The Ceres Solution

Chapter Nine

Sedated though he was, the descent through the atmosphere and the landing at the Cape had terrified Hargate.

His sojourn in space had lasted only a matter of months, but that had been enough time for him to become acclimatised to its calmness, to an environment in which all movements were characterised by deliberation, smoothness and silence. In contrast, the final stage of his return to Earth had been a period of confusion, unbearable noise levels and wild buffeting from a dark grey atmosphere that appeared to be entirely composed of clouds, rain and hail. The landing at KSC had been so rough that Hargate had been positive the ship would be hauled away for repair, and yet he had heard it take off again barely two hours later, while he was still waiting to be processed at the emergency reception centre. Earth had become an alien and hostile place, peopled by cold-eyed giants who resented his presence, where the very weight of the air threatened to stop his breathing.

And the threat, he quickly discovered, was no figment of his imagination. He was waiting in line with about twenty other disabled refugees from Aristotle—some of them also in wheelchairs—when he began to sweat profusely and something like a massive cannonball seemed to form inside his chest. It was hard, uncompromising and real, leaving no room within his ribcage for the functioning of vital organs. His lungs fluttered against it, but were easily displaced; his heart strove to beat faster, but the warmth and life were being drawn out of it and into the metallic heat sink.

A crushing pain encircled his thorax.

He glanced around the makeshift reception centre—at the concrete floor, steel-trussed walls and unadorned windows with their sections of distant flat horizon—and felt an overriding panic at the notion that this, this, could be the last scene he would ever see.

“Pardon me,” he said to the wheat-haired woman who was seated on a bench beside him. “Can you help me, please? I think I’m having a…”

“Excuse me,” the woman said, smiling abstractedly as she stood up and walked away.

“You don’t understand,” Hargate called after her, but stress and the increased weakness of his palate smothered the words in a nasal honking which even to his own ear sounded ludicrous. “You great bitch,” he whispered and lapsed into silence as an agonising pins-and-needles sensation swept from his feet up to his thighs, adding to the burden of fear, making it intolerable and at the same time providing him with a completely novel idea.

Why not die? he thought. Everything’s screwed up now, good and proper, so why don’t you just compose yourself and get ready and ride the big wave that’s going to get you to hell out of this mess?

He took stock of his feelings and found he had not been indulging in private mock-heroics—dying seemed a perfectly good, logical and justifiable response to his set of problems. He subsided in his chair, relaxing, yielding.

I’m ready now—ready as I’ll ever be.

There was a moment of something like peace, then the planetoid of iron inside his chest began to dwindle and the tide of pain slowly ebbed away from his legs. Hargate lay still, almost disappointed, and experimented with his breathing, taking longer and deeper draughts of air as the internal crisis passed. His surroundings reassembled themselves in his consciousness, resuming their former solidity, and the sounds within the hangar-like building grew louder as though a volume control was being turned up.

He saw that the wheat-haired woman was returning to her seat with a cup of coffee, appraising him from beneath lowered eyelids as she drew near. Reaching for the cup with both hands, he gave her his most dreadful one-sided grin and was rewarded by the way in which she did an abrupt left wheel and walked to another part of the line.

Got you, he thought vindictively. That’s for not loving thy neighbour.

Later, when a harassed young medic, a Doctor Costick, asked him if he had experienced any ill effects from the space journey or the return to full gravity, he divulged nothing about the episode. His motives, he realised, were only partly that he had no wish to be hospitalised—the main consideration was that he no longer cared all that much whether he lived or died.

He had a natural preference for staying alive, but not if it meant—as he had done for as long as he could remember—bowing and scraping to the cloaked figure with the scythe, kissing skeletal feet. His stay on Aristotle, his holiday in the sky, had given him some idea of what a normal existence would be like, and he could see little reward in what now lay ahead. First prize, he thought, recalling and modifying an old joke, one more year of Denny Hargate’s old life; second prize—two more years of Denny Hargate’s old life…

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Costick said. “We haven’t much in the way of specialist facilities around here. Do you feel fit enough to travel back to…ah…Carsewell right away?”

“I can make it, but there isn’t much point—I gave up my apartment there when I signed on for Aristotle.” Hargate spoke comfortably, assigning all responsibility for his affairs to the NASA man.

“I see.” The medic unhappily inspected a document. “How about relatives or friends?”

“What are those things?”

The pattern of furrows on Costick’s brow deepened. “I see you have always attended the Dutchess County neurology clinic in Poughkeepsie. We could probably find you some accommodation near there. How would that suit you?”

“I’m easy.” Talk of a new permanent home on Earth disturbed Hargate, making him realise he had not fully accepted the situation with regard to the space colony. The story which had reached him was that a maintenance engineer called Barren had gone berserk on the end-cap with a powerful cutting tool, and then had given himself up to the authorities. An artificial world was obviously vulnerable to sabotage, but Hargate was reluctant to concede that one man, in a few seconds of technological savagery, could negate what amounted to humanity’s last grand dream.

“On the other hand,” he said casually, “I quite like the climate here in Florida.”

Costick was not deceived. “I don’t think we’ll be troubling you any farther, Mr Hargate—as soon as Aristotle became unstable it became uninhabitable.”

“Yeah, but it can’t be all that hard to tack on a new mirror and steady the whole thing up again. Maybe in a month or two when they…”

“I believe it’s a question of cost,” Costick cut in, happy to show that his expertise was not confined to one specialist field. “Canada, France and Holland have already announced that they’re withdrawing from the consortium, and you know what that means—these days we couldn’t fly a kite without international funding.”

“I ought to sue this character Barren. Better still, I should kick his balls up into his throat.” Hargate took hold of his right trouser leg and raised one inert foot from the step of his chair, wondering why he was going into one of his set pieces in front of a man who was unlikely to be embarrassed.

“Maybe you’ll get your chance—they’re holding him right here in KSC in the International Condominium,” Costick said. “I don’t think they know what to do with him.”

“Him and me both.”

Costick glanced at his watch. “That’s not the case, Mr Hargate.

I’m going to put you into the hostel for a night or two—at our expense, of course—and that will give you time to have a long talk with our senior placement officer.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” Hargate said drily. Within an hour he had been installed in an architecturally unadventurous building which looked as though it had been designed as tourist accommodation back in the days when NASA still believed that Aristotle was only the forerunner of an expanding series of space colonies. It had been reactivated to house the pitiful brigade of which Hargate was a member—the invalids and the chronically ill, whose abrupt return to Earth was sending ripples of annoyance and inconvenience from one side of the country to the other. Hargate did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed over the fact that he had no relatives who would have played sullen games of pass-the-parcel with his reincarnated presence and all the attendant responsibilities. It would have been amusing, for a while anyway, to bowl unannounced on to somebody’s patio with a cheery wave. Hi, gang! I’m back…

He chose to dine in his room, and found the meal almost more trouble than it was worth. The return to full gravity had made drinking particularly difficult. Before finishing his coffee he had soaked the table napkin with fluid regurgitated through his nose, and had been forced to bring extra tissues from the bathroom. In spite of all his caution, a few drops of the coffee found their way into his bronchial tract and, due to a new difficulty he was having with coughing, he spent twenty minutes after his meal in weak heaving and choking which left him exhausted. During that time it grew dark outside the room’s single window and he found his thoughts returning to the intriguing, repulsive-attractive idea which had occurred to him in the afternoon. He was not suicidal, he decided on analysis of his feelings—it was simply that he could see some advantages in being dead.

The male attendant who came to remove the tray reproved him for sitting alone in the darkness, and after being startled by the caustic nature of Hargate’s response took some measure of revenge by switching on the wall television, unbidden, on his way out. Hargate, swearing bitterly, propelled himself towards the remote control and was on the point of killing the picture when he realised that the tired-looking, stubble-chinned young man on the screen was actually Phil Barren, astronautical engineer extraordinary, perpetrator of history’s most expensive single act of vandalism, author of all Hargate’s current troubles. Barren, whose black curly hair was prematurely receding, looked angry rather than contrite, and deep indentations which kept appearing at the corners of his mouth suggested he was aggrieved by what the interviewer was saying. Hargate turned up the volume control.

“…of people talking about this super-laser I’m supposed to have had,” Barren said. “What super-laser? I never heard of weapons like that, and even if they did exist somewhere—how would I have gotten hold of one?”

“It has been suggested,” the unseen interviewer put in, “that it came from an Eastern Bloc country.”

“That, if you will forgive me saying so, is crap.” Barron moved restlessly, highlights on his forehead turning into blue-white shimmers. “I’ve been through every loyalty check there is, and…and…Know what? This business makes me look stupid. If I had wanted to sabotage Aristotle I could have done it far better with one stick of dynamite and a timing clock. I wouldn’t have risked getting my head burned off—and you can bet your life I wouldn’t have made up that character in the funny spacesuit.”

“Oh yes—the incredible vanishing Martian.”

“I didn’t say anything about a Martian,” Barron said doggedly. “All I said was that he vanished.”

“You’re positive he was there in the first place?”

Hargate, prompted by a stirring in his subconscious, increased the volume and leaned forward, scarcely breathing, as Barron wearily recounted how a figure in a silver-and-gold spacesuit had appeared in space near the colony’s end-cap and had destroyed equipment worth millions of dollars with an unknown type of energy weapon. The story was an incredible one, quite unbelievable, and yet a small boy called Denny Hargate had once learned something very important about the hidden side of reality.

“And that’s all there was to it,” the television reporter said. “This spacesuited figure simply vanished?”

“Well…” Barron had begun to speak slowly, as though examining his own testimony for flaws. “Before it actually disappeared it seemed to give some kind of a…I guess you’d have to call it a signal.”

“It waved goodbye to you.”

Barron ignored the facetiousness. “Perhaps it was more like a sign. He did something like this…” Barron raised his right hand and hesitantly traced a curve in the air. “Then he wasn’t there any more.”

Hargate, whose heart had begun an irregular pounding, sat back in his chair and thought of the girl, the beautiful and magical girl, he had seen twenty years earlier in a secret place to which he had never been able to return.

The policeman at the main entrance was in his mid-twenties—old enough to have acquired breadth of shoulder and an air of having seen all there was to see; young enough to have retained a peachy smoothness of complexion. His tobacco-coloured uniform was neatly pressed and its multi-hued roundels, reminiscent of historic astronauts’ badges, glowed like jewelry. He stared down at Hargate with amused incredulity.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “There’s just no way you could get in to see detainee Barron without a special permit.”

“I’m very glad to hear that—the Centre’s finest would be falling down on the job if it allowed just anybody to walk in off the street and have access to dangerous criminals.” Hargate surveyed the bronzed glass foyer of the International Condominium’s police headquarters and nodded his approval. “Now, my reason for wanting to go inside is that I want to obtain one of those special permits you mentioned—so all you have to do is direct me to the appropriate room. Right?”

“Maybe. What’s your name?”

“Dennis R. Hargate.”

“And where are you from, Mr Hargate?”

“Until yesterday I was from up there.” Hargate pointed one finger skywards. “I’m a drop-out from Aristotle.”

“I see,” the policeman said doubtfully. “What’s your business with Barron?”

Hargate, in spite of having resolved to keep his tongue in check, grew impatient. He had been totally unable to sleep during the night, had left the hostel without breakfast and had spent more than an hour searching for and reaching the police building. Now he was beginning to feel tired and ill.

“I just want to visit with him,” he said. “He’s allowed visitors, isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“In that case, why don’t we stop wasting each other’s time?” Hargate moved his drive control and tried to surge towards the inner doors, but the policeman—with an embarrassed glance towards several passers-by—caught the chair’s left armrest and slewed it round, forcing him to stop.

That was the beginning of a public argument which eventually involved Hargate with another policeman, two sergeants and several plain-clothes officers of indeterminate rank, and which got him no further than a cramped office adjoining the entrance hall. As his frustration increased he began to feel flickers of pain in his chest, but he prolonged the scene—capitalising on the reluctance of the others to crack down hard on a cripple—until an entirely new symptom of his illness made itself apparent. At first his perceived world of giants simply appeared more crowded and confusing than usual, then came the jolting realisation that he was experiencing double vision. It was a classic symptom of MPN, one which Doctor Foerster had predicted, but its effect on Hargate was powerfully disconcerting. He was being attacked from within his own head. He lapsed into an abrupt silence while he groped in his pockets for the box of Enka-B tablets he had been neglecting to use.

One of the sergeants hunkered down in front of him. “Say, do you feel all right?”

“Why do you ask?” Hargate queried blandly, guessing that his features now had the additional asymmetry of a squint. “Don’t I look all right?”

It was when the sergeant turned away with a troubled expression, unexpectedly reminding Hargate of his mother when he had thrown verbal acid in her face, that he knew he wanted to go home. The notion of talking to Phil Barren, beguiling in its time, was ill-considered and pointless. What had he been hoping would come of it? An exclusive club for people who saw other people vanish in peculiar circumstances?

Hargate sat with his head down, trying to draw the calmness of pranayama from the air, only distantly aware that there were several newcomers in the small office. And when he found that one of them was Doctor Costick, presumably answering a summons from the police, he knew that his plans for the immediate future were complete.

He had done all that could be expected of him. He had tried the bold experiment of living a normal life in a frail travesty of a man’s body. He had even ventured into space, something of which only a microscopic fraction of the human race could boast, and through no fault of his own the dice had fallen badly, denying him everything that Aristotle had promised. There was nothing more that he or anybody else could do. It was now time for him to get rid of the pain and discomfort, the hopelessness and sheer indignity of being Denny Hargate.

“Good morning, doctor,” he said, smiling. “I don’t know what was wrong with my memory yesterday—I’ve just thought of the perfect place for me to stay in Carsewell.”

The fact that he was allowed to leave for the north that day was, Hargate realised, an indication of the vast overload being placed on all the Cape’s facilities by the emergency evacuation of the Aristotle colony. Throughout his entire stay the four operational shuttles had been living up to their generic name, the sound of their launchings creating an edgy vulcanic background to the lesser human activities on the ground. The Condominium was heavily populated by journalists of all kinds whose interest had been morbidly stimulated by the fact that the abandonment of Aristotle, the retreat from Lagrange, was probably the last big story concerning space flight. Hargate only escaped predatory reporters by virtue of not matching their preconceptions about how an astronaut ought to look.

His journey to the north took almost two days, a succession of starts and stops in transporter modules which clung for a while to the traction cables of huge nuclear prime movers and released their hold when a change of direction was needed. The gradual deterioration of the weather was appropriate to Hargate’s mood, and he was almost gratified by his first sight of snow, grey-white tatters which littered the passing landscapes like discarded newspapers. By the time he reached Carsewell the snow covering was complete and the coldness of the early morning air shocked him with each invasion of his lungs. He could imagine their tissue already beginning to wither, to succumb, path-finding for the rest of his body.

The other passengers who had descended from the same module quickly dispersed, leaving Hargate alone on the platform with the single large case which held all his belongings. Force of habit caused him to ponder for a moment on how to get the case to the baggage lockers unaided, then he remembered there was no need. He was abdicating from such responsibilities. Feeling oddly guilty, he engaged the wheelchair’s drive and rolled away towards the station’s exit, abandoning the case to its shabby isolation.

Carsewell was in the middle of the slight lull that always followed the morning rush, but he had difficulty in hiring a taxi. Several drivers, deciding that his chair would cause more inconvenience than the fare was worth, ignored his signals, and more than ten minutes elapsed before he was picked up. By that time the cold had penetrated his coat and the rug that covered his legs. The paralysis and debility affecting most of his body precluded shivering, the natural defence against low temperatures, with the result that he quickly began to feel numb.

“Where to?” the taxi driver said as the vehicle pulled away from Warren Station with some sputtering from its ageing electric motor.

It occurred to Hargate that his batteries would be unable to cope with the rising ground on the direct route to Cotter’s Edge, that he would need to approach it from the eastern side. “Do you know the Reigh place?”

“I only work on addresses, friend. You tell me the address and I’ll get you there.”

“Just west of Greenways—I’ll direct you,” Hargate said mildly. Under normal circumstances the other man’s brusqueness would have inspired a vigorously unpleasant retort, but that too was something for which there was no longer any need. There was no point in fighting battles after the war itself had been lost. He stared quietly and abstractedly at familiar scenery until the taxi had neared the crest of the low hills which bounded the city and was travelling along the perimeter of the Reigh farm.

The driver looked puzzled but refrained from comment when Hargate got out at a cattle gate from which the farm buildings themselves could not even be seen. Hargate felt a playful urge to increase the man’s bafflement by handing him all the money he had left as a tip, then decided it could excite suspicion and perhaps lead to interference with his plans. He gave a reasonable tip, watched the yellow vehicle disappear into the bright snowscape, then turned his thoughts to the considerable task of reaching the secret place in a conveyance which had not been designed for cross-country work.

Luckily, the snow covering had been pared thin by the wind and did not create too much drag once he had passed through the gate. He set off on a descending diagonal course towards the leafless maples which were like venous systems etched on horizontal swathes of brilliance formed by the pastures, folds of ground and distant hills. The sky was a sentient blue lens and it seemed impossible that he could reach his destination without being seen, but within five minutes he was safely among the trees and his motor was whining in complaint as the chair balked at their root systems. He used what remained of his strength to turn the wheels, careless of the thorny undergrowths which tore at his knuckles, and—magical suddenness—he was there. The secret place was all around him.

It was almost twenty-one years since Hargate had visited the hidden clearing, and he had never seen it before in winter, but the feel of the place was the same, its welcome was the same. There, exactly as he remembered it, was the limestone shelf which formed a natural armchair, cushioned now with a white meniscus of snow. There was the spring, rimmed with ice petals, and even the overturned stump was more-or-less intact.

The nasal braying sound of Hargate’s breathing began to abate as the stealthy intangibles of the place started to affect him. Its noumenon had not changed either. There was the same solitude without loneliness, the sense of being removed from the world and yet somehow, in a way that defied his understanding, of being at one with all that lay beyond the world.

I’ve done the right thing, he thought, nodding. It’ll be all right in this place…

He grasped one edge of the red plaid travel rug and flicked it away from him, exposing the near-skeletal thinness of his legs, then unbuttoned his overcoat, jacket and shirt. The cold embraced him immediately, slipping intimate arms around his body, a practised lover who fully understood the principle of being cruel to be kind. Hargate endured the sensation without flinching, wondering how long the whole process was going to take. Others might have wanted time to review their lives and make final summations, but in his case there was no need for such embellishments. It was enough to have been Denny Hargate for thirty-two years. He was under no obligation to cap the experience with uninspired metaphors—non-starter in the Great Race, dealt a losing hand, etc—when all he yearned for was a quick exit.

Hargate closed his eyes and waited.

At first there was considerable pain, from the coldness itself and from the pins-and-needles at his extremities, then the numbness took over and brought an end to all sensation. He was still alive, yet felt free of physical restraint. In the dreamlike state of being, halfway between life and death, the laws of space-time no longer seemed quite so immutable. Perhaps, after all, there was a lingering trace of magic in the universe.

I wonder if I could do what she did, he thought, aware that he was sinking fast, and taking nothing but comfort from the knowledge. I wonder if I could follow her.

Gripped by a sudden fey elation, an irrational conviction that the best was yet to come, he raised his right hand and retraced—as closely as he could remember it after a lapse of two decades—the design that had been scribed on the air by the loveliest girl he had ever seen.

Nothing happened.

No miracle occurred.

You always were a fool, he told himself, deliberately selecting the past tense, jeering at his own disappointment. Right to the end…