“Are you? You used to be known as the best production controller in the S.E.A. fleet.”
“That’s all in the past, Vance. I’ve got bigger things on my mind now.”
“Bigger than a man’s life? Braunek could have been killed over that sloppy workmanship.” “I’m sorry about young Braunek getting hurt, and I’m glad he’s all right.” Litman paused and retraced his steps towards Garamond. The reason the men went along with you a moment ago is that you gave them Orbitsville — and that’s important to them. They’re going to spread out through Orbitsville, Vance. This camp won’t hold together more than a year or two, and then most likely it will be left empty.“
“We were talking about the plane crash.”
“We don’t stand united any more. Any man who trusts his life to a machine he hasn’t made by himself and personally checked out by himself is a fool. You should remember that.” Litman turned and plodded away down the hillside, probably intent on retrieving his coolie hat. Garamond stared after the compact figure, filled with the uneasy dislike that a man always feels for another who seems in closer touch with the realities of a situation. He thought hard about Litman’s words during the midday meal and as a result decided to turn himself into a one-man inspection and quality assurance team, with entire responsibility for the airworthiness of his aircraft.
The self-imposed task — with its round of visual and physical checking of every aspect of the fleet production — occupied nine-tenths of Garamond’s working hours, and brought the discovery that he still retained the ability to sleep without stunning his system with alcohol.
Garamond was spreadeagled across the tailplane of the seventh aircraft, examining the elevator hinges, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was late in the day and therefore hot — temperatures on Orbitsville built up steadily throughout each daylight period, before dropping abruptly at nightfall — and he had been hoping to finish the particular job without interruption. He kept his head inside the resinous darkness of the inspection hatch, hoping the interloper would take the hint and go away, but there came another and more insistent tap. Garamond twisted into a sitting position and found himself looking into the creased dry face of O’Hagan. The scientist had never been a happy-looking man but on this occasion his expression was more bleak than usual, and Garamond felt a stab of concern.
He switched off his inspection light and slid to the ground. “Has anything happened, Dennis?”
O’Hagan gave a reluctant nod. “We’ve recorded a delta particle.”
“You’ve recorded a…” Garamond pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and fought to control his elation. “Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do? What’s your worry?”
“We’ve only got about eighty per cent of the original screen rebuilt.”
“So?”
“It’s too soon, Vance. I’ve been through Mike Moncaster’s math a couple of times and I can’t fault him. With two complete screens — which is what we planned for — giving a receiving area of five hundred square metres, we should have had to wait eighty or ninety days even to…”
“We were lucky,” Garamond interrupted, laughing and astonished to realize he still remembered how. “It just shows that the laws of probability are bound to give you a break eventually. Come on, Dennis, admit it.”
O’Hagan shook his head with sombre conviction. “The laws of probability are not bound to give you anything, my friend.”
The eight aircraft took off at first light, while the air was cool and thick, and climbed steadily against the seriate blue archways of the Orbitsville sky. At the agreed cruising height of five hundred metres the ungainly, stiff-winged birds levelled off, exchanging brief communications through pulses of modulated light. They assumed a V-formation, and circled once around the base camp, their shadows falling vertically on to the remains of the Bissendorf, the metallic egg which had brought about their slow and painful birth. And then, without lingering further, they set course towards the prismatic mists which lay to the east.
sixteen
Day 8. Estimated range: 94,350 kilometres
For a start, I am determined to avoid the abbreviations traditionally used by diarists — their function is that of shortening a necessary task, whereas my aim is to prolong a superfluous one. (The term ‘ship’s log’ might be more appropriate than ‘diary’; but, again, the log is a record of the events of a voyage, whereas the daily entries in my book are likely to be the only pseudo-events in a continuum of pure monotony.) (If I go on splitting hairs like this about the precise meanings of words in the opening sentence, I’ll never get beyond it; but the reference to abbreviations isn’t quite right, either. I intend to use the symbol ‘O’ instead of writing out ‘Orbitsville’ in full each time. O is much shorter than Orbitsville, but that is coincidental — it is also more expressive of the reality.) Cliff Napier was right when he guessed I was glad the job of manufacturing autopilots was beyond our resources. My reasoning was that flying the ship by hand would keep us occupied and help to reduce the boredom. It isn’t working out that way, though. There are five of us on board and we spell each other at the controls on a rota which is arranged so that the two most experienced pilots — Braunek and myself — are in the cockpit at daybreak and nightfall. These are the only times when flying the ship becomes more difficult than driving an automobile. Because day and night are caused by bands of light and darkness sweeping over the land at orbital speed, there is no proper dawn and no proper dusk, and some fairly violent meteorological processes take place.
In the ‘morning’ a sector of cold air which has been sinking steadily for hours suddenly finds itself warming up again and rising, causing anything from clear air turbulence to heavy rain. At nightfall the situation is reversed but can be even more tricky because the air which cools and begins to descend conflicts with currents rising from the still-warm ground.
All it amounts to, however, is that there are two half-hour periods when the control column comes to life. Not enough to occupy us for the next three to four years, I’m afraid, although we in the lead ship are a little luckier than the others in having a little extra work to do. There is the inertial course reference to be monitored, for instance. It is a simple-looking black box, created by O’Hagan and his team, and inside it is a monomaniac electronic brain which thinks of nothing but the bearing they fed into it. Any time we begin to wander off course a digital counter instructs us to go left or right till we’re back on line again, and the rest of the squadron follows suit.
Linked to the black box there is a one-metre-square delton detector which in a year or two, as we get considerably closer to Beachhead City, should begin to pick up other delta particles and provide course confirmation. Sometimes I watch it, just in case, or just to pass the time, but there isn’t really any need. It would feed a fresh bearing into the course reference automatically, and is also fitted with an audio attention-getter. I still watch it, though… and dream about EL. No abbreviations — Elizabeth Lindstrom.
Day 23. Estimated range: 278,050 kilometres
We’ve completed perhaps a fortieth of the journey, having flown a distance roughly equivalent to going round the Earth seven times. Without stopping. Another way to reckon it is that, after 23 days, we’ve gone nearly as far as a ray of light would have travelled in one second, but that’s a depressing thought to anyone who has been accustomed to Arthurian flight at multiples of light-speed. A more positive thought is that we’ve learned quite a lot about O.