Chapter 13
The coming of autumn had brought many changes, not least in the appearance of the hill itself. Once a perfect ovoid, it had been deprived of its entire upper half, like a gargantuan boiled egg which somebody had chosen to cut open from the side. The lower half was hidden beneath slopes of scree made up of masonry, rubble, clay and jagged fragments of the fused-earth shell. Projecting from the shambles was the entire main cylinder of the Liscard, complete with the toy-like pinnace slung under the nose section. The hull of the mother ship, copiously stained with ochreous mineral deposits, was obscured in places by scaffolding, plastic weather screens and banks of ladders.
Digging through to the ship had taken much longer than Montane or anybody else connected with the project had originally anticipated. On breaking through the outer shell they had quickly penetrated about a metre of compacted fill—only to encounter a second shell, also of vitrified earth. Montane had curbed his natural impatience with the consoling thought that his ship had been superbly protected during its seventy years of incarceration, but even he had been taken aback by the discovery of a third carapace.
It appeared that the disconsolate Ves Fugaccia had been determined to make his young bride’s tomb as inviolable as that of an ancient Egyptian princess. The third shell had proved to be the innermost—with nothing inside it but clean sand—but even then there were further obstacles to entering the ship. All three doors 011 the upper surface of the cylinder were found to have been welded along the whole length of the seams. Unwilling to have them mutilated by cutting gear, Montane had waited until the side doors of the cylinder were uncovered—and those, too, had been welded.
As Nicklin climbed towards the ship, in the pale lemon sunlight of autumn, he could see that one of the side doors was finally being breached. A valency cutter would have been too fierce and indiscriminate in its action, therefore old-fashioned oxy-acetylene was being employed in the hope of persuading the weld metal to come away without excessive damage to the adjacent structure. Showers of yellow sparks were occasionally visible through the screen of men and women who had stopped work to watch the operation.
The size of the group of spectators was a reminder to Nicklin of another change that had come about, one that he had never envisaged. Soon after the upper section of the Liscard had been uncovered, journalists had taken an interest in the proceedings and had begun visiting the site by light aircraft and helicopter. The resultant publicity had attracted quite a few enquiries from people who, swayed by Montane’s message, either wanted to work with him or to reserve places for themselves and their families on the flight to New Eden. A fair proportion of them had been prepared, as Nicklin had done, to liquidate all their assets to buy into the project.
One of the earliest had been Scott Hepworth, a physicist from the Garamond Institute, who had arrived at the site one morning on foot, having walked all the way out from Altamura. Montane and Nicklin had been sitting on the front steps of the mansion arguing about the purchase of laundry equipment, when the plump man in his sixties—red-faced and sweating—had approached them…
“Mr Montane?” the stranger said. “My name is Scott Hepworth, I’m a top-class physicist, and I want to work for you.”
“Everybody calls me Corey,” Montane replied, with the wry smile—now familiar to Nicklin—which established him as the humblest of democrats. “And this is Jim Nicklin. Would you like to sit with us for a while?”
“Thank you.” Hepworth nodded to Nicklin as he seated himself, took out a handkerchief and began to wipe his neck. “I think I’m a bit too old for hiking around in this heat.”
Montane looked sympathetic. “Would you like some tea?”
“Tea!” A look of distaste appeared on Hepworth’s roundly padded face. “The kind of thirst I have can only be quenched with gin and tonic. Any lesser brew would be an insult to the taste buds which have served me loyally for more years than I care to remember. I don’t suppose you—”
“I don’t believe in strong liquor,” Montane said.
Nicklin, who had been prepared to dislike the newcomer, largely because of his overbearing approach, decided not to be too hasty. Many another man—the former Jim Nicklin included—when courting a prospective employer would have pretended to love tea, but Hepworth had come straight out and said he was a boozer. Terrible interview technique, but it indicated that he was his own man.
Discreetly studying Hepworth, Nicklin was interested to note that he did not look anything like a senior scientist at a university which was famed for conservatism and stuffiness. His lightweight suit was cheap and ill-fitting. It was not a case of it being “well-worn but of good cut”—the hackneyed old novelistic phrase which showed that a character had the right sort of background but had “fallen into straitened circumstances”. This suit had started out shoddy, and had not improved with time. It was complemented by a rumpled shirt and comprehensively scuffed sandals.
Scott Hepworth was something of an oddball, Nicklin decided, and as such ought to be encouraged. “I’ve got some gin in my room,” he said, rising to his feet. “Ice and a slice of lime?”
“All the trimmings, my boy,” Hepworth said, looking deeply grateful.
Rewarded by a disapproving glance from Montane, Nicklin hurried to his room to prepare the drink. He was not particularly fond of gin, having bought it because it was easier to transport from town than beer, but he mixed himself a large one as well, knowing that it would further annoy Montane. He returned to the front steps in time to hear Montane ask the visitor why he had quit the Garamond.
“It wasn’t through choice,” Hepworth replied easily. “I got thrown out.” As if there might be some doubt about his meaning, he added, “I was forcibly ejected. Given the boot.”
Now positively warming to the man, Nicklin winked as he handed him a dewed glass. Hepworth took it eagerly, but, instead of drinking immediately, held it under his nose and breathed deeply of the aroma.
“May I ask why the university saw fit to dispense with your services?” Montane said, the stilted wording and coolness of their delivery showing that he was far from being impressed by Hepworth.
“I had an argument—some might call it a stand-up fight—with the head of my department.” Hepworth smiled into his drink as though enjoying pleasant memories. “He’s been trying to show me the door for quite a long time, and I finally gave him a good excuse.”
“What was the argument about?”
“I stumbled on some evidence that Orbitsville has jumped into a different universe, but Professor Phair disagreed with my interpretation.”
“A different universe!” Montane stiffened visibly. “Is this something new? We’ve already been told that the whole globe has moved.”
“Yes, but not so far.” Hepworth took an appreciative sip of his gin before going on. “I’m not talking about some kind of warp-transfer into a distant part of the familiar old continuum. I’m saying we jumped into an entirely different continuum—an anti-matter universe where time is reversed.”
“But—” Montane glanced helplessly at Nicklin.
“It’s a beautiful idea,” Nicklin said, vaguely aware of once having discussed a similar notion with Zindee White, “but what about these starships they’re starting to use on interportal runs? Shouldn’t the ions they scoop up just blow them apart?”
Hepworth shook his head. “I see you’ve already done some thinking on this, but in your scenario the ships wouldn’t be able to operate at all. If they were familiar hadronic-matter starships which had been popped into an anti-matter universe, their scoop fields would repel the surrounding anti-matter particles. What I’m saying is that our beloved Orbitsville and everything on it—present company included—has been flipped over in the process of being translated into a different universe. We have also been hurled about forty billion years backwards in time, but leave that aside for the moment. My main point is that we are composed of anti-matter now; our ships are composed of anti-matter now—so everything works cxactly as before.”