Orbitsville Departure o-1 Page 5

  Carry Dallen will fall m! Mathieu abruptly stopped walking and pinched Ac bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, trying to come to terms with the new thought. There was little that was fanciful or melodramatic about it. Dallen was a big, powerfully built, handsome man who worked a little too hard at appearing casual, who was always a little too quick with the joke or pleasantry designed to put those about him at their ease. Mathieu, a gifted people-watcher, had privately sized him up as inflexible and intolerant, with the capacity to be ruthless in pursuit of what he believed to be right. He had always been afraid of Dallen, even when there was nothing more than well-concealed graft on his conscience — now he had a chilling conviction that Dallen would took straight into his soul, know him for what he was, and come after him like a remorseless machine.

  "No more than you deserve," he said, addressing his image in a wall mirror he had had specially installed. The man he saw looked surprisingly relaxed and confident, like a Nordic tennis champion on holiday, giving no indication of criminality or of the hunger which was growing more insistent in him by the minute. The thought of felicitin caused Mathieu to slip a hand into his jacket and touch the gold pen clipped in the inner pocket. It was a functional writing instrument, but with a small adjustment it dispensed a magical ink. A one-centimetre line drawn on the tongue was enough to put right everything that was wrong in Mathieu's life, not only for the present but working in retrospect, right back to the time he had come from Orbksville at the age of eight.

  His father, Arthur Mathieu, had been a minor Metagov official who had followed the promotion trail to Earth and had lost his way in a maze of gin bottles and ill-starred departmental shuffles. The community of government workers in Madison City was small and close-knit, and the boy Gerald — humiliated by his father's failure — had gone through school as a solitary stroller, barely achieving grades, dreaming of the day he would return to the Big O's delicately ribbed sky and up-curving horizons. Then, when Gerald was sixteen, his father had thed in a ludicrous accident involving a hedge trimmer, and suddenly the way back had been open. His mother was returning, his younger sister was returning, but Mathieu had found he was afraid of the return journey and even more terrified of Orbitsville itself. He had claimed the right to an unbroken education and by sheer force of belated effort had built a successful career in Madison, achieving a position which no reasonable person would expect him to quit merely to return to his boyhood home.

  Mathieu understood his own private strategy, however. And although one part of his mind assured him his timidity was of no consequence — another part, brooding and illogical, saw it a serious character defect, evidence of a void where there should have been the cornerstone of a personality. He had tried psychological judo, presenting his weaknesses as cute foibles. I’ve never had the slightest trace of will power-ask anybody who knows me. There is only one way to get rid of temptation — give in immediately. You can always trust me to let you down…

  Then had come felicitin, bringer of the ultimate high. Felicitin, which could have been custom-designed by a master chemist for Mathieu's personal salvation, which made the user feel not only good, but right. Felicitin, at five thousand monits and more for an amount the size of a single teardrop.

  For which he had become a thief.

  For which he had become a murderer.

  Mathieu drew the gold pen out of his pocket, clenched both hands around it and made as if to snap it in two. He stood that way for a full minute, changing his grip on the cylinder several times, trembling like a marksman afflicted with target-shyness, then his posture relaxed as he felt himself arrive at one of his rationalisations. There was no need to try kicking the habit. Datten would be quick to ascertain the events leading to the annihilation of his family, to leap from motive and opportunity to half-intuitive identification. Soon after that Mathieu would be going to the prison colony — if Dallen let him get that far — and in prison one did not have to struggle to escape drug dependency. The cold turkey treatment was thrown in free with the uniform and the rehab tapes.

  From beyond his door there came the sound of other doors slamming, excited voices, rapid footsteps. One thing which had not changed over the centuries was the essential dullness of most administrative jobs, and on a heavy summer's morning, with the outside world shimmering on the windows like a multicoloured dream, the sense of ennui in the corridors was almost tangible. Now something out of the ordinary had happened in the building and the word was going around. This was going to be a day to remember.

  Mathieu slipped his pen back into his pocket, sat down at his desk and tried to plan the next hour. He decided, having made his for-the-record enquiry, to wait where he was until someone requested his presence downstairs. Frank Bryceland, the mayor, was out of town for two days, so it was likely that Mathieu would be summoned as soon as Costain realised what had happened. As the minutes slowly filtered from future into past he felt mildly surprised at how long Costain was taking, then he began to appreciate the variance between his own informed viewpoint and those of other people in the building. An alarm had sounded without any immediately identifiable cause; a security check could be slow and tentative; and the condition of the woman and child lying on the emergency stair might take time to diagnose, especially as Luddite Specials were far from common by the end of the 23rd Century.

  Prompted by impulse, Mathieu went to the window and looked down at the north side car park just as a police cruiser came slewing in from Burlington Avenue. As soon as it had stopped three men got out and ran towards the north lobby. Something gave an ky heave in Mathieu's stomach as he recognised the black-haired figure of Carry Dallen loping along with unconscious power, looking as though he could run clear through the wall of the building. Feeling cold and isolated, Mathieu returned to his desk and sat staring at his hands, waiting.

  Perhaps five minutes had gone by before there was a chiming sound and Costain's head hovered before him. Errant flecks of light swarming like fireflies around the image showed the projector was losing its adjustments.

  "Can you come down to the north lobby?" Costain sounded both nervous and guarded. "Right now?"

  "What's the matter?"

  "It looks like somebody has wiped Cona Dallen and her boy."

  "Wiped them!" Mathieu conveyed puzzlement. "Do you mean…?"

  "Yeah — total brain scour. Didn't you know?"

  "No, I…" Mathieu paused, sensitive to the question. "How the hell would I know? I've been sitting in my…"

  Costain shook his head. "It's all over the building, Gerald. You'll have to make a statement."

  "I'm on my way down." Mathieu stood up as Costain's image dissolved. He went to the door, smoothing his hair and making slight adjustments to the hang of his jacket. It was important for him to look his best when going into a difficult situation, and facing up to Dallen was going to be the worst ever, the ultimate bad scene. The elevator was waiting, and with almost no lapse of time he was in the lobby, working his way through barriers of people, all of whom were facing the door of a room which had once been used by commissionaires, back in the days when Madison had been booming. Vik Costain, as though telepathically forewarned, opened the door as Mathieu reached it, quickly drew him inside and clicked the lock.

  "We're all going to roast over this one," Costain said, the folds of his grey face set like rippled lava. "Frank has been griping about security for months."

  "I know," Mathieu mumbled, moving further into the room to become part of its central tableau. Cona Dallen was stretched out on her back on the floor, hands making random little pawing movements in the air. Her lightweight saffron dress was in disarray, showing her conical thighs, but the display was asexual because her face was blank and serene, unmarked by identity, and her eyes were those of a baby — bright, humorous, uncomprehending. A bubbled ribbon of saliva ran from one corner of her mouth. Carry Dallen was kneeling beside her, rocking gently with his son gathered in his arms, his face hidden in the boy's hair. Mathie
u said a silent farewell to joy.

  Costain touched Mathieu's arm. "Who would do a thing like this?"

  "I know who did it," Dallen announced in a leaden, abstracted voice. He raised his head and slowly looked around the half-dozen men in the room. Mathieu's heart juddered to a standstill as the grey, tear-lensed eyes locked with is own, but — miraculously — Dallen's gaze wandered away from him without pause. It was as if they had become strangers.

  "I did this," Dallen continued.

  One of the policemen in the group moved uneasily. "Carry, I don't think you should…"

  Dallen silenced him with a look. "I brought my family to this place… I handled the job wrong… pushed too hard… ignored the threats…" A muscular spasm pulled his mouth downwards at the corners, producing a caricature of an urchin who had just been thrashed, and when he spoke each word was the snapping of a glass rod. "Why couldn't I have been with them? I don't deserve a brain…"

  "I'm going to see what's holding the ambulance," Costain said, striding to the door.

  "Good idea." Mathieu went through the doorway on the heels of the older man, anxious to leave the emotional -autoclave of the room. Instead of following Costain to the lobby's outer doors he turned right along the corridor and went into a washroom. It was cool and empty, heavily perfumed with soap. In the furtive privacy of a cubicle he took the gold pen from his pocket, reset the point and drew it across his tongue, making a line twice as long as was usual for him.

  I might be lucky he thought. Perhaps I’m going to get away with it.

  He closed his eyes retreating inwards, waiting for chemical absolution.

  Chapter 5

  The accident occurred about eighty minutes into the flight.

  Jean Antony's first intimation that something serious was happening came when instrumentation panels began to go dead without any accompanying warning signals. Her Type 83 freighter was more than a century old and some of its systems were afflicted with a land of electronic gangrene, but the fault indicator circuits were supposed to be in good shape. The fact that some had failed could be trivial or catastrophic. She knew it could involve as tittle as an annoying extra maintenance charge, or as much as…

  Dear God! The prayer was instinctive, unconnected with religious belief. Dear God, don't let this cargo kill me.

  The ship's antiquated ion thrusters were creating only a fifth of normal gravity, enabling Jean to cross the control gallery in one floating stride. She glanced at the master status indicator — an array of glowing block diagrams, most of them in the form of longitudinal sections through the hull — and saw a spreading blackness which could only mean that a Bessemon-D container had ruptured in the cargo hold. For a moment she allowed herself to feel shocked at the sheer unfairness of what had happened, a series of supposedly perfect fail-safe devices failing so dangerously, then came the realisation that she was lingering in a spacecraft which could literally be dissolving around her.

  Bessemon-D was a solvent gas which had displaced nine-tenths of the capital equipment traditionally associated with metal foundries. In normal circumstances it was inimical life, but drifting free within a spacecraft it was capable of ending Jean Antony's existence in a dozen different ways. Destruction of the pressure hull was the obvious danger, but for ail she knew the first lethal wisps could already be swirling towards her through ventilation ducts, speeded on their way by plastic impellers. There was no time to waste. "Code Zero-zero-one!" she shouted as she hurled herself towards the emergency capsule compartment. No acknowledgement came from the on-board computer. As she opened the door to the compartment most of the lights on the control panel began to flicker and a sudden queasiness in her stomach told her the ship's thrust controllers were behaving erratically. She stepped into the capsule and allowed the door to slam and seal behind her. A shuddering unlike anything she had previously encountered in twenty years of astrogation stirred the capsule into life, bringing with it the conviction that it was too late to escape whatever fate was overtaking the mother ship. The capsule's activator button sprang into ruby brilliance, splintering the claustrophobic darkness.

  Jean hit the button with the heel of her right hand. There was an explosion, a wrenching jolt and a second later she was adrift in space, only fifty kilometres above the inconceivable vastness of Orbitsville.

  Jean's first reflexive action was to check that the capsule's radio beacon was functioning properly. She located the pulsing green rectangle on the miniature instrument panel, touched it for reassurance, then raised her eyes to see how the doomed freighter was faring. The coffin-sized capsule had all-round visibility, and from its viewpoint the universe was divided into two equal parts. "Above" was a hemisphere of stars, many of them individually brilliant against fainter swarms and the frozen luminous clouds of the Milky Way; "below" there appeared to be nothing.

  In spite of her years of plying the two-hundred-plus equatorial portals, Jean's brain still tended to interpret the scene as though she were in a low-flying plane which was skimming the surface of a dark ocean. She scanned the region directly below the capsule, expecting to pick out the lights of the freighter at once, and was surprised and only faintly alarmed to observe unbroken night. Did it mean that every power source on the ship had failed, dousing even the astrogation lights?

  That can't be, she told herself. Not so soon.

  She frowned, still puzzled rather than worried, turning her head from side to side to take in larger areas of the blackness below her. Then, from a corner of her eye, she became aware of something huge occulting the star fields above her. She twisted around in the confined space and verified what the first intuitive shock had already told her — that the opaque mass was the freighter sliding ahead on its own course.

  Refusing to allow herself to panic, Jean studied the larger vessel and tried to decide what had gone wrong with the escape. The answer came quickly. Astrogation and marker lights were slipping across the long silhouette at increasing speed, which meant that the dysfunction of its thrust controllers had caused the ship to rotate. And instead of the capsule having been ejected upwards, to carry it into space and clear of the equatorial trade lanes, it had been fired downwards in the direction of Orbitsville. She was bound for a grazing collision with the unseen surface a mere fifty kilometres below.

  Until that moment Jean's principal concern had been the loss of the Atkinson Grimshaw, the old ship — named after a favourite Victorian artist — which was on the point of annihilating both itself and most of her assets. With the skimpiness of her insurance coverage, the incident probably meant the end of the one-woman transport business she had been operating for eight years, ever since her mother had died, but now such considerations were trivial. The capsule was travelling downwards at about forty kilometres an hour, and also had a forward component of about thirty thousand — the speed at which it had parted company with the ship. These velocities, relative to the Orbitsville shell, were small compared to normal operational speeds, but they were enough to destroy the thin-walled capsule in the collision which was due in approximately seventy-five minutes.

  Life or death, for her, had become a question of how long it would take the rescue services to react.

  At the age of forty, Jean had retained the instinctive belief in immortality which comes from good health, good looks, an active intelligence and a satisfying life style. But now, floating in silence above the invisible vastness of the Big O's outer surface, she had to weigh up the chances of surviving the day, knowing in advance that the odds were not in her favour.

  Orbitsville had three bands of circular portals — one at its equator, one in each of the northern and southern hemispheres. Those on the equator, spaced at intervals of roughly five-million kilometres, had been given the identification numbers 1 to 207, counting east from the portal which had first been penetrated by Vance Garamond and the crew of his SEA flickerwing. Thriving ports and cities had subsequently sprung up around many of the entrances during the great migrations from Eart
h, and at that time the equatorial trade lanes had been busy and well regulated. But those cities had been built almost from force of habit, dying manifestations of mankind's need for safe huddling places. With unlimited territory available there was no longer any need for competition, conflict or defence. The millions from Earth had been effortlessly absorbed, lured by Orbitsville's endless savannahs, and — as quickly as they were created — many cities had been abandoned, echoing the fate of their forebears on the home world.

  During Jean's career the interportal space traffic had dwindled drastically, and therein lay the threat to her life. She had been flying east from 156 to another still-viable industrial centre at 183. Eighty minutes into the flight she was, as a consequence of me freighter's puny acceleration, only twenty-thousand kilometres from her starting point, and in the old days would quickly have been reached by the high-performance patrol vessels monitoring the traffic around each portal. In the last decade of the 23rd Century, however, the emergency services had been pared down to the minimum and in any case were accustomed to the leisurely type of recovery mission which would have been effective had Jean been ejected upwards. She had a conviction that nobody would even notice anything unusual about her distress signal until it was too late.

  She stared down into the featureless blackness and tried to see it as an incredibly hard wall which was rushing upwards with deadly speed. The air circulating around her smelled strongly of rubber and plastics, a reminder that the capsule was new, having been installed a year earlier in compliance with safety regulations. She almost smiled at the irony involved. The old capsule had been equipped with full radio communication and a Covell propulsion unit — either of which could have been enough in her present circumstance to make the difference between living and dying.