Nicklin was not sure why the reports had caused such a widespread frisson of public unease. It might have been due to the fact that a green luminosity had swept the exterior of Orbitsville shortly prior to the so-called Big Jump. Or, more likely, it had been because the force field associated with the lines was known to weaken any material it passed through. If it could slice a building into pieces, the thinking was, perhaps it was doing the same thing to Orbitsville itself.
It mattered not that ylem, the shell material, had for two centuries resisted technology’s fiercest efforts even to scratch it. There was a human personality type, exemplified by Montane himself, which had always been susceptible to paranoia and pessimism, to which every unusual event was an omen. They were the kind of people who saw portents of doom in an increase in the bug population, in a portrait falling off the living-room wall, in the creepy twilight which can herald a bad storm.
They were a minority, and only a tiny fraction of that minority were sufficiently motivated to take action, but in comparison to the mission’s previous scale of operations they made up an avalanche. Quite suddenly, Montane had been inundated with money and new obligations. He had found it necessary to open an office in Beachhead to deal with the flow of enquiries about the New Eden flight, and to handle legal work in connection with donations and bequests.
And, to Nicklin’s annoyance, he had given Danea a special job—a roving assignment in which she made discreet checks on applicants and their families. Nicklin could not guess how someone was assessed as the potential founder of a new race, and even if such vetting were possible he very much doubted that Danea was the right person to do it. She had a gift for weighing strangers up at a glance- he could testify to that from bitter experience—but working out their Adam-and-Eve quotient… ?
His principal source of discontent, though he could not voice it, was that his revised scheme for revenging himself on Danea was being impeded. He had been too direct, too brutal in his previous approach; now he wanted to go softly. If he could win her over by being Mr Nice Guy, by courting her with contrition, humour, consideration and gentleness he would do so. It could even go as far as marriage. And only then—when she was totally unprepared, when their relationship was a mirror image of the one they had started out with—would he let her see what it was like to be destroyed by the one person you had been unwary enough to love.
The new plan was superior to the old, it had a gratifying flavour of genuine evil to it, but it was nearly impossible to implement unless the victim was constantly at hand.
Nicklin tried to dismiss Danea from his mind as he reached the level at which the undisturbed surface gave way to mud, rubble and slippery duckboards. From that viewpoint the ship, fully a hundred metres in length, resembled a geological feature, something which had been in the earth for ever. It was impossible to imagine the vast outcrop of metal inching along highways on multi-wheel trailers, let alone ghosting through space at more than the speed of light.
He walked along the planks beside which the top of the left-engine cylinder was emerging through the protective sand. As he neared the group surrounding the cutter only one person, Gerl Kingsley, acknowledged his arrival. Kingsley had never doubted that Nicklin had done the right thing in killing the fleeing attacker, and had been overtly friendly ever since. He still had great difficulty in speaking, however, and his sociability was largely restricted to winks and salutes, plus occasional whispers of, “Sewage farm, eh, Jim!”
The cryptic greeting was a reference to the comment Nicklin once made when a woman, smarting because he had bested her in an argument, asked if he felt no remorse over having killed three fellow humans. Not the slightest—all I did was send three pieces of shit to the great sewage farm in the sky. He had been pleased by how quickly the remark had echoed through the mission’s personnel. It had earned him renewed dislike from practically everybody except Christine McGivern, on whom it appeared to have acted as an aphrodisiac, stimulating her natural inventiveness when they were together in bed.
The incident now seemed unreal to Nicklin, especially as Petruzzicho, the local sheriff, had not even bothered to come out of town to view the bodies. “It sounds to me like you ran up against the Lucci brothers, and nobody around here is going to grieve much over those characters,” he had said. “I’ll make you a deal, Jim—you bury the evidence and I’ll consider the case closed.”
Nicklin had done as requested, and that part of the incident had not paled in his memory. During the bleak hour it had taken him to bury the remains he had retched so violendy and frequently that towards the end he had been bringing up fresh blood. He had chosen to remain silent concerning the bout of squeamishness, feeling that it would not have squared too well with his public image.
On reaching the edge of the group he saw that the woman operating the cutter had almost completed the circuit of the door seam. Skilfully holding the gas nozzle at an acute angle to the line of work, she was melting the weld material and blowing it away in coruscating showers, with minimal damage to the ship’s hull. When the last molten blob was gone she stepped back, her torch popping loudly as it was turned off, and Montane took her place.
He had his familiar brown greatcoat buttoned well up to the throat, and appeared quite untroubled by the coldness of the air, in spite of having stood by for a long time. It was obvious to Nicklin that he was trying to look calm, but his mouth kept twitching with repressed jubilation as, amid the congratulations of the onlookers, he grasped the recessed door handle in a gloved hand and pushed it down. The lever did not move. He leaned his weight on it, pushing and tugging, but in spite of all his efforts the door remained firmly in place.
Aw, how could you do such a thing, O Gaseous Vertebrate? Nicklin thought, grinning. You’ve gone and screwed up Corey’s big moment!
Making no effort to conceal his amusement, he waited near the scene for twenty minutes during which obstinate fragments of metal were coaxed out of the door’s seam and quantities of penetroil were pressure-sprayed into its mechanisms. Finally, under the combined efforts of three men, the door was pulled open to reveal a rectangular airlock.
Nicklin, without being obvious about it, had worked his way into the front line of spectators. He was ready to surge forward with them, but held back when he saw that only a slim gangplank led to the inner door, which was already slightly ajar. Two metres below it was a “floor”, one which was oddly adorned with printed notices, communication sets and instrument panels, which showed that it laid equal claim to being a “wall”. He was reminded that spaceships were designed to manufacture their own gravity by means of acceleration and deceleration. The Liscard’s diaphragm decks were now perpendicular to the ground, and the narrow walkway—which facilitated reaching its interior—was there only because the ship had been land-docked at the time of Apryl Fugaccia’s death.
Having appraised the situation, Montane turned to face the group and raised his arms. “My friends, we have waited a long time for this moment—for years in quite a few cases—and I want to thank you for all the hard work you have done on behalf of the mission. God has begun to reward you for all those efforts. Atj last we are about to enter the Ark he has seen fit to provide for us—but there is one thing I would ask you to remember.
“This ship is more than the instrument of our salvation. It is also a tomb, and while inside it we must conduct ourselves accordingly-as we would while treading any plot of consecrated ground.” Montane paused and gave his audience a sombre stare.