Cliff Napier was waiting for him at the door to the operations shed, his shoulder-heavy bulk filling the entrance. “Morning, Vance. We’re nearly ready to fly.”
“Good.” Garamond eyed the first aircraft appraisingly then turned his gaze back along the strip. “It looks like a paddy field down there — why are the men wearing those sunhats?”
“Would you believe,” Napier said impassively, “to protect them from the sun?”
“But why that sort of hat?” Garamond ignored the sarcasm.
“I guess it’s because they’re light and easy to make. And it’s a good shape if the sun’s directly above you and you’re working in the dirt all day.”
“I still don’t like them.”
“You’re not working in the dirt all day.” This time there was no mistaking the coldness in the big man’s manner.
Garamond locked eyes with Napier and was shaken to feel a momentary surge of anger and dislike. This can’t be, he thought. Aloud he said, “Do you expect me to? Do you think I’m not making the most efficient use of human resources?”
“From your point of view, you are.”
“And from their point of view?”
“The cold season’s coming down soon. Most of the crew are staying here, remember. They’d rather be building houses and processing grass into protein cakes.”
Garamond decided against answering immediately in case he damaged a working relationship. He glanced up at the sky and saw that, behind the shield of brilliance, the broadest ribs of light blue were well in the ascendant in the west. They signified that summer was approaching the diametrically opposite point on Orbitsville’s shell, that Autumn was ending on the near side.
“This Orbitsville syndrome of yours,” he said after a pause. “An early symptom is that a man develops an aversion to taking orders, right?”
“That seems to come into it.”
“Then let’s sit down together and agree a common set of goals. That way…”
“That way we’d do everything you want and you wouldn’t even have to give the orders,” Napier said sharply, but this time he was smiling.
Garamond smiled in return. “Why do you think I suggested it?” Although the little crisis had passed, he had a feeling it carried significance for the future and he was determined to take appropriate action. “We’ll open a bottle tonight and get our ideas straightened out.”
“I thought we were out of whisky.”
“No. There’s plenty.”
“You’re on the stuff that Burton makes?”
“Why not?”
An incongruous primness appeared briefly on Napier’s dark features. “Maybe we can fix something up later. How about looking at this airplane?” “Certainly.” They walked out towards the waiting machine which was the biscuit colour of unpainted plastic. It was a high-wing monoplane, sitting nose-high on its skids and looking like something from a museum of aeronautics, but Garamond had no doubts about its capabilities. The ungainly ship would carry a crew of five at a maximum cruise of five hundred kilometres an hour for fifty days at a stretch, landing after that time to replenish food and water. Even this limitation was forced on it by the fact that more than two-thirds of the payload would be taken up by spares, an iron cow and other supplies.
Garamond glanced from the newly completed machine to the others of its kind further back on the open-air production line, and from them up to the black rectangular screen of the delton detector on the hillside. He felt a vague spasm of alarm over the extent to which his future was dependent on complex artifacts, but this was obliterated by the yearning hunger which kept him alive and was the motive force behind all his actions. It was ironic, he had often thought in the hours before sleep, how — in depriving him of all that was worth living for in his previous life — Elizabeth Lindstrom had provided, in herself, the single goal of his new existence. She had also given him the means of escaping from it, for he could foresee no way of long surviving the act of pulling the President’s ribcage apart with his bare hands and gripping the heaving redness within and…
“I know what you’re thinking, Vance.”
“Do you?” Garamond stared into the face of the stranger who had spoken to him, and he made the effort which allowed him to associate it with Cliff Napier. There was a psychic wrench and once again he was back into the sane world, walking towards the aircraft with his senior officer.
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” he heard himself saying.
“I think you’re secretly pleased the electronics lab isn’t able to build autopilots. If we’re going to fly that distance we want to fly it. We want to be able to tell people we did it with our hands.”
Garamond nodded. With our hands, he thought. One of the group standing at the plane was wearing a coolie hat and when its owner turned to greet him Garamond was startled to see the sweat-beaded features of Troy Litman, the senior production executive. Litman was a short pudgy man who had always compensated for the natural untidiness of his physique by paying strict attention to his uniform and off-duty dress, and he was one of the last Garamond would have expected to favour a badly-woven grass hat. Garamond began to doubt his earlier conviction that the design of the grass headgear was symbolic rather than utilitarian.
“The ship looks good,” Garamond said. “Is she ready to fly?”
“As near as she’ll ever be.”
Like the hat, the answer was not what Garamond would have expected of Litman. “How near is that?”
“Relax, Vance.” Litman grinned within the column of shadow projected by the brim of his hat. “That ship will take you as far as you want to go.”
“I’m ready to take her up now, sir,” Braunek said opportunely, from the opposite side of the group.
“You’re happy enough about it?”
“If the computer’s happy I’m happy, sir. Anyway I did a few fast taxis yesterday and she felt fine.”
“Go ahead, then.” Garamond watched the young man climb into the plane’s glasshouse and strap himself into his seat. A few seconds later the propellers started to turn, silently driven by the magnetic resonance engines, and the control surfaces flicked in anticipation. As the propeller revolutions built up the group moved out of the backwash and a similar scattering took place among the work gangs at the far end of the runway. The plane began to move and several excited shouts went up, signifying that, despite the computer predictions and tape-controlled machines, there had remained some areas of human participation.
In its unloaded condition the aircraft used very little of the runway before lifting cleanly into the air. It continued in a straight line for about a kilometre, rising steadily, shadow flitting over the grass directly below, then banked into a lazy turn and circled the encampment. The soundless flight seemed effortless, like that of a gull riding on a fresh breeze, but on the third pass Garamond thought he saw a small object detach itself from the aircraft and go fluttering to the ground.
“What was that?” Napier said, screening his eyes. “I saw something fall.”
“Nothing fell,” Litman asserted very quickly.
“I saw something too,” Garamond put in. “You’d better get a medic on to the truck, just in case.”
“It wouldn’t do any good — we had to pull the transmission out.”
“What?” Garamond stared in disbelief at Litman’s uneasy but defiant face. “One of the first basic procedures we agreed was that the truck would be kept at readiness during flight testing.”
“I guess I forgot.”
Garamond flicked a hand upwards, sending Litman’s hat tumbling behind him. “You are not a peasant,” he said harshly. “You are not a coolie. You are a Starflight executive officer and I’m going to see that you…”