places in the world where there was enough air for a man to breathe. Locked away in his memory was a comprehensive timetable of Kemp’s daily movements in and around Starflight House, and according to that schedule the acidulous little Scot would shortly be making his final inspection tour of the afternoon. The tour usually took him along the circular terrace, past the shrubbery in which Harald’s body was hidden — and how much better it would have been if Domestic Supervisor Kemp had made the fearful discovery.
Pennario kept slanting downwards across the hill until he had reached the lowest point from which he could still see a sector of the upper terrace and gauge Kemp’s progress along it. He moved into the shade of an ivy- covered loggia, set the dogs on the ground and pretended to be busy adjusting their silver collars. The excited animals fought to get free, but Pennario held them firmly in check.
It was important to him that they did not make their predictable dash to the terrace until Kemp was in exactly the right place to become involved with their discovery. Pennario glanced at his watch.
“Any minute now, my little friends,” he whispered. “Any minute now.”
In contrast to what Garamond had feared, the field seemed quieter than usual, its broad expanses of ferrocrete mellowed to the semblance of sand by the fleeting sunlight. Low on the western horizon a complexity of small clouds was assembled like a fabulous army, their helmets and crests glowing with fire, and several vaporous banners reached towards the zenith in deepening pink. As the car drew to a halt outside the S.E.A. complex Garamond shielded his eyes, looked towards his assigned take-off point and saw the squat outline of the waiting shuttle. Its door was open and the boarding steps were in place. The sight filled him with a powerful urge to drive to the shuttle, get Aileen and Chris on board, and blast off towards safety. There were certain pre-flight formalities, however, and take off without observing them could lead to the wrong sort of radio message being beamed up to the
“Some papers to sign in here, then we’ll take the slidewalk out to the shuttle,” he said easily as he opened the car door and got out.
“I thought Chris and I’d be going up to the observation floor,” Aileen replied, not moving from her seat.
“There’s no fun in that, is there, Chris?” Garamond lifted the boy off Afleen’s knee and set him down on the steps of the S.E.A. building. “What’s the point in having a Dad who’s a flickerwing captain if you can’t get a few extra privileges? You’d like to look right inside the shuttle, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, Dad.” Chris nodded, but with a curious reserve, as if he had sensed something of Aileen’s unease.
“Of course, you would.” Garamond took Aileen’s hand, drew her out of the car and slammed the door. “That’s all, driver — we can look after ourselves from here on.” The driver glanced back once, without speaking, and accelerated away towards the transport pool.
Aileen caught Garamond’s arm. “We’re alone now, Vance. What’s… ?”
“Now you two stand right here on these steps and don’t move till I come out. This won’t take long.” Garamond sprinted up the steps, returned the salutes of the guards at the top, and hurried towards the S.E.A. Preflight Centre. The large square room looked unfamiliar when he entered, as though seen through the eyes of the young Vance Garamond who had been so impressed by it at the beginning of his first exploratory command. He ran to the long desk and slapped down his flight authorization documents.
“You’re late, Captain Garamond,” commented a heavily built ex-quartermaster called Herschell, who habitually addressed outgoing captains with a note of rueful challenge which was meant to remind them he had not always held a desk job.
“I know — I couldn’t get away from Liz.” Garamond seized a stylus and began scribbling his name on various papers as they were fed to him. “Like that, was it? She couldn’t let you go?”
“That’s the way it was.”
“Pity. I’d say you’ve missed the tide.” Herschell’s pink square face was sympathetic.
“Oh?”
“Yeah — look at the map.” Herschell pointed up at the vast solid-image chart of the Solar System and surrounding volume of interstellar space which floated below the domed ceiling. The solar wind, represented by yellow radiance, was as strong as ever and Garamond saw the healthy, bow-shaped shock wave on the sunward side of Earth, where the current impacted on the planet’s geomagnetic field. Data on the inner spirals of the solar wind, however, were of interest only to interplanetary travellers — and his concern was with the ion count at the edge of the system and beyond. Garamond searched for the great arc of the shock front near the orbit of Uranus where the solar wind, attenuated by distance from Sol, built up pressure against the magnetic field of the galaxy. For a moment he saw nothing, then his eyes picked out an almost invisible amber halo, so faint that it could have represented nothing more than a tenth of an ion per cubic centimetre. He had rarely seen the front looking so feeble. It appeared that the sun was in a niggardly mood, unwilling to assist his ship far up the long gravity slope to interstellar space.
Garamond shifted his attention to the broad straggling bands of green, blue and red which plotted the galactic tides of fast-moving corpuscles as they swept across the entire region. These vagrant sprays of energetic particles and their movements meant as much to him as wind, wave and tide had to the skipper of a transoceanic sailing ship. All spacecraft built by Starflight — which meant all spacecraft built on Earth — employed intense magnetic fields to sweep up interstellar atomic debris for use as reaction mass. The system made it possible to conduct deep-space voyages in ships weighing as little as ten thousand tons, as against the million tons which would have been the minimum for a vessel which had to transport its own reaction mass.
Flickerwing ships had their own disadvantages in that their efficiency was subject to spatial ‘weather’. The ideal mission profile was for a ship to accelerate steadily to the midpoint of its journey and decelerate at the same rate for the remainder of the trip, but where the harvest of charged particles was poor the rate of speed-change fell off. If that occurred in the first half of a voyage it meant that the vessel took longer than planned to reach destination; if it occurred in the second half the ship was deprived of the means to discard velocity and would storm through its target system at unmanageable speed, sometimes not coming to a halt until it had overshot by light-days. It was to minimize such uncertainties that Starflight maintained chains of automatic sensor stations whose reports, transmitted by low-energy tachyon beams, were continuously fed into weather charts.
And, as Garamond immediately saw, the conditions in which he hoped to achieve high-speed flight were freakishly, damnably bad.
More than half the volume of space covered by the map seemed entirely void of corpuscular flux, and such fronts as were visible in the remainder were fleeing away to the galactic south. Only one wisp of useful density — possibly the result of heavy particles entangling themselves in an irregularity in the interplanetary magnetic field — reached as far back as the orbit of Mars, and even that was withdrawing at speed.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Garamond said simply.
Herschell handed him the traditional leather briefcase containing the flight authorization documents. “Why don’t you take off out of it, Captain? The
“Don’t let that ole bit of dust get away,” Herschell called after him, one flickerwing man to another. “Scoop it up good.”
Garamond sprinted along the entrance hall, relieved at being able to respond openly to his growing sense of urgency. The sight of ships’ commanders running for the slidewalks was quite a common one in the S.E.A. Centre when the weather was breaking. He found Aileen and Chris on the front steps, exactly where he had left them. Aileen was looking tired and worried, and holding the boy close to her side.
“All clear,” he said. He caught Aileen by the upper arm and urged her towards the slidewalk tunnel. She fell in step with him readily enough but he could sense her mounting unease. “Let’s go!”
“Where to, Vance?” She spoke quietly, but he understood she was asking him the big question, communicating on a treasured personal level which neither of them would ever willingly choose to disrespect. He glanced down at Chris. They were on the slidewalk now, slanting down into the tunnel and the boy seemed fascinated by the softly tremoring ride.
“When I was waiting to see the President this afternoon I was asked to take care of young Harold Lindstrom for an hour…” The enormity of what he had to say stilled the words in his throat.
“What happened, Vance?”
