Orbitsville

eighteen

Day 193. Estimated range: 2,160,000 kilometres

This may be my last journal entry. Words seem to be losing their meaning, the act of writing them is losing all significance, and I notice that we have virtually stopped speaking to each other. The silence does not imply or induce separateness — the eight of us have compacted into one. It is simply that there is something embarrassing about watching a man go through the whole pointless performance of shaping his lips and activating his tongue in order to push sound vibrations out on the air. It is peculiar, too, how a spoken word resolves itself into meaningless syllables, and how a single syllable can hang resonating in the air, in your mind, long after the speaker has turned away.

I fancy, sometimes, that the same phenomenon takes place with images. We have steered our ships above a thousand seas, ten thousand mountain ranges, all of which have promised to be different — but which are all becoming the same. A distinctive peak or river bend, a curious group of islands, the coloration of a wooded valley — geographical features appear before us with the promise of something new and, having cheated us, fall behind. Were it not for the certainty of the inertial guidance system I might imagine we were flying in circles. No, that isn’t correct, for we have learned to steer a constant course against the stripings of the sky. We seem to exist, embedded, in a huge crystal paperweight and one of the advantages, perhaps the only one, is that we can tell where we are going by reference to its millefiori design. If I hold the milk-blue curvatures in a certain precise relationship, crossing windshield and prow just so, I can fly for as long as thirty minutes before the black box chimes and edges me to left or right. The other black box, the portable delton detector, remains inert even after all this time. (Dennis was right when he said we were lucky to find that first particle so soon.) The up-curving horizon provides a constant reference for level flying. It occurred to me recently that Orbitsville is so big that we should not be able to detect any upward curvature in the horizon. As usual, Dennis was able to explain that it was an optical illusion — the horizon is straight but, through a trick of perception, appears to sag in the middle. He told me that the ancient Greeks compensated for this when building their temples.

The two aircraft are behaving as well as can be expected within their design limits. Each is carrying a reserve power-plant which takes up a high proportion of its payload, but this is unavoidable. A gyromagnetic engine is little more than a block of metal in which most of the atoms have been orchestrated to resonate in tune. It is without doubt one of the best general-purpose medium-sized power-plants ever conceived, but it has a fault in that — without warning and for no apparent reason — the orchestra can fall into discord and the power output drops to zero. When that happens there is no option than to install a new engine, so we can afford it to happen only twice. We have also had minor mechanical troubles. As yet there has been nothing serious enough to cause an unscheduled landing, but the potential is always there and grows daily.

The biggest cause for concern, however, is the biological machinery on board — our own bodies. Everybodys except for young Braunek, is subject to headaches, constipation, dizziness and nausea. Many of the symptoms are probably due to prolonged stress but, with increasingly unreliable aircraft to fly, we dare not resort to tranquillizers. Dennis, in particular, is causing me alarm and an equal amount of guilt over having brought him along. He gets greyer and more tired every day, and less and less able to do his stint at the controls. The protein and yeast cakes on which we live are not appetizing at the best of times, but Dennis is finding it almost impossible to keep them down and his weight is decreasing rapidly.

I am reaching the conclusion that the mission should be abandoned, and this time there are no emotional undertones in my thinking. I know it is not worth the expenditure of human lives.

A short time ago I could not have made such an admission — but that was before we had fully begun to pay for our mistake of challenging the Big O. The journey we attempted was perhaps only a hundredth of O’s circumference, and of that tiny fraction we have completed only a fraction. My personal punishment for this presumption is that O has scoured out my soul. I can think of my dead wife and child; I can think of Denise Serra; I can think of Elizabeth Lindstrom… and nothing happens.

I feel nothing.

This is my last diary entry.

There is nothing more to write.

There is nothing more to say.

Kneeling on the thrumming floor beside O’Hagan’s bunk, Garamond said, “It’s summertime down there, Dennis. We’ve flown right into summer.”

“I don’t care.” Beneath its covering of sheets, the scientist’s body seemed as frail and fleshless as that of a mummified woman.

“I’m positive we could find fruit trees.”

O’Hagan gave a skeletal grin. “You know what you can do with your fruit trees.”

“But if you could eat something you’d be all right.”

“I’m just fine — all I need is a rest.” O’Hagan caught Garamond’s wrist. “Vance, you’re not going to call off the flight on my account. Promise me that.”

“I promise.” Garamond disengaged the white, too-clean fingers one by one and stood up. The decision, now that it had come, was strangely easy to make. “I’m calling it off on my own account.”

He ignored the other man’s protests and went forward along the narrow aisle to the blinding arena of the cockpit. Braunke was at the controls and Sammy Yamoto was beside him in the second pilot’s seat. He had removed a cover from the delton detector and was probing inside it. Garamond tapped him on the shoulder.

“Why aren’t you asleep, Sammy? You were on duty most of the night.”

Yamoto adjusted his dark glasses. “I’m going to kip down in a minute — as soon as I put my mind at rest about this pile of junk.”

“Junk?”

“Yes. I don’t think it’s working.”

Garamond glanced at the detector’s control panel. “According to the operating light it’s working.”

“I know, but look at this.” Yamoto clicked the switch of the main power supply to the detector box up and down several times in succession. The orange letters which spelled, SYSTEM FUNCTIONING, continued to glow steadily in their dark recess.

“What a botch,” Yamoto said bitterly. “You know, I might never have caught on if a generator hadn’t cut itself out during the night. I was sitting here about two hours later when, all of a sudden, it hit me — the lights on the detector panel hadn’t blinked with all the others.”

“Does that prove it isn’t working?”

“Not necessarily — but it makes me doubt the quality of the whole assembly. Litman deserves to be shot.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Garamond lowered himself into the supernumerary seat. “Not at this stage anyway — we have to call off the flight.”

“Dennis?”

“Yes. It’s killing him.”

“I don’t want to seem callous, but…” Yamoto paused to force a multi-connector into place, “…don’t you think he could die anyway?”

“I can’t take that chance.”

“Now I have to sound callous. There are seven other men on this -” Yamoto stopped speaking as the delton detector emitted a sharp tap, like a steel ball dropped on to a metal plate. He instinctively jerked his hand away from the exposed wiring.

Garamond raised his eyebrows. “What have you done to it?”

“All I’ve done is fix it.” Yamoto gave a quivering, triumphant grin as two more tapping sounds were heard almost simultaneously.

“Then what are those noises?”

“Those, my friend, are delta particles going through our screen.” The astronomer’s words were punctuated by further noises from the machine. “And their frequency indicates that we are close to their source.”

“Close? How close?” Yamoto took out a calculator and his fingers flickered over it. “I’d say about twenty or thirty thousand kilometres.”

A cool breeze from nowhere played on Garamond’s forehead. “You don’t mean from Beachhead City.”

“Beachhead City is the only source we know. That’s what it’s all about.”

“But…” A fresh staccato outburst came from the detector as Garamond, knowing he should have been excited, looked out through the front windshield of the aircraft at a range of low mountains perhaps an hour’s flying time ahead. They seemed no more and no less familiar than all the others he had seen.

“Is this possible?” he said. “Could we have overestimated the flight time by two years?”

Yamoto turned an adjusting screw on the delton detector, decreasing the sound level of its irregular tattoo. “Anything is possible on Orbitsville.”

It was late on the following day when the two stiff-winged, ungainly birds began to gain altitude to cross the final green ridges. All crew members, including a fever-eyed O’Hagan, were gathered to watch as the mountain crests began to sink in submission to their combined wills. Changing parallaxes made the high ground below them appear to shift like sand.

Yamoto switched off the detector’s incessant roar with a flourish. “The instrument is no longer of any use to us. Astronomically speaking, we have reached our destination.”

“How far would you say it is, Sammy?”

“A hundred kilometres. Perhaps less.”

Joe Braunek squirmed in his seat, but his hands and feet were steady on the flying controls. “Then we have to see Beachhead City as soon as we clear this range.”

Garamond felt the conviction which had been growing in him achieve a leaden solidity. “It won’t be there,” he announced. “I don’t remember seeing a mountain range this close to the city.”

“It’s a pretty low range,” Yamoto said uncertainly. “You wouldn’t have noticed it unless you had a specific…”

His voice faded as the ground tilted and sloped away beneath them to reveal one of Orbitsville’s mind-stilling prairies. In the hard clean light of the sun they could see to the edges of infinity, across oceans of grass and scrub, and there was no sign of Beachhead City.

“What do we do now?” Braunek spoke with a curious timidity as he looked back at the other three men. The resilience which all the months of flight had not been able to sap now seemed to have left him. “Do we just fly on?”

Garamond, unable to feel shock or disappointment, turned to Yamoto. “Switch the detector on again.”

“Right.” The astronomer reactivated the black box and the cabin immediately filled with its roar. “But we can’t change what it says — we’re right on target.”

“Is it directional?”

“Yes.” Yamoto glanced at O’Hagan, who nodded tiredly in confirmation.

“Swing to the left,” Garamond told Braunek. “Not too quickly.” The plane banked slowly to the north and, as it did so, the sound from the delton detector steadily decreased until it faded out altogether.

“Hold it there! We’re now flying at right angles to the precise source of the particle bombardment. Right, Sammy?”

Yamoto raised the binoculars and looked in the direction indicated by the aircraft’s starboard wing. “It’s no use, Vance. There’s nothing there.”

“There has to be something. We’ve got an hour of daylight left — take a new bearing and we’ll follow it till nightfall.”

While Yamoto used the lightphone to bring the second crew up to date on what was happening, Joe Braunek steered the aircraft on to its new heading and shed height until they were at cruise altitude. The two machines flew onwards for another hour, occasionally swinging off course to make an up-dated check on their direction. Towards the end of the hour O’Hagan’s strength gave out and he had to be helped back to his bunk.

“We messed it up,” he said to Garamond, easing himself down.

Garamond shook his head as he covered the older man’s thin body. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Our basic premise was wrong, and that’s unforgivable.”

“Forget it, Dennis. Besides, you were the one who warned me we had no right to pick up that first particle so soon. As usual, you were right.”

“Don’t try to butter me. I’m too…” O’Hagan closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep at once. Garamond made his way back to the cockpit and sat down to weigh up the various factors involved in the ending of the mission. He sensed that the resistance of the other men, which had surprised him earlier, would no longer be a consideration. They had allowed themselves to hope too soon, and Orbitsville had punished them for it. What remained now was the decision on where to make the final landing. His own preference was for the foothills of a mountain chain which would provide them with rivers, variety of vegetation and the psychologically important richness of scenery. It might be best to turn back to the range they had just crossed rather than fly onwards over what seemed to be the greatest plain they had encountered so far. There was the possibility that something could go wrong with one of the aircraft when they were part way across that eternity of grass; and there was the certainty that what they would find on the far side would be no different to what they had left behind. Unless they came to a sea, Garamond reminded himself. A sea would add even more…

“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.