Nicklin’s life had been one of blissful unconcern about such matters. He had insulated himself from them, or had dismissed ihem along with other concepts he found difficulty in handling. Nevertheless, a simple distaste for the idea of living on the inner surface of a bubble was part of his primal subconscious. It was out in the open now. The time bomb had detonated, and he had entered a new mental state in which his actions were governed by the compulsion to get away from Orbitsville before the unimaginable happened.
In that land-locked, self-oriented condition his perceptions of what was going on around him became patchy and flawed, magnifying some events and diminishing others.
At one stage he was very much aware of Montane hovering on the fringes of the action, virtually ignored by most of his subordinates. Montane looked like a man on the verge of collapse. He gave the impression of being bewildered, of not quite believing the evidence of his senses. It occurred to Nicklin that he might never have uccepted in his innermost self that this day would really arrive. Given the choice, he might have gone on and on until he died, making endless preparations to lead the escape from Orbitsville, delaying the actual event for increasingly trivial reasons.
In another disconnected fragment of time Nicklin found that he was standing at the telephone in a smaller office, with no clear idea of why he was there. He stared at the instrument for a few seconds, waiting for his hold on reality to improve, then told it to connect him to the Whites’ room in the Firstfooter Hotel. Almost at once (lham White’s red-gold head appeared at the set’s projection focus. He was wearing the unnaturally polite smile of a man who has just been sentenced to death.
“Jim!” he said. “Jim Nicklin! What’s happening, Jim?”
Nicklin shook his head impatiently “There’s no time to talk about it. Do you want to get out?” “Out?”
“Out of Orbitsville. On the ship. Do you want to go?”
At that moment sunlight washed through the room in which Nicklin was standing, showing that the banded pattern of the sky had shifted again. Cham’s image, transmitted through a kilometre of cable, brightened simultaneously.
“I’m afraid, Jim,” he said, his squirrel-brown eyes wide with shock.
“We’re all afraid, for Christ’s sake,” Nicklin snapped, losing his temper. “That’s why I’m asking you if you want to take off out of here. How about it?”
“Nora and I thought about it more than once. We used to look out for you on television, and I guess that put the idea into our heads, but we never took it seriously enough. We never dreamed it would come to this. We have no tickets or whatever we would need for-”
“The ship will be travelling half-empty,” Nicklin cut in, amazed at Cham’s Montane-like ability to waste time on senseless trivia. “Is Zindee with you?”
Cham glanced to his left. “She’s in the bedroom with her mother.”
“Get them both down to the ship,” Nicklin said urgently. “I’m talking to you as a friend, Cham. Get them down to the ship—and do it right now. I’ll wait for you at the foot of the main ramp. Have you got that?”
Cham nodded unhappily. “What should we pack?”
“Pack! If you wait around to pack anything you’ll end up fucking well dead!” Nicklin shook his fist in Cham’s face and his knuckles went into the image, causing it to swirl like coloured smoke. “Get to the ship right now—and don’t let anybody stop you!”
He turned away from the telephone as the last sentence he had blurted out sank into his own consciousness. Other people would want to scramble on board the Tara in this extreme hour; people who had no connection with the mission; people for whom the enterprise had been nothing more than an extended piece of silly-season journalism—until the Big O’s Day of Judgement had arrived.
Half the population of Beachhead will want to ride, Nicklin told himself. And they won’t take no for an answer…
In another fragment of time’s mosaic he found himself in the ill-ventilated room, across the corridor from the main office, where miscellaneous effects belonging to mission personnel were stored.
Opening his own locker with a thumbprint, he took out the radiation rifle, which had been a useless encumbrance since that far-off morning in Altamura. When the Fugaccia mansion was being vacated he had taken the weapon for no reason other than a feeling that such a dangerous artefact ought not to be left lying around, perhaps for inquisitive children to find. Now it no longer seemed an encumbrance. It looked functional and deadly—qualities which were entirely appropriate to the situation.
He checked the rifle’s power indicators, slung it on his shoulder mid hurried out of the room.
When Nicklin emerged from the office building with the rest of the mission’s staff it was into daylight conditions. The sun had been shining without interruption for more than ten minutes, and the fact that to him it seemed quite a long time was an indication of how much his confidence in the natural order had deteriorated. He moved out from under the building’s broad eaves, looked up at the ky and felt a pang of sick dismay.
All his life the alternating bands of azure and lighter shades of blue—representing day and night regions on the opposite side of Orbitsville—had possessed a geometric regularity and perfection. Now they were wildly distorted, and—the feature which brought a clamminess to Nicklin’s brow—were visibly in motion. For the most part the movement was a slow writhing, but there were several small areas where the stripes narrowed into lines and ran together in seething agitation. Those patches were forming at random in parts of the sky, boiling and shimmering for a brief period before smoothing out and dissolving.
Looking up at them, Nicklin guessed that a similar convergence had caused the frenzied alternauon of light and darkness in the Beachhead region. The shadow play also told him the solar cage was convulsing like an invisible heart in its death spasms. The end of the world is nigh.
Quelling a forceful upheaval in his stomach, he looked towards the ship and saw that about thirty people, many of them spaceport workers, had already clustered around the main ramp. They were not attempting to pass Kingsley and Winnick, who were blocking access to the ramp, but the tension in the air suggested it would not take much to start them surging forward. Glancing in the opposite direction, Nicklin saw that the main gates had been closed. A crowd was forming outside. Some of its members were pressing against the bars and arguing with the uniformed guards, who were nervously pacing within. The sections of Lindstrom Boulevard visible between buildings were thronged with cars.
Corey Montane, looking more assured now that the big decision had been forced upon him, ran towards his camper, accompanied by Nibs Affleck and Lan Huertas. A larger group went towards the ramp, headed by the spindle-legged figure of Voorsanger who, incongruously, was carrying a computer under one arm. Four men, Jock Craig among them, were running to the kiosk which housed the slideway controls. The mountainous bulk of the Tara, reflecting the sun in a coppery glare, provided a towering backdrop to the scene of complex activity.
Nicklin remained where he was, feeling isolated from all that was happening around him, then became aware of shouting from the crowd at the main gate. He looked in that direction and at once saw Danea Farthing ushering men, women and children through the adjoining personnel entrance. Some uniformed guards had moved outside and were clearing a small space by pushing back intruders, but they were in obvious danger of being overwhelmed. As Nicklin watched, a burly man penetrated the line by sheer force. He darted through the entrance and collided with two guards who had just emerged from the gatehouse. They grappled with him and the three began a lurching struggle which drew alarmed cries from women nearby.