With a final swinging glance at the circular guard rail above, he took the paint container out of his shirt pocket and sprayed a colourless fluid on to the ladder's top rung. Highly nervous, fighting off a tendency to shake, he returned the container to his pocket and slid commando-fashion to the foot of the ladder. The greenhouse stillness of the bottom deck was heavy and undisturbed. Dallen ran to the elevator, took it up to Deck 5 and within a matter of seconds was back in the sanctuary of his cabin, where Cona and Mikel were still asleep. The entire sortie had taken approximately three minutes.
Dallen sat down at the table and considered what he had done. The emulsion with which he had sprayed the ladder was manufactured for law enforcement bothes under the brand name of Pietzoff, and it was peculiarly suitable for his purpose. It was used to prevent people clinging to security vehicles and the vulnerable wing generator tubes of aircraft. Finger pressure on the deposited crystals would produce a neural shock which would affect Mathieu's whole body, not only repelling him from the ladder but preventing him from grasping anything which might lessen his fall.
There was no absolute guarantee that the impact with deck would kill him, but Dallen intended to be close to the scene of the "accident", first to reach the fallen man, and would need only the briefest moment to complete his work. An extra shearing of the neck vertebrae would go unnoticed among Mathieu's other injuries. 'The final step would be to ascend the ladder, ostensibly checking for faults, and wipe away the Pietzoff emulsion with the solvent sponge already in his pocket.
At that point, justice having been done, he could return to a normal life.
Dallen spread his hands on the table and frowned down at them as — for the first time — he tried to envisage the future which lay beyond Mathieu's death. What would constitute a "normal" life in his case? A Metagov job sufficiently undemanding that he would be able to devote most of his time to rehabilitating Cona? Perhaps he would be provided with a pension on compassionate grounds and given a house on the edge of one of those heroic developments which straggled a short distance into Orbitsville's endless oceans of grass. That way he could make Cona his life's work — and what would the career landmarks be? The day she learned to flush the toilet for herself? The day she completed her first sentence? The first night on which, in the mental chaos of the dark hours, be foiled to turn her away from his bed?
Abruptly Dallen felt that he was drowning. He dismissed the feeling as a psychological effect, then realised he had breathed out and had actually omitted to initiate the next inhalation, as though his autonomous nervous system had gone on strike. He snatched air in two noisy sighs and sprang to his feet, feeling trapped within the confines of the cabin. The time display on the wall showed that it was not yet eight in the morning. Food? Would breakfast help? Dallen felt his diaphragm heave gently at the thought of eating, but coffee seemed a reasonably inviting prospect, a way of getting through a few minutes.
He made sure that Cona and Mikel were not likely to awaken, let himself out of the cabin and went upstairs to Deck 4, the first full deck. There was nobody in the mealomat area, although he could hear some crew members talking in the adjoining canteen.
Dallen drew himself a cup of black coffee, considered taking it into the canteen, then on impulse walked up another flight of stairs and went into the small observation gallery. It was deserted. Such vantage points tended to be used only during normal-space manoeuvring in the vicinity of Earth or Orbitsville — in mid-voyage, cocooned in a ship's private continuum, there was little to see outside. The universe presented itself as an intense spot of blue ahead of the ship and an equally bright locus of red astern. On the rare occasions when a vessel passed dose to a star an ultra-thin ring of light would expand out of the forward spot, slide by the ship on all sides like a conjurer's hoop and shrink into the speck of ruby brilliance behind.
Unconcerned about the lack of spectacle, Dallen dropped into a chair and sat in the theatrical darkness sipping his coffee, his thoughts still dominated by the future. Fixing the time of Mathieu's execution seemed to have removed a short-term goal which had acted as a barrier. Now the shutters had been lifted and decades lay ahead of him in a blur of shifting probabilities — and from what he could see of the temporal landscape it looked bleak. To be more analytical, without Silvia London it looked bleak. To be even more analytical — and to add a dash of honesty and self-interest — without Cona and without Silvia it looked bleak. And that came the insidious thought, is a circumstance that can easily be changed.
All he had to do was quit being stubborn and accept what qualified physicians had been telling him all along — that Cona Dallen, author and historian, no longer existed. That meant he had no moral obligations to her, that all contracts were nullified. The body Cona had inhabited was entitled to good care, to the comfort and security in which a new personality would be able to develop within its own limitations, but there was no logical reason for Carry Dallen's own life to be subordinated to the process. He should be concerned, but not interned. He had placed himself in a prison whose walls were made of mist, and all he had to do was walk free…
Fine! QED! Welcome to the bright, shadow-free world of rationality!
Dallen felt a surge of elation and wonderment over how easy it had been to put his life into logical order, a sense of giddy uplift which was immediately followed by the plunging realisation that he had achieved precisely nothing. He was building castles of romantic dreams around Silvia London — all on the strength of a few ambiguous words and enigmatic looks. What he needed was hard information, a straight yes or no from the woman in question, but right from the beginning he had behaved like a tongue-tied yokel in Silvia's presence…
"In the name of Christ," he whispered savagely, swept by a sudden boiling surf of impatience over a state of mind in which he could calmly arrange the death of a fellow human being and at the same time cower back from asking one question of a woman. He crushed the empty cup in his right hand, producing a loud crackle which caused a barely-seen figure to glance in his direction from the opposite end of the gallery. The other person was a woman, and he had no idea how long she had been sitting there. He identified the thick-set, middle-aged figure as Doctor Billy Glaister, the Foundation officer who shared a cabin with Silvia, and he found himself moving towards her with no conscious sense of volition. She looked up in surprise, her face an indistinct glow in the darkness, as he halted at her side.
"Hello," Dallen said. "Restful in here, isn't it?"
"Usually," she replied coolly. "I come here when I want peace to think."
"Hint taken." Dallen tried an ingratiating chuckle. "I'll clear off and leave you to it. By the way, is Silvia in her room?"
"I expect so. Why?" The doctor had ceased being distant and now was openly hostile.
The notion that here might be another rival for Silvia immediately appeared in Dallen's mind, but something — all the more momentous for being unanticipated — had happened inside him and he welcomed the extra challenge. He hunkered down beside the woman, deliberately invading her personal space.
"I want to have a word with her. I presume she's allowed visitors?"