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. Mathieu 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.