Orbitsville o-1

by Bob Shaw

  Again the room filled with silence. Garamond felt a curious secondary shock on hearing the words he was still formulating being uttered by another person. The silence lasted for perhaps ten seconds, then was broken by a dry laugh from O’Hagan.

  “You realize that, at our speed, running into a wall of air would be just like hitting solid rock? I’m afraid your idea doesn’t change anything.”

  “We don’t have to run into a wall of air — not if we turn the ship over again and go in nose first with the electron gun operating at full power.”

  “Nonsense,” O’Hagan shouted. He cocked his head to one side as if listening to an inner voice and his fingers moved briefly on the computer terminal before him. “It isn’t nonsense, though.” He corrected himself without embarrassment, nodding his apologies to Denise Serra, and others at the conference table began to address the central computer through their own terminals.

  “Overload power on the gun should give us enough voltage for the few seconds we would need it. It should be enough to blast a tunnel through the atmosphere.”

  “At this stage we have enough lateral control over our flight path to bring it through the aperture.”

  “But remember we haven’t got the full area of the aperture as a target. We’d be going in at an angle of about seventy degrees.”

  “It’s still good enough — as long as no other ships get in the way.”

  “There’s still time to do some structural strengthening on the longitudinal axis.”

  “We’ll shed enough kinetic energy…”

  “Hold it a minute,” Garamond commanded, raising his voice above the suddenly optimistic clamour, “We have to look at it from all angles. If we did go through the aperture, what would be the effect on Beachhead City?”

  “Severe,” O’Hagan said reflectively. “Imagine one purple hell of a lightning bolt coming up through the aperture immediately followed by an explosion equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon.”

  “There’d be destruction?”

  “Undoubtedly. But there’s plenty of time to evacuate the area — nobody would have to die.”

  “Somebody mentioned colliding with another ship.”

  “That’s a minor problem, Vance.” O’Hagan looked momentarily surprised at having used Garamond’s given name for the first time in his life. “We can advise Fleet Control of our exact course and they’ll just have to make certain the way is clear.”

  Garamond tried to weigh the considerations, but he could see only the faces of his wife and child. “Right! We do it. I want to see a copy of the decision network plan, but start taking action right away. In the meantime I’ll talk to Fleet Control.”

  The ten science-oriented and engineering officers at the table instantly launched into a polygonal discussion and the noise level in the room shot up as communications channels were opened to other parts of the ship. Within a minute perhaps thirty other men and women were taking part, many of them vicariously present in the form of miniaturized, but nonetheless solid and real-looking, images of their heads, which transformed the long room into a montage of crazy perspectives.

  Garamond could almost feel the wavecrest of hope surging through all the levels of the disabled vessel. He told Napier to make an announcement about the situation on the general address system, then went into his private suite and put a call through to Fleet Control. It was taken not by the Fleet Movements Controller, as Garamond had expected, but by a Starflight admin man, Senior Secretary Lord Nettleton. The Senior Secretary was a handsome silver-haired man who had a reputation for his devotion to the Lindstrom hierarchy. He was of a type that Elizabeth liked to have around, capable of presenting a benign fatherly image, while keeping himself remote from the inner workings of the system.

  “I was expecting somebody on the operations side,” Garamond said, dispensing with the standard formal mode of address.

  “The President has taken the matter under her personal control. She is very much concerned.”

  “I’ll bet she is.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Nettleton’s resonant voice betrayed a degree of puzzlement which was an open challenge to Garamond to speak his mind.

  Again Garamond thought about his wife and child. “The President’s concern for the welfare of her employees is well known.”

  Nettleton inclined his head graciously. “I’m aware of how futile words are under the circumstances, Captain Garamond, but I would like to express my personal sympathy for you and your crew in this…”

  “The reason I called is to inform Starflight that the Bissendorf has enough lateral control to enable it to pass through the aperture into the interior of Orbits… Lindstromland, and that is what I intend to do.”

  “I don’t quite understand.” Nettleton’s image underwent several minute but abrupt changes of size which told Garamond other viewers were switching into the circuit. “I am informed that you are travelling at a hundred kilometres a second and have no means of slowing down.”

  “That’s correct. The Bissendorf is going to hit Beachhead City like a bomb. You will have to evacuate the area around the aperture. My science staff can help with the estimates of how widespread the damage will be, but in any case I strongly recommend that you issue warnings immediately. You have less than eight hours.” Garamond went on to explain the proposed action in detail, while continued perturbations of the image showed that his unseen audience was increasing every second.

  “Captain, what happens if your ship misses the aperture and strikes the shell material below the city itself?”

  “We are confident of passing through the aperture.”

  “All you’re saying is that the probability is high, but supposing you do miss?”

  “It is our opinion that the shell would be undamaged.”

  “But the shell is one of the greatest scientific enigmas ever known — on what do you base your predictions about its behaviour under that sort of impact?”

  Garamond allowed himself a smile. “In the last hour or so our instinct about these things has become highly developed.”

  “This is hardly a time for jokes.” Nettleton looked away for a moment, nodded to someone off screen, and when he turned back to Garamond bis eyes were sombre. “Captain, have you thought about the possibility that Starflight may not be able to grant you permission to aim for the aperture?”

  Garamond considered the question. “No — but I’ve thought about the fact that there is absolutely nothing Starflight can do to stop me.”

  Nettleton shook his head with regal sadness. “Captain, I’m going to put you through to the President on a direct connection.”

  “I haven’t the time to speak to her,” Garamond told him. “Just send a message to my wife that I’ll be back with her as soon as I can.” He broke the connection and returned to the operations room, hoping he had sounded more confident than he felt.

  * * *

  Lindstrom Centre was austere compared to its equivalent on Earth, but it was the largest and most palatial building on Orbitsville. It was octagonal in plan and had been built on a slight eminence some twenty kilometres east from Beachhead City, to which it was joined by power and communication cables stretched on low pylons. No attempt had yet been made to sculpt the hill according to the President’s ideas of what it ought to be, so the glass-and-acrylic edifice was incongruously lapped by a sea of grass. Its first three floors housed those elements of the Starflight administration which the supreme executive had transported from the Two Worlds, and the top floor was her private residence.

  On this evening, the guards who patrolled the perimeter fence were distinctly uneasy. They had heard that a maniac of a flickerwing captain was going to try to crash his vessel through the aperture at interplanetary speed, and the rumour had even quoted an exact minute for the event to occur — 20.06 Compatible Local Time. As the moment grew nearer each man felt a powerful urge to fix his gaze on the distant scattering of buildings, just below the upcurved horizon, which was Beachhead Cit
y. They had been told that most of the city had been hastily evacuated to escape the promised pyrotechnics, and nobody wanted to miss the spectacle.

  At the same time, however, their eyes were frequently drawn upwards to the transparent west wall of the Presidential suite. Elizabeth Lindstrom herself could be glimpsed up there, screened only by sky reflections, her silk-sheathed abdomen glowing like a pearl — and it was well known that she sometimes kept watch on her guards through a magnifying screen. None of the men relished the idea of being dismissed from Starflight service and sent back to the crowded towerblocks of Earth, and yet the compulsion to stare into the west grew greater with each passing minute.

  The suspense was also making itself felt on the top floor of the Octagon, but in the case of Elizabeth Lindstrom it was a pleasurable sensation, heady and stimulating, akin to pre-orgasmic tension.

  “My dear,” she said warmly to Aileen Garamond, “do you think you are wise to watch this?”

  “Quite sure, My Lady.”

  “But the boy…” “I’m positive my husband knows what he is doing.” Aileen’s voice was firm and unemotional as she laid her hands on her son’s shoulders, forcing him to face the west. “Nothing will go wrong.”

  “I admire your courage, especially when the chances are so…” Elizabeth checked herself just in time. The common, characterless woman beside her appeared genuinely to believe that a ship could run into a solid wall of air at a speed of a hundred kilometres a second and not be destroyed on the instant. Elizabeth was girded with the mathematics which showed how incredible the idea was, but she knew the equations would mean nothing to her guest. In any case, she had no desire to break the news in advance — she wanted to watch Mrs Garamond’s face as she saw her husband’s funeral pyre blossom on the horizon. Only then would she receive the first payment against the incalculable debt which the Garamond family owed her.

  The concept of grief cancelling grief, of pain atoning for pain, was one which few people could properly understand, Elizabeth had often told herself. Even she had not appreciated the logic of it until days after Harald’s small body had been cast in sun-coloured resin and stood in its place in the Lindstrom chapel. But it was so true!

  There were no flaws in the system of double entries — anguish against anguish, love against love — and this realization had given Elizabeth the strength to go on, even when it appeared that the Garamonds had chosen to die in the black deeps of space. That episode had been nothing more and nothing less than God’s way of telling her that he was simply building up the Garamond’s credit to the point at which it could be used to wipe out all their debts. In retrospect, it had been fortunate that she had not been able to extract payment immediately, because there would still have been an imbalance and she would never have found her heart’s ease. A child is a focus, a repository of love which is added to in each year of its life, and it was crystal-clear that the death of a boy of nine could never be compensated for by the death of a boy of…

  “I have the latest computations for you, My Lady.” The projected voice of Lord Nettleton broke in on Elizabeth’s thoughts. “The impact will occur in exactly three minutes from… now.”

  “Three minutes,” Elizabeth said aloud, knowing that the accurately beamed sound would not have reached the other woman’s ears. Without giving any sign that she had heard, Aileen picked her son up and her face was screened by the boy’s body. Elizabeth moved quietly to the other side, as was her due, and waited.

  She waited through eons and eternities.

  And the ribbed canopy of the sky ceased to turn.

  Time was dead…

  The lightning bolt came first. An arrow-straight line of hell, searing upwards at an angle into the heavens, isolated for the first perceptible instant, then joined by writhing offshoots, tributaries and deltas of violet fire which flickered and froze on the retina. Faint shadows fled across the sky as the air above Beachhead City was hurled outwards by the fountain of energy. Appalling though the general display was, there existed at its core — on the threshold of vision — a sense of even greater forces in the shock of opposition. There was a feeling of cataclysmic upward movement, then a bright star burned briefly and dwindled in the south-west. The day returned to normalcy, but seemingly darker than it had been before.

  Elizabeth drew a deep quavering breath — no other death she had ever witnessed had been so final. She turned her gaze on to Aileen Garamond’s face, and was shocked to see there a look of serenity.

  “It was to be expected,” she said. “I know.” Aileen nodded contentedly, and hugged her child. “I told you.”

  Elizabeth gaped at her. “You fool! You don’t think he’s still alive after what you’ve just…” She was forced to stop speaking as the waves of thunder rolling out from Beachhead City, slow moving in the low-pressure air of Orbitsville, engulfed the building. Reflections of lights stretched and shrank and stretched again as the transparent walls absorbed energy, and small objects throughout the room stirred uneasily in their places. Christopher buried his face in his mother’s hair.

  “Your husband is dead,” Elizabeth announced when silence was restored to the room, “but because you are the widow of the most distinguished of all my S.E.A. captains, you will remain here as my guest. No other arrangement would be acceptable.”

  Aileen faced her, pale but immovable. “My Lady, you are mistaken. You see — I know.”

  Elizabeth shook her head incredulously and a little sadly. She had been planning to spend perhaps a year in a game of subtleties and suggestions, watching the other woman’s slow progression from doubt to certainty about her son’s eventual fate. But it was obvious now — in view of Aileen Garamond’s mentality, or lack of it — that such strategies would be ineffective. If the full payment were to be extracted, as God had decreed it should be, she would have to speak plainly, in words a child could understand. Elizabeth touched a beautiful micro-engineered ring on her left hand, ensuring that no listening devices could remain in operation nearby, and then explained the accountancy of retribution which demanded that Christopher Garamond should be allowed another three years. He was to have the same lifespan as Harald Lindstrom — but not a day longer.

  When she had finished she summoned her physician. “Captain Garamond’s death has left Mrs. Garamond in a state of hysteria. Give her suitable sedation.”

  Aileen opened her mouth to scream but the physician, an experienced man, touched her wrist in a quick movement which did not even disturb the boy she was holding in her arms. As the cloud of instant-acting drug sighed through her skin Aileen relaxed and allowed herself to be led away.

  Alone again, Elizabeth Lindstrom stood looking out across the western grasslands and was aware — for the first time in over a year — of something approaching happiness. She began to smile.

  thirteen

  The integrity of the Bissendorf’s design was so great, and the onboard preparation had been so thorough, that less than a tenth of the crew died as a result of the passage through the eye of the needle.

  Every available man and woman had been co-opted on to the teams which had welded into place a new computer-designed structure, creating load paths which actually utilized the forces of the impact to give the shell enough strength to survive. Until only a matter of minutes before the hellish transit, other gangs had swarmed on the outside of the ship, adding hundreds of sacrificial anodes to those which were already in place serving as focal points for the ion exchange which would otherwise have eaten away the hull during normal flight. The new anodes, massive slabs of pure metal, withstood the brief but incredibly fierce attrition of the lightning which wreathed the ship as it passed along the atmospheric tunnel created by its electron gun. On emerging from its ordeal the Bissendorf’s principal dimensions had altered, in some cases by several metres, but it had gone in with all pressure doors sealed — in effect it had been converted into dozens of separate, self-contained spaceships — and there was no loss of life due to decompression.


  The entire crew had donned spacesuits for primary protection. Each person had been injected with metallic salts and the ship’s restraint fields stepped up to overload intensity, creating an environment in which any sudden movement of human tissue would be resisted by a pervasive jelly-like pressure from all sides. This measure, while undoubtedly a major factor in crew survival, also caused an unavoidable number of deaths. In the few sections where severe structural failure occurred some of the occupants had fallen varying distances under multiple gravities, and the heat induced by electromotive interaction had caused their blood to boil. But, for the vast majority, the internal bracing of their organs against immense G-shocks had meant the difference between life and death.

  And yet, all the preparation all the frenzied activity, would have amounted to nothing more than a temporary stay of execution had it not been for the exotic nature of Orbitsville itself.

  The synthetic gravity of the shell material attenuated much more rapidly than that of a solid mass. Although the Bissendorf’s slanting course was drawn into the shape of a parabola the curve remained flat, and the crew had sufficient time to control their re-entry into the atmosphere from the inner vacuum of Orbitsville. The vessel’s ion tubes and short-term reaction motors were effective against the weak pull of the shell, and it was possible for the Bissendorf to skip along the upper fringes of the air shield, gradually shedding velocity. It was even possible, using the fading reserves of reaction mass, to bring the ship down in one piece, with no further loss of life.

  What was manifestly impossible, however, was to make the ship fly again.

  All its external sensors had been seared cleanly from the hull, and many of the internal position-fixing devices had been destroyed or confused by the unnatural physics of Orbitsville. But the clocks were still in operation — and they had recorded a time lapse of five days. Five days from the passage through the Beachhead City aperture to the final touchdown on a hillside far into the interior. Starting from that basic fact, and using only a pocket calculator, it took just a few seconds for those on board to realize that they had travelled a distance of more than fifteen million kilometres.