“But that leaves you only two aircraft, and it isn’t enough.”
“It’s all right.” Garamond wondered how long he could go on with the role of martyr before telling Denise he had already come to terms with himself.
She caught his hand. “I know how disappointed you must be.”
“You’re making it easy to take,” he said. Denise released his hand on the instant and he knew he had said something wrong. He waited impassively.
“Has Cliff not told you I’m having a baby?” Denise’s eyes were intent on his. “His baby?”
Garamond forced himself to compose a suitable reply. “He didn’t need to.” “You mean he hasn’t? Just wait till I get my hands on the big…”
“I’m not completely blind, Denise.” Garamond produced a smile for her. “I knew as soon as I saw both of you together this morning. I just haven’t got around to congratulating him yet.”
“Thanks, Vance. Out here we’ll need all the godfathers we can get.”
“Can’t help you there, I’m afraid — I’ll be a few million kilometres east of here by that time.”
“Oh!” Denise looked away from him. “I thought…”
“That I was quitting? Not until I’m forced — and you know better than I do that the computers didn’t say two aircraft couldn’t reach Beachhead City. It’s just a question of odds, isn’t it?”
“So is Russian Roulette.”
“I’ll see you around, Denise.” Garamond turned away, but she caught his arm.
“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
“Please forget it.” He squeezed her hand before removing it from his arm. “I really am glad that you and Cliff have got something good. Now, please excuse me — I have a lot of work to do.”
Garamond had been occupied for several hours on the load distribution plans for his two remaining aircraft when darkness came. He switched on the fuselage interior lights and continued working with cold concentration, ignoring the sounds of revelry which drifted into the cabin on the evening breeze. His fingers moved continually over the calculator keyboard as he laboured through dozens of load permutations, striving to decide the best uses for his payload capability. The brief penumbral twilight had fled when he felt vibrations which told him someone was coming on board. He looked up and saw O’Hagan squeezing his way towards the small chart-covered table.
“I’ve just discovered how much I used to rely on computers,” Garamond said.
O’Hagan shook his head impatiently. “I’ve just spent the most fantastic day of my life, and I need a drink to get over it. Where’s the supply?” He sat quietly while Garamond found a plastic bottle and handed it to him, then he took a short careful swallow. “This stuff hasn’t been aged much.”
“The man who made it has.”
“Like the rest of us.” O’Hagan took another drink and apparently decided he had devoted too much time to preamble. “We haven’t got a hope in hell of getting the bearings we need from these people. Know why?”
“Because they’ve no machine tools?”
“Because they make everything by hand. You knew?”
“I guessed. They’ve got some airplanes, but no airplane factory or airport. They’ve got some cars, but no car factory or roads.” “Good work, Vance — you were way ahead on that one.” O’Hagan drummed his fingers on the table, the sound filling the narrow confines of the cabin, and his voice lost some of its usual incisiveness. “They picked an entirely different road to ours. No specialization of labour, no mass production, no standardization. Anybody who wants a car or a cake-mixer builds it from scratch, if he has the time and the talent. You noticed their planes and cars were all different?”
“Yes. I noticed them counting our ships, too.”
“So did I, but I didn’t know what was going on in their minds. They must have been astonished at seeing seven identical models.”
“Not astonished,” Garamond said. “Mildly surprised, perhaps. I’ve a feeling these people haven’t much curiosity in their make-up. If you allow only one alien per house that city out there must have a population of twenty thousand or more, but I doubt if as many as two hundred came out to look at us today — and practically all those who came had their own transport.”
“You mean we got the lunatic fringe.”
“Gadgeteers anyway — probably more interested in our aircraft than in us. They could be a frustrating bunch to have as next door neighbours.”
O’Hagan stared significantly at the paperwork scattered on the table. “So you intend to press on?”
“Yes.” Garamond decided to let the single word do the work of the hundreds he might have used.
“Have you got a crew?”
“I don’t know yet.”
O’Hagan sighed heavily. “I’m sick to death of flying, Vance. It’s killing me. But I’d go crazy if I had to live beside somebody who kept inventing the steam engine every couple of years. I’ll fly with you.”
“Thanks, Dennis.” Garamond felt a warm prickling in his eyes. “I…”
“Never mind the gratitude,” O’Hagan said briskly. “Let’s see what sort of mess you’ve been making of these load distributions.”
Against Garamond’s expectations, he was able to raise two crews of four to continue the flight. Again making use of the extra lift to be gained from cold air, the two machines took off at dawn and, without circling or giving any aerial signal of goodbye, they flew quietly into the east.
eighteen
Day 193. Estimated range: 2,160,000 kilometres
This may be my last journal entry. Words seem to be losing their meaning, the act of writing them is losing all significance, and I notice that we have virtually stopped speaking to each other. The silence does not imply or induce separateness — the eight of us have compacted into one. It is simply that there is something embarrassing about watching a man go through the whole pointless performance of shaping his lips and activating his tongue in order to push sound vibrations out on the air. It is peculiar, too, how a spoken word resolves itself into meaningless syllables, and how a single syllable can hang resonating in the air, in your mind, long after the speaker has turned away.
I fancy, sometimes, that the same phenomenon takes place with images. We have steered our ships above a thousand seas, ten thousand mountain ranges, all of which have promised to be different — but which are all becoming the same. A distinctive peak or river bend, a curious group of islands, the coloration of a wooded valley — geographical features appear before us with the promise of something new and, having cheated us, fall behind. Were it not for the certainty of the inertial guidance system I might imagine we were flying in circles. No, that isn’t correct, for we have learned to steer a constant course against the stripings of the sky. We seem to exist, embedded, in a huge crystal paperweight and one of the advantages, perhaps the only one, is that we can tell where we are going by reference to its millefiori design. If I hold the milk-blue curvatures in a certain precise relationship, crossing windshield and prow just so, I can fly for as long as thirty minutes before the black box chimes and edges me to left or right. The other black box, the portable delton detector, remains inert even after all this time. (Dennis was right when he said we were lucky to find that first particle so soon.) The up-curving horizon provides a constant reference for level flying. It occurred to me recently that Orbitsville is so big that we should not be able to detect any upward curvature in the horizon. As usual, Dennis was able to explain that it was an optical illusion — the horizon is straight but, through a trick of perception, appears to sag in the middle. He told me that the ancient Greeks compensated for this when building their temples.