The Ceres Solution

Chapter Ten

“He did something like this…” The tired-looking young man hesitantly moved his right hand through a complex downward curve. “Then he wasn’t there any more.”

Gretana, who had been watching the television relay from the Cape with some interest, felt a near-physical impact as the content of the young man’s words and actions stormed through her mind. She froze in the act of unbuttoning her blouse, went to the set and pressed the retro-record switch. Her second and third viewings of the crucial part of the interview proved superfluous—she had known first time round, with jarring certainty, that Phil Barren had been imitating a Mollanian transfer symbol. His claim that the spacesuited figure had then vanished, rendering his story incredible to almost any other listener, was all the proof she needed. The inescapable conclusion was that the Aristotle space colony had been sabotaged by a Mollanian.

She sat down on the pliant edge of her bed, staring with unfocused eyes, forgetting the summary of the news about the abandonment of Aristotle and the fierce international recriminations it was causing. Lorrest had told her to pay attention to the news, to be on the alert for evidence of 2H’s activities—and there was no doubt that sabotaging the colony was interference with IgTerran affairs on a grand scale. It was almost certain that the renegades had located a minor transient node—a fortuitous, drifting Intersection of local skord lines—which had enabled one of their lumber to carry out a guerrilla attack on Aristotle. Even Barren’s assertion that the saboteur had stopped short of killing him was [indirect evidence that he had encountered a Mollanian, but that jnly served to deepen the central mystery.

Why had they done it?

In what way could the destruction of Earth’s first and only beachhead in space serve the aims of Lorrest and his organisation? Given that he was acting from some kind of misguided altruism, she would have expected him to assist the Terrans to spread into space and away from the chaotic third-order forces of the Earth-Moon system. It seemed to her that Lorrest had slammed a door on the Terrans, trapping them on the ill-starred planet as effectively as he was.

She remained motionless, blouse partly undone, more convinced with each passing second that she was caught up in something far beyond her understanding, and that there were vast ramifications she had not even glimpsed. Everybody in the world will know about it when it happens, Lorrest had told her. Vekrynn is going to take this planet apart to find us. Was this what he had meant? Was this pnough to prompt the Warden to institute a determined manhunt—or was it only a beginning?

The abrupt realisation that she was completely out of her depth brought Gretana an unexpected sense of relief. Changing her mind about undressing, she stood up and went to the bedroom closet to fetch her overnight bag, comforted by the fact that her duties were now so clearly defined.

It was time to report to Warden Vekrynn.

The batteries of the rented car were growing weak by the time she reached Carsewell in the grainy light of dawn.

Lingering fears about being followed by Lorrest had led her to take a circuitous route and to expend extra energy by completing most of the journey at night. The result was that by the time she reached the southern approach to Carsewell her lack of speed was beginning to make the car conspicuous. Anxious though she was to reach the nodal point, she knew better than to break one of the most basic rules of her trade. She called in at a suburban service station to exchange batteries, only to be told by a grinning, Zapata-moustached attendant that a local power failure had depleted the stock of ready-units. All he could offer was a recharge which was going to take at least an hour.

Gretana, suddenly aware of how tired she was after the protracted drive, decided to accept the recharge. She went into the deserted coffee shop, determined to relax until the car was ready. The attendant, perhaps under the impression that her decision not to press on had something to do with his personal charm, followed her to the counter and straddled the stool next to her. Gretana spoke to him quietly and earnestly for some thirty seconds, at the end of which he stood up and walked away with a thoughtful expression.

Again it occurred to Gretana that she was not the person she had been twenty-three years earlier. A sudden yearning to go home, to be done with Earth and all its futility, turned her thoughts towards Vekrynn. While sipping black coffee she wondered if what she had to report would be sufficiently important to guarantee a meeting with him. The prospect of seeing the Warden again in person was both exciting and unnerving, a foretaste and at the same time a reaffirmation of all that the future promised. Lately, in spite of all her efforts, her vision of that endless golden Sunday afternoon…no, that had been Lorrest’s derogatory phrase…of that succession of calmly joyful decades had been growing strangely two-dimensional, and she needed Vekrynn to restore its solidity.

As soon as the car was ready she drove through Carsewell to the west side of the city and parked on a little-used dirt track near the perimeter of the Greenways housing development. Ten minutes of brisk walking in the diamond-faceted morning air brought her to where nothing but the old highway separated her from the sloping pasture which led up to Cotter’s Edge. She crossed over, negotiated the snow-filled drainage ditch and began the ascent towards the nodal point. The flawlessness of the white curvatures ahead of her, proof that she was the first to take that path since the snow had fallen, raised the question of how many Mollanian observers used the same route to Station 23. She guessed the number would have to be quite small to prevent the area of the node attracting too much local interest and perhaps acquiring an odd reputation.

On reaching the cover of the trees she kicked some compacted snow off her boots, and—already sensing the other-worldliness, the connectedness of the place—made towards the hidden clearing. Rehearsing the address of Station 23 in her mind, she skirted a clump of undergrowth, went to step down into the invisible aura of the node itself and jarred to a halt, a shocked whimper escaping her lips.

Encountering another person in the clearing was a rare and surprising event—it had happened only once in more than two decades—but its strangeness was compounded by the intruder’s appearance.

Sitting in an electrically-propelled wheelchair was a frail, hollow-shouldered man, possibly in his early thirties, whose lop-sided face had been eroded by illness and pain. Here was a man, Gretana knew immediately, whose lifespan would be only a tiny fraction of her own, short even by Terran standards, but who knew more about suffering than she could ever comprehend. A reddish plaid rug lay on the ground beside his chair and his concave chest was exposed to the hostile chill of the winter air. The man’s face was mottled with blue, and small fast-fading feathers of condensation testified to the weakness and rapidity of his breathing.

He’s dying, she thought, chastened, prey to all the lacerating emotions she thought she had learned to suppress. He came here to die!

Overwhelmed by a combination of uncertainty and pity, she held herself as still as one of the surrounding trees while her mind wrestled with a terrible suspicion. There was something about the’s tortured face, something about the set of his chin and the incongruous smoothness of his brow…

Is this the same little boy? The one who fled on his crutches? Gretana felt a coldness which had nothing to do with the environment. Is this what twenty years of illness…?

The answer to her questions was both unexpected and dramatic. Under her petrified gaze, the man in the wheelchair raised his right hand and brought it downwards through the air in what was undoubtedly an attempt to reproduce a Mollanian transfer symbol.

She understood at once that the crippled boy and man were the same person, and that at some time in the past he had seen her or some other Mollanian agent depart for Station 23. The event would have seemed like magic to the Terran, especially as a child, and the impression it must have made could be gauged from the fact that he had chosen to spend the last minutes of his life here. Inspired by a last guttering of hope, he had tried to set foot on the same invisible road. Predictably, his gesture had brought no result. The whole principle of sympathetic congruency was dependent on a number of factors—an understanding of the basic philosophy, a disciplined effort of will, an awareness of the mathematical relationship between primary location and the target node.

None of these had been available to the man in the wheelchair, however, and with the failure of his untutored attempt to skord he appeared to have given up his hold on life. He had lowered his head, folded his hands in his lap, and the movements of his chest were fast becoming imperceptible. His very submissiveness—like that of a small animal curling up to die—magnified Gretana’s pain. She pressed the heels of both hands to her temples. Something had to be done, but nothing could be done. To try summoning medical aid would only…

“Over here, Ed,” a man shouted from somewhere nearby. “She’s in here.”

Gretana spun round, dry-mouthed, and through the trees glimpsed a tall, heavy-set man in the crimson cap of a hunter. He was carrying a shotgun and beckoning to a companion. She reached the centre of the clearing without being conscious of any physical effort or lapse of time. For a second she feared that the distractions of the situation would scramble her thoughts, but her mind reacted positively, assembling the elements of the transfer equation with special rapidity.

She lifted her right hand, poised herself for departure, and in that precise instant the man in the wheelchair raised his head, opened his eyes. She saw his look of disbelief merge into wonderment, then he was reaching towards her with both hands in a kind of supplication. There was a splintering of twigs, a rattling of undergrowth near the edge of the clearing.

Unable to check herself, driven by a complex emotional reaction, Gretana took one of the outstretched hands, and at the same time used her right hand to sculpt a unique quintic mnemo-curve in the cold air.

The transfer took place.