Orbitsville

nine

The new house allocated for Garamond’s use was a rectangular, single-storey affair. It was one of several dozen built from plastic panels which had been prefabricated in a Starflight workshop on board one of Elizabeth’s ships.

The compact structure was situated less than two kilometres from the aperture to the outside universe, where the coating of soil was still thin, and so was held in place by suction pads which gripped the underlying metal of the shell. After a matter of days living in it Garamond found that he could forget about the hard vacuum of space beginning only a few centimetres below his living-room floor. The furnishings were sparse but comfortable, and a full range of colour projectors and entertainment machines — plus an electronic tutor for Christopher — gave it something of the atmosphere of a luxury week-end lodge.

There was an efficient kitchen supplied with provisions from shipboard stores in the early stages, but the expectation was that the colonists would become self-supporting as regards food within a year. It was late summer in that part of Orbitsville and the edible grasses were approaching a tawny ripeness. Even before a systemized agriculture could be established to produce grain harvests, the grass would be fully utilized — part of it synthetically digested to create protein foods, the rest yielding cellulose for the production of a range of acetate plastics.

Garamond was technically still in command of the Bissendorf, but he spent much of his time in the house, telling himself he was helping his family to put down roots. In reality he was trying to cope with the sense of having been cut adrift. He acquired the habit of standing at a window which faced the aperture and watching the ever-increasing tempo of activity at the Starflight outpost. Machinery, vehicles, supplies of all kinds came through the L-shaped entry tubes in a continuous stream; new buildings were erected every day amid moraines of displaced soil; a skein of dirt roads wound around and through the complex, with its loose ends straggling off into the grasslands. Earth’s beachhead was becoming well established, and as it did so Garamond felt more and more redundant. “The weirdest thing about it is that I feel possessive,” he said to his wife. “I keep lecturing people about the inconceivable size of Orbitsville, telling them it couldn’t be controlled by a thousand Starflight corporations — yet I have a gut-feeling it’s my personal property. I guess that in a way I’m as much out of touch with reality as Liz Lindstrom.”

Aileen shook her head. “You’re angry at the way she’s proposing to handle things.”

“Angry at myself.”

“Why?”

“What made me think Starflight House would quietly bow out of existence to make way for a publicly-funded transportation system? From what I hear, Liz’s public relations teams are plugging the notion that Starflight already is a semi-governmental concern. That was a hard one to put over when there was just Terranova and the amount of land a settler got was determined by how much he paid for his passage, but now it’s different.”

“In what way?” Aileen looked up from the boy’s shirt she was hand-stitching. Her deeply tanned face was sympathetic but unconcerned — since arriving on Orbitsville she had developed a peaceful optimism. It seemed that the principal element of his wife’s personality, her unremarkable pleasantness, was standing her in good stead in the alien environment.

“There’s to be a standard transportation charge and no limitation to the amount of land a settler can occupy. That will make the operation seem pretty altruistic to most people. The trouble is it’s easy to see how they would get that impression.”

Since turning down membership of Elizabeth’s development council Garamond had found it difficult to keep himself informed of her activities, but he could visualize the approach she was using to sell Orbitsville on overcrowded Earth. The newly-established fact that the volume of space within the sphere was totally free of hydrogen or other matter, ruling out the use of flickerwing ships, could even be turned to Starflight’s advantage. It was likely that a very long time would elapse before the unwieldy and inefficient type of ship which carried its own reaction mass could be redeveloped sufficiently to make any impression on the five billion Earth-areas available within the sphere. Orbitsville, then, was truly the ultimate frontier, a place where a man and his family could load up a solar-powered vehicle with supplies, plus an ‘iron cow’ to convert grass into food, and drive off into a green infinity. The life offered would be simple, and perhaps hard — in many ways similar to that of a pioneer in the American West — but in the coast-to-coast urbs of Earth there was a great yearning for just that kind of escape. The risk of dying of overwork or simple appendicitis on a lonely farm hundreds of light-years from Earth was infinitely preferable to the prospect of going down in a food riot in Paris or Melbourne. No matter how much Starflight charged for passage to Orbitsville, there would always be more than enough people to fill the big ships.

“Does the President have to be altruistic?” Aileen said, and Garamond knew that she was drawing comparisons between Liz Lindstrom and herself, between a woman who had unexpectedly lost a son and one whose husband and child had been reprieved. “What’s wrong with making a reasonable percentage on services rendered?”

“In this case — everything.” Garamond suppressed a pang of annoyance. “Don’t you see that? Look, Earth has been raped and polluted and choked to death, but right here on Orbitsville there’s room for every human being there is to lose himself for ever. We’ve made all the mistakes and learned all the lessons back on Earth, and now we’ve been given this chance to start off from scratch again. The whole situation demands an almost complete transfer of population — and it could be done, Aileen. At our level of technology it could be done, but the entire Starflight operation is based on it not being done!

“In order for Elizabeth to go on making her quote reasonable percentage unquote there has to be a potential, a high population pressure on Earth and a low one elsewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the Lindstroms are behind the failure of all the main population control programmes.”

“That’s ridiculous, Vance.” Aileen began to laugh.

“Is it?” Garamond turned away from the window, mollified by his wife’s evident happiness. “Maybe so, but you don’t hear them complaining much about the birth rate.”

“Talking about birth rates — our own has been pretty static for a long time.” Aileen caught his hand and held it against her cheek. “Wouldn’t you like to be the father of the first child born on Orbitsville?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s impossible anyway. The first shiploads of settlers are on their way, and — from what I’ve heard about the Terranova run — a lot of the women always arrive pregnant. It’s something to do with the lack of recreational facilities on the journey.”

“How about the first one conceived on Orbitsville then?”

“That’s more like it.” Garamond knelt beside his wife’s chair, took her in his arms and they kissed.

Aileen drew back from him after a few seconds. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“I’m sorry. I keep thinking about the people, beings or gods — whatever you want to call them — who built Orbitsville.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I don’t understand them.”

“Who does?”

“You know, there’s enough living space in Orbitsville to support every intelligent being in the galaxy. For all we know, that’s why it was created, and yet…”

Garamond allowed his voice to die away. He suspected Aileen would accuse him of paranoia if he speculated aloud about why the sphere-builders had created a hostel for an entire galaxy’s homeless — and then played into Elizabeth Lindstrom’s hands by providing only one entrance.

Chick Truman was one of a breed of human beings who had come into existence with the development of interstellar travel. He was a frontiersman-technician. His father and grandfather had helped with the opening up of Terranova and with the initial surveying of a dozen other planets which, although unsuitable for colonization, had some commercial or scientific potential. He had received little in the way of formal technical training but, like all other members of the fraternity of gypsy-engineers, seemed to have an inborn knowledge of the entire range of mechanical skills. It was as though the accumulated experience of generations had begun to produce men for whom the analysis of an electrical circuit or the tuning of an engine was a matter of instinct. One attribute which distinguished Truman from most of his fellows was a strong, if undisciplined, interest in philosophy. And it was this which had fired his mind as he set up camp on the lower slopes of the hills which ringed Orbitsville’s single aperture at a distance of about sixty kilometres. He was half of a two-man team which had been sent out to erect a bank of laser reflectors as part of an experimental communications system. They had reached their target minutes before the wall of darkness had come rushing from the east, and now Truman’s partner, Peter Krogt, was busy preparing food and laying out their sleeping bags. Truman himself was concerned with less prosaic matters. He had lit a pipe of tobacco, was comfortably seated with his back to the transporter and was staring into the incredible ribbed archways of the sky at night.

“The Assumption of Mediocrity is a useful philosophical weapon,” he was saying, “but it can backfire on the guy who uses it. I know that some of the greatest advances in human thought were achieved by assuming there’s nothing odd or freakish about our own little patch — that’s what set Albert Einstein off.”

“Help me open these containers,” Krogt said.

Without moving, Truman released a cloud of aromatic smoke. “But consider the case of, say, two beetles living at the bottom of a hole on a golf course. These bugs have never been out of that hole, but if they have a philosophical turn of mind they can describe the rest of the universe just by using available evidence. What would their universe be like, Pete?”

“Who cares?”

“Nice attitude, Pete. Their projected universe would be an infinite series of round holes with big white balls dropping into them during daylight hours.”

Krogt had opened the food containers unaided and he handed one to Truman. “What are you talking about, Chick?”

“I’m telling you what’s wrong with the management back at base. Listen… We’ve been on Orbitsville for months, right?”

“Right.”

“Now take this little jaunt you and I are on right now. These hills are three hundred metres high. Our orders are to set up the reflectors at an elevation of two hundred and fifty metres. We’ve been told where to set them, where to aim them, what deviation will be acceptable, how long to take with the assignment — but there’s one thing we haven’t been told to do. And I find it a pretty astonishing omission, Pete.”

“Your yeasteak’s getting cold.”

“Why did nobody tell us to climb the extra fifty metres to the top of the hill and have a look at the other side?”

“Because there’s no need,” Krogt said heavily. “There’s nothing there but grass and scrub. The whole inside of this ball is nothing but prairie.”

“There you go! The Assumption of Mediocrity.”

“It isn’t an assumption.” Krogt gestured with his fork towards the shimmering watered-silk canopy of the sky. “They’ve had a look around with telescopes.” “Telescopes!” Truman sneered to cover up the fact that he had forgotten about telescopic examination of the far side of Orbitsville, then his talent for rapid mental calculation came to his aid. “We’re talking about a distance of more than two astronomical units, sonny. If you were standing on Earth, what would one of those spyglasses tell you about life on Mars?”

“More’n I want to know. Are you going to eat this yeasteak or will I?”

“You eat it.”

Truman got to his feet, slightly dismayed at the way in which a discussion on philosophy had led him to renounce his meal, and marched away up the slope. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the rounded summit and paused to re-light his pipe. The yellow flame from the lighter dazzled his eyes and almost a minute had passed before Truman appreciated that, spread out on the plain below him, dim and peaceful, were the lights of an alien civilization.