“It was to be expected,” she said. “I know.” Aileen nodded contentedly, and hugged her child. “I told you.”
Elizabeth gaped at her. “You fool! You don’t think he’s still alive after what you’ve just…” She was forced to stop speaking as the waves of thunder rolling out from Beachhead City, slow moving in the low-pressure air of Orbitsville, engulfed the building. Reflections of lights stretched and shrank and stretched again as the transparent walls absorbed energy, and small objects throughout the room stirred uneasily in their places. Christopher buried his face in his mother’s hair.
“Your husband is dead,” Elizabeth announced when silence was restored to the room, “but because you are the widow of the most distinguished of all my S.E.A. captains, you will remain here as my guest. No other arrangement would be acceptable.”
Aileen faced her, pale but immovable. “My Lady, you are mistaken. You see — I know.”
Elizabeth shook her head incredulously and a little sadly. She had been planning to spend perhaps a year in a game of subtleties and suggestions, watching the other woman’s slow progression from doubt to certainty about her son’s eventual fate. But it was obvious now — in view of Aileen Garamond’s mentality, or lack of it — that such strategies would be ineffective. If the full payment were to be extracted, as God had decreed it should be, she would have to speak plainly, in words a child could understand. Elizabeth touched a beautiful micro-engineered ring on her left hand, ensuring that no listening devices could remain in operation nearby, and then explained the accountancy of retribution which demanded that Christopher Garamond should be allowed another three years. He was to have the same lifespan as Harald Lindstrom — but not a day longer.
When she had finished she summoned her physician. “Captain Garamond’s death has left Mrs. Garamond in a state of hysteria. Give her suitable sedation.”
Aileen opened her mouth to scream but the physician, an experienced man, touched her wrist in a quick movement which did not even disturb the boy she was holding in her arms. As the cloud of instant-acting drug sighed through her skin Aileen relaxed and allowed herself to be led away.
Alone again, Elizabeth Lindstrom stood looking out across the western grasslands and was aware — for the first time in over a year — of something approaching happiness. She began to smile.
thirteen
The integrity of the Bissendorf’s design was so great, and the onboard preparation had been so thorough, that less than a tenth of the crew died as a result of the passage through the eye of the needle.
Every available man and woman had been co-opted on to the teams which had welded into place a new computer-designed structure, creating load paths which actually utilized the forces of the impact to give the shell enough strength to survive. Until only a matter of minutes before the hellish transit, other gangs had swarmed on the outside of the ship, adding hundreds of sacrificial anodes to those which were already in place serving as focal points for the ion exchange which would otherwise have eaten away the hull during normal flight. The new anodes, massive slabs of pure metal, withstood the brief but incredibly fierce attrition of the lightning which wreathed the ship as it passed along the atmospheric tunnel created by its electron gun. On emerging from its ordeal the Bissendorf’s principal dimensions had altered, in some cases by several metres, but it had gone in with all pressure doors sealed — in effect it had been converted into dozens of separate, self-contained spaceships — and there was no loss of life due to decompression.
The entire crew had donned spacesuits for primary protection. Each person had been injected with metallic salts and the ship’s restraint fields stepped up to overload intensity, creating an environment in which any sudden movement of human tissue would be resisted by a pervasive jelly-like pressure from all sides. This measure, while undoubtedly a major factor in crew survival, also caused an unavoidable number of deaths. In the few sections where severe structural failure occurred some of the occupants had fallen varying distances under multiple gravities, and the heat induced by electromotive interaction had caused their blood to boil. But, for the vast majority, the internal bracing of their organs against immense G-shocks had meant the difference between life and death.
And yet, all the preparation all the frenzied activity, would have amounted to nothing more than a temporary stay of execution had it not been for the exotic nature of Orbitsville itself.
The synthetic gravity of the shell material attenuated much more rapidly than that of a solid mass. Although the Bissendorf’s slanting course was drawn into the shape of a parabola the curve remained flat, and the crew had sufficient time to control their re-entry into the atmosphere from the inner vacuum of Orbitsville. The vessel’s ion tubes and short-term reaction motors were effective against the weak pull of the shell, and it was possible for the Bissendorf to skip along the upper fringes of the air shield, gradually shedding velocity. It was even possible, using the fading reserves of reaction mass, to bring the ship down in one piece, with no further loss of life.
What was manifestly impossible, however, was to make the ship fly again.
All its external sensors had been seared cleanly from the hull, and many of the internal position-fixing devices had been destroyed or confused by the unnatural physics of Orbitsville. But the clocks were still in operation — and they had recorded a time lapse of five days. Five days from the passage through the Beachhead City aperture to the final touchdown on a hillside far into the interior. Starting from that basic fact, and using only a pocket calculator, it took just a few seconds for those on board to realize that they had travelled a distance of more than fifteen million kilometres.
In terms of the overall size of Orbitsville the journey was infinitesimal. A short hop, a stone’s throw, a stroll across sunlit grass and woodlands — but in human terms the distance itself was more of a barrier than mountains or torrents. It was known, for instance, that back on Earth many a country postman had in his lifetime walked a total distance equal to a trip to the Moon, but that was only 385,000 kilometres. Walking back to Beachhead City would have been a task to be carried out by successive generations over a period of a thousand years.
Using the vast resources of the Bissendorf’s workshops it would have been possible to build a fleet of vehicles which might have cut the journey time down to a mere century — except that wheels and other automobile components wear out in a matter of months. It would not be possible to transport the maintenance and manufacturing facilities which might have enabled the caravan to complete its golden journey.
There was also the difficulty that no man or machine knew the exact direction in which to travel. It would have been possible to get a rough bearing from the angle of the day and night ribs across the sky, but a rough bearing would be of no value. At the distances involved, a deviation of only one degree would have caused the train to miss Beachhead City by hundreds of thousands of sun-gleaming kilometres.
By the time the dead had been buried, the day was well advanced, and the remaining men and women of the Bissendorf’s crew were ceasing to be citizens of Earth. They were experiencing the infinity-change, the wistful, still contentment which poured down from the motionless sun of Orbitsville.