“I’m closing her up, Jim,” Hepworth said.
“No!” That’s what the centurion is waiting for. “Leave the door alone!”
“We can’t wait!”
The sunlit universe outside tilted further. Nicklin braced himself against the door coaming, keeping his aim. There came a loud whining sound from nearby hydraulic pumps and the door began to swing shut.
“Sorry, Jim—it had to be done.”
This is when it happens, Nicklin thought, keeping his eye on the slidemaster through the narowing aperture. The door was closing quickly, aided by the angle of tilt, shutting off Nicklin’s view of the world. He saw the man make a sudden movement and in the next instant the grinding squeal of the slideway stopped.
“You bastard,” Nicklin breathed, his finger tightening on the rifle’s trigger. Little more than a second remained in which to fire, but that was plenty of time for the act of retribution, for the games player to make his final score. He sent the necessary neural command—the execution order—to his finger, but there was no response. The slim rectangle of brilliance shrank into a line and vanished. The door bedded into the hull with a clunk and automatic bolts ran their radial courses into the surrounding structure.
What happened to me? Nicklin thought in wonderment. The centurion was a dead man—but I gave him back his life!
A moment later he had to let go of the rifle and grab hold of a stanchion to avoid sliding off the gangplanks, then it came to him that the ship was still rotating. And almost at once the balm of weightlessness flooded through his body.
The Tara had taken flight.
Chapter 17
Nicklin remained clinging to the gangplank railing while he adjusted to the idea that he—Jim Nicklin!—had become a space traveller. There was no physical evidence of what was happening to the ship, but in his mind’s eye he could see the Tara—having wallowed down through the Beachhead portal—drifting out and away from the Orbitsville shell with what little momentum it had. It was quite likely that the ship was slowly tumbling, presenting its pilot with control problems and delaying the moment when the drivers could be switched on.
The only way of getting hard information was from the astrogation screens, and as soon as the thought came to mind Nicklin felt a compulsion to go to the control deck without delay. A spectacular event was taking place, and here in the midship airlock he was blind to it. He looked about him, preparing for the small adventure of flying to the inner door, and encountered Hepworth’s scandalised gaze.
“He stopped the rollers!” Hepworth said hoarsely. “The swine nearly stopped us getting away, Jim. If the ship had settled backwards we’d have been stuck there for ever.”
But that was in our previous existence, Nicklin thought, wondering how Hepworth could still concern himself with the matter. “He was sticking to his post.”
“You should have stuck him to his post. You should have melted the bastard, Jim.”
“It’s all over. Do you want to go up front and find out what’s happening?”
Without waiting for a reply, Nicklin slung the rifle on his shoulder and launched himself towards the airlock’s inner door, feeling rather like a swimmer entrusting himself to invisible waters. He caught a handrail at the door’s edge and, gratified at how natural the movement felt, swung himself around it and on to the broad ladder which ran the length of the passenger cylinder.
It was only then that he became fully aware of the state of near-bedlam which existed throughout the serried decks. The gangplanks, which ran parallel to the ladder, had been crowded with people when the Tara made its ungainly dive into space. Now, suddenly disoriented and deprived of weight, they were in frantic pursuit of safer resting places. Some were clinging to the ladder, while others—with much shouting and waving of limbs—ventured towards targets between decks. Children seemed to be crying on every level, and the confusion was made greater by items of baggage and personal effects which drifted randomly in the cramped and cluttered perspectives of the companionway.
Nicklin went towards the prow of the ship with effortless speed, his progress aided by the fact that the engineered environment, so bewildering to others, was totally familiar to him. He knew every cleat, gusset plate and fastener so well that he could have located himself simply by remembering the irregularities in certain welds. He had negotiated his way past six decks when he became aware of a faint gravitational drag and realised that the ship’s ion drive had been activated. Almost at once there was a decrease in the ambient noise level as the Tara’s passengers found a degree of reassurance in the behaviour of everything around them.
The upper decks were quieter, the living space having been allocated to mission workers, many of whom had been left behind in Beachhead. On nearing 3 Deck, two below the control room, Nicklin heard Montane’s voice just above. He stepped off the ladder beside the circular hatch which led to the pinnace. That level was partly taken up by stores associated with the pinnace, and therefore had only two accommodation suites—one for Montane, the other for Voorsanger.
Montane and Nibs Affleck were standing at Voorsanger’s door, steadying themselves in the weak gravity by gripping the frame. From inside the room there came a dry choking sound. Nicklin’s first thought was that Voorsanger was being sick, then he realised the man was sobbing. The notion of the arid and stiff-necked accountant giving vent to tears was almost as strange to Nicklin as any event of the past hour.
“What’s the matter?” he said to Montane.
Ignoring the question, Montane turned on him with a look of outrage. “Is this your doing? The launch! Was it you?”
“I didn’t have much choice.”
“Choice! Who are you to talk about choice?” Montane’s lips were quivering with anger. “Have you any idea what you’ve done? Dozens of families were left behind! Ropp’s wife has been left behind!”
“That’s too bad,” Nicklin said, “but there was absolutely nothing I—”
“We can’t go on with this,” Montane cut in. “We have to go back.”
“Back! We can’t go back, Corey—we almost had the ship taken off us as it was.”
“Jim is right,” Scott Hepworth said, corning into view on the ladder.
“You!” Montane pointed at him with a trembling finger. “You’re as bad as he is—you’re both in this together.”
“You’ve got to calm down, Corey,” Nicklin said. “If we go back now and cradle the ship we’ll lose it for sure. The mob—”
“The Lord will confound my enemies.” Montane threw himself at the ladder and went up it towards the control deck with surprising agility. Affleck, who seemed to have taken on the role of Montane’s protector, gave the others a reproachful look and followed close behind him.
“We’d better go after them,” Nicklin said to Hepworth.
“You can’t use the rifle. It would probably vent the pressure hull.”
“I’ve no intention of using it,” Nicklin said, impatient with Hepworth’s new preoccupation with death-dealing. “Besides, this is Corey’s show. If he wants to take the ship back nobody has any right to stop him—and I suppose we might be able to keep everything under control back there for a few hours.”