“Well, this is a surprise,” she said in a low voice, coming towards him. “What sign have you got?”
“Sign?” Hasson stared at her in bewilderment. In the low- centred mellow light her flimsy party clothing appeared hardly to exist at all, turning her into a feverish erotic vision.
“Yes. I’ve got Libra.” She held up a card with a drawing of a pair of scales. “What have you got?”
Hasson spread the fingers of his right hand and looked down at it. He was holding a card which also bore the sign of Libra.
“The same,” May said. “That’s lucky for both of us.” With no trace of hesitation she put her arms around his neck, drawing his face down to meet hers. In the instant before the kiss Hasson saw her open mouth grow large with its nearness, large as any screen goddess’s mouth in photographic close-up, as simplified and idealised as any sex symbol’s mouth on a movie poster, all flawless mathematical curvatures and billowing crimson and stepped white planes, filling his eyes. During the kiss he experienced a sense of unreality, but at the same time his hands and body were receiving other messages, reminding him that the business of life was life and that it had not done with him yet. The revelation unnerved him with its forcefulness and simplicity, driving him to separate himself from May so that he could look at her again.
“This is good,” he said, desperate for time in which to think, “but I’m very tired — I have to go to bed now.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well,” May replied with a husky candour which Hasson found infinitely flattering and thrilling.
“Please excuse me.” He turned, managed to identify the door which led directly into the hail and went through it. The hail was empty and in darkness, but somebody had used the bulging coat-stand as a support for a flying suit which had been left with the helmet in place and the shoulder and ankle lights flashing. Hasson squeezed past the golem-figure, went upstairs to his room and locked its door behind him. He went to the window, parted the curtains and looked out at the unfamiliar nightland. Snow was sifting down from the overhanging darkness. Immediately outside the window was a large, bare tree through the twigs of which a street lamp shed its radiance in concentric frosty circles. Myriads of glimmers, sparkles and reflections seemed to have been carefully placed on tangents to the circles, creating the sense of looking down a long illuminated tunnel wound with gossamer.
Hasson surveyed the view for perhaps a minute, trying to come to terms with the realisation that he had first seen it only twelve hours earlier, that he had completed less than a day of rest and recuperation. His mind was swollen with newly implanted memories of faces, voices, names and ideas as he went to the bed, stripped off his clothing and put on his pyjamas. As was usual at night, he was moving easily and without discomfort-the prolonged spell of activity having freed his joints and muscles — but it was time for his night-cap of pain.
He lay down on the bed and as soon as his back, now unprotected by day clothing, came in contact with the mattress a war began. The conflict was between various muscle groups, to see which would gain the advantage in new states of relaxation or tension, to see which could fire the greatest salvoes of agony — and in every case the loser was Hasson. He endured the struggle in silence until the spasms became infrequent, and very soon after that he had fallen asleep, a wounded warrior, exhausted, defeated in every skirmish of the day.
four
The dream was a familiar dream — the recreation of one day of Hasson’s early life, the reliving of one event. One special event.
The preparation had been going on for days without his admitting, even to himself, what lay in the back of his mind. At first there had been an aerial tour of the Hebrides, and there was nothing very unusual in the fact that he had chosen to go alone. Then had come the procurement of extra power packs and special long-life oxygen bottles — but even that could have been interpreted as the taking of reasonable precautions prior to flying over a remote and sparcely populated area. And Hasson had actually begun his big climb before he finally acknowledged what he was doing.
It is in the nature of some men that when a machine is placed into their hands they have to satisfy themselves as to the limits of its performance. The CG harness operated by distorting gravitic field lines in such a way that the wearer could “fall” upwards — the closest analogy being that of a magnetic field in which any nodal point moved towards the region of greatest flux intensity. Because it drew most of its energy from the gravity field itself, the CG harness was most efficient at low altitudes. Close to the ground there was little drain on the power pack, but when a flier went high he found that his energy supplies were being squandered at greater and greater rates to compensate for inherent system inefficiency.
The most obvious consequence was that there was a limit to the altitude a personal flier could achieve, but — as is always the case -that limit could be modified by various technical and human factors. Air Policeman Robert Hasson, newly qualified for the force, had no more than a normal interest in the mechanics of the big climb. He had, however, a restless craving to explore his own psychological parameters, to find out which had the greater operational ceiling — the man or the machine, He knew it was an obsessional state of mind, that it was far from being novel or unusual and yet the experiment had to be performed…
He lifted off from the Eye Peninsula on Lewis at dawn on a summer day and set his initial rate of climb at 250 metres a minute. The speed was fairly moderate by CG standards, but Has son’s dead weight had been greatly increased by the addition of three extra power packs and he had no wish to overload any of the equipment upon which his life depended. The maximum load which could be lifted by a CG harness was limited by the fact that, above a certain point, the load itself began to generate a noticeable gravitic field, thus interfering with the delicately arranged pattern of force lines set up by the counter-gravity unit. Basic modular mass, as the load figure was referred to in text- books, was 137.2 kilograms, and exceeding it induced an effect known as field collapse, which gave the flier all the aerodynamic properties of a millstone.
Not sacrificing any energy by introducing horizontal components into his flight, Hasson allowed a light westerly wind to carry him out over the waters of the North Minch. Complex vistas of land and water continued to unfurl on all sides as the Scottish coast came into view some sixty kilometres to the east. The vegetation on the islands and mainland glowed in pastel shades in the early morning sun, with swaths of pale powdery yellow sifting into areas of lime green. Coastlines were limited with white against the nostalgic travel-poster blue of the ocean, and the air Hasson was breathing felt prehistoric in its cleanliness.
Twenty minutes after take-off he had reached a height of five kilometres, far above the levels normally used in personal flight. He sealed the faceplate of his helmet and began to draw on his bottled oxygen. Beneath the soles of his boots the rolling Earth was immense, beginning to show hints of curvature, and Hasson felt the first stirrings of loneliness. He could see no birds, no ships, no signs of human habitation in all the atlas-page sweeps of territory below — and there was no sound, Hasson was alone in the silent blue reaches of the sky.
Forty minutes after take-off he had reached a height of ten kilometres and knew he was passing through the level of the polar tropopause. The air around him had been steadily growing colder throughout his ascent, the temperature decreasing by six degrees or more with every kilometre of altitude, but now he could expect it to remain constant or even become slightly warmer as he penetrated the stratosphere. Unfortunately, that fact signified little real benefit for Hasson. His heavy-duty suit heaters were labouring to cope with a surrounding air temperature of almost fifty degrees below zero, and would go on being a major drain on his energy supply.