“That’s Corey,” Voorsanger said, his voice quavering with vindication and relief. “I knew he wouldn’t desert us. I’m going to speak to him.” He went to the ladder and drew himself up it close on the pilot’s heels.
Nicklin edged past Affleck, who seemed dazed and quite unaware of the new development, and followed Voorsanger to the control room. By the time he stepped off the ladder Fleischer was in the central chair and busy with the communications panel. The voice on the radio grew louder and clearer.
“I repeat, this is spaceport control at Silver Plains, P202,” it said. “We are picking up your autoscan transmission on the general band. Is there anybody there? Please respond immediately if you are receiving this signal. I repeat, this is the spaceport control centre at Silver Plains, P202.”
“This is W-602874 answering your call, Silver Plains,” Fleischer said, her voice harshened by the long bout of retching. “Are you receiving me?”
There was a delay of several seconds before the voice on the radio was heard again. “This is spaceport control at Silver Plains. We are picking up your autoscan transmission on the…” It went on to repeat the earlier message, almost word for word.
“They didn’t hear you,” Voorsanger said nervously.
“Give them time,” Fleischer glanced at the communications panel. “They’re calling at a range of roughly thirty-five million kilometres. Our radio signal is taking a couple of minutes to get there. And we’ll have to wait as long again for a reply.”
“At least there’s somebody there to hear us,” Nicklin said, still trying to grasp the full significance of what had happened. “This means that Scott was right. His Benign Hypothesis is working out better than he’ll ever know.”
“It may also be more benign that he’ll ever know.” The pilot smiled at Nicklin for the first time in their acquaintanceship. “If all the old spaceport facilities are still in existence—and that call suggests that they are—we ought to be able to get another pinnace. Perhaps several.”
“That does sound… benign.” Nicklin returned Fleischer’s smile, tentatively, almost afraid to accept the priceless gift she was offering. “Did you say several?”
“There were four different types that I know of in the Hilversum Space Technology Centre at Portal 16.”
“Operational?”
“I flew two of them last year,” Fleischer said. “When I was adding the Explorer class to my general licence.”
“So…”
“So, the new plan is to locate Hilversum among that lot.” Fleischer, in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Hepworth, waved an arm at the image of the world cloud on the main screen. “It should be easy enough to do, as soon as they pick themselves up off the floor and get back on the air the way the people at Silver Plains have done.
“We then go into orbit around the Hilversum world; they shuttle us down to the ground; and what happens after that is up to the Lord.”
“We can only beg for His guidance and protection,” Voorsanger came in, his voice newly charged with religious fervour. “Now that Corey is no longer with us I think it falls on me to organise general prayers for our deliverance.”
Nicklin opened his mouth to comment on Orbitsville’s sudden change of status—from Devil’s snare to safe harbour—then decided it would be the cheapest kind of sarcasm. The very word had once meant tearing at flesh, and he had gorged himself to the full in the past three years. Besides, he had run as fast as anybody when the portents had come and the end of the world had seemed at hand.
“I think you should wait for some hard information before you say anything down below,” Fleischer said, after a pause.
“Of course, but are we going to have a four-minute delay every time we speak to someone back there?”
“No. When we finally reach standstill and are starting on the way back the delay will have gone up to about seven minutes.”
“Isn’t there something else you can do?” Voorsanger made a show of looking at his wristwatch. “How did we talk to Earth in the old days?”
Fleischer shook her head. “This ship has no tachyonic equipment.”
“What?” Voorsanger turned to Nicklin with a look of reproach on his compressed features.
“You were the financial expert who decided it was too expensive,” Nicklin said, amazed at how quickly Voorsanger, once he had persuaded himself that death was no longer imminent, had reverted to the role of tetchy business expert for whom a wasted second was a wasted fortune. “Besides, the Tara wasn’t supposed to need anything like tachyonics—the plan was to get out of Orbitsville and keep on going.”
“The plan was also to have a ship that was capable of—”
Voorsanger broke off as the radio speakers gave a preliminary click.
“This is Silver Plains,” the same male voice said. “We are receiving you, W-602874. Can you confirm that you are the Explorer-class vessel Tara? We have you listed as land-docked at Pi for overhaul and modifications. Over.”
“Tara confirmed,” Fleischer said at once. “We got out of Pi just before… things started to happen. One of our drive units has failed and we are currently retarding in preparation for return to any available port. We have also lost our auxiliary craft. Repeat, we have lost our auxiliary craft. Can you arrange for the retrieval of approximately one hundred passengers from parking orbit? Over.”
“That’s the big question,” Nicklin said as Fleischer relaxed back into her chair. “Is Silver Plains likely to have anything which could help?”
“We can only hope and pray. We don’t even know what happened when the portals closed up, do we? If it was a simple iris-type process you would expect that any ships which were in exterior docking cradles would have been shut out of Orbitsville. Then when Orbitsville dissolved and—how do you put it?—all the geometries were reversed, all those ships would have wound up inside their respective new planets. Is that how it seems to you?”
“I hadn’t even thought about that part of it,” Nicklin replied. “I wonder if everybody got out of them.”
“There was enough time—for ships that were actually in the cradles.” The pilot, rapidly regaining her professional composure, sounded almost casual. “But there must have been a few ships in transit between portals at the time. I’d like to know what happened to them. Even if they were somehow, by some kind of miracle, injected into orbit around new planets—how will the people on board get down to the surface?
“Ships with a surface-to-space capability are rare birds—as we very well know—and those that may still be available will only be on planets which happen to have spaceports. Even on the equatorial band that could be as few as one in a hundred.” Fleischer’s voice became abstracted, fading almost to inaudibility as she developed the line of thought.
“I wonder how far Hepworth’s Good Fairy is prepared to go to preserve human lives. I mean, how good is she at detail planning?”
Another good question, Nicklin thought, realising that even the qualified optimism he had begun to feel over the fate of the Tara had been ill-considered and premature. Fleischer had said that there were four pinnaces at P16, but there was a strong probability that all four had been in exterior cradles when the portal closed. In that case it was possible, as she had suggested, that they were now inside Hilversum’s brand-new custom-built world.
It all came down to the fact—an echo of Montane’s oft-repeated warning—that everything had been made too easy for the inhabitants of Orbitsville. The great shell had been rotating at a rate which meant that the portals in the equatorial band had a velocity exactly equal to that of a ship which was in orbit around the sun. That had made embarking and disembarking through a portal extremely simple. It had also made it pointless for an ordinary commercial spacecraft to carry the equivalent of an ocean liner’s lifeboat.