The humming grew in intensity and was joined by a low groaning. He concentrated all his imagination on the soles of his feet: the last time he had heard a noise like that, Prometheus had been breaking in two beneath him and his feet had been the first part of him to realise something was wrong. Would they warn him if the poop was about to come free? If they did, would he have a chance to get back onto the main deck before he was snatched away with everything aft of the capstan? No. No chance. If it all went now, he was dead.
Thank God he had told Robin he loved her last night and asked her to give the twins a special hug.
The whole ship was quivering now. Like a greyhound in a trap ready for the off but restrained. There was a thudding thumping from below. Or was it just his heart again?
The cable sagged.
Infinitesimally. Almost indiscernibly.
But it sagged.
Richard took a deep, shuddering breath.
‘Are we still at slow ahead, Sally?’
‘Slow ahead and due south, Captain.’ There was strain in her voice too, but her words lit a spark of hope in his breast. For if the ship was at slow ahead then the cable could only sag if—
‘Richard!’ Colin’s voice through channel four so loud it made him jump. ‘Richard, she’s moving. Manhattan’s moving!’
Then John came through over the top of him, yelling, ‘My God! Richard! My God!’ And behind John’s awed tones was the sound of wild cheering. Abruptly, the sound exploded out of the radio and into the air immediately around him. Every throat on Titan was yelling in jubilation.
Richard found himself pounding on the after rail and grinning like an idiot. He wanted to yell himself. To cheer with the rest and to dance and sing. He had never in his heart of hearts really believed they could pull this off. Even the seemingly unquestioning faith of the Mau Club and the Manhattan Club had seemed unrealistic and faintly unreal. Yet here they were. And here was Manhattan. And they were pulling and it was following. It was impossible but it was true.
‘We are moving at slow ahead, Achilles. Are you moving?’
‘Son of a bitch, Richard. Son of a bitch.’
Richard took that as an affirmative.
‘Ajax?’
‘All lines secure. Proceeding as ordered, Captain. But this “Head them up and move them out”, this I do not understand.’
‘I’ll explain it to you some time, Captain Borodin. In the meantime, slow ahead all. Come to five knots if you please. Our heading is due south.’
Chapter Twelve
Ann Cable rode down in the lift and bustled across the busy foyer of the Mawanga Hilton. She felt tired but full of a febrile energy, full of words and writing. She hesitated on the great doormat, just out of range of the infra-red beam which tripped the automatic doors. She took a last, lingering deep breath of the air-conditioned atmosphere and then, holding it in her lungs, she moved forward. The doors hissed open and she flinched. Even in the shade of the building’s wide porch, the atmosphere rolled over her like a wave of hot oil. The temperature was in the mid-thirties already and the humidity was in the nineties. She had taken less than three steps, hadn’t even reached the boiling brightness of direct sunshine, before her body was drenched in perspiration and she breathed cool air out and hot, humid air in. She felt the energy begin to leak away at once, ruthlessly sucked out of her like the sweat. She summoned reserves she didn’t know she possessed and ran down the steps towards Robert Gardiner’s jeep.
Even through the lenses of her dark glasses, the sun nearly blinded her. She wore a battered hat and headscarf and she could feel the weight of it on the crown of her head. She burned her hand on the door handle as she climbed into the vehicle. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake!
‘Has this thing got air conditioning?’ she asked.
Robert laughed, his deep booming chuckle drowning out the whine of the starter. ‘You can open the windows,’ he told her as the engine caught. ‘But be careful of the dust.’
As he drove out to the airport, she swung round in her seat and watched him. His skin was incredibly dark, gleaming like polished ebony. His face was broad — broad forehead, lined from temple to temple, broad cheeks with long, narrow eyes above and broad flat nose below. Broad mouth, perfectly sculpted, with lips the colour of aubergine. Broad, square, absolute chin. Almost no neck, the great cannonball head sitting straight on the broad shoulders and great square chest above a powerful, elephantine barrel of a belly. The limbs complemented that massive torso, giving Robert the physical impact of an Olympic-standard weightlifter. In this heat, a man of his size ought to have been sweating profusely but, apart from the oiled gleam of his skin, there was no evidence that he felt hot at all. In fact, as her first breath inside the jeep informed her, he smelt faintly of cologne and nothing more.
Unlike herself. Since her semi-hysterical shower more than a week ago she had used water for drinking only, wherever possible. She bathed with a flannel which was little more than damp and flushed the toilet only when it became difficult to breathe in the bathroom. Her hair was a dusty mess of oil and she daily thanked God that she had had it cut so much shorter than usual before she came out here. Even so, she felt filthy, itchy and smelly. And exhausted. She rested her head on the back of the seat and closed her eyes as they sped through the all too familiar shantytown outskirts of the city.
In the seventies, when it had looked as though there would be a booming travel industry here, the road from the city to the airport had been a well-constructed highway with six lanes in each direction. The massive, impressive thoroughfare seemed out of place now, and it stood in increasing need of maintenance, as though the government tacitly admitted that the tourists would never come after all.
The airport, too, was over-grandiose; the result of plans and dreams which had died. They drove past the terminal building which stood semi-derelict, the home of a number of refugees who had come here from the dust bowls upcountry and remained, as though too weak to go on into the city itself.
‘There are an increasing number of them, in spite of the aid camps and the roadblocks outside the city,’ observed Robert. ‘I don’t know how they’re getting through, but I’m afraid there will be more. It’s a bad sign, the beginning of the end.’
‘It can get worse. You know that.’
‘I know; that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was that once this sort of thing gets rolling, it follows an inevitable course. There’s no way back. It’s like a law of nature. You know about Fahrenheit 451?
‘The science fiction novel? I guess so, why?’
‘Not so much the novel as the title. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the burning point of paper. That’s why Bradbury chose it for a novel about burning books. But it’s the physics I’m interested in. The inevitability. At 450 degrees paper doesn’t burn. At 451 degrees it does and there’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘And you say we’re reaching ignition point here?’
‘I’m going to show you. Upcountry, in the heartland. And it won’t be pleasant if the reports are true.’
He braked suddenly and the long green vehicle screeched to a halt outside a corrugated iron and clapboard hangar. There was a perky-looking little single-engined Cessna parked outside with a mechanic sitting beside it in the shade of a wing. He got up as Robert and Ann climbed out of the vehicle. ‘Ready to go?’ asked Robert in fluent Kyogi. The mechanic nodded, smiled and saluted. He saluted with his right hand which was holding an automatic weapon. Robert saw the direction of Ann’s gaze. ‘Not standard UN issue,’ he admitted, ‘but if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have this plane for long either. There’s no safe UN compound here. Yet. Though as soon as the police realise what’s going on they’ll move in and clear the refugees out. Set up more roadblocks, just as they have been doing all week.’