Orbitsville

eleven

Rumours of massacre came within a month.

There had. been a short-term lull while the shallow circular basin centred on Beachhead City absorbed the first waves of settlers. During this brief respite a handful of External Affairs representatives arrived, aware of their inadequacy, and ruled that no humans were to go within five kilometres of the alien community until negotiations had been completed for a corridor through to the free territory beyond. A number of factors combined against their efficacy, however. The Government men had been late on the scene, no broadcasting media were available to them, and — most important — there was a widespread feeling among the settlers that attempting diplomatic communication with the Clowns, as they had been unofficially named, would be an exercise in futility.

At first the bright-hued aliens had been approached with caution and respect, then it was learned that they possessed no machines beyond the simplest farming implements. Even their houses were woven from a kind of cellulose rope extruded from their own bodies in roughly the same way that a spider produces its web. When it was further discovered that the Clowns were mute, the assumption of their intelligence was called into question by many of the human settlers. One theory advanced was that they were degenerate descendants of the race which had built the fortifications around the Beachhead City aperture; another that they were little more than domestic animals which had outlived their masters and developed a quasiculture of their own.

Garamond was disturbed by the attitude implicit in the theories, partly because it was a catalyst for certain changes which were taking place in the Earth settlers. The subtle loosening of discipline he had noticed among his own men within minutes of their setting foot on Orbitsville had its counterpart among the immigrants in the form of a growing disregard for authority. Men whose lives had been closely controlled in the tight, compacted society of Earth now regarded themselves as potential owners of continents and were impatient for their new status. All they had to do to transform themselves from clerks to kings was to load up the vehicles provided by the Starflight workshops and set out on their golden journeys. The only directive was that they should travel far, because it was obvious that the further a man went when fanning out from Beachhead City the more land would be available to him.

As the mood took hold of the settlers even the earliest arrivals, who had staked out their plots of land within the circular hills, became uneasily aware of the incoming hordes at their heels and decided to move onwards and outwards.

In a normal planetary situation the population pressures would not have been concentrated so fiercely on one point, but Earth technology was geared to the Assumption of Mediocrity. During the development of the total transport system of flickerwing ships and shuttles it had never occurred to anyone to make provision for an environment in which, for, example, it would not be possible for a ship to gather its own reaction mass. It would have been completely illogical to do so, in the universe as it was then understood — but in the context of Orbitsville a deadly mistake had been made.

Territories of astronomical dimensions were available, but no means of claiming them quickly enough to satisfy the ambitions of men who had crossed space like gods and then found themselves reduced to wheeled transportation. Given time to build or import fleets of wing-borne aircraft, the difficulties could have been lessened but not removed completely. Each family unit or commune had to become self-supporting in the shortest possible time and, even with advanced farming methods and the use of iron cows, this meant claiming possession of large areas without delay.

It was a situation which, classically, had always resulted in man fighting man. Garamond was not surprised therefore when reports began to reach him that the outermost settlers had forced their way through the Clown city in a number of places and were pouring into the prairie beyond. He did not try to visit any of the trouble spots in person, but had no difficulty in visualizing the course of events at each. Still haunted by the sense of having lost his purpose, he devoted most of his time to his family, making only occasional visits to the Bissendorf in his capacity of chief executive. He deliberately avoided watching the newscasts which were piped into his home along the landlines, but other channels were open.

One morning, while he was sleeping off the effects of a prolonged drinking session, he was awakened by the sound of a child’s scream. The sound triggered off a synergistic vision of Harald Lindstrom falling away from the blind face of a statue and, almost in the same instant, came the crushing awareness that he had not been sufficiently on his guard against Elizabeth. Garamond sat up in bed, gasping for air, and lurched to the living-room. Aileen had got there before him and was kneeling with her arms around Christopher. The boy was now sobbing gently, his face buried in her shoulder.

“What happened?” Garamond’s fear was subsiding but his heart was pounding unevenly.

“It was the projector,” Aileen said. “One of those things appeared on it. I turned it off.”

“What things?” Garamond glanced at the projection area of the solid-image television where the faint ghost of a tutor in one of the educational programmes was still dissolving into the air.

Christopher raised a streaked, solemn face. “It was a Crown.”

“He means a Clown.” Aileen’s eyes were slaty with anger.

“A Clown? But… I told you to keep the images fairly diffuse when Chris is watching so that he won’t get confused between what’s real and what isn’t.”

“The image was diffused. The thing still scared him, that’s all.”

Garamond stared helplessly at his wife. “I don’t get it. Why should he be afraid of a Clown?” He turned his attention to Christopher. “What’s the matter, son? Why were you afraid?”

“I thought the Crown was coming to get me too.”

“That was a silly thing to think — they never harmed anybody.”

The boy’s gaze was steady and reproachful. “What about all the people they froze? All the dead people?”

Garamond was taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t confuse him,” Aileen said quietly. “You know perfectly well what’s been in the newscasts for the last couple of days.”

“But I don’t! What did they say?”

“About the outer planet. When they built Lindstromland they shut off all the light and heat to the outer planet and froze it over.”

“They? Who were they?”

“The Clowns, of course.”

“But that’s wonderful!” Garamond began to smile. “The Clowns created Orbitsville!”

“Their ancestors.”

“I see. And there were people on the outer planet? People who got frozen to death?”

“They showed photographs of them.” A stubborn note had crept into Aileen’s voice. “Where did they get these photographs?”

“A Starflight ship must have gone there, of course.”

“But, honey, if the planet is frozen over how could anybody take photographs of its surface or anything on it? Just try thinking it over for a while.”

“I don’t know how they did it — I’m only telling you what Chris and I and everybody else have seen.”

Garamond sighed and walked to the communicator and called Cliff Napier on board the Bissendorf. The familiar head appeared almost immediately at the projection focus and nodded a greeting.

“Cliff, I need some information about ship movements within the Pengelly’s Star system.” Garamond spoke quickly, without preamble. “Has there been an expedition to the outer planet?”

“No.”

“You’re positive?”

Napier glanced downwards, looking at an information display. “Absolutely.”

“Thanks, Cliff. That’s all.” Garamond broke the connection and Napier’s apparently solid features faded into the air just as an expression of puzzlement was appearing on them. “There you are, Aileen — a direct, clear statement of fact. Now, where are the photographs supposed to have come from?”

“Well, perhaps they weren’t actual photographs. They might have been…”

“Artists’ impressions? Reconstructions?”

“What difference does it make? They were shown…”

“What difference?” Garamond gave a shaky laugh as the mental chasm opened between himself and his wife, but he felt no annoyance with her. Their marriage had always been simple and harmonious, and he knew it was based on deeper attachments than could be achieved through mere similarity in interests or outlook. One of the first things he had learned to accept was the certainty of lasting incompleteness on some levels of their relationship, and usually he knew how to accommodate it.

“It makes all the difference in the world,” he said softly, almost as if speaking to a child. “Don’t you see how your attitude towards the Clowns has been affected by what you’ve seen or think you’ve seen on the viewers? That’s the way people are manipulated. It used to be more difficult, or at least they had to be more subtle when literacy was considered vital to education…” Even to his own ears the words sounded dry and irrelevant, and he stopped speaking as he noticed Aileen’s predictable loss of interest. His wife absorbed most of her information semi-instinctively, through images, and he had no picture to show her. Garamond felt an obscure sadness.

“I’m not stupid, Vance.” Aileen touched his hand, her intuition in sure control.

“I know.”

“What did you want to tell me?”

“I just want you to remember the Starflight Corporation is like…” he strove for a suitably vivid image, “…like a snowball rolling down a hill. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it keeps going faster, and it can’t slow down. It can’t afford to stop, even when somebody gets in the way… and that’s why it’s going to roll right on over the Clowns.” “You always seem so certain about things.”

“The signs are all there. The first step is to implant in people’s minds the idea that the Clowns ought to be rolled over. Once that’s been done the rest is easy.”

“I don’t like the Crowns,” Christopher said, breaking a long silence. His grain-gold face was determined.

“I’m not asking you to like them, son. Just don’t believe that everything you see on the viewer is real and true. Why, if I went to the outer planet myself I could…” Garamond stopped speaking for a moment as the idea took hold of his mind.

“Why not? After all, that’s the sort of work the S.E.A. ships were designed to do,” Elizabeth, had said, reasonably, and at that point she had smiled. “You’re on indefinite leave, Captain, but if you would prefer to return to active service and visit the outer world I have no objections.”

“Thank you, My Lady,” Garamond had replied, concealing his surprise.

Elizabeth’s imperfect smile had grown more secretive, more triumphant. “We will find it very useful to possess some hard data about the planet — in place of all the speculations which are filling the air.”

Garamond reviewed the brief conversation many times during the period in which the Bissendorf was extending its invisible wings and disengaging from fleet formation. It came to him that he had proposed the exploratory flight partly as a challenge to the President, hoping that a duel with her would ease the growing tensions in his mind. Her ready agreement to the mission was the last thing he had expected and, as well as drawing a few pointed comments from Aileen, it had left him feeling both disappointed and uneasy.

He sat in the control gallery for hours, watching the bright images of the other Starflight ships perform the patient manoeuvres which would bring each one in turn to the entrance of Orbitsville where it could discharge its load of human beings or supplies. When the Bissendorf’s own progression had taken it out through the regulated swarm, and nothing but stars lay in front, Garamond remained on station watching the irregular stabs of the main electron gun, the ghostly blade of energy which flickered through space ahead of the ship. The harvest of reaction mass was not plentiful in the immediate vicinity of Pengelly’s Star and in the early stages of the flight it was necessary to ionize the cosmic dust to help the intake fields do their work. Gradually, however, as the ship spiralled outwards, the night-black plain of Orbitsville’s shell ceased to blank off an entire half of the visible universe. The conditions of space became more normal and speed began to build up. Once again Garamond had difficulty in setting his perceptions to the correct scale. Everything in his past experience conspired to make him think he was in a tiny ship which was painfully struggling to a height of a few hundred kilometres above a normal-sized planet, whereas at a hundred million kilometres out it was still necessary to turn one’s head through ninety degrees to take in both edges of Orbitsville’s disc. The size of the sphere was, in a way, painful to Garamond, causing familiar questions to seethe again in his mind. Was the fact that it was large enough to accommodate every intelligent being in the home galaxy a clue to its purpose? Why was there only one entrance to such a huge edifice? Did the physics of the sphere’s existence dictate of necessity that neither flickerwing ship nor radio communicator could operate inside it? Or were those features designed in by the Creators to preserve the sphere’s effective size, and to prevent ingenious technicians turning it into a global village with their FTL ships and television networks? And where were the Creators now?

Napier appeared with two bulbs of coffee, one of which he handed to Garamond. “The weather section reports that the local average density of space is increasing according to their predictions. That means we should be able to pick up enough speed to reach the outer planet in not much more than a hundred hours.”

Garamond nodded his approval. “The probe torpedo should be fitted out by then.”

“Sammy Yamoto wants to lead a manned descent to the surface.”

“That could be dangerous — we’ll have to get a better report on the surface conditions before authorizing anything like that.” Garamond began to sip his coffee, then frowned. “Why should our Chief Astronomer want to risk his neck out there? I thought he was still wrapped up in his globular filigree of force fields.”

“He is, but he reckons he can deduce a few things about how Orbitsville was built by examining the outer planet.”

“Tell him to keep me posted.” Garamond looked at Napier over the mouthpiece of his coffee bulb and saw an uncharacteristic look of hesitancy on the big man’s face. “Anything else coming to the boil?”

“Shrapnel seems to have gone AWOL.”

“Shrapnel? The shuttle pilot?”

“That’s right.”

“So he took off. Isn’t that what we expected?”

“I expected him to do it once, but not twice. He disappeared for the best part of a day soon after the Starflight crowd got here. It was during the time he was on ground detachment so I decided he had gone back to Starflight with a hard luck story, and I wrote him off — but he was back on duty again that night.”

That surprised you?“

“It did, especially as he came back without the chip on his shoulder. His whole attitude seemed to have changed for the better, and since then he’s been working like a beaver.”

“Maybe he discovered he didn’t like the Starflight HQ staff.”

Napier looked unconvinced. “He didn’t object or try to cry off when orders were posted for this flight, but he isn’t on board.”

“I’d just forget about him.”

“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 slow-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.