“Wrongs?” Cassyll spoke lightly, affecting puzzlement. He stooped and picked up a pebble which was heavily banded with gold, examined it briefly and hurled it into the nearby pool. The image of Land mirrored on the water broke up into jostling curved fragments.
“What wrongs do you speak of, father?”
Toller could not be put off. “I have neglected you both because I can never be content with what I have. It’s as simple as that. My indictment takes but a few words—none of them fancy or abstruse.”
“I never felt neglected, because I believed you would love us both for ever,” Cassyll said slowly. “Now my mother is alone.”
“She has you.”
“She is alone.”
“No more than I am,” Toller said, “but there is no remedy. Your mother understands that better than I. If you could learn to understand you might also learn to forgive.”
Cassyll suddenly looked younger than his twenty-two years. “You’re asking me to understand that love dies?”
“It can die, or it can refuse to die; or a man or a woman can change, or a man or a woman can remain changeless; and when a person does not change with time the effect—from the viewpoint of a person who is changing—is as if the unchanging person is actually the one who is undergoing the greatest change…” Toller broke off and stared helplessly at his son. “How can I know what I’m asking you to understand when I don’t understand it myself?”
“Father…” Cassyll moved a step closer to Toller. “I see so much pain inside you. I hadn’t realised…”
Toller tried to check the tears which had begun to blur his vision. “I welcome the pain. There is not enough of it for my needs.”
“Father, don’t…”
Toller opened his arms to his son and they embraced, and for the fleeting period of the embrace he could almost remember what it had been like to be a whole man.
“Put the ship on its side,” Toller ordered, his breath rolling whitely in the chill air.
Bartan Drumme, who was at the controls because he took every possible opportunity to practise skyship handling techniques, nodded and began firing short bursts on a lateral jet. As the thrust gradually overcame the inertia of the gondola, Overland slid up the sky and the great disk of Land emerged from behind the brown curvature of the balloon. Bartan halted the ship’s rotation by means of the opposing jet, stabilising it in the new attitude, with an entire world on view on either side of the gondola. The sun was close to Land’s eastern rim, illuminating a slim crescent of the planet and leaving the rest of it in comparative darkness.
Against the dim background of Land, the waiting spaceship, now less than a mile away, was visible as a tiny bar of light. It was attended by several lesser motes, representing the few habitats and stores which King Chakkell had permitted to remain in the weightless zone to service the newly completed vessel. The group was an undistinguished feature of the crowded heavens, almost unnoticeable, but the sight of it caused a stealthy quickening of Toller’s pulse.
Sixty days had passed since he had received the royal assent for the expedition to Farland, and now he was finding it hard to accept that the hour of departure was at hand. Trying to dispel a slight sense of unreality, he raised his binoculars and studied the spaceship.
There had been one major amendment to the design which Zavotle had sketched out during their meeting in the Bluebird Inn. The foremost of the ship’s five sections had originally been designated as the detachable module, but the arrangement had posed too many problems in connection with obtaining a view ahead of the vessel. After some unsatisfactory experiments with mirrors it had been decided to use the aft section as the landing module. Its engine would power the flight to Farland, and when the section was separated from the mother craft a second engine would be exposed, ready for the return to Overland.
Toller lowered the binoculars and glanced around the other members of the crew, all of them swaddled in their quilted suits, all of them deep in their own thoughts. Apart from Zavotle and Bartan, there was Berise Narrinder, Tipp Gotlon and another ex-fighter pilot, a soft-spoken young man called Dakan Wraker. Toller had been surprised by the large number of volunteers for the expedition, and he had selected Wraker because of his imperturbable nature and wide range of mechanical skills.
The conversation among the crew members had been lively in the preceding hour, but now, suddenly, the magnitude of what lay ahead seemed to have impressed itself on them, stilling their tongues.
“Spare me the long faces,” Toller said, grimly jovial. “Why, we might find Farland so much to our liking that none of us will ever want to return!”
Chapter 14
As commander of the spaceship, Toller would have liked to have been at the controls when the Kolcorron burned its way out of the weightless zone at the beginning of the voyage to Farland.
During training sessions, however, it had become apparent that he was the least talented of the crew when it came to the new style of flying. The ship’s length was five times its diameter, and keeping it in a stable attitude while under way required precise and delicate use of the lateral jets, an ability to detect and correct yawing movements almost before they had begun. Gotlon, Wraker and Berise seemed to do it without effort, using infrequent split-second blasts on the jets to keep the crosshairs of the steering telescope centred on a target star. Zavotle and Bartan Drumme were competent, though more heavy handed; but Toller—much to his annoyance—was prone to make overcorrections which involved him in series of minor adjustments, bringing grins to the faces of the other fliers.
He had therefore given Tipp Gotlon, the youngest of the crew, the responsibility for taking the ship out of the twin planets’ atmosphere.
Gotlon was strapped into a seat near the centre of the circular topmost deck. He was looking into the prismatic eyepiece of the low-powered telescope which was aimed vertically through a port in the ship’s nose. His hands were on the control levers, from which rods ran down through the various decks to the main engine and the lateral thrusters. The fierceness of his gap-toothed grin showed that he was keyed up, anxiously waiting for the order to begin the flight.
Toller glanced around the nose section, which in addition to accommodating the pilot’s station was also intended as living and sleeping quarters. Zavotle, Berise and Bartan were floating near the perimeter in various attitudes, keeping themselves in place by gripping handrails. It was quite dim in the compartment, the only illumination coming from a porthole on the sunward side, but Toller could see the others’ faces well enough to know that they shared his mood.
The flight would possibly last two hundred days—a dauntingly long period of boredom, deprivation and discomfort—and, regardless of how dedicated a person might be, it was only natural to experience qualms at such a moment. Things would be easier after the main engine had begun to fire, finally committing everybody to the venture, but until that psychological first step had been taken he and the crew were bound to be racked by doubt and apprehension.
Growing impatient, Toller drew himself to the ladder well and looked down into the ship. The cylindrical space was punctuated by narrow rays of sunlight from portholes which created confusing patterns of brightness and shadow in the internal bracing and among the bins which housed the supplies of food and water, firesalt and power crystals. There was a movement far down in the strange netherworld and Wraker, who had been checking the fuel hoppers and pneumatic feed system, appeared at the bottom of the ladder. He came up it at speed, agile in spite of his bulky suit, and nodded as he saw Toller waiting for him.