Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 13

The universe consisted of a bowl of pure blue glass.

Three objects had been tossed into the bowl and were lying, quite near each other, at the bottom of the azure curvature. Most prominent was a circular object which was intensely bright, so much so that it was painful to look directly at it He classified it as a nearby sun. Next was a small, pate crescent, almost lost in the bombardment of tight, and that had to be a non-radiant body — a planet or a moon.

The third object differed from the others in that it was larger and did not have precise geometries. It was a misty and elongated patch of white, with traces of a feathery internal structure. After some thought he identified it as a cloud.

The word initiated a rapid sequence of associations — .atmosphere… moisture… rain… land… vegetation…

The astonishing thought brought Mathieu to his feet in a split second, gasping with shock. He made several little darting runs in different directions, like a wild creature which had been trapped, only coming to a standstill when he realised the terrors were all in his mind, that no final calamity was about to overtake him. Nothing more could happen. He shaded his eyes and took his first near-rational look at the sunlit hillside.

Crimson and gold tatters of his aircraft were strewn over a wide area, and far off to his right the power plant was sending up plumes of smoke as it tried to ignite the lush grass. The pointed nose, minus its canopy, was the largest fuselage section to have survived the impact. A short distance behind the cockpit it had the semblance of a mashed cigar, ragged pennants of alloy skin enclosing a profusion of spar stumps, broken pipes and cables. Much farther down the slope was a surprisingly neat scar in the earth, as though some giant plough had upturned a short straight furrow.

Mathieu gave a shaky laugh which faded quickly into the surrounding stillness. To his own ears it had sounded insane. He examined himself and found that his tan suit was torn in places and was liberally smeared with soil and grass. A pulsing stiffness in his limbs told him he was extensively bruised, that in a day or two he would scarcely be able to move, but otherwise he was miraculously unharmed. A sudden weakness, engendered by awe rather than anything physical, caused him to sink to his knees.

I’m supposed to be dead!

The realisation that he had tried to commit suicide astonished Mathieu almost as much as his survival of the crash. He could think of nothing more stupid and pointless than ending his life, especially as the future had so much to offer. The only explanation he could suggest for his still being alive was that he had regained his sanity in the last hurtling seconds and had hauled back on the control column just in time — but what had prompted him to try kilting himself in the first place?

A picture of Carry Dallen ghosted through Mathieu's consciousness — a swarthy Nemesis, hard-muscled, running in tireless pursuit, the handsome face cold and unforgiving, the eyes murderous…

Could that have been the reason? Fear of Carry Dallen, coupled with his own nagging remorse over what he had done to Dallen's wife and child?

Mathieu considered the matter carefully and felt his bafflement increase. Surely, no matter how much nervous stress he had been under, he would have needed better motives than those for committing suicide. He had nothing to fear from Dallen — for the straightforward reason that Dallen had no way to connect him with what had happened to his family. Mathieu had been very careful all along to cover his traces, to make sure that nobody in authority could find out about his private disposal of Metagov property. That had been the whole point in his blanking out of the Department of Supply monitor, and with its memory successfully obliterated he was doubly safe.

'' True, there had been the incident with Cona Dallen and her baby on the north stair, but Dallen had no way to link him with that, and it had not been premeditated. Sheer back luck had brought all three of them together at that crucial moment, and he had done only what he had to do to protect himself, no more and no less. It was regrettable that two other people had become involved in that way, but it was not as if he had committed murder. Two new personalities would emerge to replace those which had been lost — so, in a way, the books were balanced. Certainly, there was no reason for him to go through life burdened with remorse or guilt.

If anybody was to blame it was the crooked chemists and their dealers who charged such iniquitous prices for minute quantities of…

Mathieu stood up, plunged a hand into his inner pocket and withdrew his gold pen. It was undamaged. He clicked the barrel into the special position, priming it to dispense its magical ink, then paused and frowned down at the sun glittering cylinder. Upheavals were taking place within him; mental landscapes were undergoing cataclysmic change.

In a single movement he snapped the pen in half and hurled it away from him. He turned so that he was unable to note where the pieces fell and considered what he had just done, half-expecting an onslaught of panic. Instead he felt a sweet emptiness, a total lack of concern.

"Maybe I am dead," he said aloud, shaking his head in wonderment over the knowledge — so different from the vagrant hopes of the past — that he would never again have to use felicitin. So novel was the state of mind that it took him an appreciable time to interpret it, but he was no longer a user!

The feeling of certainty persisted even when he reviewed the medical facts. There was a distinct personality profile common to those who became dependent on the drug, and he had never heard of spontaneous remissions or unaided escapes. His entire future had been predicted around the fact that he was hooked on felicitin… (Was "hooked" a sufficiently graphic word? How about skewered? Or impaled?)… and now, suddenly, the drug was irrelevant.

A sputtering sound from the aircraft's power plant drew Mathieu's attention to the scattered wreckage, and his sense of wonder over his survival returned. The contours of the ground must have exactly matched the ship's line of flight, giving it seconds instead of microseconds in which to shed its kinetic energy, and thereby saving his life. Such events were not unknown in aviation lore — a similar thing had happened to St. Exupery in North Africa — but still he had a distinct sense of the miraculous. A religious man would have been down on his knees giving thanks to God. Mathieu, however, had more earthly concerns, among them the question of how long it would take him to get back to Madison City so that he could proceed with the important business of being alive.

He was alone in a sea of verdant green which shaded into blue as it reached the vaporous blur of the horizon. This area of what had once been Alabama had been deregistered more than a century earlier and now it looked as though it had never been touched, as though the first boats had yet to come straggling across the Pacific.

The nearest population centre was probably Madison City itself, hundreds of kilometres to the east, so there was no point in straying from the wreckage of his aircraft. With the gradual emptying of the country's airspace, all the paraphernalia of traffic control had been abandoned in favour of a system using computers in each aircraft. The transport department computer in Madison would have known about the crash as soon as it had happened, and in theory an emergency team should already be on its way to him.

Deciding that he should get some gentle exercise while waiting to be picked up, Mathieu began walking along the hillside. He had taken only a few paces when his attention was caught by a pulsing speck of ruby light which appeared low above the eastern horizon. It was the beacon of an aircraft which seemed to be heading in his direction.

He watched the approaching flier for a minute or more before realising it was a rescue ship.

The discovery was yet another shock in what seemed to be an endless series. He had assumed, in view of his sense of relative well-being, that he had been only lightly stunned in the crash — but the arrival of the recovery craft implied that he had been unconscious for a considerable time, perhaps as much as thirty minutes. In that case, according to his admittedly sketchy medical knowledge, he should have been suffering an intense headache and nausea. He prodded in a gingerly fashion around his skull, almost expecting to find a severe but previously unnoticed wound, and confirmed that he was basically uninjured.

The thunderous arrival of the high-speed ship cut short his speculations. It swooped down out of the sky, chunky fuselage bristling with cranes and other recovery gear, came to a halt at a height of some fifty metres and made a vertical descent on screaming reaction tubes. Grass blasted outwards from the touchdown point before the engines thed, then a hatch in the ship's belly slid open. Four men, one of them carrying a stretcher, dropped out of it and came running towards Mathieu.

He gave an oddly self-conscious wave and walked to meet them, repressing the urge to chuckle as he got his first glimpse of their pop-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of pure astonishment.

The brandy was the first he had tasted in months, and Mathieu found it unusually satisfying. He took sip after sip of the neat liquor, relishing its warmth and flavour while he watched the countryside drift by beneath the rescue ship.

Even after they had checked him out with handheld body scanners, confirming that he had no internal injuries, the medics had wanted to put him in a bunk for the return trip to Madison. Eventually, however, he had got his way and had been allowed to occupy a passenger seat in lordly isolation at the rear of the cabin. The medics and salvage experts were clustered at the front, and the frequency with which they glanced in his direction was a sign they had not from the shock of finding him in the land of the living.

Aided by the relaxing effect of the brandy, he amused himself by picturing how they would have taken the news of the second miracle, the private one. Almost a full hour had passed since he regained consciousness on the hillside, but there had been no wavering in his new attitude towards felicitin. He knew he was free of the addiction which had so grotesquely distorted his We, and now anything seemed possible…

The door to the flight deck slid open and a crewman came aft carrying a radiophone. He handed it to Mathieu, told him that Mayor Bryceland was calling and returned to his station. Bryceland was already speaking when Mathieu raised the instrument to his ear.

"…only thing that matters is that you are all right, Gerald. That goes without saying. It's a big relief to all of us that you haven't been injured. My God, I mean… When I heard the ship" had been wrecked!"

"You heard right, Frank," Mathieu said peacefully, having divined the real purpose of the call. "The ship doesn't exist any more."

"But if you're only bruised…"

"I was very lucky, Frank — I'm all right, but the ship is metal confetti." Mathieu paused, visualising the consternation on the mayor's puffy features, and decided to turn the screw a little more. "I'm glad things didn't work out the other way round."

"So am I — that goes without saying. I don’t want to rush things, Gerald, but the insurance department boys have been at me already… Was there a control failure?"

"No. I fell asleep."

"Then the autopilot must have failed."

"I'd switched it off."

"Oh!" There was another pause and when Bryceland spoke again a noticeable coldness had appeared in his voice. "That wasn't too bright, was it?"

"It was pretty damn stupid. Suicidal, in fact."

Bryceland gave an audible sigh. "Gerald, you sound as if you're enjoying this."

"I am." Mathieu took a sip of brandy. "I'm going into orbit on free booze and laughing my head off over the entire episode."

"I'm going to assume it's shock that's making you talk this way."

"Not shock — it's the thought of you having to hoof it like an ordinary mortal for a while. That's making me hysterical, Frank."

"I see," Bryceland said grimly. "Well, possibly by the time you get back into the office I'll have some news about your employment status that'll calm you down a bit."

"What makes you think I'll ever go back?" Mathieu broke the connection and set the phone down, aware that he had virtually thrown away his job. He took stock of his feelings and found no regrets. Until a short time ago the prospect of being fired would have terrified him, but now he was quite unmoved. It was, he realised, another consequence of his conversion. He no longer needed the job and all its opportunities for graft because he no longer needed felicitin. But what if, as had happened before, his lack of interest in the drug proved to be only temporary? What if it was all part of some complex response to the brush with death? One which would fade in a few hours?

The questions were pertinent, and there was an instant during which his system tried to react with panic, but the moment passed. It was as if the striker on an alarm bell had stirred briefly and then had returned to quiescence. His inner certainty prevailed, and now something new was being added.

There's nothing to keep me here on Earth, Mathieu thought. And I'm no longer afraid of going to Orbitsville.

The idea of returning to the place of his birth was strange, perhaps the most disturbing so far in the day’s train of inner changes, and yet it was powerfully seductive. There was a felicitin-type tightness about it. His life on Earth had been a re-enactment in miniature of the planet's own history. It had been a story of waste, failure and futility, one which deserved to be brought to a quick ending.

And it might be that the journey to Optima Thule would be for him what it had been to the human race in general — a rebirth, a radical change of direction, a turning away from darkness and towards light. The decision was instantaneous.

Mathieu set his glass aside, no longer interested in its contents. He was going to Orbitsville and wanted his departure to take place without delay, but there were some practical problems. The sensible course would be to patch up his relationship with Mayor Bryceland, resign gracefully with the customary three months' notice, and eventually leave for Orbitsville with a fat severance payment logged into his bank account. But to one in his frame of mind that approach seemed intolerably slow. His new impetuosity told him he had done with Earth and therefore should leave at once, which meant cutting a few corners.

He leaned back in his chair, staring unseeingly at the drifting landscape below, and analysed the problems facing him. Ships were travelling from Earth to Ultima Thule every day, and with the tourist trade in decline there was no shortage of passenger places, but Mathieu's difficulties lay elsewhere. He had only a small reserve of cash, and walking out on his job was going to deprive him of some benefits and cause long delays with others — all of which meant he would be hard pressed to cover the cost of an unsubsidised ticket. There was an additional complication in the form of Mayor Bryceland, who would not want him to leave before a replacement arrived, and therefore would do everything in his power to block the clearances necessary for travel on a Metagov-owned ship.

What Mathieu needed was somebody who controlled the physical means of getting to Orbitsville and who also owed him a favour. Years of constantly being on the make had led him to build up a range of useful contacts, many of them of a somewhat irregular nature, but privately owned or chartered starships were something of a rarity. There was somebody, though — it was simply the matter of locating the right file in his memory — and that somebody was…

Mathieu gave a self-satisfied grunt when a name formed itself in his thoughts almost at once. Rick Renard, the playboy botanist, was reputed to have connections with the legendary Lindstrom family, and for that reason Mathieu had been exceptionally helpful to him. The indulgences had ranged from overlooking a sheaf of import restrictions on a fancy Rollac car to allowing publicly owned warehouses to be used for the temporary storage of botanical samples. And, providentially it seemed, Renard was soon to depart for Orbitsville. I found the way, Mathieu thought, reaching for the radiophone, unable to delay taking immediate and positive action. I’m going home at last.