“Over there, that’s Haddon.”
Sole pointed at the Unit half a mile away on top of the rise, backed up against its own dense mini-jungle of fir trees.
“My little Indians—” he shrugged.
He indicated the straggle of the village across the barren fields behind them.
“That’s my place—with the blue VW. You head on over there, Pierre. Eileen’ll be waiting. I—I’ll catch you up.”
His own home?
Containing a woman Eileen whom he happened to be married to—yet her voice over the comsat telephone link the other night had sounded like such a cleverly personalized answering service! Containing a boy, Peter, who more closely resembled the looks of this other bitter empty man he stood with on the country lane…
Sole pushed Pierre gently towards the stile leading on to the field path. It wasn’t an affectionate push, however—there couldn’t be any affection any more. But it was gentle.
Pierre gave Sole a puzzled look, but climbed the stile without asking any questions, and set off along the stiff mud track.
And Sole was alone.
The English countryside seemed as blank and stripped-bare as the face of the Moon, after the Amazon rainforests. The sky with all its empty dry air rubbed its nothingness over him coldly. He set off towards Haddon Unit, through the dead fields.
He had never felt quite so nervously aware, as he walked, under the clear empty eggshell sky, of being located on the surface of a gross statistical accident—as well as of being encompassed by the ghosts of billions of casualties who might have lived, but never had—of other Soles who might have been born, but weren’t—and whose exclusion bracketed his own existence about till it too seemed unreal—a life lived in brackets. He was filled with a haunting consciousness of every twig and stalk of grass crisp and clear in their total arbitrariness—bracketed into existence by the exclusion of so much more, infinitely more. Every clod of earth shaped itself into a grinning hunchback gargoyle as he walked. The blue of the sky behind barren branches became stained glass in some empty cathedral of the void—a fan of peacock plumes courting nothingness.
He swung a carrier bag stuffed with clothes, conscious of many other Soles carrying out different projects and making different choices in this dead random zone.
Beyond that peacock blue that Sole saw as a stained-glass window and a display of plumes, in the blackness which that blue had become by the height of a thousand miles, Major Pip Dennison floated in his michelin-man suit—veteran of five hundred South-East Asian combat sorties and a duty tour in Skylab, author cum laude of a PhD thesis on the math of orbital trajectories. His faceplate reflected the blue disc of Earth with its white whorling streaks of cream meringue—a soda fountain in space.
His umbilical tether snaked away, reflecting the harshest of sunlights, towards the hanging shuttle craft from which other gossamer lines also spun away to other rubber blobs of humans. Half a dozen spacemen had landed on different parts of this vast rent metal fruit whose segments had sprung apart through the rumpled rind, bursting deep black-shadowed canyons and crevasses down into it. Like wasps they had flown out to suck the juice from the spoilt fruit.
Flies to a hunk of rare venison hung up there to mature, in the icebox of space.
Pip consulted the Roentgen counter strapped to his wrist. The rate of rotting of this venison was subject to an inverse law: only when the radioactive rot had ceased would the whole carcass be ripe for the picking. What a feast in the sky it would be—this split orange, burst egg, hunk of venison.
First they would pick over this north side of the fruit. Later, they would head round it to the hole punched in the south side three hundred feet deep by five hundred wide—that million-degree axeblow that had split the enemy’s skull—watching their Roentgen counters as they worked.
Yet a thought daunted Major Dennison, as he looked down the steel crevasse. Could some alien beast have survived the axeblow and loss of air—and still be alive somewhere down there?
The pit yawned darkly. They said, didn’t they, that a spaceman was only a deepsea diver keeping the pressure in, instead of out? What octopus tentacles might reach for him out of the injured darkness? Pip shivered in his well-heated suit as he unclipped his tether and clamped it magnetically to the metal rind. Elsewhere on the ruptured surface, half a dozen Americans and Russians belayed their tethers too…
Pip angled his light down and snapped a holograph of the chasm with fat buckled tubing gleaming at the bottom of it. He let the camera hang loose and checked for a second time the handiness of the improvised weapon they had all been issued with—an explosive pellet thrower powered by compressed gas.
“Dennison about to descend,” Pip told his throat mike.
“Good luck, Pip,” a voice buzzed in his ear. “Good hunting.”
Pip swung his body round and started climbing upward. The change of orientation put Earth’s soda fountain a thousand miles below his feet, blue oceans whipped with cream.
Sole’s intentions were as ice-sharp as the winter day, as he pushed the main door open and walked into the heat inside.
The Christmas tree was gone. Balloons gone. Streamers gone.
No one saw him as he fitted his key into the first security door and passed through to the rear wing.
He took the lift down and stepped out into the corridor, hurried to the first window.
Inside the Embedding World the wall screen was dead and the four children lay sleeping on the floor in a neat row.
Gulshen’s leg was encased in plaster. Rama’s hand was wrapped in bandages. Vasilki’s brow was bandaged and her face badly bruised.
Vidya was the only unblemished one. Yet he did not sleep quietly. Even through the tranquillizers and barbiturates his lips moved. Muscular tics twisted them.
Sole barely registered the peculiar circumstances. A glance showed him that Vidya was safe and that was all he cared about. He walked through the airlock ignoring the speech mask hanging up, dropped the carrier bag beside the boy and bent over him.
“Vidya!” he called tentatively.
The boy moved fitfully and his lips twitched but he didn’t open his eyes.
Drugged, Sole noted with distaste. He glanced at the video pickups. Possibly they weren’t switched on, and if they were switched on nobody would be watching, as there was nothing to record.
He emptied the clothes out of the carrier bag and began dressing Vidya. Amusing to think of the boy waking up fully dressed for the very first time—maybe feeling bound up in a bit of a strait jacket at first—then the huge enlargement of his vistas dawning on him…
Pierre’s footsteps crumpled the gravel as he skirted the blue Volkswagen and went round the side of the house.
He looked in through a window, saw a boy wriggling about in an armchair before the TV set—crossing and uncrossing his white matchstick legs under him restlessly. The boy’s face shocked him. The soft foxy features. His own childhood face, from a green buckram photograph album.
But Chris had never said anything. Hadn’t even hinted. How long was it since that time in Paris? It was possible.
His own child? It might explain Chris’s ambivalent attitude—the sense Pierre had ever since he become conscious of Chris there in the jungle, that Chris had been thrashing out some private dilemma that had nothing to do with Indians or Aliens or even his experiments at the Hospital.
Another window brought him face to face with Eileen.
For a moment she failed to recognize him, he looked so thin and worn, then she flew to the kitchen door.