The Fugaccia mansion had become a ready-made headquarters for the mission, though not through Montane’s free choice. Ves Fugaccia’s heirs lived a hundred kilometres to the east, in a well-developed part of the region, and had never taken any interest in the unmanageable property perched right on the edge of civilisation. They had, however, a good nose for business, and on sensing the obsessive nature of Montane’s interest they had flatly refused his offer to buy the buried ship and take it off their hands. That would have been a betrayal of their grandfather’s trust, they had said. Good Roman Catholics could never acquiesce in the desecration of a loved one’s tomb, they had said. But, somehow, their group conscience had allowed them to contemplate selling the Altamura estate in its entirety; and—when their lawyers had thrice succeeded in jacking up the price—their religious and family scruples had vanished altogether.
Directly above Nicklin the sun had just emerged from a nightband, and the day was still cool in spite of being intensely bright. Before him was what had once been the garden fronting the Fugaccia mansion. Now it was a daunting tangle of overgrown shrubs, many of which had been smothered by riotous wild plants, vines and native grasses. In some places the vegetation rose into mounds whose general shape only hinted at what lay beneath—here a summerhouse or an arch, there a fountain or a belvedere. At one point the head of a classical marble statue of a woman raised itself above the leafy ferment, the blank orbs of the eyes contemplating the chaos of greenery in apparent sorrow.
Beyond the ruins of the garden was a small, rounded, man-made hill. It was vividly outlined against a scenic backdrop in which grasslands, lakes and enigmatic forests sifted and tapered through each other, creating horizontal designs which grew slimmer and slimmer until, misted by distance, they merged into ranges of remote grey-blue mountains. Striking though the general panorama was, Nicklin had eyes only for the small hill in the foreground—because the ship was cocooned inside it.
He had just finished breakfast, but he knew, despite the earliness of the hour, that Montane and big Gerl Kingsley were somewhere on the hill, already hard at work with picks and spades. Power tools had been purchased, and at that very moment were on their way from Beachhead with the main body of the caravan, but Montane was unable to hold himself in check. Ownership of the Fugaccia estate had passed into his hands four days earlier, and since then the monkey had been on his back. He had to see the ship for himself. Not until he had actually touched its metal skin would he be able to relax in the knowledge that the greatest hurdle of all was safely behind him.
Picking his way along the path that had been hewn through the wilderness, Nicklin smiled as he recalled Montane’s antics of the recent past. The preacher had actually broken down and wept on hearing that the ship was an unmodified Type 83.
“Why!” he had said to Nicklin, blinking at him through lenses of tears. “You want to know why! Because, you smirking great idiot, it’s one of the Explorer class!”
It had taken a few seconds for the significance of the statement to penetrate Nicklin’s mind. To him the flight to New Eden was a preposterous fantasy, one which had no hope of being realised, and he had given no thought to the practicalities involved. Had he considered the matter he would have seen at once that, while the crossing of hundreds of light years of interstellar void could be accomplished routinely, dropping down through the final hundred kilometres to achieve landfall gave rise to unusual problems.
The great majority of spaceships constructed in the previous two centuries were designed to ply between Earth and Orbitsville—from the parking orbits of the former to the docking cradles of the latter—and therefore had no provision for transferring personnel to and from the surface of an unprepared world.
Montane had always anticipated the difficulty and expense of equipping his starship with a pinnace, and now—suddenly and unexpectedly—the problem had ceased to exist. “It’s an omen, Jim,” he had said. “This is the Lord’s way of telling me not to despair, that He is still tending His flock.”
The sheer irrationality of that proposition had dissuaded Nicklin from trying to argue. The Lord, it seemed, had not tended very hard in the case of Apryl Fugaccia. A penniless hairdresser of Scandinavian stock, she had professionally met the elderly billionaire, Ves Fugaccia, in a Beachhead salon. He had been captivated by the newly minted gold of her Nordic good looks, and she had been equally drawn by the prospect of wealth and limitless opportunities for travel and adventure. She must have counted herself among the luckiest people in the universe when, on their first wedding anniversary, Fugaccia had granted her dearest wish by presenting her with a starship of her very own. Only a comparative handful of exploration craft had been built—the Orbitsville syndrome had seen to that—and the enormous expense involved had been yet another proof of her husband’s boundless love. So infatuated had Apryl been with the notion of becoming a planetary first-footer that she had sneaked on board her new toy while it was land-docked at Portal 9, and had donned her HESS (Hostile Environment Survival Suit) without first mastering the intricacies of its breathing-gas regulatory system. Her body had been found in the left-hand seat of the pinnace’s cockpit.
How Montane could construe such a pathetic sequence of events as evidence of the existence of a caring Almighty was a source of puzzlement to Nicklin. To him it was a prank worthy of that greatest of all tricksters, the Gaseous Vertebrate, but he had refrained from making any comment, and had continued quite happily with his duties as second-in-command of the mission. For the present those duties consisted of little more than living with Montane and Kingsley in the decaying Fugaccia mansion and waiting for the rest of the team to arrive.
In particular, he was waiting for the arrival of Danea Farthing. He had devised a new plan for dealing with her, one which would take time to put into effect, but which had the merit of promising to make her humiliation—when it finally came—all the more complete.
The thought, enlivened his stride as he reached the base of the hill and began to climb. Clearing a way through the vegetation had been easier here because the hill was plentifully endowed with stone steps and paths, exactly as in his dream. He wound his way to the crest on meticulously fitted hexagonal paving and found Montane and Kingsley standing in a broad but shallow excavation which was the result of their combined labours.
Its floor resembled streaky brown glass copiously studded with nodules of grey and white, reminding Nicklin of a gigantic slab of nut candy. The discovery of the fused-earth and rock carapace below the topsoil had bothered Montane at first, because it delayed his progress, but he had been consoled by the thought of the excellent protection it afforded the ship. Seventy years would have been a long time for any metal artefact—even one constructed from electron-sated alloys—to resist the chemical ravages of damp earth.
“Good morning, navvies,” Nicklin called out. “How are the calluses today?”
Montane looked up from the drawing he was studying and responded to the greeting in amicable tones. He had been in Nicklin’s company almost continuously for three months, while they were finding Ves Fugaccia’s heirs and negotiating the purchase of the property, and understood that the best way to preserve their enmity was to masquerade as friends. Kingsley, the huge ex-farmer, who had no time for such strategies, confined himself to giving Nicklin a barely audible grunt.
“You’re an engineer,” Montane said, beckoning to Nicklin. “Take a look at this drawing and tell me what you think.”