At 6.30 when he went to the commissary for his evening meal, he found that he was a quarter of an hour late.
‘Your meal time was changed this afternoon,’ Baker told him, lowering the hatchway. ‘I got nothing ready for you.’
Francis began to remonstrate but the man was adamant. ‘I can’t make a special dip into space-hold just because you didn’t look at Routine Orders can I, Doctor?’
On the way out Francis met Abel, tried to persuade him to countermand the order. ‘You could have warned me, Abel. Damnation, I’ve been sitting inside your test rig all afternoon.’
‘But you went back to your cabin, Doctor,’ Abel pointed out smoothly. ‘You pass three SRO bulletins on your way from the laboratory. Always look at them at every opportunity, remember. Last-minute changes are liable at any time. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until 10.30 now.’
Francis went back to his cabin, suspecting that the sudden change had been Abel’s revenge on him for discontinuing the test. He would have to be more conciliatory with Abel, or the young man could make his life a hell, literally starve him to death. Escape from the dome was impossible now – there was a mandatory 20 year sentence on anyone making an unauthorized entry into the space simulator.
After resting for an hour or so, he left his cabin at 8 o’clock to carry out his duty checks of the pressure seals by the B-Deck Meteor Screen. He always went through the pretence of reading them, enjoying the sense of participation in the space flight which the exercise gave him, deliberately accepting the illusion.
The seals were mounted in the control point set at ten yard intervals along the perimeter corridor, a narrow circular passageway around the main corridor. Alone there, the servos clicking and snapping, he felt at peace within the space vehicle. ‘Earth itself is in orbit around the Sun,’ he mused as he checked the seals, ‘and the whole solar system is travelling at 40 miles a second towards the constellation Lyra. The degree of illusion that exists is a complex question.’
Something cut through his reverie.
The pressure indicator was flickering slightly. The needle wavered between 0.001 and 0.0015 psi. The pressure inside the dome was fractionally above atmospheric, in order that dust might be expelled through untoward cracks (though the main object of the pressure seals was to get the crew safely into the vacuum-proof emergency cylinders in case the dome was damaged and required internal repairs).
For a moment Francis panicked, wondering whether Short had decided to come in after him – the reading, although meaningless, indicated that a breach had opened in the hull. Then the hand moved back to zero, and footsteps sounded along the radial corridor at right angles past the next bulkhead.
Quickly Francis stepped into its shadow. Before his death old Peters had spent a lot of time mysteriously pottering around the corridor, probably secreting a private food cache behind one of the rusting panels.
He leaned forward as the footsteps crossed the corridor.
Abel?
He watched the young man disappear down a stairway, then made his way into the radial corridor, searching the steel-grey sheeting for a retractable panel. Immediately adjacent to the end wall of the corridor, against the outer skin of the dome, was a small fire control booth.
A tuft of slate-white hairs lay on the floor of the booth.
Asbestos fibres!
Francis stepped into the booth, within a few seconds located a loosened panel that had rusted off its rivets. About ten inches by six, it slid back easily. Beyond it was the outer wall of the dome, a hand’s breadth away. Here too was a loose plate, held in position by a crudely fashioned hook.
Francis hesitated, then lifted the hook and drew back the panel.
He was looking straight down into the hangar!
Below, a line of trucks was disgorging supplies on to the concrete floor under a couple of spotlights, a sergeant shouting orders at the labour squad. To the right was the control deck, Chalmers in his office on the evening shift.
The spy-hole was directly below the stairway, and the overhanging metal steps shielded it from the men in the hangar. The asbestos had been carefully frayed so that it concealed the retractable plate. The wire hook was as badly rusted as the rest of the hull, and Francis estimated that the window had been in use for over 30 or 40 years.
So almost certainly old Peters had regularly looked out through the window, and knew perfectly well that the space ship was a myth. None the less he had stayed aboard, perhaps realizing that the truth would destroy the others, or preferring to be captain of an artificial ship rather than a self-exposed curiosity in the world outside.
Presumably he had passed on the secret. Not to his bleak taciturn son, but to the one other lively mind, one who would keep the secret and make the most of it. For his own reasons he too had decided to stay in the dome, realizing that he would soon be the effective captain, free to pursue his experiments in applied psychology. He might even have failed to grasp that Francis was not a true member of the crew. His confident mastery of the programming, his lapse of interest in Control, his casualness over the safety devices, all meant one thing –
Abel knew!
1962
PASSPORT TO ETERNITY
It was half past love on New Day in Zenith and the clocks were striking heaven. All over the city the sounds of revelry echoed upwards into the dazzling Martian night, but high on Sunset Ridge, among the mansions of the rich, Margot and Clifford Gorrell faced each other in glum silence.
Frowning, Margot flipped impatiently through the vacation brochure on her lap, then tossed it away with an elaborate gesture of despair.
‘But Clifford, why do we have to go to the same place every summer? I’d like to do something interesting for a change. This year the Lovatts are going to the Venus Fashion Festival, and Bobo and Peter Anders have just booked into the fire beaches at Saturn. They’ll all have a wonderful time, while we’re quietly taking the last boat to nowhere.’
Clifford Gorrell nodded impassively, one hand cupped over the sound control in the arm of his chair. They had been arguing all evening, and Margot’s voice threw vivid sparks of irritation across the walls and ceiling. Grey and mottled, they would take days to drain.
‘I’m sorry you feel like that, Margot. Where would you like to go?’
Margot shrugged scornfully, staring out at the corona of a million neon signs that illuminated the city below. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course. You arrange the vacation this time.’
Margot hesitated, one eye keenly on her husband. Then she sat forward happily, turning up her fluorescent violet dress until she glowed like an Algolian rayfish.
‘Clifford, I’ve got a wonderful idea! Yesterday I was down in the Colonial Bazaar, thinking about our holiday, when I found a small dream bureau that’s just been opened. Something like the Dream Dromes in Neptune City everyone was crazy about two or three years ago, but instead of having to plug into whatever programme happens to be going you have your own dream plays specially designed for you.’
Clifford continued to nod, carefully increasing the volume of the sound-sweeper.
‘They have their own studios and send along a team of analysts and writers to interview us and afterwards book a sanatorium anywhere we like for the convalescence. Eve Corbusier and I decided a small party of five or six would be best.’
‘Eve Corbusier,’ Clifford repeated. He smiled thinly to himself and switched on the book he had been reading. ‘I wondered when that Gorgon was going to appear.’
‘Eve isn’t too bad when you get to know her, darling,’ Margot told him. ‘Don’t start reading yet. She’ll think up all sorts of weird ideas for the play.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ Clifford said wearily. ‘It’s just that I sometimes wonder if you have any sense of responsibility at all.’ As Margot’s eyes darkened he went on. ‘Do you really think that I, a supreme court justice, could take that sort of vacation, even if I wanted to? Those dr
eam plays are packed with advertising commercials and all sorts of corrupt material.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘And I told you not to go into the Colonial Bazaar.’
‘What are we going to do then?’ Margot asked coldly. ‘Another honeyMoon?’
‘I’ll reserve a couple of singles tomorrow. Don’t worry, you’ll enjoy it.’ He clipped the hand microphone into his book and began to scan the pages with it, listening to the small metallic voice.
Margot stood up, the vanes in her hat quivering furiously. ‘Clifford!’ she snapped, her voice dead and menacing. ‘I warn you, I’m not going on another honeyMoon!’
Absently, Clifford said: ‘Of course, dear,’ his fingers racing over the volume control.
‘Clifford!’
Her shout sank to an angry squeak. She stepped over to him, her dress blazing like a dragon, jabbering at him noiselessly, the sounds sucked away through the vents over her head and pumped out across the echoing rooftops of the midnight city.
As he sat back quietly in his private vacuum, the ceiling shaking occasionally when Margot slammed a door upstairs, Clifford looked out over the brilliant diadem of down-town Zenith. In the distance, by the space-port, the ascending arcs of hyperliners flared across the sky while below the countless phosphorescent trajectories of hop-cabs enclosed the bowl of rooflight in a dome of glistening hoops.
Of all the cities of the galaxy, few offered such a wealth of pleasures as Zenith, but to Clifford Gorrell it was as distant and unknown as the first Gomorrah. At 35 he was a thin-faced, prematurely ageing man with receding hair and a remote abstracted expression, and in the dark sombre suit and stiff white dog-collar which were the traditional uniform of the Probate Department’s senior administrators he looked like a man who had never taken a holiday in his life.
At that moment Clifford wished he hadn’t. He and Margot had never been able to agree about their vacations. Clifford’s associates and superiors at the Department, all of them ten or twenty years older than himself, took their pleasures conservatively and expected a young but responsible justice to do the same. Margot grudgingly acknowledged this, but her friends who frequented the chic playtime clinics along the beach at Mira Mira considered the so-called honeyMoon trips back to Earth derisively old-fashioned, a last desperate resort of the aged and infirm.
And to tell the truth, Clifford realized, they were right. He had never dared to admit to Margot that he too was bored because it would have been more than his peace of mind was worth, but a change might do them good.
He resolved – next year.
Margot lay back among the cushions on the terrace divan, listening to the flamingo trees singing to each other in the morning sunlight. Twenty feet below, in the high-walled garden, a tall muscular young man was playing with a jet-ball. He had a dark olive complexion and swarthy good looks, and oil gleamed across his bare chest and arms. Margot watched with malicious amusement his efforts to entertain her. This was Trantino, Margot’s play-boy, who chaperoned her during Clifford’s long absences at the Probate Department.
‘Hey, Margot! Catch!’ He gestured with the jet-ball but Margot turned away, feeling her swim-suit slide pleasantly across her smooth tanned skin. The suit was made of one of the newer bioplastic materials, and its living tissues were still growing, softly adapting themselves to the contours of her body, repairing themselves as the fibres became worn or grimy. Upstairs in her wardrobes the gowns and dresses purred on their hangers like the drowsing inmates of some exquisite arboreal zoo. Sometimes she thought of commissioning her little Mercurian tailor to run up a bioplastic suit for Clifford – a specially designed suit that would begin to constrict one night as he stood on the terrace, the lapels growing tighter and tighter around his neck, the sleeves pinning his arms to his sides, the waist contracting to pitch him over –
‘Margot!’ Trantino interrupted her reverie, sailed the jet-ball expertly through the air towards her. Annoyed, Margot caught it with one hand and pointed it away, watched it sail over the wall and the roofs beyond.
Trantino came up to her. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked anxiously. For his part he felt his inability to soothe Margot a reflection on his professional skill. The privileges of his caste had to be guarded jealously. For several centuries now the managerial and technocratic elite had been so preoccupied with the work of government that they relied on the Templars of Aphrodite not merely to guard their wives from any marauding suitors but also to keep them amused and contented. By definition, of course, their relationship was platonic, a pleasant revival of the old chivalrous ideals, but sometimes Trantino regretted that the only tools in his armoury were a handful of poems and empty romantic gestures. The Guild of which he was a novitiate member was an ancient and honoured one, and it wouldn’t do if Margot began to pine and Mr Gorrell reported him to the Masters of the Guild.
‘Why are you always arguing with Mr Gorrell?’ Trantino asked her.
One of the Guild’s axioms was ‘The husband is always right.’ Any discord between him and his wife was the responsibility of the play-boy.
Margot ignored Trantino’s question. ‘Those trees are getting on my nerves,’ she complained fractiously. ‘Why can’t they keep quiet?’
‘They’re mating,’ Trantino told her. He added thoughtfully: ‘You should sing to Mr Gorrell.’
Margot stirred lazily as the shoulder straps of the sun-suit unclasped themselves behind her back. ‘Tino,’ she asked, ‘what’s the most unpleasant thing I could do to Mr Gorrell?’
‘Margot!’ Trantino gasped, utterly shocked. He decided that an appeal to sentiment, a method of reconciliation despised by the more proficient members of the Guild, was his only hope. ‘Remember, Margot, you will always have me.’
He was about to permit himself a melancholy smile when Margot sat up abruptly.
‘Don’t look so frightened, you fool! I’ve just got an idea that should make Mr Gorrell sing to me.’
She straightened the vanes in her hat, waited for the sun-suit to clasp itself discreetly around her, then pushed Trantino aside and stalked off the terrace.
Clifford was browsing among the spools in the library, quietly listening to an old 22nd Century abstract on systems of land tenure in the Trianguli.
‘Hello, Margot, feel better now?’
Margot smiled at him coyly. ‘Clifford, I’m ashamed of myself. Do forgive me.’ She bent down and nuzzled his ear. ‘Sometimes I’m very selfish. Have you booked our tickets yet?’
Clifford disengaged her arm and straightened his collar. ‘I called the agency, but their bookings have been pretty heavy. They’ve got a double but no singles. We’ll have to wait a few days.’
‘No, we won’t,’ Margot exclaimed brightly. ‘Clifford, why don’t you and I take the double? Then we can really be together, forget all that ship-board nonsense about never having met before.’
Puzzled, Clifford switched off the player. ‘What do you mean?’
Margot explained. ‘Look, Clifford, I’ve been thinking that I ought to spend more time with you than I do at present, really share your work and hobbies. I’m tired of all these play-boys.’ She drooped languidly against Clifford, her voice silky and reassuring. ‘I want to be with you, Clifford. Always.’
Clifford pushed her away. ‘Don’t be silly, Margot,’ he said with an anxious laugh. ‘You’re being absurd.’
‘No, I’m not. After all, Harold Kharkov and his wife haven’t got a play-boy and she’s very happy.’
Maybe she is, Clifford thought, beginning to panic. Kharkov had once been the powerful and ruthless director of the Department of Justice, now was a third-rate attorney hopelessly trying to eke out a meagre living on the open market, dominated by his wife and forced to spend virtually 24 hours a day with her. For a moment Clifford thought of the days when he had courted Margot, of the long dreadful hours listening to her inane chatter. Trantino’s real role was not to chaperone Margot while Clifford was away but while he was at home.
‘Margot, be sen
sible,’ he started to say, but she cut him short. ‘I’ve made up my mind, I’m going to tell Trantino to pack his suitcase and go back to the Guild.’ She switched on the spool player, selecting the wrong speed, smiling ecstatically as the reading head grated loudly and stripped the coding off the record. ‘It’s going to be wonderful to share everything with you. Why don’t we forget about the vacation this year?’
A facial tic from which Clifford had last suffered at the age of ten began to twitch ominously.
Tony Harcourt, Clifford’s personal assistant, came over to the Gorrells’ villa immediately after lunch. He was a brisk, polished young man, barely controlling his annoyance at being called back to work on the first day of his vacation. He had carefully booked a sleeper next to Dolores Costane, the most beautiful of the Jovian Heresiarch’s vestals, on board a leisure-liner leaving that afternoon for Venus, but instead of enjoying the fruits of weeks of blackmail and intrigue he was having to take part in what seemed a quite uncharacteristic piece of Gorrell whimsy.
He listened in growing bewilderment as Clifford explained.
‘We were going to one of our usual resorts on Luna, Tony, but we’ve decided we need a change. Margot wants a vacation that’s different. Something new, exciting, original. So go round all the agencies and bring me their suggestions.’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 50