of recording television interviews for Colbert Mason. The reporter, after his initial difficulties on Orbitsville, had established himself in a position of relative strength, and had obtained an office in Beachhead City from which he sent back a prolific stream of news stories for syndication on the Two Worlds. Garamond cooperated with him as much as he could, mainly because in his estimation his personal fame was still his family’s best protection against Elizabeth Lindstrom.
There were times when he was almost persuaded by Aileen that he was wrong in his suspicions of the President, but against that there were persistent rumours that she had slain a member of her domestic staff who had found her son’s body. Garamond continued to maintain his defences. The system was that Mason supplied him with tridi tapes of recorded questions and when it was convenient Garamond used his own equipment to fill in his answers and comments. On a number of occasions Mason had confessed that he was making a fortune from the arrangement and had proposed sharing the profits but Garamond had refused to accept any money, stipulating only that Mason obtain for him the widest possible exposure. It appeared that this objective was being achieved because there was a growing clamour for the discoverer of Lindstromland to make a personal return to Earth.
Garamond spent most of the current session giving suitable reasons for not being able to return and in describing, in precise details, what had been learned about the invisible planet. Assuming the material would be safely relayed to the Two Worlds by Mason and broadcast on the planet-wide networks, he had gone a long way towards killing any suggestion that the Clowns or any other beings connected with Orbitsville had obliterated an entire civilization.
He stored the tapes away carefully, again wondering at the great latitude Elizabeth was permitting him, and fastened himself into his bed with the intention of catching up on his sleep. The sl
ow-drifting cubes of coloured radiance merged and shimmered in the air above him, creating hypnotic patterns. Once more there came the idea that he might be completely wrong about Elizabeth Lindstrom, and he found himself wishing it were possible to discuss the subject emotionlessly and intellectually with his wife. There would be, he decided sleepily, no communications problem with a woman like Denise Serra who shared his background and his interests, and who produced the curiously pleasant sensation in his eyes when he…
Garamond slept.
He awoke two hours later with an unaccountable sense of unease and decided to put a call through to Aileen and Christopher before going out on to the control gallery. The communications room made the necessary connection and in less than a minute Garamond was looking at the image of his wife, but a winking sphere of amber told him he was viewing and hearing a recording. It said:
“I was hoping you would call, Vance. I know you are only making a short trip, but Chris and I have got so used to having you with us lately that we are spoiled and the time is passing very slowly. Something very exciting has happened, though. You’ll never guess.” The unreal Aileen paused for a moment, smiling, to demonstrate to Garamond his inability to divine what was coming next.
“I had a personal call from the President — yes, Elizabeth Lindstrom herself — inviting Chris and me to stay with her in the new Lindstrom Centre for a few days…“
“Don’t go!” Garamond was unable to restrain the words.
“…knew I’d be feeling lonely while you were away,” the image was saying contentedly, “but what really decided me was that she said she was the one who would benefit most from the visit. She didn’t actually put it into words, but I think she is looking forward to seeing a child about the place again. Anyway, Vance, I must go now — the President’s car is calling for us in a few minutes. By the time you hear this I’ll be wallowing in luxury and high living at the Octagon, but don’t worry — I’ll be at home to cook you a meal when you arrive. Love you, darling. Bye.”
The image dissolved into a cloud of fading stars, leaving Garamond cold, shaken, and angry at his wife. “You silly bitch,” he whispered to the fleeting points of light. “Why do you never ever, never ever, listen to anything I tell you?”
The last handful of stars vanished in silence.
* * *
The probe torpedo worked its way up the gravity hill from the dead planet, carrying its samples of dust and rock, and homed in on the Bissendorf. Although there was a sun only three astronomical units away, its light was screened off and the torpedo was moving through a blackness equivalent to that of deep interstellar space. In that darkness the mother ship appeared to some of the probe’s sensors as a faint cluster of lights, but to other sensors concerned with different sections of the electromagnetic spectrum the ship registered as a brilliant beacon whose radiation embodied many voices commanding, guiding, coaxing it homewards. Responding with greater and greater precision as the electronic voices grew louder, the torpedo approached the ship with the familiarity of a parasite fish flittering about a whale. At last it made physical contact and was taken on board.
During the final manoeuvres Garamond had waited on the Bissendorf’s control gallery with growing impatience. As soon as the signal announcing closure of the docking bay was received he gave the order for the main drive to be activated. Initial impetus was given to the ship by the relatively feeble ion thrusters, but that propulsion system was shut down when the ramjet intake field had been fanned out to its maximum area of half a million square kilometres and reaction mass was being scavenged from the surrounding space. As the scooped-up hydrogen and other matter were fed into the fusion reactors the ship wheeled away sunwards, and the acceleration restored close-to-normal gravity throughout the inhabited levels of the central cylinder.
The feeling of the deck pressing firmly on the underside of his feet helped Garamond to regain his composure. He assured himself that if Elizabeth were to move against his family it would be done anywhere but in the crystal cloisters of her new residence. Into the bargain, Elizabeth knew that Garamond would be back from the dark planet in only a few days, imbued with an even greater amount — if that were possible — of the power called fame. The hours and the duty periods went by and, as Orbitsville filled the forward view panels with its unrelieved blackness, Garamond was able to satisfy himself that he had panicked for no good reason.
The Bissendorf had accomplished turnover at mid-point on the return journey, and was two days into the retardation phase, when explosions occurred simultaneously in both field generators, robbing the vessel of its means of coming to a halt before it would smash into the impregnable outer shell of Orbitsville.
twelve
“The starboard explosion was the worst,” Commander Napier reported to the emergency meeting of the Bissendorf’s executive staff. “It actually breached the pressure hull in the vicinity of Frame S.203. The pressure-activated doors functioned properly and sealed off the section between Frames S.190 and 210, but there were five technicians in there at the time, and they were killed.”
O’Hagan raised his grey head. “Blast or decompression?”
“We don’t know — the bodies were exhausted into space.”
“I see.” O’Hagan made a note on his pad, speaking aloud at the same time. “Five missing, presumed dead.”
Napier stared at his old antagonist with open dislike. “If you know how we can turn the ship to recover the bodies this would be a good time to tell us about it.”
“I merely…”
“Gentlemen!” Garamond slapped the table as loudly as was possible in conditions of almost zero gravity. “May I remind you that we are scheduled to be killed in about eight hours? That doesn’t leave much time for bickering.”
O’Hagan gave a ghastly smile. “It gives us eight hours for bickering, Captain — there’s nothing else we can do.”
“That’s for this meeting to decide.”
“So be it.” Chief Science Officer O’Hagan shrugged and spread his dry knobbly hands in resignation.
Garamond felt a reluctant admiration for the older man who seemed determined to remain egotistical and cantankerous right to the end. O’Hagan also had a habit of being right in everything he said, and in that respect too it seemed he was going to preserve his record. Although reaction mass was not plentiful in the region of Pengelly’s Star, the Bissendorf had been aided in its return journey by the pull of the primary and had achieved a mean acceleration of close on one gravity. Modest though the acceleration and distances were, the ship had been travelling at 1,500 kilometres a second at turn-over point and, although it had been slowing down steadily for two days when the explosions occurred, its residual velocity was still above a hundred kilometres in each second. At that speed it was due to impact with Orbitsville in only eight hours, and it appeared to Garamond that there was nothing he or anybody else on board could do about it. The knowledge boomed and pounded beneath all other thoughts, and yet he felt a surprising absence of fear or any related emotion. It was, he decided, a psychological byproduct of having eight hours in hand. The delay created the illusion that something might still be done, that there was a chance to influence the course of events in their favour, and — miraculously — this held good even for an experienced flickerwing man who understood only too well the deadly parameters of his situation.
“I understand that both auxiliary drive systems are still functional,” Administrative Officer Mertz was saying, his round face glowing like pink plastic. “Surely that makes a difference.”
Napier shook his head. “The ion tubes are in action right now — which accounts for the very slight weight you can feel — but they were intended only to give the ship a close-manoeuvring capability, and they won’t affect our speed very much. I guess the only difference they’ll make is that we’ll vaporize against Orbitsville a minute or two later than we would otherwise.”
“Well, how about the secondary nuclears? I thought they were for
collision avoidance.”
“They are. Maximum endurance twenty minutes. By applying full thrust at right angles to our present course we could easily avoid an object as large as Jupiter — but we’re dealing with that.” Napier pointed at the forward view panels, which were uniformly black. Orbitsville was spanning the universe.
“I see.” Mertz’s face lost some of its pinkness. “Thank you.”
The operations room filled with a silence which was broken only by faint irregular clangs transmitted through the ship’s structure. Far aft, a repair crew was at work replacing the damaged hull sections. Garamond stared into the darkness ahead and tried to assimilate the idea that it represented a wall across the sky, a wall which was rushing towards him at a hundred kilometres a second, a wall so wide and high that there was no way to avoid hitting it.
Yamoto cleared his throat. “There’s no point in speculating about why the ship was sabotaged, but do we know how the bombs got on board?”
“I personally believe it was done by Pilot Officer Shrapnel,” Napier said. “There isn’t much evidence, but what there is points to him. We gave all the information in our emergency call to Fleet Control.”
“What did they say?”
“They promised he would be investigated.” Napier’s voice had a flinty edge of bitterness. “We are assured that all necessary steps will be taken.”
“That’s good to know. Isn’t that good to know?” Yamoto pressed the back of a hand to his forehead. “I had so much work still to do. There was so much to learn about Orbitsville.”
They’re going to learn at least one thing as a result of this mission, Garamond thought. They’re going to find out how the shell material stands up to the impact of fifteen thousand tons of metal travelling at a hundred kilometres a second. And they won’t even have to go far from the aperture to see the big bang… Garamond felt an icy convulsion in his stomach as he half-glimpsed an idea. He sat perfectly still for a moment as the incredible thought began to form, to crystallize to the point at which it could be put into words. His brow grew chill with sweat. “Has anybody,” Denise Serra asked in a calm, clear voice, “considered the possibility of adjusting our course in such a way that we would pass through the aperture at Beachhead City?”