At 6.30 when he went to the commissary for his evening meal, he found that he was a quarter of an hour late.
‘Your meal time was changed this afternoon,’ Baker told him, lowering the hatchway. ‘I got nothing ready for you.’
Francis began to remonstrate but the man was adamant. ‘I can’t make a special dip into space-hold just because you didn’t look at Routine Orders can I, Doctor?’
On the way out Francis met Abel, tried to persuade him to countermand the order. ‘You could have warned me, Abel. Damnation, I’ve been sitting inside your test rig all afternoon.’
‘But you went back to your cabin, Doctor,’ Abel pointed out smoothly. ‘You pass three SRO bulletins on your way from the laboratory. Always look at them at every opportunity, remember. Last-minute changes are liable at any time. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until 10.30 now.’
Francis went back to his cabin, suspecting that the sudden change had been Abel’s revenge on him for discontinuing the test. He would have to be more conciliatory with Abel, or the young man could make his life a hell, literally starve him to death. Escape from the dome was impossible now — there was a mandatory 20 year sentence on anyone making an unauthorized entry into the space simulator.
After resting for an hour or so, he left his cabin at 8 o’clock to carry out his duty checks of the pressure seals by the B-Deck Meteor Screen. He always went through the pretence of reading them, enjoying the sense of participation in the space flight which the exercise gave him, deliberately accepting the illusion.
The seals were mounted in the control point set at ten yard intervals along the perimeter corridor, a narrow circular passageway around the main corridor. Alone there, the servos clicking and snapping, he felt at peace within the space vehicle. ‘Earth itself is in orbit around the Sun,’ he mused as he checked the seals, ‘and the whole solar system is travelling at 40 miles a second towards the constellation Lyra. The degree of illusion that exists is a complex question.’
Something cut through his reverie.
The pressure indicator was flickering slightly. The needle wavered between 0.001 and 0.0015 psi. The pressure inside the dome was fractionally above atmospheric, in order that dust might be expelled through untoward cracks (though the main object of the pressure seals was to get the crew safely into the vacuum-proof emergency cylinders in case the dome was damaged and required internal repairs).
For a moment Francis panicked, wondering whether Short had decided to come in after him — the reading, although meaningless, indicated that a breach had opened in the hull. Then the hand moved back to zero, and footsteps sounded along the radial corridor at right angles past the next bulkhead.
Quickly Francis stepped into its shadow. Before his death old Peters had spent a lot of time mysteriously pottering around the corridor, probably secreting a private food cache behind one of the rusting panels.
He leaned forward as the footsteps crossed the corridor.
Abel?
He watched the young man disappear down a stairway, then made his way into the radial corridor, searching the steelgrey sheeting for a retractable panel. Immediately adjacent to the end wall of the corridor, against the outer skin of the dome, was a small fire control booth.
A tuft of slate-white hairs lay on the floor of the booth.
Asbestos fibres!
Francis stepped into the booth, within a few seconds located a loosened panel that had rusted off its rivets. About ten inches by six, it slid back easily. Beyond it was the outer wall of the dome, a hand’s breadth away. Here too was a loose plate, held in position by a crudely fashioned hook.
Francis hesitated, then lifted the hook and drew back the panel.
He was looking straight down into the hangar!
Below, a line of trucks was disgorging supplies on to the concrete floor under a couple of spotlights, a sergeant shouting orders at the labour squad. To the right was the control deck, Chalmers in his office on the evening shift.
The spy-hole was directly below the stairway, and the overhanging metal steps shielded it from the men in the hangar. The asbestos had been carefully frayed so that it concealed the retractable plate. The wire hook was as badly rusted as the rest of the hull, and Francis estimated that the window had been in use for over 30 or 40 years.
So almost certainly old Peters had regularly looked out through the window, and knew perfectly well that the space ship was a myth. None the less he had stayed aboard, perhaps realizing that the truth would destroy the others, or preferring to be captain of an artificial ship rather than a self-exposed curiosity in the world outside.
Presumably he had passed on the secret. Not to his bleak taciturn son, but to the one other lively mind, one who would keep the secret and make the most of it. For his own reasons he too had decided to stay in the dome, realizing that he would soon be the effective captain, free to pursue his experiments in applied psychology. He might even have failed to grasp that Francis was not a true member of the crew. His confident mastery of the programming, his lapse of interest in Control, his casualness over the safety devices, all meant one thing — Abel knew!
Passport to Eternity
It was half past love on New Day in Zenith and the clocks were striking heaven. All over the city the sounds of revelry echoed upwards into the dazzling Martian night, but high on Sunset Ridge, among the mansions of the rich, Margot and Clifford Gorrell faced each other in glum silence.
Frowning, Margot flipped impatiently through the vacation brochure on her lap, then tossed it away with an elaborate gesture of despair.
‘But Clifford, why do we have to go to the same place every summer? I’d like to do something interesting for a change. This year the Lovatts are going to the Venus Fashion Festival, and Bobo and Peter Anders have just booked into the fire beaches at Saturn. They’ll all have a wonderful time, while we’re quietly taking the last boat to nowhere.’
Clifford Gorrell nodded impassively, one hand cupped over the sound control in the arm of his chair. They had been arguing all evening, and Margot’s voice threw vivid sparks of irritation across the walls and ceiling. Grey and mottled, they would take days to drain.
‘I’m sorry you feel like that, Margot. Where would you like to go?’
Margot shrugged scornfully, staring out at the corona of a million neon signs that illuminated the city below. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course. You arrange the vacation this time.’
Margot hesitated, one eye keenly on her husband. Then she sat forward happily, turning up her fluorescent violet dress until she glowed like an Algolian rayfish.
‘Clifford, I’ve got a wonderful idea! Yesterday I was down in the Colonial Bazaar, thinking about our holiday, when I found a small dream bureau that’s just been opened. Something like the Dream Dromes in Neptune City everyone was crazy about two or three years ago, but instead of having to plug into whatever programme happens to be going you have your own dream plays specially designed for you.’
Clifford continued to nod, carefully increasing the volume of the sound-sweeper.
‘They have their own studios and send along a team of analysts and writers to interview us and afterwards book a sanatorium anywhere we like for the convalescence. Eve Corbusier and I decided a small party of five or six would be best.’
‘Eve Corbusier,’ Clifford repeated. He smiled thinly to himself and 339 switched on the book he had been reading. ‘I wondered when that Gorgon was going to appear.’
‘Eve isn’t too bad when you get to know her, darling,’ Margot told him. ‘Don’t start reading yet. She’ll think up
