The Ceres Solution

Chapter Fifteen

Lorrest tye Thralen, in spite of his many years on Earth, had never quite shaken off his Mollanian fear of heights. He could recall with amusement his earliest decades in Eyrej province, when he too would never have considered running without first donning an exercise mask to protect his face in the event of a fall. In his opinion that was one of the more ludicrous of his people’s foibles, evidence of their obssessive preoccupation with physical beauty as expressed in the Twenty Rubrics of the Lucent Ideal.

He had often told himself that the acrophobia which was universal on Mollan, making buildings of more than one storey extremely rare, was merely an extension of the same attitude, that the principal reason for it was the dread of what the impact with the ground could do to face and form. That being the case, he—who had scrupulously discarded all that was petty and parochial in his upbringing—should have been able to perch on a high ledge with the same equanimity he showed in, say, driving a car. But it had not worked out that way.

A short distance beyond the window of his fifth-floor hotel room were the rusting beams of an adjoining steel-framed building which had never been completed. At times he would stand for long periods by the window, concentrating all his attention on the reality of the beams, bringing their flanges and cleats and welds into intensely sharp focus against the blurry background of the street, but no matter how he tried he was never able to identify himself with the construction workers who had routinely put the steelwork in place. And as for the men who ventured far higher, the erection crews on skyscrapers, their minds and lives were beyond his comprehension.

A common Mollanian rationalisation was that, with only a few decades of life at stake, the Terrans could be much more casual about the risk of death, but Lorrest was inclined to reverse that reasoning. The shorter the term of life the more precious each day had to be, and the physical courage often displayed by Terrans—as compared to the cautious nature of the average Mollanian—was another indication that they had begun to differ generically from the interstellar human stock. Against all the odds, the savage riptide of lunar forces which played havoc with their initial genetic structuring had created something positive in addition to all the predictable malaises. That vital essence was worth preserving, as far as Lorrest was concerned, no matter how great the cost or effort…

He was standing by the window, watching dust motes march and countermarch in a ray of lemon-coloured sunlight, when his telephone sounded at precisely the arranged hour. He allowed it to bleep eight times, part of the 2H identification code, then picked up the instrument and slipped a scrambler disc into place across the mouthpiece.

“Fair seasons, Haran,” he said, speaking in English. “It looks as though Phase Two has gone off all right.”

“Phases One and Two were the easy parts,” Haran tye Felthan replied stolidly. “Warden Vekrynn couldn’t care less about what we did to the space colony, and until recently he hasn’t had any reason to concern himself with Ceres—but it’s all different now, Lorrest. He’s bound to have heard about the disappearance by this time, and he’s bound to have connected it with us, and with any kind of computer survey of the possibilities he’s bound to…”

“You’re bounding faster than a kangaroo,” Lorrest cut in. “Has there been much public reaction in France?”

“Practically none. Up to the present six different organisations have claimed responsibility for flattening the Eiffel Tower, and the average citizen here finds that more interesting than astronomers losing a ball of rock.”

“They’ll learn,” Lorrest said cheerfully. “It’s been quiet here too. A few stargazers-are-scratching-their-heads stories in the magazine programmes…nothing more…but they’ll learn. Everybody’s going to learn.”

“Lorrest!” There was a brief pause, and when Haran spoke again he sounded edgy and depressed. “I didn’t get the scheduled check call from Orotonth this afternoon.”

“It could be a foul-up in the telephones.”

“Could be, but if the Bureau has picked him up he’ll have told them everything he knows.”

“Which isn’t very much.”

“Except that he knows you’re in Baltimore,” Haran said. “Think about it, Lorrest. If Vekrynn has any inkling of what is happening he’ll think nothing of spending a million, a billion, to pull you in before it’s too late. You’ve got to be careful.”

Lorrest snorted his indignation. “When was I ever not careful?”

“Do you mean within the last week? How about your going off on your own and trying to recruit that woman in Annapolis? We’re not a religious organisation looking for converts, man. We’re up to our necks in a very dangerous…”

“Point taken,” Lorrest said quickly, unwilling to discuss his tactical blunder of a few days earlier. “But you wouldn’t be talking like that if I’d got the location of the north-east node out of her.”

“And I wouldn’t be talking to you at all if she’d turned you in.”

“Let’s not hold a post-mortem,” Lorrest said, using a favourite formula for dismissing any consideration of his impulsiveness. The reminder that one of his personal foibles could have endangered the most important plan ever conceived by 2H left him feeling guilty and nervous, and when he had finished the telephone conversation he prowled around the apartment several times, scowling at the floor and trying to define his position with regard to the outside universe.

One of his most serious problems, as he saw it, was that he tended to regard everything as a kind of game. Haran was justified in sounding so serious, so dire, but at the same time—and knowing perfectly well that his colleague was right—Lorrest was unable to repress a flickering of contempt and amusement. He could remember how in his second decade he had heard for the first time about the doctrine of Preservationism and the role of the Bureau of Wardens. The idea of studying the rise and decline of civilisation on a hundred human worlds for the sole purpose of ensuring that Mollanian culture could continue indefinitely had struck him as being both egocentric and craven. On learning that the observation was done in secret, and that there was never any intervention—even when a civilisation was spiralling down into final extinction—because “the data would have been invalidated”, he had unhesitatingly declared the policy to be criminal, callous and inhuman.

He had become an activist and had published articles stating that Mollan, as the probable fountainhead of mankind, had a moral obligation to unite, guide and where necessary aid the younger human cultures—but always there had been the faint sense of solving an abstract problem or taking part in a college debate. The requirement was to work out what was right or wrong and to cast a vote, to support one’s chosen team and wave its colours. Even when he had joined 2H and had been told to infiltrate the Bureau of Wardens, even when he had undergone the drastic cranial and facial surgery and had been sent to Earth, even when he had been arrested and had escaped to become a fugitive in an alien society—he had retained a sneaking suspicion that his life had not really begun. To use a Terran colloquialism, he had always been waiting for the main feature to start. Now people were assuring him that the main feature was well under way, and he could not quite believe them…

This is bad, he thought in unexpected panic. There’s a world and all its people at stake and all I do is drift!

The room suddenly seemed small and oppressive, and the sunlit word outside correspondingly more inviting, a better place in which to think. There were three days to wait until the 2H plan reached its irrevocable climax, and at any point up to a few hours before zero all the years of planning and work could be negated by his making a single mistake. It was essential that he should pull himself together and get his thinking straight, and a plunge into the bright winter chill seemed as good a way as any to begin. He took his slate-grey overcoat from a closet, put it on and went out into the corridor.

There was a sign at the elevator saying it was operating that day, but he decided against paying the surcharge and went down the nearby stair. As an after-effect of Haran’s call and his bout of introspection, he was abnormally alert when he reached the bottom flight. At another time the four tall men shouldering their way into the lobby through the glass doors might not have drawn his attention, but on this occasion he picked them out at once and recognition jarred him to a halt.

Mollanians!

The word clamoured inside his head as he backed up the stairs to the first corner. One of the men had gone to the reception desk, one was heading for the hotel’s rear entrance, another was approaching the elevator bank and the fourth was walking directly towards the stairs. Their behaviour was odd by normal standards, Lorrest realised, but understandable if the object was to seal off the building. He turned and sprinted towards the upper floors, easily taking the steps four at a time, his heart thudding with a fierce excitement. At the third floor he swung into the short transverse corridor and ran to its end, where an emergency door opened on to the fire escape. His instinct was to throw the door open and launch himself down the outside stair without checking his speed, but a warning voice sounded above the thunder of blood.

He slid to a halt, very gently opened the door and looked down the fire escape.

A big man was waiting in the alley below.

Lorrest closed the door, his mind grappling with the fact that the man had been standing with one hand thrust inside the unzipped front of his quilted jacket. Weapons? Would Vekrynn’s men use weapons against him?

The answer came immediately, impelling him back towards the hotel’s main stair in an urgent loping run. He carried defences against certain kinds of radiation weapons, but there was no guarantee his pursuers would not employ drug darts. He reached the stairs without encountering anybody and was going up them in great leaps, two to each short flight, when it occurred to him that he was running blind. Any hiding place he might chance on would be discovered sooner or later, and there was no escape route in the upper part of the hotel, unless…unless he dared take what was, for a Mollanian, an unthinkable risk…

At the fifth floor he deflected himself into the corridor and got to the door of his own room just as the elevator’s arrival light came on. He stabbed his key into the lock, sidestepped into the room, began to bolt the door behind him then realised that doing so would be a clear indication of where he was. The desk clerk spent much of her time in the back office and would not have been able to tell his pursuers for sure whether he was in or out, and it was up to him to make them believe they had been unlucky.

He ran to the window, threw it open and climbed out on to the ledge. Cold breezes tugged at his clothing as he closed the window, and when he turned the shifting of parallax made the steel skeleton of the adjacent structure appear to sway like the masts of a ship.

Lorrest stared at the nearest floor beam, mesmerised. It was perhaps three good paces away from him, a distance he knew he could leap with ease, but a measurement in paces implied the reassuring support of the ground. Here there would be nothing but cold clear air beneath him, and if he were to make a bad jump—perhaps hampered by his overcoat—he would go down and down, and there would be lots of time to anticipate what was going to happen to him when he hit the pavement, or perhaps a perimeter fence and then the pavement, or perhaps a ledge and a perimeter fence and then the pavement…

This must be the main feature, he thought in bemused wonderment as he saw angular patterns flow beneath, evidence that he had made the leap and was flying through space. His feet came down on rusted metal. He caught hold of a stanchion for momentary support and, now totally committed, ran along the narrow aerial pathway of a floor beam to where the massive stump of an incompleted central column offered some concealment. Belatedly aware that he could have attracted the attention of other residents of the hotel, he worked his way round to the far side of the column, hunkered down and nestled into the boxlike space between its flanges.

A sudden eye-of-the-storm calm descended over him as he realised he had done all that was possible for the time being. If he had been seen by the Mollanians he would know about it soon enough, and if any Terrans had noticed him there would be some kind of outcry—but for the present all he could do was crouch in his strange geometrical eyrie and survey the deserted wasteland of the building site below. And force himself not to think about falling.

As the protracted minutes went by he gradually came to accept that he had eluded the Bureau’s agents. They would certainly have gone into and searched his room, but Mollanian conditioning would have prevented them from considering the vertiginous metal pathway to freedom. Unfortunately, one problem led to another. If the Mollanians believed he would soon return to his hotel they were bound to keep watch on all the entrances, and if he wanted to clamber down to the ground inconspicuously he would have to wait for the cover of nightfall.

The thought of making the climb in darkness caused Lorrest to press himself closer to the chilling metal of the column and he diverted his thoughts to the problem of getting safely through the next three days. Haran had been right when he said that Vekrynn would spend unlimited amounts of money to pick up a key member of 2H before it was too late. There were not enough Bureau agents on Earth to form a really effective search team, but there was little doubt that the Warden would have enlisted every conceivable Terran agency, legal and illegal, to track him down. A trumped-up criminal charge would be enough to bring in the police, and the lure of really big money would take care of the rest.

Trying to ignore the cold which was spreading through his body. Lorrest analysed his chances of remaining undetected in the city for the greater part of a week and decided they were dangerously low. His best course would be to get off the planet altogether, but as that was impossible he would have to consider isolating himself in a rural area, even though the weather was against him. At another time of the year it would have been easy enough to fill his pockets with canned food and spend the time hiding out in the forest land on the eastern side of the Allegheny range, but there was a limit to what even a Mollanian constitution could stand. It looked as though he would have to find and move into a disused house, and that had its own set of risks.

All this should have been arranged in advance, he thought. We’re a bunch of amateurs, behaving like amateurs. I suppose our excuse has to be that there aren’t any experts in this line—nobody has ever done to a world what we’re going to do to this one.

To his surprise, Lorrest managed to doze for short periods during the two hours he had to wait for nightfall. When he finally decided to return to the ground the steel framework on which he was suspended had become a cube of mysterious darkness, its components patchily illuminated by greenish glimmers from the street. Telling himself that the lack of visibility would help dispel vertigo, he straightened up tentatively. His legs were numb and a tingling stab of pain hinted that the return of blood circulation would be far from pleasant. He gripped the flanges of the column, began a shuffling turn in preparation for climbing down it, then made the appalling discovery that he was getting no nerve signals from his feet. It was quite impossible for him to decide if he was standing squarely on a floor beam or teetering on its extreme edge.

He shifted his weight slightly, trying to assess the situation, and suddenly—there was no perceptible lapse of time—flaking corners of metal were ripping upwards in his hands like saw-blades.

Before he had time to understand that he was falling, before he had time to scream, the beam on which he had been standing smashed into his outflung left arm just above the elbow. Brutal though the impact was, it checked his descent sufficiently to let him throw his legs and right arm around the column. He clung to it with a desperate ardour, pressing his loins and torso and face against the abrasive steel, while he fought to damp down the panic that was exploding through his system.

Reality…nightmare…reality. As the giddy swings in his perception faded away he moved his left arm and knew at once that he was badly hurt. The pain that invaded his body by way of the shoulder left no doubt that a bone had been fractured. With it came the uncompromising message that if he was to complete the long climb to the ground he would have to do it immediately and quickly before the anaesthesia of shock wore off and the real pain began.

Moaning quietly, he slightly relaxed his grip on the flanges of the column and allowed himself to slide to the floor below, checking his descent often enough to prevent a lethal build-up of speed. Windows in the hotel glowed with placid light, a group of youths ran noisily through the fenced-off alley at the rear of the building site, and the siren of a nuclear engine sounded dolefully in the distance, but Lorrest remained locked in a private purgatory.

By the time he neared the ground his right hand was slipping on a copious lubrication of blood. He dropped to the rough concrete of the column’s foundation, almost fell, and stood swaying in the darkness while he tried to formulate new plans for a future that had suddenly become very much more dangerous.