“Except what?”
“Three years is a long time to be left in the dark.”
Unexpectedly, Drew moved closer to Hasson and lowered his voice. “Did Sybil rope you in, as well?”
Hasson stared at him in silence for a moment, tying to hide his confusion. “Sybil? No, she didn’t rope me in.”
“I thought she might have done,” Drew said in confidential tones. “She contacted some of Al’s relations and got them to lean on him, but Al’s the only one who is legally responsible for the boy, and it had to be his own private, personal decision.”
Hasson searched his memory and dredged up a vague recollection of Werry mentioning that his former wife’s name was Sybil. A glimmer of partial understanding appeared in his mind.
“Well,” he said guardedly, “there are things for and against this new treatment.”
Drew shook his head. “The only thing against it is the three- year delay, but — especially for a youngster — that’s a small price to pay for perfect vision.
“Is it?”
“Of course it is. AJ made the decision, anyway, and Sybil should have stuck with him over it and backed him up, if only for Theo’s sake. Personally, taking everything into consideration, I think he made the right decision.”
“I suppose …” Hasson, recognising dangerous conversational waters ahead, cast around for a change of subject and for no reason he could explain his mind fastened on the man he had encountered in the downtown health food shop. “Do you get much competition from alternative medicine around here?”
“Practically none.” Drew glanced sideways and raised his eyebrows as he was joined by Ginny Carpenter. “Albertan law is pretty strict about that son of thing, Why do you ask?”
“It’s nothing much. I bumped into an interesting character today — an Asian who runs a health food shop. He said his name was Oliver.”
“Oliver?” Drew looked blank.
“That’s Oily Fan,” Ginny put in, cackling like a Disney witch. “You wanna stay away from him, boy. You wanna stay away from all those Chinks. They can live where white folks would die off “cause all they ever think about is how to make money.” She swayed for a moment, glass in hand, her triangular face flushed with alcohol. “Do you wanna know how those sons make money in their corner stores when there’s no customers in?”
“What I want is another drink,” Drew replied, moving off.
Ginny caught his arm. “I’ll tell you what they do. They can’t bear to let a minute pass without making money, so they just stand there at the cigar counter opening match boxes and taking one match out of each. I’ve looked in and seen them at it — just standing there! One match out of each box! Nobody would ever miss one, but when they’ve done it fifty times they’ve got an extra box to sell. White folks wouldn’t go to all that trouble, but the Chinks just stand there. . . One match out of each box!”
Hasson considered the story briefly, classified it under the heading of “Racist Apocryphal” and simultaneously picked our a flaw in its internal logic. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Ginny mulled over his words and seemed to note their ambivalence. “Do you think I made all that up?”
“I didn’t mean to imply …” Hasson smiled apologetically, dreading a confrontation with the flinty little woman. “I think I need another drink, too.”
Ginny waved expansively in the direction of the table. “Go ahead and soak it up, friend.”
Hasson thought of a number of retorts ranging from the coldly sarcastic to the crudely obscene, but again in his mind there was a verbal log-jam complicated by undercurrents of embarrassment, exhaustion and fear. He found himself mumbling thanks to Ginny and backing away from her like a courtier excusing himself from a royal presence. He topped up his glass, aware that he was drinking too much, and decided to adopt Werry’s technique of continually moving from one locus to another until he could decently withdraw to the fortress of his room. In a short time the excess of strong drink combined with his tiredness to produce in him a trance-like state in which the room became an encompassing screen upon which human forms were flat and meaningless projections, like the patterns radiated by a guttering fire.
At one stage Hasson was dumbfounded to realise he had been drawn into some kind of inebriated game whose rules were never made clear to him, but which engendered a great deal of stumbling in darkness, whispering, laughing, and slamming of unseen doors. It came to him that his chance of escape had arrived, that with any luck at all he could be safe in bed before his absence was even noticed. He tried to take his bearings in the darkness and set out for the door which opened into the hall, but his progress was impeded by others who seemed to possess a magical ability to know exactly what they were doing and exactly where they were going in the absence of light. A door opened in front of him, revealing a dimly lit room, and several hands pushed Hasson forward. He heard the door slam behind him and in the same moment became aware that he was alone in the kitchen with May Carpenter. His heart began an unsteady pounding.
“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.
Ten minutes later Hasson saw a layer of thin cloud moving eastwards beneath him, beginning to obscure his view of the land, and he knew the time had come to perform the illegal action which had necessitated his making the flight from such a remote area. He checked his first power pack, saw that it was nearing exhaustion, and switched to the second in line. For one heart-stopping instant, while the electrical circuit was being broken and re-made, he felt himself begin to fall, but the harness renewed its grip on him almost immediately and he knew the ascent was continuing. He unbuckled the expended power unit and, with a transient pang of guilt, released it from his fingers. The heavy pack dwindled out of sight beneath his feet, bombing its way down to an unseen impact with the choppy waters of the Minch.
Hasson’s plan had included shedding the second power unit and perhaps the third, provided conditions had been right, so as to Lighten the load on those remaining as they clawed their way up
