Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Four

The terminal station for International Land Extension, U. S. 23, was an artificial island mounted on stilts ten miles off the coast. Three miles above its storage sheds, receiving bays, and administrative area was the western edge of the He, which was a rectangular raft measuring ten by fifteen miles. In the center of the island was a bank of six freight elevators which ferried supplies up to the lie and brought back its produce for shipment to the shore. Each elevator was a simple platform structure fitted with negative-gravity units, automatic docking equipment, and remote guidance facilities which enabled it to be operated from a glass-roofed control block.

Stirling had been on the island once before, with a party of journalists on one of the infrequent press visits organized by the East Coast Government; but now he saw it through new eyes.

At the start of the ten-minute skimmer ride out from Newburyport, the island was a slate-blue hump on the horizon, no different from the other irregularities marking the chain of Food Tech processing stations which skirted most of the coast. It was a crisply sunny afternoon with a fresh westerly breeze, which drove the black-looking water along in neat, regular waves. The processing stations, which could be seen to the north and south, were rimmed with lines of white foam as sharp as the finest brush strokes on an Oriental vase. Stirling picked out a number of the freight skimmers busily shuttling loads of the fish protein, marine protozoa, and sea greens which nourished most of the population. Beyond the line of stations, he saw one of the giant trawlers drifting in as it impassively herded shoals, armies, whole deep-sea kingdoms of fish in its invisible magnetic nets.

Living on shore, Stirling realized, it was easy to forget the awesome scale of the Food Technology Authority’s operations, or the simple fact that it stood between the people of the United States and decimation by famine. Looked at in that light, Gordon Hodder and the other members of the F.T.A. hierarchy could almost be forgiven for creating a political machine and systematically filling key governmental posts with their own men. There even were arguments in favor of this from the constitutional point of view. Many political theorists had pointed out that, since the U.S. had been virtually divided by the dust into two separate countries, each with its own administrative setup, the F.T.A. was the one, big, unifying force that remained. The nominally Democratic East Coast Government and the Republican West seemed to be drifting further and further apart, creating a political climate in which Hodder might become the first real President the country had seen in nearly a century.

Stirling was not a political animal; but the idea of a country’s ruler having absolute control over its food supplies had negative appeal for him. His objection was so ingrained that he had never felt it necessary to express it in less basic terms.

As the processing stations fell behind, the island ahead began to bulk larger on the horizon. While he watched, a black mote detached itself from the upper surface and began the long climb to Heaven. It brought home to Stirling the enormity of what he was setting out to do. The He was a huge, misty trapezium filling most of the eastern sky. Wisps of cloud streamed beneath it—obscuring much of the fine detail of its underside—but at this range he could see the protuberance of the centrally positioned power plant. Smaller booster units dotted the structure in a regular pattern—propagating the field which shielded it from the lethal yearnings of gravitation—and between them ran intricate webworks of lattice girders and secondary beams.

Why, Stirling wondered numbly, why would anyone want to leave the ground and live up there? Green fields and fresh food there might be—but a man would be exposed, with a naked sky above, and fifteen thousand feet of wind\ darkness yawning below his bed while he slept. The idea was … unthinkable. Suddenly Stirling did not want to go and was unable to produce any reason for going. There was no longer any mystery about Johnny’s fate: Bennett had confirmed that he had bought a one-way trip to the He. His mother had been hit harder by the disappearance than her despair-molded nature would let her admit; but what would be solved by dragging Johnny back by the seat of his pants? And if he, Stirling, was being motivated by a belated need to play the role of a protective big brother, was there not some less traumatic gesture he could make to the memory of the flushed, defenseless face that had shared his boyhood pillow?

The questions gnawed steadily into Stirling’s resolve as the island loomed up ahead—rearing its masts and gantries into the sky. He moved his shoulders uneasily in the unfamiliar gray uniform and walked across the cargo hold to a spot where Bennett was staring moodily into an empty phosphates container.

“You’d better get in,” Bennett said. “We’ll be berthing in a couple of minutes.”

Stirling hesitated, imagining an uninterrupted arch of throbbing blue sky overhead and three merciless miles of thin air beneath his feet. An icy feeling started in his groin and crept upwards in a leisurely tide through his abdomen and stomach. He gripped the edge of the container, crushed the thick buttery plastic, then noticed Bennett staring up at him with open malice.

“What’s the matter, big man? Changing your mind?” “I’m not changing my mind.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. A guy would need to be sick before he would want to get up on that thing. There’s time to call it quits.”

“Forget it.” Stirling clambered into the container and hunkered down in its base to let Bennett fit the lid.

Bennett shrugged. “All right, big man, but don’t make any mistakes. Remember to check your watch as soon as you feel the elevator take off. The trip will take twelve minutes, give or take a few seconds. Then you’ll be shunted onto a transfer belt.

“I’ve kept this container near the end of the batch, so you’ll have a good five minutes before it reaches the openers. The blades slice off the top as clean as a whistle… . So don’t be in there too long.” Stirling nodded doggedly.

“We’ll give you two minutes from time of arrival—that is, exactly fourteen minutes from the second you take off— then you break out in a hurry. Fourteen minutes, remember. I’ll be in the monitoring room down here distracting the duty officer exactly then. But I won’t be able to keep his eyes off the screen more than about thirty seconds. You’ll have to move real fast. Understand?”

“Wait fourteen minutes and jump out,” Stirling said impatiently. “It’s hardly as abstruse as anti-grav field theory.” Bennett grinned. “Theory on the ground and practice up there are two different things. You’ll see.”

Stirling stared at him expressionlessly as Bennett fitted the yellow plastic lid, which shut out all light except for a dim mustard radiance from above. It occurred to him that Bennett might be lying about the sequence of operations up on the He and their timing. What if the phosphates containers were shunted off the elevator directly into an opening machine? Or even a crushing machine? After all, the containers were disposable; so there was no need to baby them around. And with Stirling dead there would be little to incriminate Bennett even if the monitoring team glimpsed his body. The guards at the shore checkpoints would hardly remember seeing the two men walk through together.

Negative thinking, Stirling told himself. He could not fully understand the pressures that were driving him up to the He in his brother’s footsteps; but he knew he was not turning back at this stage. Stirling spent a few minutes going through the small pack which he had prepared, at Bennett’s advice, and checking its contents. He had brought a foam-insulated sleeping bag, a supply of individually wrapped protein bars, and a powerful handlight. There was no telling how long it would take to find Johnny and persuade him to return, and he had tried to reconcile himself to the idea of being aloft for several days.

Getting back was a comparatively easy problem, because at this time of the year large daily consignments of lettuce and other leaf vegetables were taking the big drop every day. The cases were loaded out of range of the monitoring cameras; and Bennett had supplied a schedule of his own shift times for the coming week, plus instructions on how to mark the case in which they chose to hide.

Stirling felt the skimmer lurch as it reached the island and went up a ramp into its berth. There was a brief delay followed by a period of jolting and slithering sensations. Indecipherable shouts punctuated the querulous whining of servos, and he wondered just how many strings Bennett was pulling to circumvent the normal weight and irradiation checks which might have revealed his presence.

Crouched in the saffron twilight of the container, Stirling held his watch close to his eyes and waited for the ascent to begin. He wondered if he would be sure of the exact moment.

He was sure.

All anti-grav vehicles designed for passenger transport divert part of the frustrated gravitic force through a field reversal stage, in effect creating an artificial gravity on the upper side of the craft. This was an unnecessary refinement on a vehicle intended purely for freight work: it was cheaper and simpler to ensure that the cargo was either in secured containers or netted in position to prevent it drifting. Stirling’s first intimation that the’ elevator had begun to rise was a sudden feeling that he was falling, hurtling downwards just as fast as the Earth could suck him in. He drifted up from the base of the container, vainly grabbed for an anchor point, and brushed gently against its lid. All the ancient instincts in his body told him to scream because, since the dawn of life, every creature that had ever experienced this sensation was destined to die within seconds.

An indeterminate time went by before cool-fingered logic told him that he could not be falling and that he was merely being screened from the force of gravity. Stirling forced himself to relax, then realized he had not noted the take-off time on his watch. He looked at the jerking sweep-hand—the blind present tapping its way into eternity—and wondered, ten, twenty, thirty, seconds? Settling for twenty, he got his back against a wall of waxy plastic, braced his feet on the opposite one, and waited out the long climb to Heaven.

On reflection, he should have expected the weightlessness. It was that very phenomenon which had been a major factor in halting the spread of the International Land Extensions. In the panic years which followed 1992, money had been no barrier and the Big Three’s first impulse had been to create an air-borne agriculture—if necessary, to span seas and oceans with anti-grav rafts. A start had actually been made on such a program; but the new science of anti-gravities had run foul of man’s oldest —astronomy. It became clear that raft construction on the scale proposed would have screened off a sizable proportion of the mutual attraction of Earth and sun, and would have sent the planet into a widening spiral away from the celestial hearth. A new start was made with lies in which only the supporting structural grid was screened—a vastly more difficult engineering proposition—but by then the F.T.A. was already getting results from the ocean, and the He program lost way.

Stirling’s next indication that the elevator was gaining altitude came when he began to feel the cold, but the drop in temperature was one thing he had expected: even as boys he and Johnny had realized the need for big boots when walking the uplands of Heaven. He slipped the straps of the pack over his shoulders and struggled into a kneeling position, ready to burst through the lid of the container. His watch was showing just over twelve minutes gone when there was an abrupt return of weight and a sense of trundling, lateral movement. A variety of overlapping mechanical sounds filtered through to him: hydraulic moans, the dull thunder of pumps and meshing gears, occasional shrill squeaks.

Stirling’s mouth was dry. I’m three miles up in the blue, he thought, and there’s nothing above or below me. Will I be able to control my arms and legs? And my bladder?

At exactly fourteen minutes Stirling thrust himself upwards. The flexible plastic of the lid bowed upwards momentarily, then snapped flat again, throwing him back down on his knees. He swore furiously. So that was it! Bennett had secured the lid intending Stirling to remain in the container until it reached the blades. Or would it be crushers?

Bracing his hands against broad knees, Stirling put his back against the lid and exerted all the lift of which his outsized body was capable. The lid domed upwards, but did not break. Wait for me, Johnny. For God’s sake wait for me! Growling with effort, he drove up again with bunched shoulders. The plastic ruptured into sharp-edged tongues which tore into his skin as he went through.

As he struggled to extract his legs from the obstinately contracting hole in the lid, Stirling caught a glimpse of sterile blue sky patterned by overhead girders, a green horizon on his left, and his immediate predecessors in the line of yellow containers. They were jostling along a roller way and over a line of snarling circular blades which ripped them open from underneath, allowing the white powder to fall through into a hopper. There were less than five seconds to go before he reached the ripsaws, and his ankles and feet were still enmeshed in the tough triangles of plastic.

Stirling kicked out frantically, feeling cloth and skin give way on the rough edges; then he was tumbling sideways, clear of the train of containers. He leaped from the roller way into the struts of a lattice girder which paralleled it, dropped onto a flat area crisscrossed with metal tracks, and sprinted in the direction of the green horizon.

His feet were sliding on a thick coaling of frost, and the gelid air ravaged his throat and lungs. To his right, an angular, bright red object whined into life and sped towards him on wheels limned with purple fire.

Reaching the edge of the flat area, Stirling discovered, too late, that he was about fifteen feet above the level of the vegetation he had glimpsed. The red object chattered at him and whipped the air with chromium arms. He jumped blindly out from the edge and smashed down into a world of wet green foliage and black earth. His legs, unprepared for the impact, doubled up and he pitched forward, landing on a smooth rock half buried in the soil.

Incredibly, there was a moment of perfect silence and peace: the red machine seemed to have lost interest in him once he vanished from its precinct. Stirling sat up cautiously, trying to regain his wind, and noticed something unpleasant about the rock on which he had fallen. It was whitish in color, and had gaping eye sockets.

Gold fillings glittered in two of the teeth.