Vertigo

four

The dream was a familiar dream — the recreation of one day of Hasson’s early life, the reliving of one event. One special event.

The preparation had been going on for days without his admitting, even to himself, what lay in the back of his mind. At first there had been an aerial tour of the Hebrides, and there was nothing very unusual in the fact that he had chosen to go alone. Then had come the procurement of extra power packs and special long-life oxygen bottles — but even that could have been interpreted as the taking of reasonable precautions prior to flying over a remote and sparcely populated area. And Hasson had actually begun his big climb before he finally acknowledged what he was doing.

It is in the nature of some men that when a machine is placed into their hands they have to satisfy themselves as to the limits of its performance. The CG harness operated by distorting gravitic field lines in such a way that the wearer could “fall” upwards — the closest analogy being that of a magnetic field in which any nodal point moved towards the region of greatest flux intensity. Because it drew most of its energy from the gravity field itself, the CG harness was most efficient at low altitudes. Close to the ground there was little drain on the power pack, but when a flier went high he found that his energy supplies were being squandered at greater and greater rates to compensate for inherent system inefficiency.

The most obvious consequence was that there was a limit to the altitude a personal flier could achieve, but — as is always the case -that limit could be modified by various technical and human factors. Air Policeman Robert Hasson, newly qualified for the force, had no more than a normal interest in the mechanics of the big climb. He had, however, a restless craving to explore his own psychological parameters, to find out which had the greater operational ceiling — the man or the machine, He knew it was an obsessional state of mind, that it was far from being novel or unusual and yet the experiment had to be performed…

He lifted off from the Eye Peninsula on Lewis at dawn on a summer day and set his initial rate of climb at 250 metres a minute. The speed was fairly moderate by CG standards, but Has son’s dead weight had been greatly increased by the addition of three extra power packs and he had no wish to overload any of the equipment upon which his life depended. The maximum load which could be lifted by a CG harness was limited by the fact that, above a certain point, the load itself began to generate a noticeable gravitic field, thus interfering with the delicately arranged pattern of force lines set up by the counter-gravity unit. Basic modular mass, as the load figure was referred to in text- books, was 137.2 kilograms, and exceeding it induced an effect known as field collapse, which gave the flier all the aerodynamic properties of a millstone.

Not sacrificing any energy by introducing horizontal components into his flight, Hasson allowed a light westerly wind to carry him out over the waters of the North Minch. Complex vistas of land and water continued to unfurl on all sides as the Scottish coast came into view some sixty kilometres to the east. The vegetation on the islands and mainland glowed in pastel shades in the early morning sun, with swaths of pale powdery yellow sifting into areas of lime green. Coastlines were limited with white against the nostalgic travel-poster blue of the ocean, and the air Hasson was breathing felt prehistoric in its cleanliness.

Twenty minutes after take-off he had reached a height of five kilometres, far above the levels normally used in personal flight. He sealed the faceplate of his helmet and began to draw on his bottled oxygen. Beneath the soles of his boots the rolling Earth was immense, beginning to show hints of curvature, and Hasson felt the first stirrings of loneliness. He could see no birds, no ships, no signs of human habitation in all the atlas-page sweeps of territory below — and there was no sound, Hasson was alone in the silent blue reaches of the sky.

Forty minutes after take-off he had reached a height of ten kilometres and knew he was passing through the level of the polar tropopause. The air around him had been steadily growing colder throughout his ascent, the temperature decreasing by six degrees or more with every kilometre of altitude, but now he could expect it to remain constant or even become slightly warmer as he penetrated the stratosphere. Unfortunately, that fact signified little real benefit for Hasson. His heavy-duty suit heaters were labouring to cope with a surrounding air temperature of almost fifty degrees below zero, and would go on being a major drain on his energy supply.

Ten minutes later Hasson saw a layer of thin cloud moving eastwards beneath him, beginning to obscure his view of the land, and he knew the time had come to perform the illegal action which had necessitated his making the flight from such a remote area. He checked his first power pack, saw that it was nearing exhaustion, and switched to the second in line. For one heart-stopping instant, while the electrical circuit was being broken and re-made, he felt himself begin to fall, but the harness renewed its grip on him almost immediately and he knew the ascent was continuing. He unbuckled the expended power unit and, with a transient pang of guilt, released it from his fingers. The heavy pack dwindled out of sight beneath his feet, bombing its way down to an unseen impact with the choppy waters of the Minch.

Hasson’s plan had included shedding the second power unit and perhaps the third, provided conditions had been right, so as to Lighten the load on those remaining as they clawed their way up into regions of weakening gravitic flux. A prime requisite, though, had been perfect visibility below. The chances of a falling unit causing any damage to life or property were virtually non-existent in his present geographical location, but a deep- rooted instinct would not let him consider dropping a dense object through cloud. He would simply have to accept the limitation on his flight.

The realisation came as less of a disappointment than Hasson might have expected an hour earlier. He had already climbed higher than most fliers even cared to think about, and the nameless hunger within him was slowly abating. On the other hand, he had reached a dimensionless zone — once the domain of the big jets — and going on upwards into regions of darker blue seemed just as logical and natural as returning to the ancient kingdoms of men. With his head tilted back, and arms and legs trailing limply, Hasson continued his climb, his posture an unconscious echo of the one in which mediaeval artists depicted human souls ascending to heaven. A single point of light — possibly Venus — appeared in the aching purity above him, beckoning, and Hasson swam towards it. His rate of ascent was decreasing with every minute, in inverse proportion to the drain on his power packs, but a further hour took him to an altitude of twenty-five kilometres. The world curved away beneath him in nacreous splendour. There was no visible movement anywhere, except for the hastening progression of needles across the dials on his chest panel. Hasson flew onwards.

At thirty kilometres above sea level he checked his instruments and saw that his upward movement had all but ceased. His CG field generator, with less and less invisible grist for its mills, was expending stored energy at a prodigious rate simply to keep him from falling. The only way in which he could gain more height would be to discard the dead power packs, but he had ruled that action out, and in any case the result would be of no great significance. He had done what he set out to do.

Hanging motionless in the icy blue solitude, poised on the threshold of space, Hasson gazed all about him and felt… nothing. There was no fear, no elation, no wonder, no sense of achievement, no communion with the cosmos — removed from the context of humanity he had lost his humanity.

He completed a full survey of the heavens, knew himself to be a stranger there, then adjusted a control on his belt and began the long and lonely fall to Earth.