“Our first duty is a harrowing one. We must remove the mortal remains of Apryl Fugaccia from the ship, and transfer them to the last resting place with all due respect and…”
Consecrated ground, mortal remains, last resting place. Nicklin, bored with the rhetoric, occupied his thoughts by trying to compose an aphorism. The art of religious oratory is stringing the maximum number of cliches together with the minimum of… let’s see… fresh verbiage in between? No, the last bit is too stilted, not pithy enough. Virgin grammar? That’s even worse. Now I know how Oscar Wilde must have felt when… Nicklin abandoned the composition, becoming apprehensive as he realised that Montane’s eyes were drilling into his.
“Naturally, as God’s appointed leader of the mission, I am taking it upon myself to move the body, but I will need the assistance of one other person,” Montane said, his gaze still fixed on Nicklin’s face. “Let’s go, Jim.”
He switched on a portable light and immediately started across the gangplank. Nicklin swore inwardly, acknowledging that the preacher had scored another point in their private duel. The very last thing he wanted to do was manhandle a seventy-year-old corpse, or even go near a seventy-year-old-corpse, but there was no way in which Killer Nicklin could evade the task with half the mission watching. He was, after all, the man of ice.
“I hope this won’t take long,” he said, shouldering forward through the spectators. “I’m dying for something to eat.”
As he followed Montane out of the sunlight and into the shaded interior of the ship he was surprised to find that the air smelled of something like dead leaves. The earthy aroma, which perhaps also hinted of mushrooms, was not what he would have expected in a triple-sealed tomb. He forgot about it as Jock Craig, the electrician, who was carying an armful of lights, crowded into him from the rear. Petra Davies, similarly burdened, was following close behind.
The group moved slowly forward through the ship, with the electricians extending the area of illumination by attaching the miniature suns to every convenient surface. Nicklin’s first impressions of a starship’s interior were distorted by his being at a right angle to the normal lines of every open space. The webwork of shipfitters’ scaffolding and staging, looking as though it had been left in place during a temporary halt in the work, further complicated the alien environment.
Being in the lead, Montane must have found the going even more difficult, but Nicklin had trouble in pacing him as they went through deck after deck. He caught up at a place where the catwalk passed over a circular hatch whose location established that it led down to the pinnace. The two men lowered themselves on to the surrounding wall, which gravity now designated as a floor. Taking care not to tread on the indicator panels and controls, they swung the hatch up to reveal a short dark well. Light spilling into it showed that another circular door at the bottom was already open, a silent invitation to enter the pinnace…
Ves Fugaccia’s money-wise heirs had been delighted at the chance to unload the Altamura estate, but some remnant of propriety had led them to put in a stipulation. The small family burial plot at the rear of the house was to remain in their name, and the body of Apryl Fugaccia was to be interred in it with all due respect. Although Corey Montane hardly qualified as a priest in their eyes, they had agreed to have him conduct the ceremony. The concession had gratified Montane, in spite of Nicklin’s suggestion that things would have been otherwise had the tragic young bride become a convert to the true faith of old Rome.
He would have further demonstrated his scepticism by not attending the burial ceremony—had it not been for an unexpected internal event. The sight of Apryl Fugaccia’s small figure in the left-hand seat of the pinnace’s cockpit, still clad in her custom-made vacuum suit, had inspired him with the sudden and unmanning idea that disturbing her was an act of genuine crassness.
All dressed up and nowhere to go, he had thought, but no amount of smart braintalk could allay his feeling that the Gaseous Vertebrate had played enough pranks on her, that one more was one too many. Since before he was born, through all the time he could remember, she had been sitting there in the silent blackness… flying her expensive toy spaceship into the Dawn of Nothing… and, by rights, the pointless, aimless, beautiful flight should have gone on for ever. She should not have been grounded by a manic preacher who had been led to her by his capering, morally clubfooted assistant.
So Nicklin had attended the burial ceremony, while the cold airs had drifted in from Orbitsville’s endless savannahs, and afterwards he had drunk gin with Scott Hepworth until his ability to taste it had failed.
Chapter 14
It had taken almost a year for the starship to complete the journey from Altamura to Beachhead City, and at some stage in that painful, frustrating trek Nicklin had fallen in love with the huge and unprepossessing vessel.
Standing at the front window of the mission’s Beachhead office, he had an excellent view of the Tara—as it had been renamed by Montane—and could see nothing in its appearance to explain his emotional involvement. The three-cylinder layout had been introduced more than two centuries earlier by the historic Starfiight corporation, and had survived because of its efficiency, but even the most romantic of enthusiasts had to concede that it was ugly. Snow was caking on the Tara’s upper surfaces, swirling around the scaffolding and gathering in soiled drifts beneath the drive cylinders, giving it the forlorn appearance of an abandoned civil engineering project. The pinnace, which might have added a touch of aerodynamic glamour to the ponderous structure, had been unslung from beneath the nose section and transported separately.
More than ever, to Nicklin’s eyes, the ship looked quite incapable of flight, but he felt for it the special passion that some men and women can develop for a machine which was designed for a difficult task and has the potential to carry it out superbly.
The love affair had begun inauspiciously.
When the excavators bared the twin drive cylinders, upon which the ship had rested during its long incarceration, they discovered that Ves Fugaccia had made a mistake of the kind to which obsessive monument builders had been prone throughout history. In his determination to make his wife’s tomb impregnable he had swathed it with layer after massive layer of defences—and the combined weight of them had split the ferro-concrete foundation upon which the great edifice was constructed. In addition, somebody had forgotten to seal off the ventilators, purging ducts and drain tubes which had been opened for the ship’s overhaul in land-dock.
The apertures were comparatively tiny, almost invisible in the expanses of impermeable pressure hull, but they had been like six-lane highways for the myriads of fungal, crawling and slithering life-forms which existed in Orbitsville’s fertile soil.
When Montane’s workers opened the doors leading from the central cylinder into the engine cylinders they entered a dank and unwholesome netherworld. It was a jungle of tendrils and threads emanating from huge, pallid, fronded growths—some of them oozing in decay—among which there lived vast populations of things which moved on many legs or no legs at all. For seventy years they had fought among themselves for control of that dark microcosm, squirming armies of them disputing the principality of a fuse box or the kingdom of a transformer housing. They were united, however, in their dislike for the giant invaders from the world of light, and they demonstrated the fact with every means at their disposal.