Two men levered a square section upwards and then, without speaking the others took it in turn to look downwards at the stars.
nineteen
“This is North Ten, the most advanced of our forward distribution centres,” Elizabeth Lindstrom said, with a warm note of pride in her voice. “You can see at once the amount of effort and organization that has been put into it.”
Charles Devereaux walked across to the parapet of the roof of the administration building and looked out across the plain. Four hundred kilometres to the south lay Beachhead City, and the arrow-straight highway to it was alive with the small wheeled transports of settlers. Here and there on the road, before it faded into the shimmering distance, could be seen the larger shapes of bulk carriers bringing supplies. The highway ended at North Ten, from which point a series of dirt tracks fanned out into the encircling sweep of prairie. For the first few kilometres the tracks made their way through an industrial area where reaping machines gathered the grass which was used as a source of cellulose to produce plastics for building purposes. Immediately beyond the acetate factories the homesteads began, with widely spaced buildings sparkling whitely in the sun.
“I’m impressed with everything Starflight has done here, My Lady,” Devereaux said, choosing his words with professional care. “Please understand that when I put questions to you I do so solely in my capacity as a representative of the Two Worlds Government.”
Do you think I would waste time answering them otherwise? Elizabeth suppressed the thought and bent her mind to the unfamiliar task of self-control. “I do understand,” she assured the dapper grey man, smiling. “It’s your duty to make sure that all that can possibly be done to open up Lindstromland is in fact being done.”
“That’s precisely it, My Lady. You see, the people on Earth and Terranova have heard about the fantastic size of Lindstromland and they can’t understand why it is that, if there is unlimited living space available, the Government doesn’t simply set up a programme of shipbuilding on a global scale and bring them here.” “A perfectly understandable point of view, but…” Elizabeth spread her hands to the horizons, fingers flashing with jewel-fire, “…this land I have given to humanity makes its own rules and we have no option but to abide by them. Lindstromland is unthinkably large, but by providing only one entrance — and placing restrictions on interior travel and communications — its builders have effectively made it small. My own belief is that they decided to enforce a selection procedure, or its equivalent. As long as Lindstromland can accept immigrants only in regulated quantities the quality of the stock which arrives will be higher.”
“Do you think the concept of stock and breeding would have been familiar to them?”
“Perhaps not.” Elizabeth realized she had used an unfortunate trigger-word, one to which the upstart of a civil servant reacted unfavourably. It struck her that things had already gone too far when she, President of Starflight, was being forced to placate an obscure official in the weakest government in human history. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of Lindstromland, she was beginning to appreciate, had been ill omens.
Devereaux apparently was not satisfied. “It would be a tragedy if Earth were to export attitudes such as nationalism and…”
“What I’m saying,” Elizabeth cut in, “is that it would be an even bigger tragedy if we were to empty every slum and gutter on Earth into this green land.”
“Why?” Devereaux met her eyes squarely and she made the discovery that his greyness had a steely quality. “Because the transportation task would be too great to be handled by a private concern?”
Elizabeth felt her mouth go dry as she fought to restrain herself. Nobody had ever been allowed to speak to her in this manner before, with the possible exception of Captain Garamond — and he had paid. It was infuriating how these small men, nonentities, tended to lapse into insolence the moment they felt secure.
“Of course not,” she said, marvelling at the calmness of her voice. “There are many sound reasons for regulating population flow. Look at the squalid difficulties there were when the first settlers here encountered those creatures they call Clowns.”
“Yes, but those difficulties could have been avoided. In fact, we think they may have been engineered.”
For one heady moment Elizabeth considered burning Devereaux in two where he stood, even if it led to a major incident, even if it meant turning Lindstromland into a fortress. Then it came to her that Devereaux — in abandoning all the rules of normal diplomacy — was laying his cards on the table. She regarded him closely for a moment, trying to decide if he was offering himself for sale. The approach, in greatly modified form, was a familiar one among government employees — show yourself to be dangerous and therefore valuable in proportion. She smiled and moved closer to Devereaux, deliberately stepping inside his proximity rejection zone, a psychological manoeuvre she had learned at an early age. His face stiffened momentarily, as she had known it would, and she was about to touch him when Secretary Robard appeared on the edge of the stair-well. He was carrying a headset and feeding wire out of a reel as he walked.
Elizabeth frowned at him. “What is this, Robard?”
“Priority One, My Lady. Your flagship is picking up a radio message which you must hear.”
“Wait there.” She moved away from Devereaux. The brusqueness of her man’s voice, so out of keeping with his normal manner, told her something important had happened. She silently cursed the obtuse physics of Lindstromland which had denied her easy radio contact with the outside universe. A voice was already speaking when she put on the headset. It was unemotional, with an inhuman steadiness, and the recognition of it drained the strength from her legs. Elizabeth Lindstrom sank to her knees, and listened.
“…using the resources of the Bissendorf’s workshops we built a number of aircraft with which it was planned to fly back to Beachhead City. The ships proved inadequate for the distance involved, but they got eight of us to the point from which I am making this broadcast, the point where we have discovered a second entrance to the sphere.
“The entrance was not discovered during the equatorial survey because it is sealed with a metal diaphragm. The metal employed has nothing in common with the material of the Orbitsville shell. I believe it is the product of a civilization no further advanced than our own. This belief is strengthened by the fact that we had no difficulty in cutting a hole in it to let us extend a radio antenna.”
There was a crackling pause, then the voice emerged strongly in its relentless measured tones. “The fact that we were able to find a second entrance so quickly, with such limited resources, can only mean that there must be many others. Many hundreds. Many thousands. It is logical to assume that all the others have been similarly blocked, and it is equally logical to assume that it was not done by the builders of the sphere.
“This raises questions about the identity and motivation of those who sealed the entrances. The evidence suggests that the work was carried out by a race of beings who found Orbitsville long before we did. We may never know what these beings looked like, but we can tell that they shared some of the faults of our own race. They, or some of them, decided to monopolize Orbitsville, to control it, to exploit it; and the method they chose was to limit access to the interior of the sphere.