This was a good place to bring up my son^ he thought as he waited for the breakfast coffee to percolate. Good as any place you would find.
It was a diamond-dear morning — one of a seemingly endless succession of fine mornings in that summer — yet he was acutely conscious of the date as he moved about the familiar environment of the kitchen. August 25, 2302. Only nine years had passed since Orbitsville had departed for another universe, but it had been two whole centuries since an exploration ship had slipped away from the Earth-Moon system heading for unknown space. Now the Columbus was fully stored and ready to spiral out of Polar Band One to test itself against sun-seeded infinities, and the date would be one for the history books.
The thought of books drew Dallen from the kitchen and into the pleasant, long-windowed room he used as a study. One wall featured a custom-built rosewood case which held exactly four hundred literary works, many with antique bindings which proclaimed them to be early editions. In the centre of the case, glazed and framed, was the handwritten reading list which had been the basis of the collection, Dallen smiled as he ran his gaze over the display, taking a wholesome and pleasurable pride in having read every volume, from Chaucer right through to the major 23rd Century poets. His brain, conditioned by nine years of schooling in total recall techniques, effortlessly recreated the circumstances in which he had recovered the list…
For protracted aching minutes after the disappearance of Orbitsville the group of people who had tried to enter Portal 36 had been too stricken to think coherently or act constructively. Dallen remembered continuing his slow-tumbling fell towards the sun, his mind a chaotic battleground for alien concepts and a crushing sense of personal loss, unable to care much about whether he was going to be lost or saved. He had been thousands of metres away from the Hawkshead before the crewman dispatched by Captain Lessen had overtaken him and jetted them both back to safety. The ship's pressure skin, abruptly released from an invisible vise, had resealed itself within its elastic limits and the air losses were no longer a matter of urgency.
In the days that followed Dallen had been able to lose himself in hard work, because — once the incredible truth about the sphere had been accepted — there remained the practical business of the return to Earth.
Many starships, ranging in type from bulk carriers to passenger vessels, had been left in a vast circle around the sun when Orbitsville had vanished from the normal continuum. Forming part of the same circle, but in much larger numbers, had been an even wider variety of interportal ships, many of which had been en route when their destinations had ceased to exist. In some extreme cases, maintenance workers on exterior port structures had been left floating in space, clinging to sliced-off sections of docking cradles.
The salvage operation had been facilitated by the fact that everything left behind was in a stable and tidy orbit around the sun, and was also provided with stellar heat. As a preliminary to the retreat to Earth, all personnel with only spacesuits or unpowered habitats to keep them alive had been located and rescued by small craft. Next, all ships — large and small — had gathered in a single orbiting swarm, and the interstellar vessels had taken on board every human being left in that region of space. That stage of the operation had been complicated by the arrival of twelve ships from Earth and one from Terranova, all of which had been locked in warp transfer at the time of the disappearance, but the problems had been mostly concerned with credibility and had eventually been resolved. The thesis that Orbitsville no longer existed, although astonishing, was remarkably easy to demonstrate.
The logistics of assembling the return fleet had been such that Dallen had plenty of time to rescue his family's possessions from the condemned Hawkshead and transfer them to an aging but grandiose passenger liner, the Rosetta, in which they had been assigned a suite. And it had been while repacking some oddments that he had found the reading list folded and tucked into a rarely-used tobacco pouch. Cona had prepared it for his benefit three years earlier. It detailed four hundred books she regarded as important and which she had urged him to read.
"That's purely for starters," she had said, smiling. "Just to give you some idea of where you came from and where you ought to be going."
The old Dallen had refused the intellectual gift, inflicting unknown pain by not trying even one of the suggested books, but the new Dallen had been determined to make amends. Standing there in the special sunlight of that special morning, he touched the oiled wood of the bookcase, recognising and respecting all that remained to him of his former wife. The body which had once belonged to Cona was now inhabited by a cheerful and uncomplicated young woman who had a mental age of about thirteen and whose home was on a nearby farm owned by the Foundation. Belatedly accepting his former physician's advice, Dallen had renamed her Carol and used the name automatically in his thoughts.
He went to visit Carol once a month and occasionally they would go horseback riding together, and he was always glad that their relationship, although pleasant, was cool and undemanding. Carol treated him as she would an uncle, sometimes enjoying his visits a lot and at others showing impatience over being dragged away from the stables. The active farming life had pared her figure down, taking years off her apparent age, with the result that when Dallen saw her from a distance there was little to remind him of his former wife — Cona Dallen doesn't live here any more — and he had learned that all grief has to fade.
"Coffee in five minutes," he shouted, hearing the first subdued thump from the old-style percolator in the kitchen. He arranged settings for three people at the breakfast bar, then returned to the study and sat down at his desk. The computer displayed his job notes for the day, but he found it hard to concentrate on the symbols when the lawns and shrubs beyond his window were glowing with a phosphorescent nostalgic brilliance and the Columbus was circling up there beyond the atmosphere, making ready for deep space. Dallen reached for his pipe and, while filling it, allowed his thoughts to drift back over the previous nine years.
Dwelling in the past was psychologically inadvisable for most people, but in his case it had literally become a way of life, a profession. Project Recap had been set up within weeks of his return to Earth after the Orbitsville departure, with Dallen as a principal director. In the early stages all but three of the thirty-four men and women who had witnessed and been affected by the seminal encounter with the Ultans had been part of the team, each making a unique contribution to the collective memory. The ineffable moment of wordless, mind-to-mind contact had been shared by all, but the common experience had been interpreted by individuals in different ways, modified by their intelligence, outlook and education.
Holorecordings of the event — with their hazy images of black entities shimmering in blackness — had proved to the rest of humanity that something had happened, but it had been the very diversity of the participants' reactions which had finally eliminated all theories about mass hysteria. Doctor Glaister, for example, with her background in particle physics, had emerged from the experience with recollections which varied a great deal from Dallen's in some places, especially where the "dialogue" had touched on the relationship between mindons and gravitons. The detailed insights she had received — cameos of cold logic, engraved in permafrost, with the black ice of eternity showing through" was how she once described them — revitalised her entire field of learning, in spite of the fact that only one in a thousand of its workers had not been translated into the Region II universe.