Day 109. Estimated range: 1,207,000 kilometres
We have lost Tayman’s ship, No 6. It happened while we were landing for our second scheduled stop, putting down in formation on an ideal-looking plain. There was a hidden spar of rock which wrecked one of Tayman’s skids, causing the plane to dip a wing. Nobody was hurt, but No 6 had to be written off. (In future we will land in sequence on the lead aircraft’s skid marks to reduce the risk of similar incidents.) Tayman and his crew — which includes two women — took the mishap philosophically and we spent an extra day on the ground getting them set up for a prolonged stay. Among the parts we took from No 6 were the propeller shaft bearings, one of which was immediately installed in No 7’s starboard engine.
I suppose the latter has to be regarded as a kind of bonus — fleet speed is back to maximum cruise — but the loss of Jack Tayman’s steady optimism is hard to accept. Strangely, I find myself missing his aircraft most at night. We have no radio altimeters or equivalents because the conditions on O will not permit electromagnetic transmission, and the environment also makes barometric pressure readings too unreliable, so we use the ancient device of two inclined spotlights on each aircraft, one at each end of the fuselage. The forward laser ray is coloured red, the aft one white, and they intersect at five hundred metres, which means that a machine flying at the chosen height projects a single pink spot. Looking downwards through the darkness we can see our V-formation slipping across the ground, hour after hour, a squadron of silent moons, and the disappearance of one of those luminous followers is all too apparent.
Day 140. Estimated range: 1,597,000 kilometres
Within the space of ten days propeller shaft bearing trouble has developed on five ships, and fleet speed has been reduced by fifty kilometres an hour. Prognosis is that there will be continued deterioration, with progressive cuts in flying speed. Everybody is properly dismayed, but I think I can detect an undercurrent of relief at the possibility of so many aircraft having to drop out at the same time, thus providing for the setting up of a larger and stronger community. I have discussed the situation with Cliff Napier over the lightphone and even he seems to be losing heart.
The only aspect of the matter which looks at all ‘hopeful’ is that the ships which have experienced the trouble are No 3 through to No 8, which reflects the order in which they came off the production line. The first and second ships — mine and Napier’s — are all right, and it may be that Litman had enough Grade E metal available for our propeller bearings. I put the word hopeful in quotes in this context because, on reflection, it simply is not appropriate. Being reduced to two airplanes at this stage of the mission would be disastrous, and it would take fairly comprehensive technical resources to restore us to strength. Resources which are not available.
I am writing this at night, mainly because I can’t sleep, and I find it difficult to fight off a sense of defeat. The Big O is too…
Garamond set his stylus aside as Joe Braunek, who had been in the cockpit serving as stand-by pilot, appeared in the gangway beside his bunk. The young man’s face was deeply shadowed by the single overhead light tube but his eyes, within their panda-patches of darkness, were showing an abnormal amount of white.
“What is it, Joe?” Garamond closed his diary.
“Well, sir…” “Vance.”
“Sorry, I keep… Do you want to come up front a minute, Vance?”
“This gets us back to square one — is there anything wrong? I’m trying to rest and I don’t want to get up without a good reason.”
“There are some lights we can’t explain.”
“Which panel?”
Braunek shook his head. “Not that sort of light. Outside the ship — near the horizon. It looks like there’s a city of some kind ahead of us.”
seventeen
At first sight, the lights were disappointing. Because the fleet was travelling roughly eastwards, the blue and darker blue bands which represented day and night on other parts of Orbitsville were arcing across the sky from side to side. The lower one looked in the eastern sky the narrower and closer together the bands appeared to grow, until they merged in the opalescent haze above the upcurving black horizon. Even when Braunek had shown him where to look Garamond had to scan the darkness for several seconds before he picked out a thin line of yellowish radiance, like a razor cut just below the edge of a cardboard silhouette.
Delia Liggett, who was at the controls, raised her face to him. “Is there any chance that… ?”
“It isn’t Beachhead City,” Garamond said. “Let’s get that clear.”
“I thought there might have been a mistake over distances.” “Sorry, Delia. We’re working on a very rough estimate of how far the Bissendorf travelled, but not that rough. You can start looking out for Beachhead City in earnest a couple of years from now.” There was silence in the cockpit except for the insistent rush of air against the sides of the ship.
“Then what is that?”
Garamond perversely refused to admit excitement. “It looks like sky reflections on a lake.”
“Wrong colour,” Braunek said, handing Garamond a pair of binoculars. “Try these.”
“It has to be an alien settlement,” Garamond admitted as the glasses revealed the beaded brightness of a distant city. “And it’s so far from the entrance to the sphere.”
At that moment Cliff Napier’s voice came through on the lightphone. “Number Two speaking — is that Vance I can see in the cockpit?”
“I hear you, Cliff.”
“Have you seen what we’ve seen?”
“Yeah — and are you wondering what I’m wondering?”
Napier hesitated. “You mean, what’s an alien city doing way out here? I guess they got to Orbitsville a very long time before we did. It might have taken them hundreds or thousands of years to drift out this far.”
“But why did they bother? You’ve seen what Orbitsville’s like — one part is as good as another.”
“To us, Vance. Aliens could see things a different way.”
“I don’t know,” Garamond said dubiously. “You always say things like that.” He dropped into one of the supernumerary seats and fixed his eyes on the horizon, waiting for the wall of daylight to rush towards him from the east. When it came, about an hour later, sweeping over the ground with thought-paralysing speed, the alien settlement abruptly became an even less noticeable feature of the landscape. Although it was now within a hundred kilometres, the ‘city’ was reduced in the binoculars to a mere dusting of variegated dots almost lost in greenery. During the lightphone conversations between the aircraft there had been voiced the idea that it might be possible to obtain new propeller bearings or have the existing ones modified. Garamond, without expressing any quick opinions on a subject so important to him, had been quietly hopeful about the aliens’ level of technology — but his optimism began to fade. The community which hovered beyond the prow of his ship reminded him of a Nineteenth Century town in the American West.
“Looks pretty rustic to me.” Ralston, the telegeologist, had borrowed the glasses and was peering through them.