Hepworth sniffed. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
“That’s why we’ve got to talk some sense into the man.” Nicklin got back on to the ladder and went up it at speed, doing most of the work with his hands. When he reached the control deck Montane was already standing beside Megan Fleischer, who was in the centre seat of the five which faced the master view screen. It was being fed by an aft-facing camera and the display on it had the effect of distracting Nicklin from his immediate purpose.
At the bottom edge were two copper-glowing segments, equally spaced, which represented the Tara’s drive cylinders as seen from a point at the rear of the passenger cylinder. They failed to hold the eye because most of the screen was taken up by the huge, sky-blue circle, with the Orbitsville sun close to its centre, which was the image of the Beachhead portal. Ribbons of a lighter blue, shifting like moire patterns, formed a background for streamers of milky cloud and the condensation trail of a lonely aircraft. The rest of the screen, dramatising a simple geometric design, was filled by the utter blackness of the Orbitsville shell.
It’s really happening, Nicklin thought, eyes and mind brimming. I’m in a spaceship—and it’s leaving the world behind…
“…hope you realise that it’s impossible for any ship to disengage itself from a docking cradle,” Fleischer was saying. “If we go back we won’t be able to get away again unless somebody in the Port Authority gives permission.” She was about fifty and, like many of Montane’s appointees, strictly religious. Her neat, regular features were unadorned by cosmetics and, although she was not required to be in uniform, she favoured dark grey suits which were almost military in style. She had abundant chestnut hair, long and flowing, which to Nicklin’s eye contrasted oddly with the general severity of her appearance.
“They can’t withhold permission,” Montane said. “Not now. There have been too many signs.”
“Corey, you didn’t see what it was like just before we got out,” Nicklin said. “The whole place was—”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Nicklin.” Montane’s voice was hard and his gaze openly hostile.
“I’m giving it to you just the same,” Nicklin replied, noting that Montane had, for the first time, addressed him by his surname. “It would be madness to go back.”
“What are you doing here, anyway? What happened to the great disbeliever? Why aren’t you back in Beachhead, scoffing and sneering, and telling everybody who’ll listen to you that Orbitsville will go on for ever?”
“I…” Nicklin looked away, vanquished by the preacher’s logic and contempt.
“Jim is right in what he says,” Hepworth put in. “If we go back we’ll lose the ship.”
Montane dismissed him with a gesture and spoke directly to the pilot. “I’ve given you your orders—take the ship back to the portal and put it into dock.”
For a moment Fleischer looked as though she was about to protest, then she nodded and turned her attention to the control console before her. She touched several command pads in rapid succession. Hepworth took a step towards her, but his way was immediately blocked by Affleck, whose ravaged face was stiff with the promise of violence.
Bemused, filled with conflicting emotions, Nicklin studied the brilliant blue disk of the portal. He guessed the Tara was some five kilometres out from the surface of Orbitsville. At that range the port’s docking cradles, massively clamped to the rim of the aperture, were visible as a cluster of tiny irregularities in an otherwise perfect circle. He tried to visualise the scenes that would occur in the dock area when it was discovered that the ship was returning, but his imagination balked. Human behaviour was unpredictable at the best of times, and when thousands of people were driven by primaeval terror…
But whatever happens, he told himself, I’ve done with killing.
Almost of its own accord his right hand dropped to the stock of the rifle and ejected the weapon’s power pack. He was slipping the massy little cylinder into his pocket when he became aware of a fundamental change taking place in the geometries of the view screen. The change was so radical, so contrary to all his expectations, that he had to stare at the image for several seconds before accepting its message.
The searingly bright blue disk of the portal was shrinking.
His first thought was that Fleischer had defied Montane by directing maximum power into the ion tubes, dramatically speeding up the ship’s flight away from Orbitsville. Then came the realisation that he was dealing in physical impossibilities—no star drive yet devised could produce the kind of acceleration which would be compatible with what he was seeing. He could feel no gravitational increase at ail, and yet the image of the portal was visibly contracting. The only possible explanation was that the view screen was depicting a real event.
The portal itself was becoming smaller.
All activity in the control room ceased. The power to move or speak, or even to think, was removed from the five watchers as the portal dwindled. In the span of less than a minute the huge circle shrank to the apparent size of an azure planet, a moon, a bright star.
It glimmered briefly, amid a haze of after-images, and then it was gone.
The Orbitsville trap had been sprung.
PART THREE: The Scheme Shatters
Chapter 18
“Looks like we got out of there just in time.”
The speaker was Nibs Affleck, who normally maintained a deferent silence in the presence of senior personnel, and the sheer banality of his remark served to free the others from their mental and physical paralysis.
“God, God, God,” Montane whispered, sinking to his knees, hands steepled beneath his chin. “Do not abandon your children in their hour of need.”
“We should try the radio,” Hepworth said to Fleischer, his voice surprisingly firm and clear.
She twisted in her seat to look up at him. “Why?”
“I want to know about the other portals. Perhaps what happened at Pi is an isolated phenomenon. We should try to get in touch.”
The pilot managed to smile. “Something tells me that would be a waste of time. Especially mine.”
“I could do it for you,” Hepworth said. He glanced down at the adjacent seat and Nicklin realised that—even in this hour of astonishment, when reality itself seemed to be in a state of flux—he was observing shipboard protocol.
“Be my guest,” Fleischer said, turning back to her own area of the console.
As Hepworth sank into the high-backed seat, his movement slowed by the minimal gravity, Nicklin returned his attention to the master screen. It was now uniformly black, the Tara’s drive cylinders having become invisible when the rays from the Orbitsville sun were shut off. Several auxiliary screens, fed by cameras aimed ahead of the ship and to the side, were showing patterns of stars—but looking aft there appeared to be a universe without light. Nicklin knew the emptiness was illusory, that Orbitsville’s vast non-reflective shell occupied half of the normal sphere of vision, but the sense of being a castaway in a totally sterile cosmos persisted.
Mentally, he was similarly adrift. How was he to come to terms with the simple fact that Corey Montane had been right all along? Orbitsville was not eternal and changeless. He had always intuited that it was a product of nature, an object which had somehow evolved to the nth state of matter at which it could never be understood by the human mind. Now he was face-to-face with the concept of Orbitsville as an artefact, and that led to the great questions about who had built it and their purpose in doing so.