Orbitsville Judgement

Chapter 18

“Looks like we got out of there just in time.”

The speaker was Nibs Affleck, who normally maintained a deferent silence in the presence of senior personnel, and the sheer banality of his remark served to free the others from their mental and physical paralysis.

“God, God, God,” Montane whispered, sinking to his knees, hands steepled beneath his chin. “Do not abandon your children in their hour of need.”

“We should try the radio,” Hepworth said to Fleischer, his voice surprisingly firm and clear.

She twisted in her seat to look up at him. “Why?”

“I want to know about the other portals. Perhaps what happened at Pi is an isolated phenomenon. We should try to get in touch.”

The pilot managed to smile. “Something tells me that would be a waste of time. Especially mine.”

“I could do it for you,” Hepworth said. He glanced down at the adjacent seat and Nicklin realised that—even in this hour of astonishment, when reality itself seemed to be in a state of flux—he was observing shipboard protocol.

“Be my guest,” Fleischer said, turning back to her own area of the console.

As Hepworth sank into the high-backed seat, his movement slowed by the minimal gravity, Nicklin returned his attention to the master screen. It was now uniformly black, the Tara’s drive cylinders having become invisible when the rays from the Orbitsville sun were shut off. Several auxiliary screens, fed by cameras aimed ahead of the ship and to the side, were showing patterns of stars—but looking aft there appeared to be a universe without light. Nicklin knew the emptiness was illusory, that Orbitsville’s vast non-reflective shell occupied half of the normal sphere of vision, but the sense of being a castaway in a totally sterile cosmos persisted.

Mentally, he was similarly adrift. How was he to come to terms with the simple fact that Corey Montane had been right all along? Orbitsville was not eternal and changeless. He had always intuited that it was a product of nature, an object which had somehow evolved to the n^th state of matter at which it could never be understood by the human mind. Now he was face-to-face with the concept of Orbitsville as an artefact, and that led to the great questions about who had built it and their purpose in doing so.

His rejection of a religious scenario was instinctive, intellectual and complete—but what was left?

As his mind rebounded from what it could not encompass he found himself turning to the more immediate question of what would happen next. Was it possible that, as Montane believed, the forces involved in Orbitsville’s transformation were hostile to life? Not solely to humanity—that notion was paranoic to far beyond the point of absurdity—but to every form of animate matter. Could the central sun be extinguished, thus purging the globe of biological contamination? Could the Big O contract like a collapsing star and eventually disappear? Or could it explosively fly apart?

The apocalyptic vision of Orbitsville’s shell yielding to mechanical stresses led Nicklin, by association, to remember the green lines which had appeared in many places three years earlier. The force field connected with them was known to weaken the cohesion of steel and concrete—was it therefore having the same effect; on the shell material? There had been reports that the glowing lines were also visible on the outside of Orbitsville, which suggested that their influence was indeed able to penetrate ylem.

Reluctant to regard the idea as anything but purest fantasy, Nicklin nevertheless scanned the dark screen more closely in search of radiant green threads. None was visible, but he realised at once that, as the lines had been hundreds of kilometres apart, the camera facing directly astern covered too little of Orbitsville’s surface. He tried the lateral images, but in them the angle of sight was too acute to be of any value.

“Nothing on the radio,” Hepworth announced, getting out of his chair. “I had to check, but my guess is that Orbitsville has sealed itself up all over. Tighter than the proverbial duck’s ass.”

“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that,” Fleischer said, “but I’m in agreement.”

“That means we drop any proposal to go back.” Hepworth turned to Nicklin. “What do you say, Jim?”

“It seems to me we have no option but to go on with the flight, but—” Nicklin glanced down at Montane, who was still on his knees and praying silently with his eyes closed.

“But what?”

“We’re talking like a management committee, but things were never set up that way. Corey is the man in charge.”

“Jim! What’s the matter with you?” Hepworth’s plump face showed exasperation. “Just look at him! The man obviously isn’t capable of commanding a rowboat, let alone a—” He broke off and made a placating gesture as Nibs Affleck took a threatening step towards him.

“All I can say, Monsignor Nicklin,” Hepworth added in a low voice, moving closer to Nicklin, “Is that I never noticed you deferring much to Pope Corey in the past.”

“I know, I know.” The emotional conflict Nicklin was experiencing made speech difficult. “But he laid it on the line a minute ago. I shouldn’t even… I mean, if it hadn’t been for Corey I would still be…”

“It’s all right, Jim.” Montane had risen to his feet, his face set and unnaturally white. “There’s no need for an argument here. A lot of people have been left behind, but that’s my fault. I was warned some time ago that direct action was called for, and… well… I did nothing about it. One day I will have to answer to God for that, and I only hope I can face Him when my time comes.”

“In the mean time,” Hepworth said impatiently, “we press on to Prospect One. Is that what you’re saying?”

Montane shrugged, something Nicklin had never seen him do before. “That’s what I’m saying.”

Hepworth, looking triumphant, nodded to the pilot. “There you are, captain—do you want to spread your wings?”

For a moment Nicklin thought that Hepworth was trying to sound poetic, then realised he had referred to the electromagnetic scoop fields which had to be deployed on each side of the Tara to gather reaction mass. On diagrams their curved shape looked like huge wings, causing interstellar ramjets to be popularly known as butterfly ships.

“We don’t need to worry about traffic controllers, and we don’t need to worry about traffic,” Fleischer said, turning back to the console.

Nicklin watched in fascination as she moved her hands over the sloping surface, causing lanes, highways, townships of coloured lights to spring into existence. This was the first step in taking the ship out of Einstein’s domain and into that realm of strangeness where Arthurian physics held sway. Nicklin knew, and only dimly understood, that in order for the ship to travel at multiples of the speed of light it would temporarily cease to exist as far as observers in the normal continuum were concerned.

The massive vessel and everything in it, including his own body, would be transformed into a cloud of particles with more affinity to tachyons than to normal matter. The mode of travel—which had once been described as “crooked accountancy applied to mass-energy transformations”—was magical in its effect. But before it could be brought into play the ship would have to reach a very high normal-space velocity, and there was nothing at all magical about how that velocity was achieved.

It was a product of greasy-overall engineering, spanner-and-screwdriver technology, involving a host of control systems—mechanical, electrical, hydraulic—among which a twentieth-century artificer would have felt reasonably at home. To begin the voyage proper, Megan Fleischer was activating the thermonuclear reactor and feeding power to the flux pumps, thereby unfurling the Tara’s intangible wings. At the ship’s present negligible rate of movement the scoops could do little more than complement the ion drive, but they would become increasingly effective as the speed built up.

“Here we go,” Fleischer said after a few seconds, touching the master control pads.

Nicklin felt a slight but immediate increase in weight and was gripped by a numbing sense of wonder as he realised that the great metallic entity, upon which he had lavished three years of devotion, had ceased being an inert object and was stirring fully into life.

Fleischer switched camera channels and the star fields ahead of the ship blossomed in the main view screen. Perhaps a hundred major stars shone with a diamond-pure lustre against a dusting of fainter specks, creating a three-dimensional matrix which seemed to draw Nicklin’s consciousness into it. I must have been blind, he thought as his gaze roved through the alien constellations. How did I fail to understand that we were all born for this?

“Not very good,” Fleischer said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Not very good, at all.”

Hepworth was beside her on the instant, scanning the console. “What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t what I would call a clean start-up. The intake fields seemed a bit slow in establishing themselves.”

“It happens in a hundredth of a second.” Hepworth sounded relieved and irritated at the same time. “You can’t judge it by sight.”

“I’ve been a pilot for more than twenty years, and I can judge it by sight,” Fleischer snapped. “Besides, that wasn’t the only thing I didn’t like—the left field wasn’t a good shape when it opened up.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“It looked a bit…flat.”

Hepworth examined the glowing butterfly that was the intake field distribution diagram. “It looks fine to me.”

“It looks all right now,” Fleischer said stubbornly, “but I’m telling you it started off flat.”

“It might have met a bit of resistance—God knows what sort of stuff is spewing out of Orbitsville.” Hepworth patted the pilot’s luxuriantly covered head. “I think you can safely leave the vacuum physics to me.”

She twisted away from him. “Keep your hands to yourself, Mister Hepworth, or I’ll bar you from this deck.”

“Touchy, touch-eee!” Hepworth said jovially. He turned to look at Nicklin, enlisting support, his eyes rounded in a what-do-you-think-of-that? expression.

Nicklin gazed back at him unsympathetically, unable to think of anything but Zindee White’s scathing comments on Hepworth’s qualifications as a physicist. The little that Nicklin had seen of Megan Fleischer had persuaded him that she was a top-class professional pilot, a woman who knew exactly what she was talking about. It was quite possible that a fleeting irregularity in a scoop field was an insignificant event, just as Hepworth had said, but did he know as much about starship drives as he claimed? Montane, desperate for low-cost help, had taken him pretty much on trust…

“Something on your mind, Jim?” Hepworth’s joviality had evaporated, and there was now something watchful and unpleasant in his expression.

Nicklin recalled the way in which Hepworth would become caustic and angry, and even threaten violence, when challenged on any technical or scientific point. It had happened on many occasions in the past three years, but this would be a particularly inconvenient time for a fresh performance.

“I’ve got plenty on my mind,” he said, glancing at the view screens. “All this is a bit daunting.”

Hepworth shook his head impatiently, refusing to be put off. “You’re looking at me like I was something you’d just found in your soup—perhaps you think I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“You must be nearly as jumpy as I am, Scott,” Nicklin soothed. “You know I think you’re the greatest living expert on everything.”

“Don’t patronise me, you country—” Hepworth broke off, staring in surprise at the companionway.

A bearded young man in the blue uniform of a spaceport guard had appeared on the ladder. He stared for a moment at the group by the console, raised one hand in a kind of apologetic greeting, then slowly sank from view again.

“This place is getting like a train station,” Fleischer said irritably. “I can’t have people wandering in here any time they feel like it.”

“Quite right!” Montane, perhaps comforted by being given a minor administrative problem, appeared quite composed as he turned to Affleck. “I want you and Gerl to spell each other on the deck below this one. Nobody is to pass you—except those that are here now—unless I give you the word.”

“Right, Corey.” Affleck, looking gratified, immediately hurried to the ladder.

Montane directed a thin smile at Nicklin. “Jim, as you’ve decided to grace us with your company on this flight, I expect you to earn your rations. You can start right now by going through all the decks and finding out just how many outsiders have jumped on board. Make a list of their names and bring it to me and I’ll decide what rooms we can put them in.”

“Okay, Corey,” Nicklin said, slightly surprised at how glad he was to see the improvement in the other man’s state of mind.

“And tell them I’ll want to speak to them in my room, individually, as soon as I have the time.”

“Yessir, yessir!” Putting the uneasy confrontation with Hepworth to the back of his mind, Nicklin glanced once more at the main screen—wondering if Prospect One was even visible at that early stage of the flight—then made his way to the lower regions of the ship.

The hot shower felt even more luxurious than he had been anticipating.

He had slept for almost seven hours, disturbed only by occasional dreams of falling, and had risen from his bed feeling both hungry and filthy. The thought of breakfast was alluring, but he had decided it would be more enjoyable were he in a reasonably hygienic condition when he sat down to eat. He had descended through many levels to 24 Deck, where the laundry and shower rooms had been situated because of the ease of supplying hot water from the adjoining engine cylinders. He had washed his underpants and socks and had put them in one of the driers before going into a shower cubicle.

Now there was a blessed period in which he had nothing to do but let the needle sprays cleanse his body. Clothes were going to be quite a problem he realised as he relaxed in the tingling warmth, especially if the voyage were to last for months. Many of those on board the Tara had nothing other than what they had been wearing when the panic had gripped Beachhead City. The families who had managed to bring suitcases had thus become instant aristocrats, distinguished from their fellows by a wealth of fresh underwear.

Nicklin smiled as he tried to visualise how Montane would handle the situation. In an ideal Christian society the rich should share their goodies with the poor without even waiting to be asked, but the cynic in Nicklin suspected that things might not work out that way.

Luckily, Montane had been spared similar problems with the ultimate commodity, the one which really would have separated the haves from the have-nots. Imperishable food stores had been going on board for weeks, and any shortfall due to the hasty departure was more than compensated for by the Tara carrying only half the projected number of passengers.

Paid-up emigrants accounted for sixty-nine of the complement, and another twenty-six mission personnel had been able to join the ship in the dreadful last hour—the remainder being on home leave or simply out on casual errands. Nicklin’s census had revealed, in addition to the Whites, the presence of three spaceport guards, plus a group of seven men and women who had happened to be working in the dock area at the crucial time.

The total came to 108, which meant that the Tara could, if necessary, extend the New Eden quest for as long as two years. Nicklin refused to think what would happen at the end of that time if no suitable world had been found. In the past he had felt some concern about the ultimate fate of the pilgrims, especially the children, but had avoided becoming too pessimistic. No matter how distant the ship might be when the decision to abandon the mission was taken it would always be possible to return to the starting place. The strange mathematics of supraluctic flight meant that all destinations in the universe were roughly equidistant and equally accessible—but there would be no point in the travellers returning home when all doors were barred against them.

A new and disturbing thought occurred to Nicklin as he absorbed the abundant warmth of the shower. It would be a grim irony, one of the Gaseous Vertebrate’s finest pranks, if the disturbances in Orbitsville had been transient phenomena—incidental effects which had manifested themselves while the portals were preparing to close. If that were the case, daily life in places like Orangefield would already be returning to drowsy normality. The Orangefield Recorder would be preparing waggish editorials about the curious goings-on in the Big Smoke, couples would be strolling in Coach-and-Four Lane and there would be business as usual in the Victoria Hotel and Mr Chickley’s orange-lit ice-cream parlour. And in a few years’ time the very existence of portals would be a fading memory—and nobody would know about the ghost ship drifting in the void which began a short distance beneath their feet, beyond Orbitsville’s impenetrable shell.

The unwelcome vision had the effect of suddenly making Nicklin feel trapped and claustrophobic. He stepped out of the cubicle and began towelling himself dry. The only other person in the washroom was Lan Huertas, who—as usual—refrained from speaking to him. Nicklin dressed in silence, ran a depilator over his chin and left the room.

A short distance up the ladder he began to wonder if the going was easier than it should have been. When he had gone to bed, at the beginning of the arbitrary “night” period, the ship’s acceleration had been about .5G. Now it was, perhaps, slightly less, although it was difficult for a novice in such matters to say for sure whether his weight was a half or a third or a quarter of normal. Was this an indication that a genuine fault existed in the intake field generators? Or was it simply that the ship had entered a region in which the harvest of interstellar particles was poor?

The aroma of coffee drifting down from the canteen—or refectory, as Montane styled it—distracted him from the questions. He felt a pang of guilt-tinged pleasure as he recalled that the atrocious cook, Carlos Kempson, had been one of those left behind in Beachhead. One of the new pilgrims, a professional chef, had volunteered to run the canteen, thus making the prospect of a long voyage somewhat brighter.

The levels that Nicklin passed were quiet for the most part, the passengers having been requested to remain in their quarters until 09.00 hours, ship time. A few children were at play in the landing areas common to each deck’s four suites, but they were unnaturally subdued. Resilient as the very young always were, they had not had time to adjust to the austere environment of plasboard partitions and arctic lighting.

On 10 Deck, three levels below the canteen, he heard a familiar voice and looked around to see Zindee White standing at the open door of a suite. She was talking to a teenage girl, presumably from adjacent quarters. Nicklin raised his hand in greeting, but before he could say anything Zindee had retreated out of his sight. The teenager gave him a quizzical look as he ascended through the deck above.

On reaching the canteen he saw half a dozen mission personnel—Danea Farthing and Gerl Kingsley among them—seated at one of the narrow tables. Kingsley produced one of his grotesque smiles on seeing Nicklin, but the others studiously ignored his arrival. The reception was of a kind to which he had become accustomed, and from which he usually derived perverse satisfaction. Normally he would have elbowed his way into the group and proceeded to dominate the conversation, but on this occasion the force of silent rejection was overwhelming.

He obtained a bulb of coffee from the dispenser and sat down alone. Something is happening, he thought as he sipped the hot liquid, and it started yesterday morning when Zindee ran away from me.

Like a drunk trying to reconstruct the events of the previous night’s binge, he played the meeting with Zindee on the screen of memory, step by step and in considered slow motion. There was a stranger there… a stranger who looked and spoke like Jim Nicklin… a stranger who was Jim Nicklin as far as the rest of the world was concerned…

Isolated, mesmerised, appalled, Nicklin watched the intruder—the usurper of his body—go about his business, which was the pretence of being alive while in reality the essential spark of humanity had been quenched. Observing the encounter was a difficult and painful thing to do, because he had to accept that he and the stranger were as one, and that there could be no apportionment of responsibility or shame.

I was a dead man! I was a walking corpse… and Zindee came out of times that were lost… reminding me of the good that was lost… and how did I repay her?

Nicklin felt the hot pulsing of blood in his face as he watched the simulacrum act on his behalf and heard it speak the lines he had devised for it. The coffee bulb grew cold in his hand. An indeterminate time later he became aware that Danea—her eyes dark and thoughtful—was watching him from the other table. He averted his gaze, smiled the selfi-deprecating smile of one who wants people to believe he has just remembered an appointment, and left the canteen.

On the cramped landing he hesitated for a moment, with no particular objective in mind, then went up towards the control room. When he reached 3 Deck, easily distinguishable because of the pinnace tunnel, the red telltales on the locks told him that the doors to Montane’s and Voorsanger’s suites were bolted shut. Both men were probably still asleep—one in the company of his dead wife; the other deprived of the company of his living wife. Neat touch, O Gaseous Vertebrate!

On 2 Deck, which housed the pilot’s private quarters, he found Nibs Affleck dutifully guarding the topmost section of the ladder. Affleck gave him a barely perceptible nod as he climbed past. Emerging in the control room he saw that two of the five seats were occupied by Hepworth and Fleischer. The main screen was again being fed by an aft-facing camera, but the view was no longer one of unrelieved darkness.

The ship had been under continuous acceleration for more than fifteen hours, allowing the camera to take in a large area of Orbitsville’s shell—and the captured image had been transformed. Luminous green lines filled the entire screen in a pattern of complex curvatures which resembled interlocking flowers. The effect was that of a vast array of brilliantly glowing neon tubes laid out to the design of an artist working on a macroscopic scale. In the auxiliary screens the shining filigree spread away in every direction until, condensed by perspective, the lines merged to form horizons of cold green radiance.

“Quite a sight, eh Jim?” Hepworth turned in his seat to look up at Nicklin. He looked exhausted, as though he had not been to bed, but his face showed none of the animosity which had been there the night before.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Nicklin said, grateful that the benign streak in the other man’s nature had never allowed him to nurse a grudge. It was of some comfort to know that not quite everybody had been alienated by his maiaise of the past three years.

“Yes, the old lady’s putting on quite a show for us.” Hepworth took a silver flask from his side pocket and offered it to Nicklin. “Drink?”

Nicklin glanced at Megan Fleischer and saw that she was in a deep sleep, although still sitting upright. “No, thanks.”

“This is an unrepeatable offer, Jim—I haven’t even got a bottle tucked away in my room. When this is finished we’re on a strict diet of cocoa and carrot juice and similarly disgusting brews.” A look of intense revulsion appeared on Hepworth’s well-padded face. “Christ! I might even have to drink some of Corey’s God-awful fucking tea!”

Nicklin chuckled and reached for the proffered flask. A drink of neat, warm gin was the last thing he wanted at that moment, but it represented friendship and that was something for which he had developed a craving. In the boozers’ ethic the sharing of the last available drink was a symbol as potent as a wedding ring.

Here’s to solidarity, he thought as he swallowed the flat and tepid spirit. For years there were just the two of us. Two disbelievers, two disciples of the Gaseous Vertebrate—the Lord of Chance—surrounded by an army of bible-thumpers. But we got the ship ready. Between us we got the ship ready…

“Have a seat,” Hepworth said. “Her ladyship is in no condition to object.”

“Okay.” Nicklin handed the flask back as he sat down, his gaze returning to the fantastic glaring traceries of the main screen. “What do you think happened back there?”

Hepworth took a swig of gin. “Who knows? And, if you ask me, it isn’t finished yet. I have this feeling in my water, Jim. It’s totally unscientific, I know, but I have this feeling in my water that the show has only just started.”

“I know what you mean.” Nicklin was unable to take his eyes away from the screen. “Those lines must be really bright for us to see them at this range. I mean… how far are we away from Orbitsville?”

“Just over two miks. We passed the two-million mark a little while ago.”

“I never thought this kind of thing would happen to me,” Nicklin said. “James Nicklin—space traveller!”

Hoping he had achieved a natural-sounding change of subject, he tried to work out why the figure Hepworth quoted had drawn a cold feather along his spine. Fifteen hours at say 5G would be… His skill with mental calculation seemed to desert him as he realised that by this time the ship should have been on full gravity, its drive becoming more efficient as the build-up in speed allowed the intake fields to gather increasing amounts of reaction mass. The current acceleration felt more like a third or a quarter of the optimum, and there might have been fluctuations while he was asleep, causing the dreams of falling…

“Don’t overload that walnut you use instead of a brain.” Hepworth spoke in friendly tones and returned the flask to Nicklin, good evidence of his not being antagonised. “Under normal conditions we’d have been a lot farther out by this time.”

“I…ah…didn’t want to open my big mouth too soon.”

“I know—you were being tactful.” Hepworth gave him a quizzical look. “I never noticed you trying to be diplomatic before. What’s the matter, Jim—are you sick?”

Nicklin tried to smile. “I have my off days. What were you saying about the engines?”

“About the engines? Nothing! Not a word! Not a peep, not a cheep! The engines are fine.”

“But you said-”

“I said that under normal conditions the ship would be travelling a lot faster.”

“So what’s wrong?”

“Space itself is wrong,” Hepworth said peacefully. “You must remember that we’re in an anti-matter universe now, Jim. Some things are different here. It’s too soon for me to say exactly what the differences are—it could be something to do with the density or distribution of interstellar dust, or it might be something more basic than that.

“If some nuclear interactions are different—as with cobalt 60—then some of the ship’s performance parameters might also be different. For instance, our intake fields might be slightly porous to anti-matter ions. I tell you, Jim—whole new areas for research are opening up all around us.”

Nicklin took another drink of luke-warm gin.

I’m going to put all my trust in this man, he thought, repressing a grimace as the alcohol burned in his throat. I’m going to accept everything he says. I’m going to have total faith in him because nobody—not even the Great Prankster—would cast a hundred souls adrift in a ship that can’t fly.

Again, there were dreams of falling.

In one of them the ship was in orbit around a green planet. The planet had no cloud markings, no oceans, no polar caps. It was a sphere of unrelieved colour—pantomime scenery green, children’s paintbox green, remembered holiday green—too rich for normal vegetation. Megan Fleischer had come to Nicklin and confessed that she was unable to fly the pinnace. He had taken over for her, and now he was in the pilot’s seat as the little craft plunged—buffeted by turbulent atmosphere—towards the virescent bauble. He glanced down at the controls and terror gripped him as he realised they were a meaningless array of levers and dials. He knew nothing about flying, nothing at all! What madness had made him think he could pilot any kind of spacecraft or aircraft? The poisonous green surface was rushing upwards, expanding, spinning in the windshield. He could see now that it was a swamp—heaving, bubbling, gloating. The pinnace was hurtling into it at many times the speed of sound.

And there was nothing he could do but wait to die…

On the following morning, the second day of the flight, Nicldin decided that the only way to survive a prolonged journey was by making himself genuinely useful. The simple disciplines of hard work had sustained him for the year in which the Tara had been dragged, inch by inch, from Altamura to Beachhead City, and the experience had taught him a valuable lesson.

“You can trust work,” he announced to the emptiness of his room as he got out of bed and began to dress. “Work isn’t fickle. Work never lets you down.”

There was, he knew, a ready-made outlet for his particular abilities and knowledge. Jock Craig, the electrician, had a good record as a general handyman and had been promoted—in the vague way that Montane handled such things—to the post of “maintenance supervisor”. The job would have required Craig to mend anything from a lighting switch to a ventilation fan, but he had been among those who failed to board the ship in time for the escape from Orbitsville.

Nothing had broken down at this early stage of the voyage, as far as Nicklin was aware, but there was one major item of housekeeping which cried out for his attention. The gangway which passed through every deck had been vital for mobility while the ship was lying on its side in dock. Now it was an encumbrance which hindered access to the single longitudinal ladder which ran the length of the ship—and it was time for it to go.

Within an hour Nicklin had eaten a solitary breakfast, sought out Montane and appointed himself maintenance supervisor in Craig’s place.

The gangway was made of pressed metal in some places, and in others of simple wooden planks which still bore dusty footprints. Nicklin started at the upper end of the ship, removing sections, cutting them into convenient lengths and storing them in an empty room on 5 Deck. As he cleared each deck he checked that its sliding anti-fire hatch could be moved freely. The work was aided by the low gravity, but hampered by the number of people moving between levels. Having spent one ship day adjusting to their surroundings and getting used to the idea of being in space, the emigrants were beginning to establish the life patterns which might have to serve them for many months.

Looking along the ladder was, for Nicklin, like taking a core sample of the activities on the seriate decks. In the dwindling companionways he could see knots of men and women in conversation, while others progressed between the two public levels of the canteen and washrooms. Children were visible almost everywhere, establishing their hold on new territories or being harried by adults. At one stage there was a bible class going on below Nicklin, a committee meeting of some kind on his level and what seemed like a choir practice several floors above him.

Inconvenient though the continual traffic on the ladder was, he derived comfort from the abundant evidence that the human spirit was irrepressible. Many of the emigrants spoke to him in a friendly manner, some—having tapped into an information grapevine—expressing gratitude for the part he had played in getting the ship off the slideway. These men and women were obviously more in touch with the realities of their situation than his anti-religious prejudice had allowed him to expect, and the idea that they might form a viable colony on a new world gradually began to seem less preposterous.

Twice during the morning’s work he saw Zindee White coming towards him. Unable to meet her eyes, he moved as far off the ladder as possible and kept his back turned while she was passing. On the first occasion he allowed himself to hope that she would speak and show some sign of forgiveness, but no contact was made. That’ s that, he told himself grimly. To use one of Corey’s best cliches-I’m reaping what I sowed.

There was little to tax his mind in the dismantling of the gangway, but he gave the task full concentration, using the physical labour to ease the pressures of self-reproach and recrimination. Having shut everything but bolts, clamps and lashing ropes from his personal universe, he felt a dull sense of surprise when—some time later—he became aware of Nibs Affleck beckoning to him from higher up the ladder.

Making sure he was leaving nothing in a dangerous condition, he followed Affleck towards the control deck, trying to guess why he had been summoned. He knew that Megan Fleischer was deeply unhappy about the weak acceleration, and that she had been engaged in bitter arguments with Hepworth, but he had no responsibilites in that area. Perhaps Montane, increasingly concerned with the trivia of shipboard routine, wanted to discuss illumination levels or the canteen rota. Or, could it be… could it possibly be… ?

Orbitsville!

Nicklin’s premonition gave way to numb certainty as he entered the control room.

In spite of some magnification the main screen now depicted a much greater area of the Orbitsville shell, with the result that the pattern of green lines appeared to have become more intricate. There were hundreds of regularly spaced foci, generating sprays of interlocking curves, resembling flower petals, which confused and dazzled the eye. The vast design had not only increased greatly in brightness, but was now pulsing at a rate of about once a second. Each peak of brilliance washed through the control room, garishly outlining the high-backed seats and their occupants—Montane, Voorsanger, Fleischer and Hepworth.

“You’re entitled to see this, Jim,” Hepworth said without turning his head. “Something is going to happen.”

Nicklin moved to stand behind Hepworth. “When did the pulsing start?”

“A couple of minutes ago—and it’s speeding up.”

Frozen, entranced, Nicklin stared at the living image as the tempo of light beats increased. It became an eye-stabbing frenzy, the intervals between the peaks lessening, shrinking to zero. And then the screen steadied at an intolerable level of brightness.

A second went by; two seconds; three seconds…

Scott was right, Nicklin thought, sick with apprehension, half-blinded by the glare. Something is going to happen.

…four seconds; five seconds…

The incredible filigree of green fire ceased to exist—and in its place there was a new pattern.

Blue-white crescents suddenly filled the entire screen. Row upon row, line upon line, layer upon layer. The largest were in the centre of the field of view, and outwards from them, graduating downwards in size to star-like points, there ran countless curving meridians of dwindling beads. The farther they were from the centre of the screen the fuller were the crescents. In their entirety they formed concentric gauzy spheres, depth leading to depth, at the centre of which was a small yellow sun.

Nicklin’s gaze fixed on one of the largest of the side-lit globes, but long before he had brought it into perfect focus—identifying the blue and green variegations as oceans and continents—an inner voice had told him he was looking at a new-born planet.

Orbitsville—equal in area to millions of Earths—had become millions of Earths.

Chapter 19

The utter silence in the control room lasted for minutes, during which the image on the screen continued to evolve.

Unable to take his gaze off the spectacle, Nicklin groped his way around the empty seat beside Hepworth and sat down. As his eyes gradually recovered from the punishing overload of green light he began to take in more and more details of the fantastic scene and to interpret some of its elements.

He saw that the sun was not enclosed by the blackness of space. The multiple layers of planets in the foreground had prevented him from realising that the sun was at the centre of a pale blue disk. The circle of blue exhibited shifting moire patterns of a paler shade, and—in spite of the alien nature of the visual setting—it looked achingly familiar.

“That’s the sky,” he breathed. “I mean… We’re looking at the inside of Orbitsville.”

“You’re right.” Hepworth sounded calm and emotionless, the scientist in him having displaced the merely human observer. “Feast your eyes on it while you can, my boy. You have slightly less than eighteen minutes—then it will disappear for ever.”

“Eighteen minutes?” The precision of the term added to Nicklin’s sense of awe. “How do you know that?”

“Well, it seems that the Orbitsville shell has been converted into smaller spheres, each about the size of a small planet.” Hepworth glanced along the row of seats. “Are we in agreement on that one? Nobody wants to claim it’s all an optical illusion?”

Fleischer nodded. Montane and Voorsanger, gaping at the screen, appeared not to have heard.

“I think we can assume that the conversion was universal and simultaneous,” Hepworth went on, seizing the best opportunity he would ever have to deliver one of his impromptu lectures. “That feels right to me, if nothing else. The entire shell broke up all at once, and was converted into smaller spheres all at once—but we can’t see it that way because Orbitsville was eighteen light minutes in diameter. For us, the conversion will appear to be progressive…”

Nicklin lost the sound of the physicist’s voice as soon as he had, belatedly, worked out for himself what was happening. He watched in fascination as the blue disk expanded in the view screen, its edge appearing to dissolve and vaporise into a mist of planets. The disk, with its crazed pattern of day and night bands, was the sunlit interior of Orbitsville—but he knew that it no longer existed, that he was seeing it by virtue of light which had started on its journey while he was still in a lower part of the Tara, working on the gangway.

For the first time in his life, he began to get some inkling of Orbitsville’s true size. The vast sphere had already met its enigmatic end, but by virtue of sheer immensity it was clinging to an illusory existence, reluctantly yielding up its substance at the speed of light.

To suffer a C-change, Nicklin marvelled, into something rich and strange…

The circle of striated blue expanded off the edges of the screen. Fleischer touched a camera control, dropping the magnification to zero, and the field of view was increased by a factor of ten. The circle continued its growth, spewing millions of new worlds in a silver fog at its rim, but the pace of enlargement slowed with the light front reaching the widest aspect of the shell. It was still racing across Orbitsville’s doomed, dreaming landscapes—annihilating them at a rate of 300,000 kilometres a second—but, as the direction was nearly parallel to the watchers’ line of sight, lateral change was temporarily minimised.

There was a period of near-stasis which lasted for more than a minute, then the azure circle began to shrink.

The contraction was barely perceptible at first, but in accordance with the laws of spherical geometry there was an acceleration—and an acceleration of acceleration. The blue circle dwindled fiercely, boiling itself away in a steam of planetary creation. In a final silent implosion it vanished behind the stellar corona.

The sun remained—unaffected and unchallenged—at the centre of a spherical cloud of new-born worlds.

Nicklin was frozen in his seat, breathing at only the shallowest level, staring at the incredibly beautiful display on the main screen. His mind was scoured out. He felt cold, chastened and uniquely privileged—as though the whole of Creation had been reprised especially for his benefit. He felt that he ought to speak—but what was there to say?

“My eyesight isn’t what it used to be,” Hepworth came in, “but those are planets, aren’t they?”

Nicklin nodded, forcing his larynx into action. “They look like planets to me.”

Montane emitted a hoarse sobbing sound. “They are not planets! It’s all part of the Devil’s trickery! It’s an illusion.”

“I thought we dealt with that notion at the start,” Hepworth said, with a patience which conveyed impatience. “What we have just witnessed was the creation of millions of planets out of the material of the Orbitsville shell. The big question now, or one of the big questions, is—is everybody still alive on them?”

“Everybody has to be dead,” Montane announced. “Everybody is—dead!”

Nicklin, who had thought his capacity for wonder exhausted, was freshly awed by Hepworth’s imaginative power. “How? How could anybody possibly be alive after all that?”

“How me no hows,” Hepworth replied. “I don’t think we’ll ever understand how it was done. But—and don’t ask me to explain this either—to me it seems that the whole exercise would have been pointless unless life was preserved. Don’t you see that?”

“I want to see that. I want to see that very much.”

“How much magnification can you give it?” Hepworth said to Megan Fleischer. “A hundred?”

She nodded, fingers moving on a panel in the armrest of her seat. A tiny red circle appeared near the centre of the screen. It adjusted position slightly to enclose one of the glowing specks, then it began to expand, magnifying the contained area, progressively obliterating the rest of the screen. The object it enclosed was quickly revealed to be a black disk surrounded by a thin circle of brilliance.

“That one is too nearly in line with the sun,” Hepworth said. “We’re looking at its night side, but the halo demonstrates an important point—it has an atmosphere. It proves, to me anyway, that whoever dissolved Orbitsville had our best interests at heart.”

“You’re a fool,” Montane whispered. “The Devil is our enemy.”

“Go out to one side a bit,” Hepworth said to the pilot.

The red circle immediately collapsed to its former size, moved to the left and centred itself on another mote of light. The process of magnification began again, and this time the target expanded to become a bright crescent which was—unmistakably—dappled with green and blue beneath the white curlicues of weather systems.

“There you are,” Hepworth said triumphantly. “A prime piece of Orbitsville real estate, parcelled up a different way.”

Nicklin’s mind made a dizzy leap. “Will we be able to see cities?”

“Possibly, but the trick would be to find them.” Hepworth made a sweeping gesture which took in the jewel-dusted margins of the screen outside the crimson circle. “What was the surface area of Orbitsville compared to, say, Earth? Wasn’t it something like 650 million times bigger? If nothing has gone to waste, that means we have about 650 million new planets out there—and our little handful of cities would be fairly insignificant.”

“I’ll start a radio scan,” Fleischer said. “It’s a bit soon to expect- ”

“Stop this!” Montane shouted, lurching to his feet, face contorted into a pale mask. “I’ll listen to no more of this… blasphemous mouthingl”

“We’re talking science now, Corey,” Hepworth said calmly, kindly and with more than a hint of condescension. “Sooner or later you’ll have to start dealing in the facts of the situation.”

“Facts! I’ll give you facts! Those are not real worlds-only God can create real worlds—and there are no cities. Every single soul we left behind has been claimed by the Evil One. They are all dead\”

Voorsanger shifted uneasily. “Just a minute, Corey. I’d like to hear what—”

“That man speaks for the Devil,” Montane cut in, voice rising in pitch. “I’m warning you, Ropp, if you listen to him you wiil put your own immortal soul at risk.”

“But if there’s a chance that my wife is still alive!” Voorsanger paused, looking oddly shamefaced but stubborn, and when he spoke again he avoided Montane’s gaze. “If there is any chance at all that Greta is still alive… and that all the others might still be alive… is it not our duty to turn back and try to find them?”

“But you saw what happened out there!” Montane’s voice was cracking, becoming an articulated shriek. “How can you even—?”

He stopped speaking, mouth and eyes widening in shock. He clapped his right hand to his chest and at the same time pressed the left to his back in a sudden twisting movement, almost as if he had been transfixed by an invisible blade. His tongue flickered for a moment, snake-like, depositing saliva on each side of his chin. Affleck, who had been standing by the ladder, darted to Montane’s side and lowered him into his seat.

“See what you done!” Affleck growled, switching a baleful stare between Voorsanger and Hepworth. “If Corey dies…”

“I’m not going to die, Nibs-it’s all right.” Montane took several deep breaths and, unexpectedly, produced a weak smile. “There’s nothing for you to be alarmed about.”

“Corey, you ought to lie down.”

Montane squeezed Affleck’s arm. “Just let me sit here, my good friend. I’m going to be fine, you’ll see.”

Affleck nodded uncertainly and backed away to his post by the ladder.

“I must apologise for my little display,” Montane said, addressing the others, and now, in contrast to his previous hysteria, sounding gentle and reasonable. “I accused Scott of blasphemy, but I was the real blasphemer. I presumed to make myself the channel for God’s divine wrath, and He sent me a little reminder that pride is a mortal sin.”

The cliches are just the same, Nicklin thought in dismay, his mind diverted from external wonders, but this has to be a different man.

“Doctor Harding is with us,” Voorsanger said. “I think I should ask him to come up here and—”

“Thank you, Ropp, but I assure you I am in no need of medical attention.” Montane’s eyes were bright and humorous as he looked at Hepworth. “Go on with what you were saying, Scott. I want to hear the scientist’s view of the Devil’s handiwork.”

“It was all a bit speculative,” Hepworth said, obviously in some doubt about the effects his words might have on Montane’s state of mind.

“Don’t be so modest! You were doing a wonderful job—laying down scientific laws that both Our Lord and the Devil have to obey. Go on with it, Scott—I really am interested.” Montane, becoming aware of the saliva on his chin, drew the back of his sleeve across it, momentarily dragging his mouth out of shape.

The action was so atypical of the normally fastidious preacher that Nicklin felt a twinge of unease. Corey, are you in there? he thought. Or have we a stranger in our midst?

“All right, let’s try to be as rational and unemotional as we possibly can,” Hepworth said in a subdued voice which hinted that he too could be concerned about Montane’s mental well-being. “Corey believes that Orbitsville was dissolved by the… um… Devil for the sole purpose of wiping out humanity, and I’m going to refer to that as the Malign Hypothesis. I disagree with him, so I’m going to champion the opposite point of view—the Benign Hypothesis.

“I have little doubt that the spheres we can see on our screens—all 650 million of them—are not ‘real’ planets in the normal astronomical sense. I would say that they are hollow shells, just as Orbitsville was a hollow shell; and I would say that their gravity is generated by the shell material, just as Orbitsville’s gravity was generated.”

“You’re assuming that they have gravity in the first place,” Montane cut in.

Hepworth nodded soberly. “That’s right, Corey—I’m making that assumption.”

“Just checking, just being scientific.” Montane gave the others a conspiratorial grin which made Nicklin want to cringe away from him.

“To proceed,” Hepworth said, “the Benign Hypothesis actually requires us to regard those artificial planets as being as durable as the ‘real’ variety, perhaps more so. We should also think of them as being ideal cradles for intelligent life—custom-designed, if you like, for our needs.”

Nicklin tried to make the imaginative leap, and failed. “You’re getting away from me, Scott,” he said. “How… how can you possibly justify that?”

“It’s implicit in the theory, Jim. It’s implicit in the fact that the conditions in Orbitsville itself were so exactly what were needed for the human race to thrive and flourish. How often have we heard Corey advance the same argument, that it was no coincidence that Orbitsville drew us into it—like wasps being lured into a jar of honey?”

“You can’t fall back on—” Nicklin glanced at Montane’s avid, watchful face. “Are we talking science or religion?”

“Science, Jim. Science! Though I don’t mind telling you I would love it if some kind of devil or demon or imp or fucking familiar were to materialise in here at this very moment.” Hepworth palmed his brow. “I’d be more than happy—believe this—I’d be more than happy to sell my immortal soul for a bottle of gin. Or even a glass!”

“What about this hypothesis?” Nicklin said, beginning to feel impatient.

“As I said, there is every evidence of design. Look at the green lines. They weakened building materials, remember. I would say that was a warning for us to keep off them—because they were dangerous boundaries.” Hepworth glanced at the awesome image on the main screen. “I wouldn’t mind betting that all that was achieved without the loss of one human life. I know how preposterous that sounds, but for beings who have total control of every geometry, every dimension—possibly including time—it could be done.”

Montane snickered. “When does the Good Fairy appear?”

Hepworth inclined his head thoughtfully, half-smiling. “That’s as good a name as any for the entity who is in control out there. It fits in well with the name of the hypothesis. I like it, Corey—Good Fairy! Yes, I like it.”

“You could abbreviate that a bit,” Nicklin said, feeling slightly awkward, like a reticent person who has been forced into a public debate. He and the others had just witnessed the most stupendous event imaginable, and it seemed inappropriate for them to be engaging in a quiet philosophical discussion so soon afterwards.

“You mean God?” Hepworth blinked his disagreement. “It’s hardly His style is it?”

“All right, can you tell us who the Good Fairy is, and what she’s up to?”

“The Good Fairy is the entity who designed and constructed Orbitsville in the first place. She must be as far ahead of us in evolutionary terms as we are ahead of amoebae.”

“I could have said something like that,” Nicklin protested. “Scott, I hate to say this—but your theory doesn’t seem to take us very far.”

“Mr Hepworth, could I ask you about the benign part of it,” Voorsanger said, his narrow face pale and intent. “What makes you think that my… that everybody we left behind is still alive?”

“Occam’s razor. You don’t do all that… you don’t go to all the trouble of creating two-thirds of a billion new homes for privileged customers and then allow the customers to die. It simply wouldn’t be logical.”

“Logical! Oh dear, oh dear! Logical!” Montane leaned far back in his seat and smiled at the ceiling.

Nicklin noticed, with a return of his uneasiness, that the smile seemed to be off centre. An obscure heavy-dictionary term flickered in his mind—plaice-mouthed—together with a horror vision of Montane’s facial tissues having turned into an inelastic dough, allowing his mouth to be permanently dragged out of place when he wiped it. Are we all going mad? Has the encounter with the Good Fairy been too much for us?

“I want to believe you, Mr Hepworth,” Voorsanger said, his eyes fixed on Hepworth’s face, pleading. “Do you think we could find the right… planet?”

“I don’t see why not.” Hepworth’s grandiloquent manner was returning. “If Orbitsville’s equatorial material has remained at an equivalent position in the world cloud- and it seems only logical that it should—then—”

“For Christ’s sake, Scott,” Nicklin cut in, raising his voice. “Don’t get carried away! I can hear the wheels going round in your head. You’re adding bits and pieces to your so-called theory as you go along.”

Hepworth wheeled on him and Nicklin saw in his eyes the beginnings of the sudden rage that so often transformed him when his scientific authority was challenged. There was a moment of silent antagonism, then Hepworth’s plump face relaxed. He stood up and slowly walked around the control console, taking up a position beside the main screen, like a teacher with a blackboard. The screen was still largely occupied by the image of the single planet.

Hepworth gave Megan Fleischer a perfunctory smile. “Would you please revert to the general view?”

The pilot’s hand moved slighdy and the planet vanished. The cloud of worlds again dominated the screen, enclosing the sun in a gauzily bejewelled sphere of impossible beauty.

“In your slightly rusticated and untutored way, you were actually making a valid philosophical point,” Hepworth said in mild tones, looking directly at Nicklin. “There is a classic test which can be applied to any good scientific theory. You make a prediction based on that theory, and if the prediction comes true the theory is strengthened.

“Would you be more kindly disposed towards my brain-child if we went through that process? If I were to make a prediction, here and now, and if- as some of us might put it—the prophecy were to be fulfilled? Would that bring a smile back to that cherubic countenance of yours?”

“Don’t make a banquet of it, Nicklin thought irritably, refusing even to nod.

“Very well,” Hepworth went on, an actor enjoying the centre of the stage. “I will now stick my neck out and predict that these worlds… which have just been created by the Good Fairy… all 650 million of them… will soon disappear from our sight.”

Fleischer sat up straighter. “How can you say a thing like that?”

The question reverberated in Nicklin’s mind as he stared at Hepworth’s jowled and silver-stubbled face. The physicist looked more disreputable than ever in his smudged and shoddy clothing. This was the scientist manque, the man who had allowed gin to leach his brain to the extent that he could flunk on high-school basics, but whose imaginative power seemed to encompass galaxies, universes, infinities.

I’m listening to you, Scott, he thought, all animosity and scepticism gone. Say what you have to say—and I’ll believe you.

“It’s all built in to the Benign Hypothesis,” Hepworth said, indicating the world cloud. “I don’t need to tell anybody that these planets are not in orbit around the sun. If the cloud is in rotation, as Orbitsville was, planets in the equatorial band might be in orbit—but I don’t think they are. The entire system is impossible in terms of our celestial mechanics. It should fly apart, but it won’t, and that is because some force is keeping those planets in place—just as another unknown force kept Orbitsville stable.”

Fleischer raised one hand a little, like a student in class. “It seems to me that you’re advancing reasons for the planets not to disappear.”

“Yes and no. I’m saying that they could remain exactly where they are—if the Good Fairy wanted things to be that way. But—and this is the nub of everything—what would have been the point in dissolving Orbitsville in the first place?” Hepworth spread his hands and looked at each of his listeners in turn.

“Essentially, very little has changed out there. Instead of one huge Orbitsville there are 650 million little ones—turned inside out, of course—but if things stay as they are life will quickly return to normal. The cries of wonder and alarm from ordinary people will soon die down, because that’s the way ordinary people are. There will be a few adjustments to make, of course, and the annus mirabilis will excite historians, philosophers and scientific researchers for many centuries to come—but, in essence, everything will be pretty much the same as before.”

Hepworth paused, apparently distracted from his grand theme by the discovery that his shirt had crept up over his bulging stomach. He spent a few seconds stuffing it back into his pants before fixing his audience with a sombre gaze.

“So, I put it to you,” he said, “what would be the point in leaving all those brand-new planets where they are?”

“Perhaps there isn’t any point,” Nicklin said. “Perhaps that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

“That’s another line of thought—call it the Null Hypothesis—but I don’t like it. I don’t believe that the Good Fairy squanders her time and energy.”

Nicklin found himself floundering in the onrush of new concepts. “All right—where will the planets go? And why will they go?”

“That isn’t part of the bet,” Hepworth said simply. “I can’t explain the wheres and whys—all I’m saying is that the planets will be relocated. They may disappear suddenly, all at once; or the process may be a gradual one. For all we know it has already started—”

“It shouldn’t be too hard to find out, provided our old planet-search programme can handle that many points,” Fleischer said, beginning to address her main computer. “What we might be able to do is monitor say a one per cent sample, and then…” Her voice faded into an abstracted murmur as she became involved in the mathematics of the self-imposed problem.

Voorsanger glanced apprehensively at Montane before fixing his gaze on Hepworth. “All this is enough to start me questioning the whole purpose of this flight.”

Hepworth nodded. “Are you saying we should go back?”

“I suppose…” Voorsanger glanced again at Montane and his face suddenly hardened. “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

“How about you, Jim?”

“How would I know?” Nicklin said, unable to suppress the feeling that it was monstrously unfair to ask him for a judgement on such a vast issue and with so little hard evidence available. “Besides, we’re talking like a management committee again.”

“All right, we’ll ask the boss.” Hepworth looked at Montane. “How about it, Corey?”

“You fools!” Still grinning, Montane continued to stare at the ceiling. “You poor foolsl”

“I don’t think Corey is quite ready to give us a considered opinion.” Hepworth gave Affleck a meaningful look. “Nibs, why don’t you see if you can find Doctor Harding and bring him up here? I think it would be for the best…”

Affleck shuffled his feet, looking tortured, then stepped on to the ladder and sank out of view.

Hepworth returned his attention to Nicklin. “How about it, Jim?

“How about you?” Nicklin said, putting off any kind of decision. “What do you say?”

Hepworth gave him a strange little smile. “It’s a tough one—especially without suitable lubrication. There’s so much to find out about this universe. I’d like to go on, and at the same time I’d like to go back.”

“That’s a lot of help,” Nicklin said. “It seems to me that as you started the—”

“Gentlemen!” Megan Fleischer cut in. “Allow me to make up your minds for you—we have to turn back.”

“At least there’s no equivocation there,” Hepworth said coldly. “Would you mind telling us how you arrived at such a firm conclusion?”

“I don’t mind at all.” Fleischer smiled in a way that signalled her dislike for the physicist. “This ship isn’t fit to carry out an interstellar flight.”

“What?” Hepworth’s belligerence was immediate. “What are you talking about, woman?”

“I’m talking about the drive, man. We’re losing the left intake field.”

“Nonsense!”

Hepworth leaned over the control console, staring down at the field distribution display. Nicklin followed his line of sight and saw that the glowing butterfly had become noticeably asymmetric. He watched in chill fascination as, in the space of only a few seconds, the left wing—changing shape all the while—shrank to a writhing speck and finally blinked out of existence. In the same moment he felt a queasy upsurge in his stomach which told him the ship’s acceleration had been sharply reduced. There followed a ringing silence which was broken by Fleischer.

“As commander of this vessel,” she announced in clear, precise tones, “I have decided to abort the flight.”

“You stupid bitch!” Hepworth shouted.

He turned and ran to the ladder, reaching it in two grotesque low-gravity bounds, and lowered himself through the deck opening. Several seconds went by before it dawned on Nicklin that Hepworth was on his way to the engine cylinders. Gripped by a sense of unreality, he stood up and looked at the others half-expecting to receive some guidance as to what he should do next. Fleischer and Voorsanger gave him blank stares; Montane continued to grin wetly at the ceiling.

Nicklin loped past them and sprang on to the ladder. He went down it in the normal manner for a short distance, then realised that the quickest way to proceed in the low-gravity conditions was by a controlled fall. He curled his fingers loosely on the stringers, took his feet off the rungs and allowed himself to drop.

The fall was gentle and easily controllable by tightening his grip. Far below him he could hear Hepworth bellowing at people using the ladder to get out of his way. On almost all the decks that Nicklin passed there were children to applaud his unorthodox descent. Some adults eyed him with less enthusiasm, and he knew they were experiencing the qualms that travellers had always felt on noticing a disturbance in shipboard routine. It occurred to him that they would feel considerably worse when they learned what the disturbance was all about. The future of the New Eden express was being threatened from without and within.

He caught up with Hepworth on 14 Deck, the first on which there was access to the engine cylinders. Hepworth had already tapped his authorisation code into the lock and was dragging the shielded door open.

“What do you want?” he demanded, scowling at Nicklin with the face of an enemy.

What’s happening to us? Nicklin thought. “Scott, I’m with you. You’re not the only one who sweated in here. Remember?”

Hepworth’s brow cleared at once. “We’ve got a minor problem down here, Jim. That Fleischer woman would just love it if the whole drive complex packed up, but it isn’t going to! I know exactly what’s wrong—and I know exactly how to put it right.”

“That’s good,” Nicklin said, unhappily remembering Hepworth’s previous assertion that the weak acceleration was the result of unfavourable conditions outside the ship.

“It’s the output gate control mechanisms,” Hepworth said, stepping over the door’s high threshold into the bleakly illuminated environment of the engine cylinders. “They were never right! I told Corey that from the start. The contractors who overhauled them were a bunch of know-nothings, but he wouldn’t part with the money for a dependable job. Not Corey! And now that the inevitable has happened that bitch up above is trying to shift the blame on to me!”

Hepworth was moving towards the left output chamber as he spoke. Nicklin followed close behind, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. He had had little to do with the gates and their associated mechanisms, partly because they had been Hepworth’s jealously guarded territory, but also because the gates themselves were blocks of ferro-molybdenum weighing in the region of 600 tonnes each. In spite of their enormous mass they had to be moved quickly, with three degrees of freedom, to direct the magnetic flux of the Tara’s intake fields.

The support frames, controls, gears and resonance motors were heavy power engineering, and outside the scope of Nicklin’s fields of expertise. He had always worked alone and had taken no interest in anything he was unable to lift without help. But in spite of his limited knowledge, as he trailed behind Hepworth through the inhuman environment of the engine cylinder, he found himself again experiencing doubts about the man’s qualifications and practical experience.

What he had seen portrayed on the ship’s control console had looked, to him, like a straightforward collapse of the left intake field. At a guess he would have said that a flux pump had developed one of the dozen or so faults to which such complex machines were prone. But he was relegated, condemned, to the role of bystander because of his cursed lack of relevant training. Could the field have withered in a way that, to the experienced eye, told of a failure in gate mechanisms?

Hepworth reached the massive bulkhead of the field emission chamber and, breathing heavily, began tapping the access code into the lock.

“Scott, what are you doing?” Nicklin grabbed Hepworth’s upper arm. “You can’t just walk in there!”

Hepworth angrily shook his arm free. “I know what I’m doing. The whole complex has shut down automatically.”

“But you don’t know what the residual level of motor activity is! There could be… I mean…”

Nicklin strove for the right form of warning, the formula with which to penetrate the shell of Hepworth’s irrational fury. He knew a lot about magnetic pulse motors, and on a small scale had seen the havoc they could wreak when suddenly frustrated in their normal activities. For as long as five minutes after a serious breakdown they could emit bursts of gyromagnetic energy which, flitting through the vicinity like poltergeists, could invade metal objects and invest them with a pseudo-life of their own. He had seen cables writhing like snakes, and pliers leaping from workbenches with enough force to shatter windows. In those cases the kinetic force had been released by broken motors no larger than his fist—and the motors in the field emission chamber were the size of beer kegs.

“There’s nothing wrong with the motors,” Hepworth snapped. “The trouble is in the gate control rods, and I know exactly where.”

“But at least look at the monitors and…” Nicklin gestured at the panel beside the door and his voice faded as he saw that all its dials and counters were inert.

“Somebody put the wrong fuses in that thing,” Hepworth said defiantly. “It’s a redundant piece of junk anyway.”

“But you told Corey… you told us all that the work on your side of things was finished weeks ago! What else have you declared redundant around here?”

“All essential systems are functional.”

Nicklin stared into the physicist’s eyes and saw something there which terrified him. “Fleischer was right about you, wasn’t she? You’re not up to the job!”

The punch Hepworth threw was both clumsy and slow, but when Nicklin tried to avoid it his feet, lacking purchase in the low gravity, skidded out from under him. Hepworth’s fist hit him squarely in the stomach as he went down. He landed on his back and slid into a tool rack. Mentally rather than physically shocked, he gripped the rack and drew himself to his feet as Hepworth was disappearing from his view in the emission chamber.

“Scott, I’m sorry,” he called out. “Please don’t go—”

His voice was lost amid a series of violent reports from within the chamber. Metal was striking on metal with a ferocity which punished Nicklin’s ears and numbed his brain. The clamour went on for perhaps ten seconds, and somewhere in the heart of it he heard a different kind of sound. It was a softer impact, less strident than the others and with several elements—a crushing, a pulping, a gasp. The mechanical bedlam reached an awesome climax and then, quite abruptly, slackened off. In the ringing aftermath Nicklin could hear a single piece of metal bouncing, come to rest, vibrating—then there was total silence.

He remained where he was, petrified, staring at the baffle screen which prevented him from seeing far into the emission chamber. Gyromagnetic demons had been unleashed behind that screen, he knew, and he was not venturing into their lair until it was safe to do so. Five minutes, he thought. I’ll give it a full five minutes from now—just to be safe…

He began counting the time on his wristwatch.

Don’t get me wrong on this thing. I’m not actually saying that old Scott is dead. No, sir! He isn’t making any noises—I’ll grant you that—but that doesn’t mean he’s been defunctified, not by a long chalk. He could be cowering inside a locker, wondering what the hell happened. Perhaps he has filled those awful fucking baggy pants of his and is too ashamed to come out into the open. What a bloody scream that would be!

Almost two minutes had passed when there came a single loud clank from behind the screen.

“Scott?” Nicklin whispered. “Is that you, Scott?”

As if answering the query, the wrenches and screwdrivers in his pockets stirred into life, twisting and squirming like trapped animals. He gave a quavering moan as the rack upon which he was leaning shuddered and briefly became a discordant carillon, every tool on it clattering its individual note. But the agitation soon passed. His new fear evaporated as he realised that the gyromagnetic demons had, in their death throes, given birth to and sent forth a horde of mischievous kinetic imps.

Another nice touch, O Gaseous Vertebrate! You really had me going there for a moment. But there’s just one minor point—does this mean that Scott is really dead? Extincticated? Exanimated? Kaputorised?

Two minutes further on Nicklin heard a faint sound to his right. He looked in that direction and saw a young man in the uniform of a spaceport guard. It was the same young man—obviously a restless and inquisitive type—who had earlier intruded on the control deck. He studied Nicklin’s face for a long moment and then, without uttering a word, placed a finger vertically against his lips and retreated out of sight.

When five minutes had gone Nicklin advanced slowly to the door of the emission chamber. From the narrow space between the bulkhead and the baffle screen he could see part of a surreal world of grey metal masses, grey cabinets and twisted control rods, the whole accented with streaks of red here, and spots of red there.

When he moved to the end of the screen and looked around it the first thing he noticed, lying almost at his feet, was Hepworth’s head. It had been untidily severed, very untidily severed, and the face was turned up to his.

Nicklin felt his own face become an equally contorted death mask, and his mind immediately ricocheted into the safe universe of the absurd and the irrelevant. Look at the blackhead at the side of his nose. Just look at the frigger! Maybe I should squeeze it out before anybody else sees him like this… do him a last favour… mark of respect…

Part of Nicklin’s mind which still dealt in logic told him there should be a body close by. On the perimeter of his vision there was something which just might have qualified as a body, but he was unable to direct his gaze on to it. Groaning with each breath, he backed out of the emission chamber and went to the nearest commset. He spoke the pilot’s number and her face immediately appeared on the screen.

“This is Jim Nicklin,” he said.

“I can see that,” Fleischer replied drily. “Well?”

“Is Doctor Harding up there?”

“Yes, he’s looking at Corey. Why?”

“Scott is dead. Somebody has to… gather him up-and I can’t do it.” Nicklin took a deep, steadying breath. “Ask Doctor Harding if he would come down to 14 Deck right away. Tell him his professional services are required.”

In times of crisis—Nicklin had discovered—small, familiar comforts assume an inestimable degree of importance. There was no potable alcohol in the ship’s medical supplies, thanks to Montane’s prohibition, but it had turned out that Jon Harding had a bottle of brandy in his personal kit. Harding was not the Tara’s official medic—he was a paid-up pilgrim, accompanied by his wife and two children—who happened to be a general practitioner, and was standing in for the appointee, who had been a casualty of the sudden departure from Beachhead. He had prescribed and dispensed a large measure of brandy for Nicklin’s condition of shock. Nicklin had almost wept with gratitude on being handed the well-filled bulb, and now he treasured it more than an orb of gold.

It was “night” time and, although the clamour of the previous hours had subsided, the ensuing silence was far from being restful. Too much had happened in too short a time. The passengers had been alarmed and confused by the news of Orbitsville’s transformation—as was evidenced by the crowds which had formed around the television monitors on several decks. And then, in close succession, had come the cut in acceleration, Hepworth’s sensational death, and the announcement that the Tara was turning back.

Voorsanger and Fleischer had gone on the general audio system to say that the ship was returning to investigate the world cloud at close range—which was a diplomatic understatement rather than an outright lie. They had emphasised that the return was a minor event and should be viewed in the context of what was scheduled to be a months-long voyage, but too many doubts and fears had been aroused in the passengers’ collective consciousness. Danea Farthing, and a few others of the mission’s long-term staff who were fully acquainted with the situation, had spent hours in counselling anxious parents—with only qualified success.

Nicklin could sense the icy apprehension which was abroad in the ship’s lower decks. The chill of it was deep within him, and slow to disperse. He had never really enjoyed brandy in the past, but as he sat with Voorsanger and Fleischer in the control room each sip he took yielded nostalgic pleasure beyond description. He could imagine himself, were the right circumstances ever to return, devoting the rest of his life to the worship of the fiery spirit. That possibility, however, had begun to seem more remote than the stars.

Harding had done heroic work in removing Hepworth’s remains from the emission chamber without help. The Tara, as a ship of the Explorer class, was capable of being flown by one person if necessary. Its designers had done their best to anticipate every adverse situation a small crew might have to face, but they had overlooked the possibility that, occasionally, the crew might become even smaller. There was no suitable storage space for dead bodies. The oversight had created problems for Harding, and he had solved them by sealing Hepworth’s corpse in wrappings of plastic and transferring it to a free corner of the ship’s deep freeze facility, thus enabling Nicklin to enter the emission chamber and prepare a damage report.

Nicklin had found that one of the gate positioning rods had failed, just as Hepworth had diagnosed. The broken rod had jumped its bearings, displaced other rods and damaged two servomotors—something Hepworth had not thought of and which had cost him his life. But the root cause of the trouble had been more fundamental.

The sequence of disaster had been triggered by flux pump coils burning out. Automatic cut-outs had been slow coming into action—another fault—with the result that for a split-second the left intake field had been wildly misshapen. And it had been the system’s attempt at correcting the field distortion that had made impossible demands on the output gate controls.

Enter Nicklin and the doomed Hepworth from stage left…

Nicklin squirmed in his seat as he wondered how badly the drive complex in the right-hand cylinder might be affected by the gangrene of Hepworth’s incompetence.

The ship as a whole was in good condition. The thermonuclear power unit could be trusted, because it was self-contained and designed to run for centuries. Much the same could be said for the short-range ion drivers, and Nicklin also had faith in anything for which he had been responsible. So there would be no structural failures and the Tara’s passengers were assured of regenerated oxygen, ventilation, light, heat and water.

All of which meant that, should the ship fail to reach a safe haven, they would be reasonably comfortable while they starved to death.

Their lives depended on the trouble-free functioning of everything in the right-hand drive cylinder. And Nicklin could visualise the ghost of Hepworth down there at that very minute—bragging, boozing, issuing worthless guarantees, threatening violence to anyone who questioned his ability…

“I’ve just come from Corey’s room,” Voorsanger said. “He is still asleep and Jon says he’ll probably stay that way for the next six or seven hours. I think that could be something of a blessing for all of us, don’t you?”

“It’s probably a blessing for him,” Fleischer replied in a tired voice. “I don’t see what difference it makes to the rest of us.”

“Well… He’s less likely to… ah… object too strenuously to our going back if he finds we’re already well on the way.”

“He can object all he wants,” Fleischer said firmly. “I’m the commander of this vessel. I made the decision to return, and nothing will make me alter it.”

Good for you! Nicklin thought, sympathising in full with the pilot. She was becoming increasingly terse and irritable, and he could see why. She was a professional who had somehow allowed the religious side of her nature to blind her to the fact that she was joining a company of fools. It had become apparent to Fleischer that her faith in Corey Montane was going to cost her plenty, possibly her life, and she felt deeply embittered as a result.

There’s a good chance of the Gaseous Vertebrate gaining another convert here, Nicklin thought, allowing a few drops of brandy to float on to his tongue. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

“The Lord will decide everything in the end,” Voorsanger said, reproving the pilot for her lack of humility. “Anyway, it makes me feel better to know that we’re on our way back.”

“I’ll probably feel the same way—when we actually begin travelling back.”

“But you turned the ship ages ago!” Voorsanger pointed at the sun and its fantastic retinue of planets on the main screen. “That’s a forward view, isn’t it? It-says so underneath. Nought degrees! That means the camera is looking dead ahead, doesn’t it?”

Nicklin smiled to himself as he took another minuscule sip of brandy, conserving the precious supply. Voorsanger was undoubtedly a good man with financial facts and figures, but it was obvious that he had not thought much about balancing the books in which the Tara’s energy transactions were logged.

“Yes, I turned the ship around,” Fleischer said with some show of impatience, “but we had been accelerating for roughly thirty hours at that point and were travelling away from the sun at more than 320 kilometres a second. The ship is now pointing its nose at the sun, and it thinks it’s moving in that direction—but it’s actually flying backwards.

“We’re trying to discard speed, but with only half of the original thrust available it will take us about sixty hours just to come to a halt and we’ll have covered more than fifty million kilometres. Then we can start heading back to the edge of the world cloud, but the return leg is going to take even longer than the outward one.”

“I see,” Voorsanger said gloomily. “I thought we’d be able to start the search quite soon… in a couple of days…”

Fleischer shook her head. “Eight days minimum. That’s assuming nothing else goes wrong—and around here that’s a pretty big assumption.”

“I think we all realise that.” Voorsanger gave Nicklin a disapproving glance. “I warned Corey about giving responsible posts to inebriates.”

“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Nicklin said in a pious voice.

“When I said inebriates I was including you, though I must admit your friend was worse. I never met him when he didn’t reek of alcohol—it’s no wonder he wasn’t fit for his job.”

“The booze had nothing to do with it,” Nicklin countered. “Scott could make even better cock-ups when he was cold sober—he had a natural flair for it.”

Lovely epitaph, he added mentally, wondering when the emotional trauma associated with Hepworth’s death was going to catch up on him. They had spent too many lonely bull sessions together, holed up on rainy nights in odd corners of the gutted ship, for him not to have pain in reserve. It was banked away for him, accruing interest. Before long he would become a pain millionaire.

“Always the jokes,” Voorsanger said. “But they don’t alter the fact that Hepworth has endangered the lives of a hundred men, women and children.”

“Scott was a good man,” Nicklin replied, provoked into a declaration he knew to be totally out of context and, in most people’s eyes, indefensible.

“Scott was a male chauvinist dinosaur,” Megan Fleischer came in, her voice so matter-of-fact that Nicklin, even in his weariness and mild intoxication, knew it had to herald something important.

“But I’ll say this much for him,” she went on, fingers at work on the computer panel. “He was absolutely right about those planets disappearing—the world cloud has started to thin out.”

“There you are!” Nicklin was about to comment on the power of Hepworth’s imagination when an unwanted new thought crept into his mind. “If Scott was right the cloud will disappear altogether.”

“That’s possible. It may even be probable.”

“Can you say how long that would take?”

“Not really,” Fleischer said, very much the cool professional. “I don’t know how representative my sample is, and I have a feeling the computer is a little confused by points moving in behind other points, thus apparently reducing the real number. I’ll have to refine things a bit more for it.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Nicklin said, wondering if the pilot had chosen to tantalise him, “will it take longer than eight days?”

“The computer is saying thirty to forty days, so we ought to be all right.” Fleischer’s face was unreadable beneath its crown of luxuriant hair. “Though I have no idea what the margin of error is—and I am, of course, assuming that the planets are disappearing at a constant rate.”

Thank you ever so bloody much for that last bit, Nicklin thought, fixing his gaze on the main screen. The gauzy sphere of the world cloud now had a new fascination for him, quite apart from its breathtaking beauty. He raised the drinks container to his lips and, no longer in the mood to conserve its comforts, jetted warm brandy into his throat until the bulb was empty.

A fresh element of uncertainty had been introduced to a situation which already had too many life-threatening variables. He stared at the world cloud, trying to force his perceptions into a radical new mode which would enable him to detect the Good Fairy at work—dispatching planet after planet after planet into the unknown.

All thought of sleep had deserted him, but in a short time his eyes and mind tired of the impossible task he had set for himself. It was warm and quiet in the control room, and it was possible to forget that he was inside a pneumatic bomb, hurding through the interstellar void under doubtful control. His seat was unexpectedly comfortable, the brandy was exercising its benign influence, and he could have been in another time and place. This could have been Orangefield—drowsing in ageless security—preserved in the amber of distant summer afternoons…

He was awakened by a startled cry from Megan Fleischer.

He jerked upright, fully expecting to see that the gauze of the world cloud had dissolved into patches and threads, but the image on the main screen was exactly as before. To his left Voorsanger was struggling out of sleep, and Fleischer was knuckling her eyes while staring intendy at pulsing lozenges on the console.

“There’s somebody in the pinnace!” She clapped a hand to her forehead, no longer the imperturbable commander. “It’s going! It’s going!”

Nicklin twisted his way out of his seat and made a low-gravity swoop towards the ladder. He went down it at speed, but before he reached 2 Deck he saw that the floor plate had been slid into place, barring access to the deck below. He dropped to his knees, gripping the ladder with one hand and tugging at the plate with the other. There were no locks on the plate, but it moved only a centimetre or two and then stuck. He knew at once that it had been tied in place from underneath.

“Nibs!” he shouted. “Are you down there, Nibs? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

As if in answer to his questions a multiple tremor ran through both ladder and deck.

“The pinnace has gone.” Fleischer’s face had appeared above him in the control-room hatchway. “There was nothing I could do about it.”

Nicklin pounded on the floor plate. “Nibs, if you don’t move this plate out of the way I’ll come down there and kill you.” He thought for a moment about the contradictory nature of the threat and decided on a change of tack. “Mr Voorsanger wants to go down there. This is serious, Nibs.”

A moment later he heard some fumbling from below. He was able to push the plate aside and saw Affleck standing at the open door to Montane’s suite. The fire plate on 3 Deck had also been drawn over and lashed in place, sealing the level off from the lower regions of the ship. The rectangular shape of Milly Montane’s coffin was projecting a short distance through the doorway, and the lid was missing.

Oh Christ, no! Nicklin thought as he lowered himself on to 3 Deck, with Fleischer and Voorsanger following from above. Nicklin halted and looked down into the coffin. It was empty, just as he had known it would be. The white satin lining was nested in the shape of a human being, and the depression was ringed with stains, like a contour map, the colours ranging from pale yellow to black. A sweet, sickly and faintly spicy smell—the pot-pourri of corruption—hung in the air.

“What’s going on here?” Megan Fleischer demanded, pushing against Nicklin from behind.

He moved aside and gave her an unobstructed view of the coffin. She looked at it, turned back—face quite impassive—and pushed her way between Nicklin and Voorsanger to reach the ladder. She clung to it and began a harsh dry retching, measured and painful, regular as breathing.

She didn’t know about the extra passenger, Nicklin realised. Welcome on board the good ship Lollipop, captain.

“None of you got no idea how it was with Corey and me,” Affleck said defiantly, his nose purple against the unnatural pallor of the rest of his face. “I had to do what he told me to do. I owe my life to Corey.”

“Not any more,” Nicklin replied. The torrent of events in the past minute had numbed his mind—and the nearness of the obscenely yawning coffin was not helping matters—but it was dawning on him that none of the mishaps so far encountered by the New Eden pilgrims was in a class with the latest grim development.

Without the pinnace to ferry them to a safe landfall, the hundred-plus men, women and children on board the Tara were condemned to remain in space for the rest of their lives.

“If you ask me,” he said to Affleck, still speaking like an automaton, “you and Corey can call it quits.”

Chapter 20

Montane knew that he had to act quickly in the first few seconds after separation.

The passenger cylinder of the Tara was visible above him, its coppery curvatures glowing in the weak light of the Orbitsville sun. The mother ship was in retardation, which meant—thanks to the arithmeuc of relative velocities—that it was trying to overtake the pinnace. There was a real danger of the little ship colliding with the front end of the giant’s engine cylinders and then tumbling back along the sides to be engulfed in the invisible but lethal exhaust flare.

It was many years since Montane had done any kind of flying, but he had retained the instincts of a pilot. He slammed the throttle to the FULL POWER position and at the same time pushed the single control column forward.

The nose of the passenger cylinder immediately slid backwards and out of sight, while at the same time the view ahead of him underwent a dizzy change. The sun swam upwards and passed out of his field of view, and the vast cloud of pseudo-planets which surrounded it partook of the same motion. For a giddy moment the jewelled curtain streamed vertically, then it too was gone, and the blackness of space filled the cockpit’s forward transparency.

Montane brought the control column back to the neutral position to prevent the pinnace continuing on a circular path which would have taken it through the Tara’s exhaust. The star fields ahead of him obediently settled into place, steady and serene, and he knew that he was once again flying away from the deadly web which the Devil had spun around the sun.

God in his infinite mercy had laid the universe and all its riches out before him—and each one of the brilliant points ahead of his speeding craft held infinite promise for the future.

Montane began to laugh, and as he laughed the nightmare years were erased from his memory. He was a young man—what could have made him think otherwise?—and the optimism and potency of youth suffused every part of his body.

And the Lord had appointed him to the most glorious and fulfilling task imaginable.

“It won’t always be easy for us,” he said to his young bride. “We may have to face great hardships when we reach the New Eden, but we will overcome them as long as we preserve our faith in Him and our love for each other.”

“I know that, my darling,” Milly replied, smiling at him from the cockpit’s left-hand seat.

The pearl silk bridal gown emphasised her slimness and utter femininity, but he knew she also had an inner strength which would enable her to overcome any adversity the years might bring. The gladness he felt at simply being near her was almost unbearable.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you looking so lovely,” he said, briefly touching her wrist.

She made no reply, but her smile grew wider.

Chapter 21

The idea that he had just been sentenced to death was strangely easy for Nicklin to accept.

He felt neither fear nor anger—just a kind of sad resignation, which might have been the result of emotional overload. A more likely explanation, he decided as he stood with the others on the landing of 3 Deck, was that he had known in his heart for some time that this moment was inevitable. It had been rolling towards him, down a narrow alleyway of time, ever since that sunny afternoon in Altamura when he had first met Scott Hepworth. It had been accelerating all along, gaining momentum from each unexpected new event—within the ship or in the cosmos beyond—and now its force was irresistible.

I’m turning into a fatalist, he thought. And just in time, too!

“Might as well get this thing out of the way,” he said, putting his foot against the end of Milly Montane’s coffin. He thrust hard, propelling the coffin into the suite, then he closed the door. “Might as well keep the place tidy.”

“Corey must have gone mad,” Voorsanger whispered.

“Nobody is going to argue with you on that one. I’d say that Corey parted company with us a long time ago.”

“But where does he think he’s going?”

“He’s going where the rest of us are going, but he’ll get there sooner,” Nicklin said. “There’s no food or water on the pinnace—and not much oxygen.”

“Would somebody kindly… explain to me what’s been going on here?” Fleischer was gulping as she spoke, fighting to control her stomach, and her forehead was dewed with sweat.

“Corey’s wife died a long time ago, but he wouldn’t allow her to be buried on Orbitsville.” Nicklin, who had had years to get used to the bizarre story, was unable to imagine how it must sound to Fleischer, hearing it for the first time in such extreme circumstances. “I… ah… don’t think he could stand the idea of taking her back to…”

“You’re insane,” the pilot whispered, her eyes wide with incredulity. “You’re all insane!”

Don’t look at me, lady, Nicklin thought, then it came to him that he had little grounds for indignation. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “That would account for a lot.”

“If only I’d known what I was letting myself in for,” Fleischer said, dabbing her brow.

“Perhaps Corey will come back.” Voorsanger’s gaze travelled around the other faces, and his eyes seemed to plead with them. “The children…”

I wish you hadn’t said that, Nicklin thought, his awareness suddenly expanding beyond his own concerns and prospects. There were many children among the pilgrims who had believed that Corey Montane was going to save their mortal bodies and immortal souls. The adults had made a serious blunder and would have to pay the forfeit, but the little ones—the innocents who had been given no say in the matter—were going to exit from their short lives in suffering and bewilderment.

There ought to be a law, Nicklin thought. Somebody should have made a law against this kind of thing. A long time ago.

The pain within him intensified as he faced the fact that Zindee White was also on board. She and her parents had placed their faith in another false prophet, and as a consequence…

His recriminations were interrupted by the faint sound of a male voice filtering through the hatchway above.

“The radio!” Megan Fleischer, who had been clinging to the ladder, took proper hold of it and rapidly climbed out of Nicklin’s sight.

“That’s Corey,” Voorsanger said, his voice quavering with vindication and relief. “I knew he wouldn’t desert us. I’m going to speak to him.” He went to the ladder and drew himself up it close on the pilot’s heels.

Nicklin edged past Affleck, who seemed dazed and quite unaware of the new development, and followed Voorsanger to the control room. By the time he stepped off the ladder Fleischer was in the central chair and busy with the communications panel. The voice on the radio grew louder and clearer.

“I repeat, this is spaceport control at Silver Plains, P202,” it said. “We are picking up your autoscan transmission on the general band. Is there anybody there? Please respond immediately if you are receiving this signal. I repeat, this is the spaceport control centre at Silver Plains, P202.”

“This is W-602874 answering your call, Silver Plains,” Fleischer said, her voice harshened by the long bout of retching. “Are you receiving me?”

There was a delay of several seconds before the voice on the radio was heard again. “This is spaceport control at Silver Plains. We are picking up your autoscan transmission on the…” It went on to repeat the earlier message, almost word for word.

“They didn’t hear you,” Voorsanger said nervously.

“Give them time,” Fleischer glanced at the communications panel. “They’re calling at a range of roughly thirty-five million kilometres. Our radio signal is taking a couple of minutes to get there. And we’ll have to wait as long again for a reply.”

“At least there’s somebody there to hear us,” Nicklin said, still trying to grasp the full significance of what had happened. “This means that Scott was right. His Benign Hypothesis is working out better than he’ll ever know.”

“It may also be more benign that he’ll ever know.” The pilot smiled at Nicklin for the first time in their acquaintanceship. “If all the old spaceport facilities are still in existence—and that call suggests that they are—we ought to be able to get another pinnace. Perhaps several.”

“That does sound… benign.” Nicklin returned Fleischer’s smile, tentatively, almost afraid to accept the priceless gift she was offering. “Did you say several?”

“There were four different types that I know of in the Hilversum Space Technology Centre at Portal 16.”

“Operational?”

“I flew two of them last year,” Fleischer said. “When I was adding the Explorer class to my general licence.”

“So…”

“So, the new plan is to locate Hilversum among that lot.” Fleischer, in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Hepworth, waved an arm at the image of the world cloud on the main screen. “It should be easy enough to do, as soon as they pick themselves up off the floor and get back on the air the way the people at Silver Plains have done.

“We then go into orbit around the Hilversum world; they shuttle us down to the ground; and what happens after that is up to the Lord.”

“We can only beg for His guidance and protection,” Voorsanger came in, his voice newly charged with religious fervour. “Now that Corey is no longer with us I think it falls on me to organise general prayers for our deliverance.”

Nicklin opened his mouth to comment on Orbitsville’s sudden change of status—from Devil’s snare to safe harbour—then decided it would be the cheapest kind of sarcasm. The very word had once meant tearing at flesh, and he had gorged himself to the full in the past three years. Besides, he had run as fast as anybody when the portents had come and the end of the world had seemed at hand.

“I think you should wait for some hard information before you say anything down below,” Fleischer said, after a pause.

“Of course, but are we going to have a four-minute delay every time we speak to someone back there?”

“No. When we finally reach standstill and are starting on the way back the delay will have gone up to about seven minutes.”

“Isn’t there something else you can do?” Voorsanger made a show of looking at his wristwatch. “How did we talk to Earth in the old days?”

Fleischer shook her head. “This ship has no tachyonic equipment.”

“What?” Voorsanger turned to Nicklin with a look of reproach on his compressed features.

“You were the financial expert who decided it was too expensive,” Nicklin said, amazed at how quickly Voorsanger, once he had persuaded himself that death was no longer imminent, had reverted to the role of tetchy business expert for whom a wasted second was a wasted fortune. “Besides, the Tara wasn’t supposed to need anything like tachyonics—the plan was to get out of Orbitsville and keep on going.”

“The plan was also to have a ship that was capable of—”

Voorsanger broke off as the radio speakers gave a preliminary click.

“This is Silver Plains,” the same male voice said. “We are receiving you, W-602874. Can you confirm that you are the Explorer-class vessel Tara? We have you listed as land-docked at Pi for overhaul and modifications. Over.”

“Tara confirmed,” Fleischer said at once. “We got out of Pi just before… things started to happen. One of our drive units has failed and we are currently retarding in preparation for return to any available port. We have also lost our auxiliary craft. Repeat, we have lost our auxiliary craft. Can you arrange for the retrieval of approximately one hundred passengers from parking orbit? Over.”

“That’s the big question,” Nicklin said as Fleischer relaxed back into her chair. “Is Silver Plains likely to have anything which could help?”

“We can only hope and pray. We don’t even know what happened when the portals closed up, do we? If it was a simple iris-type process you would expect that any ships which were in exterior docking cradles would have been shut out of Orbitsville. Then when Orbitsville dissolved and—how do you put it?—all the geometries were reversed, all those ships would have wound up inside their respective new planets. Is that how it seems to you?”

“I hadn’t even thought about that part of it,” Nicklin replied. “I wonder if everybody got out of them.”

“There was enough time—for ships that were actually in the cradles.” The pilot, rapidly regaining her professional composure, sounded almost casual. “But there must have been a few ships in transit between portals at the time. I’d like to know what happened to them. Even if they were somehow, by some kind of miracle, injected into orbit around new planets—how will the people on board get down to the surface?

“Ships with a surface-to-space capability are rare birds—as we very well know—and those that may still be available will only be on planets which happen to have spaceports. Even on the equatorial band that could be as few as one in a hundred.” Fleischer’s voice became abstracted, fading almost to inaudibility as she developed the line of thought.

“I wonder how far Hepworth’s Good Fairy is prepared to go to preserve human lives. I mean, how good is she at detail planning?”

Another good question, Nicklin thought, realising that even the qualified optimism he had begun to feel over the fate of the Tara had been ill-considered and premature. Fleischer had said that there were four pinnaces at P16, but there was a strong probability that all four had been in exterior cradles when the portal closed. In that case it was possible, as she had suggested, that they were now inside Hilversum’s brand-new custom-built world.

It all came down to the fact—an echo of Montane’s oft-repeated warning—that everything had been made too easy for the inhabitants of Orbitsville. The great shell had been rotating at a rate which meant that the portals in the equatorial band had a velocity exactly equal to that of a ship which was in orbit around the sun. That had made embarking and disembarking through a portal extremely simple. It had also made it pointless for an ordinary commercial spacecraft to carry the equivalent of an ocean liner’s lifeboat.

Lifeboat, Nicklin mused. LIFEboat. The character who thought up that name knew exactly what he…

He lost track of the thought as the radio speakers gave their preliminary click well in advance of the four-minute interval which had been anticipated.

“This is spaceport control at Hilversum, formerly Portal 16,” a male voice said tentatively. “We are receiving an autoscan transmission. Please identify yourself. Over.”

“He sounds more scared than we are.” Fleischer gave the others a wry smile which warmed Nicklin towards her. “I wonder who he thinks is calling.”

“Answer the man,” Voorsanger said impatiently.

“This is spacecraft W-602874 answering your call, Hilversum. Are you receiving me? Over.” Fleischer glanced at the communications panel then settled back in her chair. “That’s the call I was hoping for. We’ll soon know how we stand.”

Voorsanger moved into the chair beside her. “How long will it take?”

“Hilversum is farther away along the equator. The range is nearly seventy-five miks this time, so the round-trip delay will be over eight minutes.”

“That’s too long,” Voorsanger said in sepulchral tones. “We should have been tachyonic.”

“I can wait eight minutes. Every reply we get increases our chances of getting out of this alive—and I’m hoping to raise a hundred spaceports in the next few hours. If two of them are functioning there’s no reason every port there is shouldn’t come on the air.”

As he listened to the pilot Nicklin felt a growing respect for her tough-minded style of thinking. Whereas he was allowing himself to swing between optimism and despair, she appeared to be holding steady, concentrating her experience, talent and mental energies on maximising their chances of survival. There had been 207 portals on Orbitsville’s equator, virtually all of them developed as spaceports, and they represented a vast reserve of hardware and manpower which could be tapped to bring the Tara in from the cold.

The big battalions are on our side, he thought. Now, if only I could forget about… He tried to fend off a secondary thought, but it was coming with too much speed, too much power. If only I could forget about the time limit. The world cloud is thinning out—just the way Blackhead Hepworth said it would. The new planets are going somewhere, and—according to the Benign Hypothesis—it’s somewhere good. And if we don’t get ourselves bedded down on one of them pretty damn quick it’s going to be lonely out here…

He tried not to think about the prospects for all those on board the Tara if the ship were to be left in orbit around a barren sun. The food would last two years, but would anybody in his right mind want to hang on right to the end, in a drifting tomb in which the dead were beginning to outnumber the living? And in which the taboos against cannibalism were outmoded? It would be better to steer the ship into the sun long before that unimaginable degree of horror was attained, but even that would result in protracted and agonising deaths for the little ones. The best plan might be to override all the safety mechanisms and vent the ship, thus ensuring that suffering was kept to a minimum.

Nicklin, suddenly beset by feelings of suffocation, pulled air deeply into his lungs and wrenched his thoughts on to a different course. He was grateful to discover that Voorsanger had asked Fleischer about the procedures for putting the ship into parking orbit about a planet and transferring its company to the surface. The subject was life-oriented, and he poured his consciousness into it, managing to lose track of the minutes until—with heart-stopping abruptness—the speakers again emitted their now-familiar preliminary click.

“This is space traffic control at Amsterdam, formerly based on P3,” a woman’s voice said. “We are receiving your autoscan signal on the general band. Please identify yourself. Over.”

“Things are looking up,” Fleischer said calmly.

She was reaching towards the communications panel when the speakers were activated yet again. This time the call was from Peking P205. Nicklin listened in a kind of pleasurable bemusement as Fleischer dealt with the two new contacts. The family of communities on Orbitsville’s equator had survived the dissolution, and were reaching out across space to gather in their prodigals and strays. The only appropriate response was to acknowledge hope—anything else would be a betrayal of the human spirit.

Within moments of Fleischer having sent identification messages there came a second response from Hilversum.

“Hilversum calling in answer to your query, Tara,” the man’s voice said, “we have two Type-II pinnaces in land dock. Both have transfer facilities compatible with the Explorer class, and both can be operational within three or four days. We foresee no difficulty in evacuating one hundred personnel, so set your mind at rest on that score. We will get you out of there, and that is a promise, but before I end this transmission I have another message for you.”

There was a brief pause—during which Nicklin, Fleischer and Voorsanger exchanged looks of surmise—then a different male voice was heard.

“Tara, this is Cavan Gomery. I’m head of the astronomical section here at STC. I want to back up everything my colleague has just said—all you have to do is get into orbit and we’ll take care of the rest. In the mean time, I’m asking for your assistance with another problem.

“You don’t need to be told that something very big has happened to Orbitsville, but you may not know that the residual planets are reducing in number. We don’t even know how to begin explaining this, but we need as much data as we can get to help us put a handle on the problem—and you are in a unique position in that respect.

“Can you send us a wide-angle, general view of the residual sphere? We need a good picture from you, and we need it for as long as possible to help us make the best computer predictions about the rate of disappearance.

“I will stand by for your answer. Over.”

For the remainder of the “night” period Nicklin watched and listened as Fleischer dealt with an increasing volume of radio traffic—each new contact adding to the proof of Hepworth’s Benign Hypothesis.

Eventually calls were coming in from spaceports which identified themselves with P numbers in the region of 100. Those calls, originating on the far side of the world cloud, were subject to a forty-minute delay in responses—a chastening reminder of the scale upon which Orbitsville had been built. As the electronic babel built up to a level where Fleischer had to institute computer procedures to impose order, it came to Nicklin that what he was hearing represented only a tiny fraction of the newly created worlds which filled the main screen.

Radio communications had never been possible within the Orbitsville shell, and therefore only those planets which happened to have former spaceports had a voice in the new congress. A far greater number had library access to the relevant technology, and Nicklin had no doubt they were hastily building the equipment which would allow them to speak to their neighbours in the close-packed sky. He also had no doubt that they would be seeking some kind of reassurance.

That was the common factor in all communications being received by the Tara. The radio messages, beneath the terseness and jargon, gave a composite picture of a civilisation which had been jarred out of its age-old complacency. Nicklin had been so preoccupied with his own traumatic experiences that he had spared no thought for the vast majority of humanity who had been going about their humdrum daily lives when the transformation had come. But the voices on the control-room radio gave him an inkling of what it had been like to live through the ultimate bad dream.

There had been the distortions of the sky patterns, the terrifying fluctuations of gravity, the sudden alternations between day and night, culminating in stroboscopic frenzies which stopped the heart and suspended reason.

Then had come the… snap.

For some it had been followed by a new kind of daytime, with once-familiar landscapes rearranged and the sun wildly displaced from its normal position at the zenith. For others there had come a new kind of night, with the glowing archways of the heavens replaced by millions of blue brilliants, shimmering in every design the eye wished to impose on them. And for those on the extreme edge of the world cloud there had been the first experience of night as their forebears on Earth had known it—a direct look into the spangled blackness of interstellar space.

As well as responding to the Tara’s distress, those on the spaceport worlds were communicating with each other, symbolically huddling together in the face of the unknown, seeking answers to questions which could not even have been formulated a day earlier. What had happened? Why had it happened? What was going to happen next? Were the new planets being relocated by some kind of dimensional sorcery, or were they simply ceasing to exist? Were all the planets going to disappear, or would the thinning-out process eventually stop and leave a handful of worlds in stable orbits?

For those on board the Tara, there was a set of questions in a special category of urgency: how rapidly was the world cloud dispersing? Were the disappearances evenly diffused through the cloud, or were there zonal effects which had not yet been detected? Was the dispersal taking place at a uniform rate, or was it accelerating?

In short—what were the chances of the ship reaching the safety of Hilversum before that planet blinked out of existence?

Try as he might, in spite of all his resolves to think positively and hopefully, Nicklin was unable to keep that particular question from dominating his mind.

Effectively, he lived on the control deck, leaving it as infrequently and for as short a time as possible.

On the second night of retardation, when all the lower decks were dim and quiet, he went down to the canteen to have a coffee, and was surprised to find Danea Farthing sitting at a table in the otherwise empty room. He knew she had been working flat out all day, relaying explanatory messages from Fleischer to worried families, trying to convey to them something of the pilot’s stoic optimism.

It was a task Nicklin did not envy. Little had actually been put into words, as far as he knew, but a number of the pilgrims bitterly regretted ever having heard of Corey Montane, and their feelings of resentment and betrayal were close to the surface. In particular, Nicklin dreaded having to face the Whites—but for his intervention in their lives they would still be in Beachhead City, which now seemed a haven of security.

On entering the canteen he drew a bulb of hot coffee from the dispenser. His first instinct was to leave with it in silence, but he became aware that Danea was watching him with the enigmatic and moody-eyed intentness he had noticed earlier. He decided, with some misgivings, to risk her resumption of full hostilities.

“On your own, I see,” he said, taking a seat nearby. “I suppose you miss Christine.” The words were out before he could do anything about it, and he was immediately appalled by his ineptitude. He had begun with a banality, and had swiftly progressed to tactlessness.

“I think you have more reason to miss her than I have,” Danea said mildly.

Nicklin lowered his gaze and stared at the coffee bulb as his cheeks began to tingle with embarrassment. Why had he not left the canteen while the going was good? To stand up and depart now would be the action of a complete bumpkin, and yet to remain would only increase his discomfiture.

“What’s happening up above?” Danea’s voice was neutral. “Any new developments?”

“The planets are all developing polar caps,” Nicklin said, grateful for the new conversational opportunity. “You know—caps of frost or snow at their north and south poles. It makes them look like all those old pictures of Earth.”

“That’s interesting, but it isn’t what I meant.”

“We still don’t know how fast they’re disappearing. But some pretty good telescopes and computers are working on it.”

Nicklin sipped his drink. “I think we’ll get an answer soon.”

“That’s good.” Danea smiled in a way that revealed utter weariness and her heavy-lidded eyes locked with his. “Are you sorry you left Orangefield?”

What sort of a question is that? Nicklin thought, floundering. That question could mean anything!

“Danea, I—” He was reaching out to touch her hand when there came the sound of someone on the ladder.

“I’m glad somebody else can’t sleep—do you mind if I join the party?” The speaker was the blond, bearded young man in spaceport uniform, the same man that Nicklin had encountered before and who seemed to spend most of his time wandering around the ship. Without waiting for a reply he took a drinks bulb from the dispenser and sat down beside Danea.

“Jim, have you met Per Bosshardt?” she said.

“Hi, Jim!” Bosshardt smiled broadly. “We keep seeing each other around—at odd times.”

Nicklin nodded. “Yes, we do.”

“I’ve got fifty-two pals with me to liven up the party,” Bosshardt said, producing a deck of cards from his breast pocket. “How about a game?”

“I’m sorry,” Nicklin said, rising to his feet. “I have to get back to the control room now.”

“Too bad.” Bosshardt gave him a genial wave. “See you around, Jim!”

Nicklin glanced back into the canteen as he was stepping on to the ladder. Bosshardt was already dealing cards which, because of the minimal gravity, were skittering all over the table. Danea was laughing delightedly as she trapped some of the fleeting rectangles with her forearms.

“Are you sorry you left Orangefield?” Nicklin muttered to himself as he climbed through the higher levels of the ship. “What kind of a question is that?”

As the night wore on it occurred to Nicklin that he would probably feel better were he to sleep in his bunk instead of dozing in the seat beside Megan Fleischer. The circumstances of his existence were unnatural enough without his failing to take proper rest—but he had a compulsion to remain close to the main screen at all times.

The image of the world cloud, beautiful in its symmetry, was his past, present and future. It gave the impression of being serene and eternal, but that was only because of the limitations of human perception. The Good Fairy was at work in the cloud, deciding the fate of enure planetary populations at the rate of perhaps hundreds in every passing second, and Nicklin felt that if he stared hard enough and long enough he might find evidence of her design.

Billions of human beings on those newly created and ephemeral worlds were deeply apprehensive about the future. The prospect of being magicked out of the normal continuum—perhaps of ceasing to exist at all—was a terrifying one; but it was a sad commentary on the plight of those on board the Tara that they were praying to be part of that final disposition. A plunge into the unknowable was infinitely preferable to the alternative facing those who had been lured into joining the New Eden express.

Adding to Nicklin’s sense of helplessness was the fact that, in spite of all appearances, the ship was actually flying backwards. It was aimed at the world cloud, its drive unit was thrusting it in the direction of the world cloud, but such was the speed previously attained that—two drawn-out days after entering retardation—the Tara was still receding from its goal.

“There’s no point in fuming about it,” Fleischer had told him. “Personally, I thank God for every hour that the drive keeps on functioning.”

I suppose that’s one way to cheer yourself up, Nicklin had thought, tiredly wondering if he would be able to recognise the moment at which the ship eventually came to a standstill and began the return flight proper. It was decelerating continuously, which was why he had a certain amount of weight, but there had to come the instant of turnaround, during which the ship—by definition—would not be moving at all. If it was not moving at all, neither accelerating nor decelerating, it would have to cease generating gravity even though the drive had not been shut down.

But that doesn’t sound right. I must be too dog-tired to think properly. I’ll just have to go over it again…

He struggled out of sleep to the uneasy awareness that something had altered in the ambience of the control deck.

It took him a few bleary seconds to identify the change—the level of noise from the communications system had fallen. His uneasiness increased as he realised that the sounds of radio traffic had been diminishing for some time. Ever since Fleischer had been forced to computerise and regulate the flood of incoming calls, the speakers had been emitting a near-continuous series of code signals between actual messages. Now, however, they were quite silent.

Nicklin sat up straighter and glanced across the other chairs. Voorsanger was absent, but Fleischer was frozen in an attitude of utter concentration, staring at the image of the world cloud. Nicklin’s heart lurched as he noted the pilot’s expression. “What’s happening?” he cried. “Is there—” She silenced him by raising one hand while she addressed the communications panel with the other.

“…is definite,” a man’s voice was saying. “We’ve got it! The residual sphere is being stripped from the outside. There are five skim-off bands—call them whatever you like—two in the northern hemisphere, two in the southern, and one very close to the equator. All the bands are widening rapidly, God help us! There is no way of predicting how long it will be before this station is…” The silence in the control room became total. Nicklin focused his gaze on the world cloud, and—now that he knew exactly where to look—he could see evidence of the Good Fairy’s handiwork. There was a subtle, twinkling agitation along the equator. But in essence it was the opposite of twinkling. It was a disturbance in a motionless pattern caused by the progressive disappearance of tiny light sources.

The world cloud was visibly being unwound… like a vast ball of wool… into nothingness.

“They’ve gone,” Fleischer said in the voice of a timid child. “The spaceports have all gone.”

“We don’t need spaceports,” Nicklin shouted, refusing to play the game of logic. “We can keep on going! We can go into orbit around any fucking planet!”

“What good would that do? If we can never land?” “It would be better than being left out… herel” “Perhaps you’re right.” Fleischer nodded as she considered the proposition, and then—incredibly—her face lit up with perverse triumph as she saw how to refute it.

“The trouble is, Mr Nicklin, that we can’t reach any—as you put it—fucking planet. Things have changed for the worse out there. The disappearances speeded up while you were asleep… and they’re still speeding up… and within a matter of hours there’ll be no planets left—fucking or otherwise!”

Chapter 22

There was a peculiar rightness about what he was doing now, Nicklin decided.

For a period of some twelve hours he had sat in the control room, mesmerised, watching the world cloud disappear at an ever-increasing rate. In the beginning the process had been almost imperceptible, then a darkening sparsity had become noticeable in five widening strips. The effect had added to the awful beauty of the spectacle, giving the cloud the semblance of a pointillist painting of one gigantic banded planet. After that the dissolution had become all too apparent, as swath after swath thinned out into a blackness through which remote stars were beginning to show. At some point in the progression the Tara had finally discarded its outward velocity and begun the painfully slow return, but nobody in the control room had noticed its change of status. It had been impossible for the watchers to do anything but watch. Even their ability to think seemed to have been suspended as the discrete entity which had once been Orbitsville was reduced to filmy wisps, to fast-fading strands of gossamer, and finally to nothing. Nothing at all. The 650-million new-born worlds had been dematerialised, and only a small sun remained, the lone source of light and heat in a region of emptiness which extended for many light years all around.

What comes next? Nicklin had thought numbly. Where do we go from here?

What had come next, within a matter of seconds, was an intercom message for Nicklin from a woman who had been bathing her children in the communal washrooms on 24 Deck. She was angry because the water temperature in the showers had become erratic, and she wanted the fault corrected without delay. She also wanted to know why Nicklin spent all his time lounging around on the control deck instead of attending to his duties.

The reminder that life would make its quotidian demands until the very end had come as a blessing to Nicklin. He had left the seclusion of the control room immediately, and now—a man with an important mission—he was working his way down through the most populated levels of the ship. Because the Tara was carrying only half of its projected complement, the passengers had largely been free to decide where they would be accommodated, and the majority—obeying their instincts—had chosen the forward section, as far as possible from the engine cylinders.

By the time he reached 14 Deck, the first to give access to the engine cylinders, the sounds of human activity were fading above him. He continued his downward drift, fingers barely touching the stringers of the ladder, and was passing 17 Deck when, almost of their own accord, his hands clamped on thedural bars, bringing him to an abrupt halt. There followed a moment of total confusion, then he realised what had caused the autonomous reaction.

A short distance to his right, in the curving primary wall of the passenger cylinder, there was a door leading into the adjacent engine cylinder.

To someone not so well acquainted with the metallic bones and guts and nerves of the Tara the sight of that door would have had little or no significance, but for Nicklin it came as a psychic hammer blow—because he knew there was no engine access door on 17 Deck.

He froze in place on the ladder, looking around him. The rest of the small landing was exactly as it should have been. Behind him there were two doors leading into passenger suites, and stencilled signs clearly proclaimed that he was on what he knew to be 17 Deck. He had no need of the signs to tell him where he was—the surrounding rivet and weld patterns would have been enough—but he was confronted by an engine access door where no engine access door had any right to exist.

The door was real. He could see scratches on the green paint. He could see smudges on the nine white tablets of the lock’s keyboard. The door was real!

“This is a dream,” he said aloud, relieved at having explained the inexplicable. “This is one of those cognisant dreams, and to prove it—”

He punched the edge of the deck beside him with careless force and gasped as pain swept back through his nervous system from the point of impact. He looked at his knuckles and saw that patches of skin had been curled back. Tiny lentils of blood were appearing on the subcutaneous tissue.

There was no doubt that he was wide-awake—and the engine access door was still in place.

My memory for numbers has gone haywire, he extemporised as he stepped off the ladder and went to the door. A little molecule of the grey stuff has flipped or sprung a leak or whatever it is they do when they’re starting to wear out. You always could reach the engines from 17 Deck. The fact that I don’t remember it that way is neither here nor there, and to prove it…

He tapped the admittance number into the lock—8949823—and smiled as he heard the lock solenoid operating. Still got a few numbers left! He slowly pushed the door open and found himself looking into an enclosed space not much larger than a telephone kiosk. The arrangement was wrong, absolutely and totally wrong for the Tara, but he was now committed to proving to himself that wrong was right, and he stepped over the high threshold with a certain amount of brashness.

As the door sighed shut behind him he saw another door in the left-hand wall, and beside it was a small niche of the type which normally held fire-fighting equipment. In the niche was a body-curved flask of silver, upon which somebody had enamelled the words: DRINK ME. The lettering was excessively ornate and Nicklin grinned as he recognised Scott Hepworth’s handiwork.

So you forgot about one of your stashes, you boozy old sod!

Still amused, he picked the flask up. It felt warm, and when he shook it he heard and felt the sloshing of a small amount of liquid. On impulse he removed the cap and took a drink of what proved to be tepid gin.

A real Hepworth special, that was. He loved his geneva zvitk fresh tonic and all the trimmings, but when necessary he would take it any way it came. As some playwright or other put it—when the mood was on him he would drink it out of a sore. I bet old Scott would be turning in his plastic wrapper if he knew he had missed this last drop.

There’s just one thing I don’t understand, though.

How come the gin is still warm?

Moving like a man in a dream, filled with premonitions that he was doing the wrong thing, Nicklin opened the inner door. Beyond it was a dimly lit space which seemed too large to be contained within the five-metre radius of the engine cylinder. Nicklin went in, allowing the door to close behind him. Above the door was a single bulkhead light casting a wan glow over a semicircle of empty deck. That was wrong, too, because most of the space within the cylinder should have been taken up by massive engine components. He tried to see beyond the vague boundary of illumination, but the outer darkness was impenetrable. An air current tugged momentarily at his hair and clothing, and it seemed sweet and pure, as though he were standing at the edge of a midnight plain.

After a few seconds a figure appeared in the darkness, coming towards him, and he groaned aloud—cowering back with knuckles pressed to his mouth—as he saw that it was Scott Hepworth.

“Good man, you found my medicine!” Hepworth said, taking the flask from Nicklin’s inert fingers. “Where did I leave it?”

Nicklin groaned again as Hepworth raised the flask to his lips and took a drink. His neck seemed intact beneath his rumpled collar, but as he swallowed a clear fluid welled out through the front of his shirt.

“Go away,” Nicklin mumbled through his knuckles. “You’re dead!”

“Don’t be so plebeian in your thinking, my boy,” Hepworth said jovially. “Do I look dead?”

Nicklin studied the apparition before him and saw that it was perfect in every detail, from the smudged shoddiness of the clothing to the blue-rimmed blackhead at the side of the nose. “Get away from me, Scott,” he pleaded. “I can’t look at you.”

“Very well—but I must say I’m deeply disappointed in you, Jim.” Hepworth began to back off into the darkness. “I could have helped you with what’s coming next. There are others waiting to meet you, and I could have helped you deal with them…”

As the Hepworth thing faded out of sight Nicklin grabbed the door handle and twisted hard. It refused to turn, just as he had expected, and now two other figures were approaching. One was Corey Montane—grinning a wet, lop-sided grin—and the other was a pretty young woman who looked quite wholesome and normal, except that the handle of a kitchen knife was protruding from her chest. The knife was moving in tune with her heart beats.

“Milly and I are happy now, Jim,” Montane said, slipping his arm around the woman’s waist. “And I want you to know that you can be happy, too. All you have to do is—”

“You’re dead too!” Nicklin shouted. “Don’t come near me! You’re dead, and you’re trying to make me think that I’m dead as well, but I’m still alive and this is only a dream!”

Montane and his wife exchanged concerned glances, all the while moving closer to him. “I hate to see you like this, Jim,” Montane said. “And it’s all so unnecessary. All you have to do is listen to—”

“Fuck off!” Nicklin screamed, covering his eyes. He remained that way for as long as he dared, afraid that the two dreadful beings were stealthily closing in, bringing their sympathetic faces closer to his. But when he lowered his hands Montane and his wife had gone. The surrounding darkness was intact again, except that he could now see farther into it and his former impression of standing on a vast plain was reinforced. In the spurious, half-perceived distance there was the hint of an enormous presence, black curvatures imposed on blackness. Could it be a hill, a mountain of obsidian, repelling the light of unseen stars?

What have I done to deserve this? Nicklin asked himself, making another futile attempt to open the bulkhead door.

“I’ll tell you what you’ve done,” a familiar and yet unidentifiable voice said from just beyond the pool of tallowy light. “You have filled your head with negative thoughts and false concepts, little Jimmy Nicklin—and now you must suffer as a result.”

“Who are you?” Nicklin quavered, sickened by a new premonition. “And why do you call me Jimmy? Nobody has called me Jimmy since—”

“Since you were a little boy, isn’t that right?” The towering shape of Nicklin’s great-uncle Reynard advanced into the cone of dismal light.

Nicklin cringed as he saw that this was not the figure of the scarcely-remembered real Uncle Reynard. This was the fearsome Uncle Reynard of the dream. This was the terrifying shape that his mother had insisted on treating as a perfectly acceptable human being in spite of the fact that it was over two metres tall, had spiky red-brown fur, feral yellow eyes, and a long snout surmounted by a Disney-animal nose which resembled a shiny black olive. And, as had happened before, recognition robbed the animated image of its oppressive power.

“You can’t frighten me,” Nicklin challenged.

“And why should anybody be frightened of a fine, handsome fellow like me?” the fox said, preening in his nineteenth-century wing collar and patched frock coat. “I fully understand why you wanted nothing to do with those other characters—especially the woman! Did you see the knife?—Ugh!” A look of revulsion passed over the fox’s stylised features. “Between ourselves, Jimmy, you did the right thing in getting rid of that lot.”

“I’m getting rid of you as well,” Nicklin said. “You don’t exist!”

“What a peculiar thing to say!” The fox cast a worried glance over his shoulder, then gave a laugh which exposed all his pointed teeth. “You wouldn’t be able to talk to me if I didn’t exist. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? You see, this is mental space—and mental entities are just as real here as physical entities. You remember what you were told about mental space, don’t you?”

Nicklin shook his head. “I wouldn’t allow you to exist in any kind of space.”

“Don’t do this to me, Jimmy.” Uncle Reynard glanced back into the darkness again, spraying cartoon-style droplets of sweat into the air from his forehead. “I can help you with what’s coming next. You’ve got to have your interview with Gee-Vee, and I can—”

“Go away!”

The fox took a step backwards, his entire body beginning to ripple, and suddenly he was a thin, balding, unhappy looking man of about forty. Nicklin felt a stirring.of old memories. The creature before him purported to be his real Uncle Reynard.

“You can frig off too,” Nicklin said.

“Don’t do this to me, Jimmy,” the creature pleaded. “All right, perhaps I was a bit too friendly with your mother after your old man died. Maybe you felt sort of betrayed—and I can’t say as I blame you—but that’s all in the past. You’re a grown man now, Jimmy, and you must know how it is when a healthy young woman is-”

“Go away!”

“Let me explain something very important to you, Jimmy,” the creature said in an urgent whisper. “You think this is all a dream—but it isn’t! You’re in mental space now, Jimmy. You must remember what you were told that day in the Beachhead office by Silvia London. You remember her, don’t you? The one with the big knockers? Well, everything she said was absolutely true!”

Nicklin frowned. “That would mean you have an independent existence of your own, and that I can’t harm you.”

“Yes, but I’m not a true mindon entity.” The creature shot a quick look behind itself, in the direction of the mountainous presence which might or might not exist in the blackness, and its disconsolate expression turned into one of purest misery. “Your real Uncle Reynard is somewhere else in this continuum. The only reason I exist at all is that I’m a projection of part of your childhood personality, and if you start interfering with things—”

“You mean—if I grow up.”

“You grew up years ago, Jimmy.” The creature produced a shifty, ingratiating smile. “You grew up great! The way you exploded those three ape men in Altamura was a treat to watch. Specially the third one, when he thought he was getting away. And then there’s the Farthing bitch. I’ll tell you something for nothing, Jimmy—she’s sorry she ever got on the wrong side of you. If you went to her right now you could—”

“Go!” Nicklin commanded, his entire consciousness given over to hatred. “Cease to exist!”

The creature gave a snarl of fury. Its face began to flow… extruding a bestial snout, teeth becoming fangs… but before the metamorphosis could be completed the entire apparition shimmered out of existence.

Nicklin was left alone, but not alone. Beyond the cone of sickly light, far out across the half-perceived plain, an enormous shape was moving. In the absence of spatial referents it could indeed have been as large as a mountain, but it also—was this possible?—might have had a human configuration. What was the name of that statue? The one of the man sitting with his fist pressed against his forehead?

Jim Nicklin, the entity said, its voice a silent thunder between Nicklin’s temples, the time has come for us to speak to each other.

“I don’t want to,” Nicklin quavered, amazed by his ability to emit any kind of sound. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”

That is not true. You know you could not have gone on for much longer as you were.

Nicklin pressed his back against the metal doorframe—his sole remaining contact with the universe of rationality. “Who are you?”

Come on now, Jim! You know perfectly well who I am.

“How… how could I?”

Because you have communed vnth me many times throughout your adult life.

“Communed? I’ve never been a believer. The only deity I ever acknowledged was… the Gaseous Vertebrate!”

Well done, Jim.

“But that’s impossible! You’re just a sort of a private joke. I mean, I invented you!”

No, Jim—I invented you.

Somehow Nicklin managed to resuscitate the argumentative side of his character. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go along with that,” he said. “It doesn’t even make dream-sense to me.”

You always have to make things difficult. I simply wanted to personalise myself for your benefit. Your conception of the Gaseous Vertebrate… the Supreme Prankster… is as near as you have come to visualising a higher order of being.

“I meant him as an analogue of blind chance.”

Yes, but you personalised him.

“Nevertheless, it’s wrong to think of you as the Gaseous Vertebrate?”

It doesn’t have to be wrong.

“Are you claiming to be God?”

I am not claiming to be God—but you may think of me that way, if you please.

“This could go on and on. I prefer Gaseous Vertebrate.”

So, after much circumlocution, you are back where you started—I am the Gaseous Vertebrate.

“Are you also the Good Fairy? Did you create the artefact I knew as Orbitsville?”

At last you have asked a sensible question, one to which I can give a sensible answer. No, I did not create Orbitsville.

“Have you any objections to telling me who did?”

I have no objections at all, Jim. I am willing to provide all the knowledge you are capable of assimilating. Your mind is part of my mind at this unique moment in cosmic history. The only limits to the amount of knowledge you may gain are the limits of your own mentality.

“Did you say my mind is part of your mind?”

Let’s have no rhetorical questions, Jim. You know what I said.

“But it’s important to me. There are little questions as well as big questions. For instance, I would like to know why I am not afraid. I have wandered into a surrealist nightmare, and I have witnessed horrors—”

The horrors were of your own devising.

“All right, but I’m alone in what might easily be a Dali landscape with what might easily be a black statue the size of a mountain… and yet I am not afraid. Why is that?”

You are in mental space now. You exist as a mindon entity—and, as such, you are immune to all the fears which trouble a carnate being.

“I see. So that’s why I can hold a conversation with a sentient black skyscraper.”

There is no conversation. For the moment your mind has been encompassed by and united with my mind. You must take what you can, and make of it what you will.

“Very well then—who built Orbitsville?”

Orbitsville was devised and constructed by beings who are more highly evolved than humans. In their one direct encounter with humans they chose to call themselves Ultans. That is as good a name as any.

“Why did the Ultans construct Orbitsville?”

They did so in an attempt to alter the fate of the entire cosmos. A few of your fellow human beings have already discovered that mind is a component of matter. And it is not a minor component. In some regards it is even more significant than gravity, because its attractive force is sufficient to close the universe. Gravitation alone could not do that.

“I remember that woman… Rick Renard’s wife… trying to tell me something like this.”

Yes, but she was more concerned with an incidental effect—the continuance of personality after physical death. The true importance of the class of particles known as mindons lies in their cohesive power. Without the mindon/graviton component an expanding universe would continue to expand for ever. One of your fellow humans, with quite a poetical turn of mind, has stated that it is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

“I don’t see what this has to do with Orbitsville.”

The history of the cosmos could be described as a series of Big Bangs and Big Squeezes, to use the inelegant phraseology of which your scientists are so fond. At the instant of each Big Bang two universes are created—one composed of normal matter and going forward in time; the other composed of anti-matter and going backwards in time. Both universes expand to their limits, then the contraction begins, and eventually, when time has run its circular course, they are reunited and the stage is set for a new Big Bang. You will, of course, appreciate that terms such as matter and anti-matter are completely subjective.

“I’m not stupid.”

There are some complications—such as tachyon and anti-tachycm universes—which I do not intend to trouble you with at this juncture.

“Very kind,” Nicklin said. “Go on.”

At the instant of the last Big Bang—which I believe to have been the eighteenth in the Grand Sequence—two symmetrical universes were created, as had always happened before. But their evolution did not follow the established pattern. A great asymmetry developed because—for reasons which have not made themselves apparent—intelligent life failed to evolve anywhere in the Region 2 universe.

Under those circumstances, without mindon cohesion, the Region 2 universe was destined to go on dispersing for ever—and without the contribution of its matter the nature of the next Big Bang will be radically altered. And as a consequence, the cycle of cosmic renewal will be disrupted.

Some Ultans viewed that prospect with disfavour on philosophical grounds—and they took steps to correct the great imbalance.

“They built Orbitsville!”

Yes.

“It was a mind collector! And that explains the Big Jump—Orbitsville was relocated in the anti-matter universe! When the Ultans were ready they simply moved it!”

The situation was more complex than that, because other Ultans—also motivated by philosophical considerations—opposed any meddling with the course of nature. But, basically, you are correct.

“And was that all it took to change the future of an entire universe? I’m not used to thinking on this kind of scale, but the effect of one sphere seems—to say the least of it—disproportionate.”

More than one sphere was constructed, Jim. To be sure of capturing a viable stock the Ultans placed similar instruments in every galaxy of the Region I universe. Each galaxy, depending on its size, was given anywhere from eight to forty of the spheres, all of them in localities favourable to the development of intelligent life. Your race’s discovery of the one you refer to as Orbitsville was not entirely fortuitous.

“But there are at least a hundred billion galaxies!” Even in his discorporate form Nicklin was humbled by the sudden insight into the extent of the Ultans’ efforts to influence the shape of the space-time continuum itself. “And if you multiply that number-”

Do not concern yourself with the mathematics—suffice it to say that the Ultans pursued their misguided ambition on such a large scale that my brothers and I were obliged to move against them.

“But is it not too late? I saw Orbitsville being dissolved into millions of planets, and I saw them all disappear. If they have been dispersed all over the galaxy…”

I intervened. The new planets have indeed been dispersed—but it was done under my direction. They have been seeded into the Region I galaxy from which Orbitsville came.

A new question was beginning to form somewhere in the depths of Nicklin’s mind, but he shied away from it. “They’ve gone back?”

Yes, Jim. You see, the Ultans were wrong to impose their will, their necessarily limited view, upon the natural ordering of Totality. The imbalance between Regions i and 2 in the present cycle heralds great change—that is quite true—but change is the instrument of evolution. Resistance to change is wrong. Totality must be free to evolve.

“Will the Ultans be… punished?”

They will be advised and watched, but they will not be harmed. My brothers and I partake of Life, and we serve Life. The Ethic requires us to do everything in our power to ensure that no mind units are lost as a result of our actions.

“Is that why you are here? Is that why you are speaking to me?”

Ax I said earlier, the dialogue is entirely within your own consciousness. It is part of your private reaction to the fact that your mind is encompassed by mine while I am transferring your ship back to the Region I universe. You are interpreting the experience in your own way—for others it will be different.

“Do you mean that for them it’s a religious experience? They’re seeing what they believe to be God?”

They’re seeing what they believe—just as you are seeing what you believe.

The question which had earlier formed itself in a part of Nicklin’s consciousness tried to obtrude once more, and once more he was unable to deal with it. “Are we all going to live?”

Yes, Jim—I have plucked your little ship out of the body of my stillborn brother, and I have placed it on the surface of an eminently hospitable world in your home galaxy. You are all going to live.

“Thank you, thank you.” Nicklin began to feel an unaccountable sense of urgency. “Is our time together coming to an end?”

There is no time as you understand it in mental space. In one version of reality the transfer has taken a billionth of a billionth of a second; in another version of reality it has taken forty billion years.

“But the dialogue is drawing to a close.”

You are reaching your limits.

“There is just one more question. Please! I must know the answer.”

Across the midnight plain the dark presence seemed to stir slightly. I am listening.

“Who are you?”

But you no longer have any need to ask that question. The half-perceived entity was definitely moving now, growing taller, preparing to depart. You KNOW who I am, don’tyou,Jim?

“Yes,” Nicklin murmured, the vessel that was his mind at last filled to brimming. “I know who you are.”

Chapter 23

The six Curlew aircraft of Woolston Skyways were ranged in line, waiting to carry their separate loads of passengers to the regional centre of Rushport. Curlews had been chosen because of their ability to operate from unprepared grass strips. Each would take a maximum of ten people on the two-hour hop to Rushport, where they would then be put on an airliner for the 8,ooo-kilometre flight to Beachhead City.

Behind the Curlews were three smaller and faster jets belonging to the news agencies which had been first to get their people to the scene. Looming over the aircraft, making them look like toy miniatures, was the burnished coppery hull of the Tara. And beyond the ship was a lake which stretched to the horizon, its waters sewn with diamond-fire by the low morning sun.

No matter how old he lived to be, Nicklin had decided, he would never get used to a sun which traversed the sky. On the previous evening, scant hours after the Tara’s return, he had watched the first sunset of his life, unable to take his eyes off the searing disk as it slid below the horizon. Like many others of the dazed and bemused pilgrims, he had spent most of the night in the open, staring at new constellations and waiting for the sun to reappear. Even though he had known in advance that it had to show itself on the opposite side of the world, the fact that it actually did so filled him with a profound wondering. The confirmation that he now lived on the outside of a sphere had come as a quasi-religious experience for one accustomed to the insularity of Orbitsville. He felt exhilarated, and dangerously exposed to the vastness of the universe, a micro-organism clinging to the surface of a ball that was hurtling through unpredictable space.

And in keeping with the diminutive size of the new world in comparison to Orbitsville, the pace of human affairs seemed to have speeded up to match the flickering, inertia-less activities of creatures whose cosmos is a drop of water…

In one instant the Tara had been drifting in deep space; in the next it had been resting on a sunlit, grassy plain.

The ship’s clocks showed no lapse of time, but every individual on board—children included—had recollections of a time outside of time. From what Nicklin could gather, the common experience—unlike his own—had been a brief and wordless communion with a benign deity, one who was shrouded in white light, rendered invisible by mingling glories.

They had emerged from it as essentially the same people, with all their previous beliefs confirmed beyond all doubt. The first thing Ropp Voorsanger had done was to lead the entire company out on to the lush grass and conduct a service of thanksgiving. And never in human history could there have been a congregation so united in its unshakeable faith. After all, they had been part of a general and undeniable miracle. They had been lost, and now they were saved, and their salvation had come about through a Divine Intervention. They had been justified, as no others had ever been justified, in sending up their cry of Hallelujah!

Nicklin’s experience had been unique, because he had been necessarily transformed. He had come out of it with a new set of beliefs which required him to revise his internal model of reality. Thereafter he had to acknowledge the existence of a supreme being. Giving it the name of God, or the Good Fairy, or the Gaseous Vertebrate made no difference to the central, essential fact that he could no longer live his life as a sceptic.

While waiting, alone beneath the stars, he had wondered if the impact on his personality could have been any greater had he been persuaded to accept the existence of the Judaic God—and not of the ultimate, non-mystical Personality.

You KNOW who I am, the Personality had said, and the uncanny thing was that Nicklin had been prepared long in advance for the revelation. He had almost reached the truth that grey wintry morning in the Beachhead office when Silvia London had preached that all matter had a mindon component, and that all that was needed for the development of an immortal personality was the existence of a sufficiently complex physical organisation, such as the human brain.

Nicklin had begun to argue that if physical complexity was all that was needed to conjure a mind into existence there was, in principle, no need to insist on a biological element. It should have been possible for any sufficiendy complex organisation to develop an intelligent personality. And, taking that argument to its logical conclusion, what better candidate could there be—in the category of complex, multi-component physical structures—than a galaxy?

The concept of an intelligent galaxy was hardly new—scientific visionaries such as Firsoff had advanced it as far back as the middle of the twentieth century.

But to be confronted with the actuality!

Years would pass, Nicklin knew, before he could hope to assimilate the knowledge that he shared the stage of eternity with beings like the Ultans, so advanced and so powerful that they could presume to remodel the entire scheme of creation to their own desires. And that—as far beyond the Ultans as the Ultans were beyond humans—were what he might think of as the Galactians. They were unimaginable, incomprehensible entities, yet so life-oriented that they could concern themselves with the welfare of individual mind units.

Nicklin had to admit the remote possibility that the Tara had been positioned where it was because of some vague and tenuous paraphysical decree that matter would be drawn to its own point of origin on the old Orbitsville shell. But his new instincts told him that the Personality—which had referred to an inert Region 2 galaxy as its “stillborn brother”—had made a conscious and personal decision in the matter.

The implication was that all mind units were uniquely and individually important. They were all immortal, and would all partake in a grand scheme of evolution and assimilation which would lead to the ultimate convergence of Life. The further implication, for those receptive to it, was that no life had ever been wasted, and that…

“Good morning, Jim!” The speaker was Cham White. He and Nora had climbed the hummock which Nicklin had chosen as a vantage point, and both were breathing heavily from the exertion. “What are you doing up here?”

Nicklin waved a greeting. “It’s a good place to think.”

“You have more than most of us to think about, haven’t you, Jim?” Nora said, a smile appearing on her gold-freckled face. “I seem to remember that you were quite the atheist in the old days.”

Nicklin nodded. “As you say, Nora—I have a lot to think about.”

“We came up to bid you goodbye for the time being,” Cham said. “We’re heading back to Beachhead and then Orangefield as soon as possible.”

“You don’t feel like staying on here and helping Voorsanger to found his new Holy City?”

“It was an inspiring sermon he gave this morning.” Cham fingered his grimy trousers with a look of humorous distaste. “But I think I’ll wait until the first hotels have been built and the plumbing put in.”

“Cham White!” Nora dug him with her elbow. “That’s an affront to the Lord.”

“These pants are an affront to everybody—I can’t wait to get changed into something decent.”

“I’m off!” Nora shook Nicklin’s hand, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and started down the slope.

Cham waited until she was some distance off. “Jim, I don’t know what happened between you and Zindee, and I don’t want to know,” he said quickly. “But I have a feeling she’d like to speak to you before we leave. Will you come down and say goodbye to her?”

Nicklin’s heart began to pound. “Of course, Cham.”

He walked beside Cham, his eyes scanning the various centres of activity. Lines were forming near each of the Curlews, but quite a few families had elected to remain with the Tara for the time being, and children belonging to them were darting excitedly between knots of adults. Journalists were wandering about with cameras, and civic officials from Rushport—including welfare people and a few police—were also going about duties which only they seemed to understand. The fiuttery beat of an approaching helicopter added to the impression that the randomly chosen patch of open countryside had become a focus of interest for the rest of the world.

Radio communications had never been possible on the old Orbitsville, but Fleischer had been able to call up the Beachhead spaceport without any difficulty—and it was apparent that what she had said had caused a sensation, even on a world whose inhabitants should have been sated with wonders. It was just as Hepworth had predicted, Nicklin thought. Astronomical marvels were all very well for those who were interested in that kind of thing, but a hundred people magically returning from the dead was genuine, honest-to-God news.

He forgot about the overall picture as he picked out the green-clad figure of Zindee standing alone close to an orange-splashed bandanna shrub. Before Nicklin could move to prevent him, Cham veered away from his side—no doubt being tactful—leaving him to approach Zindee on his own. As he drew near she eyed him with a strangely intent speculation which, inexplicably, reminded him of his last meeting with Danea.

“Hello, Zindee,” he said awkwardly. “I hear you’re going home.”

“Yes.” Her eyes hunted over his face. “Back to Orangefield, for a while.”

“That’s good,” he said, unable to meet her gaze. “Ah… I have to go now, Zindee. Ropp needs me on the ship.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why does Mr Voorsanger need you on the ship?”

“Well, you see…” He strove to find a good, plausible reason for leaving. “The ship was never intended to sit on soft ground like this. When it’s in the horizontal attitude it’s supposed to sit on six special cradles below the major hard points. The way things are now the soft ground is pushing on the skin and distorting the sub-frames, and that could cause pressure leaks and all kinds of-”

He broke off, nonplussed, as Zindee gave a delighted laugh.

“That’s a load of male ox,” she accused. “You’re a liar, Jim Nicklin! That was one of your stories! You made it all up out of your head!”

“Well…” He looked into her eyes, judged his worth by what he saw there, and felt something which he could only describe as a return of joy. “Perhaps you’re right.”

Zindee stopped laughing. “What happened to you, Jim?”

“I…” He spread his hands, helplessly. “I lost my way, Zindee. That’s about all I can say.”

“It’s enough.” She came close, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. The pressure of her slim body against his was pleasantly asexual, and in her hair he detected the childhood smell of clean perspiration. He hugged her for a long moment, then stepped back, searched in a pocket and brought out the old coin which had once hung around her neck.

“Will you have this back?” he said.

“I was going to ask you for it.” As she was accepting the coin the propellers on one of the nearby Curlews began to turn. “It looks like they’ll be taking off soon, Jim—you’d better move quickly.”

“Move?”

“Yes, move! Danea’s plane will be going in a couple of minutes. Are you just going to stand there and let her fly off to Beachhead on her own?”

He followed the direction of her gaze and saw Danea in the knot of people waiting by the nearest aircraft. Beside her in the group was the uniformed figure of Per Bosshardt.

“She may not be on her own,” Nicklin said, wondering if he had caught Danea looking in his direction.

“Go over there and find out.” Zindee’s small chin had the determined set he remembered so well from her earliest days. “Jim Nicklin, if you don’t do something I’ll never speak to you again. Get yourself over there!”

“All right, all right.” He walked slowly across the intervening grass, blood pounding in his ears, and stopped when he was about ten paces away from the group, unable to think of what he might say. Danea eyed him from under her flat black sombrero, but did not move. Standing close to her, Bosshardt gave him an easy, slightly interrogative smile.

“Danea,” Nicklin said desperately, “I need to talk.”

He waited, not moving, knowing that everything was in the balance. If Danea invited him to go closer, so that he would have to talk within earshot of the others, there would be no real point in his doing it. In the shade of the sombrero her face was utterly beautiful, and as unreadable as ever. Several seconds dragged by, then she left the line and came towards him.

“What do you want to talk about?” she said, heavy-lidded eyes cool and only slightly inquisitive.

His mind went blank. “What are you going to do in Beachhead?” “For a while—nothing. I need a holiday.”

“We all need a holiday,” he said, trying to smile. “We’ve been through a lot.”

“Yes.”

“Well… Perhaps I’ll see you in Beachhead some ume.”

“Perhaps.” Danea glanced back towards the watchful group by the aircraft. “The plane is ready to go.”

“Yes.” Nicklin took a deep unsteady breath as he realised that no other moment in his life would have the same karma potential as this one. “Don’t go on the plane, Danea. Not today.”

Her eyes widened. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I don’t give a damn about the money. I’m saying I’m sorry for all the things I said in the past and for the way I treated you. I’m saying I don’t want you to leave. I’m saying I love you, Danea.”

“That isn’t enough, Jim.” Her voice was low, tremulous.

“What else is there?”

“That morning in Orangefield… when I went out to your place…”

“Yes?”

“Do you believe… do you really believe that I loved you that day? If you have any doubts, Jim… if you have even the slightest lingering trace of a doubt… we’ll never be any good for each other.”

“I believe,” he replied fervently, blinking to clear his visiton. “I swear—”

“Don’t swear,” she murmured, placing one finger vertically against his lips. “You’ve said it—and that’s all I had to hear.”

She moved into his arms, and as they embraced he became aware that they were being watched by dozens of people on all sides.

“We’re making a spectacle of ourselves,” he whispered. “How about going for a walk?”

Later, as they lay together—surrounded by a blaze of bandanna shrubs—they talked about their plans for all the years that lay ahead.

“Even though Corey is dead, the work he started looks like going on and on,” Danea said dreamily. “I like the idea of founding a new kind of city here—with the Tara as a kind of centre piece—and there’ll be so much to do.”

“It would make a good memorial.” Nicklin cast his mind back over the previous three years. “I used to disagree with just about everything Corey said, but—and this is the weird bit—I see now that he was absolutely right. It was all in the choice of words. He used the vocabulary of religion, and I would have preferred the vocabulary of science, but he knew that Orbitsville was a trap…a dead end…”

“You’ve changed, Jim.” Danea raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him. “On the ship… when it happened… did you see God? Just like the rest of us?”

Should I tell a lie? Nicklin thought. If I can accept the idea of an intelligent galaxy—simply because it is a structure of sufficient complexity to exist as a mindon personality, what do I say about the entire universe? Is it not the ultimate structure? Is it not, therefore, the ultimate mindon personality?

Is it not… therefore… worthy of the name of God?

“I saw what everybody else saw,” he said to his loved one, and he smiled as he spoke. “Would I tell you a lie?”