Orbitsville o-1

by Bob Shaw

  “I think we’ve arrived,” Braunek called over his shoulder. “I see something in front of us.”

  Garamond moved up behind the pilot and peered through the forward canopy at the flat prairie. It stretched ahead, unbroken, for hundreds of kilometres. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “Straight ahead of us. About ten kilometres.”

  “Is it something small?” “Small? It’s huge! Look, Vance, right there!”

  Garamond followed the exact line of Braunek’s pointing finger and a cold unease crept over him as he confirmed his belief that they were looking at featureless flatlands.

  Yamoto shouldered his way into the cockpit. “What’s going on?”

  “Straight ahead of us,” Braunek said. “What do you think that is?”

  The astronomer shielded his eyes to see better and gave a low whistle. “I don’t know, but it would be worth landing for a closer look. But before we go down I want to get an infrared photograph of it.”

  Garamond examined the sand-smooth plain once more, and was opening his mouth to protest when he saw the apparition. He had been looking for an object which distinguished itself from its surroundings by verticality and texture, but this was a vast area of grass which differed from the rest only in that it was slightly darker in colour. It could have been taken for a natural variation in the grass, perhaps caused by soil composition, except for the fact that it was perfectly circular. From the approaching aircraft it appeared as a ghostly ellipse of green on green, like a design in an experimental painting. Yamoto opened his personal locker, took out a camera and photographed the slowly expanding circle. He reeled the print out, glanced at it briefly and passed it round for the others to see. On it the area of grass stood out darkly against an orange background.

  “It’s quite a few degrees colder,” Yamoto said. “I would say that the entire area seems to be losing heat into space.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Well, the grass there is of a slightly different colour to the rest — which could mean the soil is absorbing some mineral or other. And there’s the heat loss. Plus the fact that radiation from the outside universe is being admitted… It adds up to just one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’ve found another entrance to Orbitsville.”

  “How can that be?” Garamond felt a slow unexpected quickening of his spirit. “We did a survey of the equatorial region from the outside, and besides… there’s no hole in the shell.”

  “There is a hole,” Yamoto said calmly. “But — a very long time ago — somebody sealed it up.”

  * * *

  They landed close to the edge of the circle and, although darkness came flooding in from the east only a few minutes later, began to dig an exploratory trench. The soil was several metres thick in the area, but in less than an hour an invisible resistance to their spades told them they had encountered the lenticular field. A short time later a massive diaphragm of rusting metal was uncovered. They sliced through it with the invisible lance of a valency cutter.

  Two men levered a square section upwards and then, without speaking the others took it in turn to look downwards at the stars.

  nineteen

  “This is North Ten, the most advanced of our forward distribution centres,” Elizabeth Lindstrom said, with a warm note of pride in her voice. “You can see at once the amount of effort and organization that has been put into it.”

  Charles Devereaux walked across to the parapet of the roof of the administration building and looked out across the plain. Four hundred kilometres to the south lay Beachhead City, and the arrow-straight highway to it was alive with the small wheeled transports of settlers. Here and there on the road, before it faded into the shimmering distance, could be seen the larger shapes of bulk carriers bringing supplies. The highway ended at North Ten, from which point a series of dirt tracks fanned out into the encircling sweep of prairie. For the first few kilometres the tracks made their way through an industrial area where reaping machines gathered the grass which was used as a source of cellulose to produce plastics for building purposes. Immediately beyond the acetate factories the homesteads began, with widely spaced buildings sparkling whitely in the sun.

  “I’m impressed with everything Starflight has done here, My Lady,” Devereaux said, choosing his words with professional care. “Please understand that when I put questions to you I do so solely in my capacity as a representative of the Two Worlds Government.”

  Do you think I would waste time answering them otherwise? Elizabeth suppressed the thought and bent her mind to the unfamiliar task of self-control. “I do understand,” she assured the dapper grey man, smiling. “It’s your duty to make sure that all that can possibly be done to open up Lindstromland is in fact being done.”

  “That’s precisely it, My Lady. You see, the people on Earth and Terranova have heard about the fantastic size of Lindstromland and they can’t understand why it is that, if there is unlimited living space available, the Government doesn’t simply set up a programme of shipbuilding on a global scale and bring them here.” “A perfectly understandable point of view, but…” Elizabeth spread her hands to the horizons, fingers flashing with jewel-fire, “…this land I have given to humanity makes its own rules and we have no option but to abide by them. Lindstromland is unthinkably large, but by providing only one entrance — and placing restrictions on interior travel and communications — its builders have effectively made it small. My own belief is that they decided to enforce a selection procedure, or its equivalent. As long as Lindstromland can accept immigrants only in regulated quantities the quality of the stock which arrives will be higher.”

  “Do you think the concept of stock and breeding would have been familiar to them?”

  “Perhaps not.” Elizabeth realized she had used an unfortunate trigger-word, one to which the upstart of a civil servant reacted unfavourably. It struck her that things had already gone too far when she, President of Starflight, was being forced to placate an obscure official in the weakest government in human history. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of Lindstromland, she was beginning to appreciate, had been ill omens.

  Devereaux apparently was not satisfied. “It would be a tragedy if Earth were to export attitudes such as nationalism and…”

  “What I’m saying,” Elizabeth cut in, “is that it would be an even bigger tragedy if we were to empty every slum and gutter on Earth into this green land.”

  “Why?” Devereaux met her eyes squarely and she made the discovery that his greyness had a steely quality. “Because the transportation task would be too great to be handled by a private concern?”

  Elizabeth felt her mouth go dry as she fought to restrain herself. Nobody had ever been allowed to speak to her in this manner before, with the possible exception of Captain Garamond — and he had paid. It was infuriating how these small men, nonentities, tended to lapse into insolence the moment they felt secure.

  “Of course not,” she said, marvelling at the calmness of her voice. “There are many sound reasons for regulating population flow. Look at the squalid difficulties there were when the first settlers here encountered those creatures they call Clowns.”

  “Yes, but those difficulties could have been avoided. In fact, we think they may have been engineered.”

  For one heady moment Elizabeth considered burning Devereaux in two where he stood, even if it led to a major incident, even if it meant turning Lindstromland into a fortress. Then it came to her that Devereaux — in abandoning all the rules of normal diplomacy — was laying his cards on the table. She regarded him closely for a moment, trying to decide if he was offering himself for sale. The approach, in greatly modified form, was a familiar one among government employees — show yourself to be dangerous and therefore valuable in proportion. She smiled and moved closer to Devereaux, deliberately stepping inside his proximity rejection zone, a psychological manoeuvre she had learned at an early age. His face stiffened momenta
rily, as she had known it would, and she was about to touch him when Secretary Robard appeared on the edge of the stair-well. He was carrying a headset and feeding wire out of a reel as he walked.

  Elizabeth frowned at him. “What is this, Robard?”

  “Priority One, My Lady. Your flagship is picking up a radio message which you must hear.”

  “Wait there.” She moved away from Devereaux. The brusqueness of her man’s voice, so out of keeping with his normal manner, told her something important had happened. She silently cursed the obtuse physics of Lindstromland which had denied her easy radio contact with the outside universe. A voice was already speaking when she put on the headset. It was unemotional, with an inhuman steadiness, and the recognition of it drained the strength from her legs. Elizabeth Lindstrom sank to her knees, and listened.

  “…using the resources of the Bissendorf’s workshops we built a number of aircraft with which it was planned to fly back to Beachhead City. The ships proved inadequate for the distance involved, but they got eight of us to the point from which I am making this broadcast, the point where we have discovered a second entrance to the sphere.

  “The entrance was not discovered during the equatorial survey because it is sealed with a metal diaphragm. The metal employed has nothing in common with the material of the Orbitsville shell. I believe it is the product of a civilization no further advanced than our own. This belief is strengthened by the fact that we had no difficulty in cutting a hole in it to let us extend a radio antenna.”

  There was a crackling pause, then the voice emerged strongly in its relentless measured tones. “The fact that we were able to find a second entrance so quickly, with such limited resources, can only mean that there must be many others. Many hundreds. Many thousands. It is logical to assume that all the others have been similarly blocked, and it is equally logical to assume that it was not done by the builders of the sphere.

  “This raises questions about the identity and motivation of those who sealed the entrances. The evidence suggests that the work was carried out by a race of beings who found Orbitsville long before we did. We may never know what these beings looked like, but we can tell that they shared some of the faults of our own race. They, or some of them, decided to monopolize Orbitsville, to control it, to exploit it; and the method they chose was to limit access to the interior of the sphere.

  “The evidence also shows that they succeeded — and that, eventually, they failed.

  “Perhaps they were destroyed in the battle we know to have taken place at the Beachhead City entrance. Perhaps in the end they lost out to Orbitsville itself. By being absorbed and changed, just as we are going to be absorbed and changed. The lesson for us now is that the entire Starflight organization — with its vested interest in curbing humanity’s natural expansion — must be set aside. All of Orbitsville is open to us. It is available as I speak…”

  Elizabeth removed the headset, cutting herself off from the dreadful didactic voice. She put her hands on the smooth surface of the roof and sank down until she was lying prone, her open mouth pressed against the foot-printed plastic.

  Vance Garamond, she thought, her mind sinking through successive levels of cryogenic coldness. I have to love you… because you are the only one ever to have given me real pain, ever to hurt me, and hurt me. She moved her hips from side to side, grinding against the roof with her pubis. Now that all else is ending… it is my turn… to make love… to you…

  “My Lady, are you ill?” The voice reached her across bleak infinities. Elizabeth raised her head and, with effort, identified the grey anxious face of Charles Devereaux. She got to her feet.

  “How dare you!” she said coldly. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Nothing. I…”

  “Why did you let this… object enter my quarters?” Elizabeth turned and stared accusingly at Robard who had quietly retrieved the headset and was reeling in the attached wire. “Get him out of here!” “I’m going — I’ve seen enough.” Devereaux hurried towards the stairwell. Elizabeth watched him go, twisting a ruby ring on her finger as she did so. It turned easily on bearings of perspiration.

  Robard bowed nervously. “If you will excuse me…”

  “Not yet,” Elizabeth snapped. “Get me Doctor Killops on that thing.”

  “Yes, My Lady,” Robard murmured into the instrument, listened for a moment, and then handed it to her. He began to withdraw but she pointed at a spot nearby, silently ordering him to stay.

  Elizabeth raised the communicator to her lips. “Tell me, Doctor Killops, has Mrs Garamond had her sedative today yet? No? Then don’t give it to her. Captain Garamond is returning, alive, and we want his wife to be fully conscious and alert for the reunion.” She threw the instrument down and Robard stooped to pick it up.

  “Never mind that,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Get my car ready to leave in five minutes. I have urgent business in Beachhead City.”

  * * *

  The shock of hearing by radio that his wife and son were still alive had stormed through Garamond’s system like a nuclear fireball. In its wake had come relief, joy, gratitude, bafflement, renewal of optimism — and finally, as a consequence of emotional overload, an intense physical reaction. There was a period of several hours during which he experienced cold sweats, irregular heartbeat and dizziness; and the symptoms were at their height when the little transit boat from fleet headquarters arrived underfoot.

  As had happened once before, he felt disoriented and afraid on seeing a spacesuited figure clamber upwards through a black hole in the ground. The figure was followed by others who were carrying empty spacesuits, and — even when the faceplates had been removed and the two parties were mingling — they still looked strange to him. At some time in the preceding months he had come to accept the thin-shouldered shabbiness of his own crew as the norm, and now the members of the rescue party seemed too sleek and shiny, too alien.

  “Captain Garamond?” A youthful Starflight officer approached him and saluted, beardless face glowing with pleasure and health. “I’m Lieutenant Kenny of the Westmorland. This is a great honour for me, sir.”

  “Thank you.” The action of returning the salute felt awkward to Garamond.

  Kenny’s gaze strayed to the sloping, stiff-winged outlines of the two aircraft and his jaw sagged. “I’m told you managed to fly a couple of million kilometres in those makeshifts. That must have been fantastic.”

  Garamond suppressed an illogical resentment. “You might call it that. The Westmorland? Isn’t that Hugo Schilling’s command?”

  “Captain Schilling insisted on coming with us. He’s waiting for you aboard the transit boat now. I’ll have to photograph those airplanes, sir — they’re just too…”

  “Not now, Lieutenant. My Chief Science Officer is very ill and he must be hospitalized at once. The rest of us aren’t in great shape, either.” Garamond tried to keep his voice firm even though a numbness had enveloped his body, creating a sensation that his head was floating in the air like a balloon.

  Kenny, with a flexibility of response which further dismayed Garamond, was instantly solicitous. He began shouting orders and within a few minutes the eight members of the Bissendorf’s crew had been suited up for transfer to the waiting boat. Garamond’s mind was brimming with thoughts of Aileen and Chris as he negotiated the short spacewalk, with its swaying vistas of star rivers and its constrained breathing of rubber-smelling air. As soon as he had passed through the airlock he made his way to the forward compartment, which seemed impossibly roomy after his months in the aircraft’s narrow fuselage. Another spacesuited figure rose to greet him.

  “It’s good to see you, Vance,” Hugo Schilling said. He was a blue-eyed, silver-haired man who had been in the Exploration Arm for twenty years and treated his job of wandering unknown space as if he was the pilot of a local ferry.

  “Thanks, Hugo. It’s good to…” Garamond shook his head to show he had run out of words.

  Schilling inspected him
severely. “You don’t look well, Vance. Rough trip?”

  “Rough trip.”

  “Enough said, skipper. We’re keeping the suits on, but strap yourself in and relax — we’ll have you home in no time. Try to get some sleep.”

  Garamond nodded gratefully. “Have you seen my wife and boy?”

  “No. Unlike you, I’m just a working flickerwing man and I don’t get invited out to the Octagon.”

  “The Octagon! What are they doing out there?”

  “They’ve been staying with the President ever since you… ah… disappeared. They’re celebrities too, you know — even if there is some reflection of glory involved.”

  “But…” A new centre of coldness began to form within Garamond’s body. “Tell me, Hugo, did the President send you out here to pick us up?”

  “No. It was an automatic reaction on the part of Fleet Command. The President is out at North Ten — that’s one of the forward supply depots we’ve built.”

  “Will she have heard my first message yet?”

  “Probably,” Schilling pointed a gloved finger at Garamond. “Starting to sweat over some of those things you said about Starflight? Don’t worry about it — we all know you’ve been under a strain. You can say you got a bit carried away with the sense of occasion.”