Orbitsville

statement of fact. Now, where are the photographs supposed to have come from?”

“Well, perhaps they weren’t actual photographs. They might have been…”

“Artists’ impressions? Reconstructions?”

“What difference does it make? They were shown…”

“What difference?” Garamond gave a shaky laugh as the mental chasm opened between himself and his wife, but he felt no annoyance with her. Their marriage had always been simple and harmonious, and he knew it was based on deeper attachments than could be achieved through mere similarity in interests or outlook. One of the first things he had learned to accept was the certainty of lasting incompleteness on some levels of their relationship, and usually he knew how to accommodate it.

“It makes all the difference in the world,” he said softly, almost as if speaking to a child. “Don’t you see how your attitude towards the Clowns has been affected by what you’ve seen or think you’ve seen on the viewers? That’s the way people are manipulated. It used to be more difficult, or at least they had to be more subtle when literacy was considered vital to education…” Even to his own ears the words sounded dry and irrelevant, and he stopped speaking as he noticed Aileen’s predictable loss of interest. His wife absorbed most of her information semi-instinctively, through images, and he had no picture to show her. Garamond felt an obscure sadness.

“I’m not stupid, Vance.” Aileen touched his hand, her intuition in sure control.

“I know.”

“What did you want to tell me?”

“I just want you to remember the Starflight Corporation is like…” he strove for a suitably vivid image, “…like a snowball rolling down a hill. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it keeps going faster, and it can’t slow down. It can’t afford to stop, even when somebody gets in the way… and that’s why it’s going to roll right on over the Clowns.” “You always seem so certain about things.”

“The signs are all there. The first step is to implant in people’s minds the idea that the Clowns ought to be rolled over. Once that’s been done the rest is easy.”

“I don’t like the Crowns,” Christopher said, breaking a long silence. His grain-gold face was determined.

“I’m not asking you to like them, son. Just don’t believe that everything you see on the viewer is real and true. Why, if I went to the outer planet myself I could…” Garamond stopped speaking for a moment as the idea took hold of his mind.

* * *

“Why not? After all, that’s the sort of work the S.E.A. ships were designed to do,” Elizabeth, had said, reasonably, and at that point she had smiled. “You’re on indefinite leave, Captain, but if you would prefer to return to active service and visit the outer world I have no objections.”

“Thank you, My Lady,” Garamond had replied, concealing his surprise.

Elizabeth’s imperfect smile had grown more secretive, more triumphant. “We will find it very useful to possess some hard data about the planet — in place of all the speculations which are filling the air.”

* * *

Garamond reviewed the brief conversation many times during the period in which the Bissendorf was extending its invisible wings and disengaging from fleet formation. It came to him that he had proposed the exploratory flight partly as a challenge to the President, hoping that a duel with her would ease the growing tensions in his mind. Her ready agreement to the mission was the last thing he had expected and, as well as drawing a few pointed comments from Aileen, it had left him feeling both disappointed and uneasy.

He sat in the control gallery for hours, watching the bright images of the other Starflight ships perform the patient manoeuvres which would bring each one in turn to the entrance of Orbitsville where it could discharge its load of human beings or supplies. When the Bissendorf’s own progression had taken it out through the regulated swarm, and nothing but stars lay in front, Garamond remained on station watching the irregular stabs of the main electron gun, the ghostly blade of energy which flickered through space ahead of the ship. The harvest of reaction mass was not plentiful in the immediate vicinity of Pengelly’s Star and in the early stages of the flight it was necessary to ionize the cosmic dust to help the intake fields do their work. Gradually, however, as the ship spiralled outwards, the night-black plain of Orbitsville’s shell ceased to blank off an entire half of the visible universe. The conditions of space became more normal and speed began to build up. Once again Garamond had difficulty in setting his perceptions to the correct scale. Everything in his past experience conspired to make him think he was in a tiny ship which was painfully struggling to a height of a few hundred kilometres above a normal-sized planet, whereas at a hundred million kilometres out it was still necessary to turn one’s head through ninety degrees to take in both edges of Orbitsville’s disc. The size of the sphere was, in a way, painful to Garamond, causing familiar questions to seethe again in his mind. Was the fact that it was large enough to accommodate every intelligent being in the home galaxy a clue to its purpose? Why was there only one entrance to such a huge edifice? Did the physics of the sphere’s existence dictate of necessity that neither flickerwing ship nor radio communicator could operate inside it? Or were those features designed in by the Creators to preserve the sphere’s effective size, and to prevent ingenious technicians turning it into a global village with their FTL ships and television networks? And where were the Creators now?

Napier appeared with two bulbs of coffee, one of which he handed to Garamond. “The weather section reports that the local average density of space is increasing according to their predictions. That means we should be able to pick up enough speed to reach the outer planet in not much more than a hundred hours.”

Garamond nodded his approval. “The probe torpedo should be fitted out by then.”

“Sammy Yamoto wants to lead a manned descent to the surface.”

“That could be dangerous — we’ll have to get a better report on the surface conditions before authorizing anything like that.” Garamond began to sip his coffee, then frowned. “Why should our Chief Astronomer want to risk his neck out there? I thought he was still wrapped up in his globular filigree of force fields.”

“He is, but he reckons he can deduce a few things about how Orbitsville was built by examining the outer planet.”

“Tell him to keep me posted.” Garamond looked at Napier over the mouthpiece of his coffee bulb and saw an uncharacteristic look of hesitancy on the big man’s face. “Anything else coming to the boil?”

“Shrapnel seems to have gone AWOL.”

“Shrapnel? The shuttle pilot?”

“That’s right.”

“So he took off. Isn’t that what we expected?”

“I expected him to do it once, but not twice. He disappeared for the best part of a day soon after the Starflight crowd got here. It was during the time he was on ground detachment so I decided he had gone back to Starflight with a hard luck story, and I wrote him off — but he was back on duty again that night.”

That surprised you?“

“It did, especially as he came back without the chip on his shoulder. His whole attitude seemed to have changed for the better, and since then he’s been working like a beaver.”

“Maybe he discovered he didn’t like the Starflight HQ staff.”

Napier looked unconvinced. “He didn’t object or try to cry off when orders were posted for this flight, but he isn’t on board.”

“I’d just forget about him.”

“I’m trying to,? Napier said, ”but the Bissendorf isn’t a sailing ship tied up in a harbour. A man who is able to come and go unofficially must have some organization behind him. It makes me think Shrapnel had contacts in Starflight.“

“Let’s have some whisky,” Garamond suggested. “We’re both getting too old for this type of work.”

* * *

Even before it was denied the light and heat of its own sun, the outer planet of the Pengelly’s Star system had been a bleak, sterile place.

Less than half the size of Earth, and completely devoid of atmosphere, it was a ball of rock and dust which patrolled a lonely orbit so far out that its parent sun appeared as little more than a bright star casting barely perceptible shadows in an inert landscape. And when that sun vanished it made very little difference to the planet. Its surface became a little colder and a little darker, but the cooling stresses were not great enough to cause