The room had large windows in its inboard wall, and he sometimes paused at one of them to stare at the incredible trefoil perspectives of the colony’s interior. From his unusual vantage point there appeared to be three suns, each hanging in a tapering strip of blue-black sky which converged on the distant end-cap. Between the strips, filling in the radial geometrical design, were the colony’s three “valleys” with their compact areas devoted to industrial production, hydroponics, garden villages and grassland. It was a strange and totally unnatural prospect, an enclosed universe in the form of a stylised flower, but in his five months in Aristotle Hargate had learned to regard it with deep affection. This contrivance, this flimsy cocoon of metal and glass, had given him mobility, a useful job, the promise of something like a normal lifespan—therefore it was a habitat more natural to him than Earth could ever have been. He was at home.
Denny Hargate, he would intone while floating at the window, marvelling at the odds he had beaten in order to reach that particular point in space and time. Citizen of the solar system!
It was his affinity for the miniature world and its peculiar physics whch alerted him, almost before any other colonist, to the fact that something serious had happened. He was alone in the crystal farm carrying out routine checks on a sensitive batch, when there wasj sudden decrease in the amount of light in the room. Unexpected though the change was, it was the barely perceptible tremor accom. panying it which sent a frisson of alarm coursing through his ner. vous system. He twisted in mid-air, looked through the window and saw that the radial pattern of his environment had been radically altered.
One of the reflected suns was no longer there.
The first explanation occurring to him was that No.2 mirror had either been retracted or allowed to splay out beyond its normal maximum, then—with savagely jolting heart—he saw that the two remaining suns had begun a drunken and irregular wobbling, There was no escaping the conclusion that Aristotle had developed a serious instability. The perturbations were too small to generate any noticeable G-forces, but within a short time the mirror alignments had shifted so much that the sun reflections slid off their edges and the interior of the colony was plunged into darkness. In a compartment near to Hargate a man gave a hoarse bellow of alarm. The darkness lasted only a few seconds, then daylight suddenly returned with full intensity.
Clinging to a nylon hand-rope, Hargate saw the frightening alternations of night and day occur twice more before the twin suns raced down the sky and he realised that the No. 1 and No.3 mirrors had been retracted to reduce the eccentric forces acting on the colony. As prolonged darkness fell all the interior lights sprang into life, creating brilliant geometries the full length of the colony, but the “night” which ensued was not normal. The longitudinal strip which should have been closed by No.2 mirror remained transparent, and the Earth and the Moon could be seen batting across it twice in every minute, adding swift-changing variations to the general level of illumination.
The mirror can’t be gone, Hargate told himself. It can’t be possible to lose a mirror.
Still gripping the hand-rope, afraid to cast off in case the rootf shifted violently while he was in flight, he looked all about him and waited for the public address system to dispense reassurance. His outlook had changed. Aristotle, which only minutes ago seemed to possess the stability and permanence of a planet, had somehow been reduced to an entirely different status—that of a spaceship in trouble.
It was incredible and shockingly unfair that something as important as Denny Hargate’s continued existence should depend on something as notoriously fallible as human engineering. If something as vital as one of the huge mirrors could simply fall off, who was to say that even bigger disasters could not follow. Who could guarantee that the whole colony was not about to burst open under its internal pressures like a ripe seed pod?
Hargate’s heart had begun thudding fiercely and steadily, but with the new thought there came a change in its rhythm, a hint of a more intimate catastrophe. It missed a beat altogether, and Hargate—floating, poised on the brink of the ultimate abyss—had time to consider the possibility that his life had ended. When it came, the next beat was more like a detonation inside his chest than the action of a muscle, and close in its wake there was pain, the kind of pain that draws the mind down into it, obliterating thought.
Hanging there in the solitary dimness of the crystal farm, like a fish in a net, mouth opening and closing silently, limbs making small involuntary movements, Hargate stared down the jewelled tunnel of the space colony and waited.
All he could do was wait…
Chapter Eight
Long experience had shown that seven years was the longest period for which it was prudent for a Mollanian agent to remain in one location and with one identity. Beyond that span, no matter how good the agent had been at avoiding close relationships, people began to notice that the man or woman in the apartment down the hall was strangely untouched by the passage of time. They simultaneously became resentful and inquisitive, often without being consciously aware of their own feelings, and that was the signal for the agent to pack up and move on to another town.
“I call it the Dorian Grey syndrome,” Ichmo had told Gretana, showing off his knowledge of Terran literature on one of her early returns to Station 23. “It’s almost as if the Terrans are on the alert for that sort of thing, as if they have a collective unconscious in which there’s a suspicion that they’ve been unfairly treated by Nature. The idea of immortality crops up many times in their mythology and literature, and it’s interesting that anybody who is suspected of being immortal is usually presented in an unfavourable light.
“We could be directly responsible, of course—some of our people are bound to have been careless from time to time—but that’s all the more reason to be careful now. Always move on at the very first hint that somebody is taking an undue interest in you.”
Gretana had recalled the conversation a number of times—but always with a mild and fairly academic interest—during her stay of seven years in Silver Spring under the name of Greta Rushton. Any special attention from Terrans had been inspired by her physical appearance, and she had soon learned to counter it with a glacial indifference which left the other party humbled or scornful according to his degree of self-esteem, and in either case definitely no longer interested. It had been the same during the seven-year spells she had spent in two other cities in the same region, and now that she was two years into her stay in Annapolis, Maryland it had begun to seem that her technique of repulsing strangers had reached perfection. That was why, quite suddenly, she was worried by the tall man in the slate-grey overcoat.
In an odd way, it had been the garment’s lack of distinction which had drawn her attention to it. Two or three times while walking in Carter Park, she had thought: There’s a coat that was made for blending into backgrounds. Then had come the belated realisation that it was the same coat each time, and that in turn had drawn her attention to the wearer—the black-haired man who, by accident or design, seemed to visit many of the places she visited.
He appeared to be about thirty, was no more and no less ugly than any other native of Earth, and had droop-lidded grey eyes which gave him an expression of bored knowingness. It was his eyes which disturbed Gretana most. More than twenty years on Earth had taught her that some of the crudest and most offensive sexual advances could be made through eye contact alone, without a word being spoken, but this man seemed to have different objectives. It was as though he got all the satisfaction he wanted simply by being near her in a crowd, looking at her, knowing about her—and, for someone in Gretana’s position, that kind of attention was highly unwelcome. It was almost the worst possible kind.