His rejection of a religious scenario was instinctive, intellectual and complete—but what was left?
As his mind rebounded from what it could not encompass he found himself turning to the more immediate question of what would happen next. Was it possible that, as Montane believed, the forces involved in Orbitsville’s transformation were hostile to life? Not solely to humanity—that notion was paranoic to far beyond the point of absurdity—but to every form of animate matter. Could the central sun be extinguished, thus purging the globe of biological contamination? Could the Big O contract like a collapsing star and eventually disappear? Or could it explosively fly apart?
The apocalyptic vision of Orbitsville’s shell yielding to mechanical stresses led Nicklin, by association, to remember the green lines which had appeared in many places three years earlier. The force field connected with them was known to weaken the cohesion of steel and concrete—was it therefore having the same effect; on the shell material? There had been reports that the glowing lines were also visible on the outside of Orbitsville, which suggested that their influence was indeed able to penetrate ylem.
Reluctant to regard the idea as anything but purest fantasy, Nicklin nevertheless scanned the dark screen more closely in search of radiant green threads. None was visible, but he realised at once that, as the lines had been hundreds of kilometres apart, the camera facing directly astern covered too little of Orbitsville’s surface. He tried the lateral images, but in them the angle of sight was too acute to be of any value.
“Nothing on the radio,” Hepworth announced, getting out of his chair. “I had to check, but my guess is that Orbitsville has sealed itself up all over. Tighter than the proverbial duck’s ass.”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that,” Fleischer said, “but I’m in agreement.”
“That means we drop any proposal to go back.” Hepworth turned to Nicklin. “What do you say, Jim?”
“It seems to me we have no option but to go on with the flight, but—” Nicklin glanced down at Montane, who was still on his knees and praying silently with his eyes closed.
“But what?”
“We’re talking like a management committee, but things were never set up that way. Corey is the man in charge.”
“Jim! What’s the matter with you?” Hepworth’s plump face showed exasperation. “Just look at him! The man obviously isn’t capable of commanding a rowboat, let alone a—” He broke off and made a placating gesture as Nibs Affleck took a threatening step towards him.
“All I can say, Monsignor Nicklin,” Hepworth added in a low voice, moving closer to Nicklin, “Is that I never noticed you deferring much to Pope Corey in the past.”
“I know, I know.” The emotional conflict Nicklin was experiencing made speech difficult. “But he laid it on the line a minute ago. I shouldn’t even… I mean, if it hadn’t been for Corey I would still be…”
“It’s all right, Jim.” Montane had risen to his feet, his face set and unnaturally white. “There’s no need for an argument here. A lot of people have been left behind, but that’s my fault. I was warned some time ago that direct action was called for, and… well… I did nothing about it. One day I will have to answer to God for that, and I only hope I can face Him when my time comes.”
“In the mean time,” Hepworth said impatiently, “we press on to Prospect One. Is that what you’re saying?”
Montane shrugged, something Nicklin had never seen him do before. “That’s what I’m saying.”
Hepworth, looking triumphant, nodded to the pilot. “There you are, captain—do you want to spread your wings?”
For a moment Nicklin thought that Hepworth was trying to sound poetic, then realised he had referred to the electromagnetic scoop fields which had to be deployed on each side of the Tara to gather reaction mass. On diagrams their curved shape looked like huge wings, causing interstellar ramjets to be popularly known as butterfly ships.
“We don’t need to worry about traffic controllers, and we don’t need to worry about traffic,” Fleischer said, turning back to the console.
Nicklin watched in fascination as she moved her hands over the sloping surface, causing lanes, highways, townships of coloured lights to spring into existence. This was the first step in taking the ship out of Einstein’s domain and into that realm of strangeness where Arthurian physics held sway. Nicklin knew, and only dimly understood, that in order for the ship to travel at multiples of the speed of light it would temporarily cease to exist as far as observers in the normal continuum were concerned.
The massive vessel and everything in it, including his own body, would be transformed into a cloud of particles with more affinity to tachyons than to normal matter. The mode of travel—which had once been described as “crooked accountancy applied to mass-energy transformations”—was magical in its effect. But before it could be brought into play the ship would have to reach a very high normal-space velocity, and there was nothing at all magical about how that velocity was achieved.
It was a product of greasy-overall engineering, spanner-and-screwdriver technology, involving a host of control systems—mechanical, electrical, hydraulic—among which a twentieth-century artificer would have felt reasonably at home. To begin the voyage proper, Megan Fleischer was activating the thermonuclear reactor and feeding power to the flux pumps, thereby unfurling the Tara’s intangible wings. At the ship’s present negligible rate of movement the scoops could do little more than complement the ion drive, but they would become increasingly effective as the speed built up.
“Here we go,” Fleischer said after a few seconds, touching the master control pads.
Nicklin felt a slight but immediate increase in weight and was gripped by a numbing sense of wonder as he realised that the great metallic entity, upon which he had lavished three years of devotion, had ceased being an inert object and was stirring fully into life.
Fleischer switched camera channels and the star fields ahead of the ship blossomed in the main view screen. Perhaps a hundred major stars shone with a diamond-pure lustre against a dusting of fainter specks, creating a three-dimensional matrix which seemed to draw Nicklin’s consciousness into it. I must have been blind, he thought as his gaze roved through the alien constellations. How did I fail to understand that we were all born for this?
“Not very good,” Fleischer said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Not very good, at all.”
Hepworth was beside her on the instant, scanning the console. “What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t what I would call a clean start-up. The intake fields seemed a bit slow in establishing themselves.”
“It happens in a hundredth of a second.” Hepworth sounded relieved and irritated at the same time. “You can’t judge it by sight.”
“I’ve been a pilot for more than twenty years, and I can judge it by sight,” Fleischer snapped. “Besides, that wasn’t the only thing I didn’t like—the left field wasn’t a good shape when it opened up.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“It looked a bit…flat.”
Hepworth examined the glowing butterfly that was the intake field distribution diagram. “It looks fine to me.”
“It looks all right now,” Fleischer said stubbornly, “but I’m telling you it started off flat.”
“It might have met a bit of resistance—God knows what sort of stuff is spewing out of Orbitsville.” Hepworth patted the pilot’s luxuriantly covered head. “I think you can safely leave the vacuum physics to me.”