only twice. We have also had minor mechanical troubles. As yet there has been nothing serious enough to cause an unscheduled landing, but the potential is always there and grows daily.
The biggest cause for concern, however, is the biological machinery on board — our own bodies. Everybodys except for young Braunek, is subject to headaches, constipation, dizziness and nausea. Many of the symptoms are probably due to prolonged stress but, with increasingly unreliable aircraft to fly, we dare not resort to tranquillizers. Dennis, in particular, is causing me alarm and an equal amount of guilt over having brought him along. He gets greyer and more tired every day, and less and less able to do his stint at the controls. The protein and yeast cakes on which we live are not appetizing at the best of times, but Dennis is finding it almost impossible to keep them down and his weight is decreasing rapidly.
I am reaching the conclusion that the mission should be abandoned, and this time there are no emotional undertones in my thinking. I know it is not worth the expenditure of human lives.
A short time ago I could not have made such an admission — but that was before we had fully begun to pay for our mistake of challenging the Big O. The journey we attempted was perhaps only a hundredth of O’s circumference, and of that tiny fraction we have completed only a fraction. My personal punishment for this presumption is that O has scoured out my soul. I can think of my dead wife and child; I can think of Denise Serra; I can think of Elizabeth Lindstrom… and nothing happens.
I feel nothing.
This is my last diary entry.
There is nothing more to write.
There is nothing more to say.
Kneeling on the thrumming floor beside O’Hagan’s bunk, Garamond said, “It’s summertime down there, Dennis. We’ve flown right into summer.”
“I don’t care.” Beneath its covering of sheets, the scientist’s body seemed as frail and fleshless as that of a mummified woman.
“I’m positive we could find fruit trees.”
O’Hagan gave a skeletal grin. “You know what you can do with your fruit trees.”
“But if you could eat something you’d be all right.”
“I’m just fine — all I need is a rest.” O’Hagan caught Garamond’s wrist. “Vance, you’re not going to call off the flight on my account. Promise me that.”
“I promise.” Garamond disengaged the white, too-clean fingers one by one and stood up. The decision, now that it had come, was strangely easy to make. “I’m calling it off on my own account.”
He ignored the other man’s protests and went forward along the narrow aisle to the blinding arena of the cockpit. Braunke was at the controls and Sammy Yamoto was beside him in the second pilot’s seat. He had removed a cover from the delton detector and was probing inside it. Garamond tapped him on the shoulder.
“Why aren’t you asleep, Sammy? You were on duty most of the night.”
Yamoto adjusted his dark glasses. “I’m going to kip down in a minute — as soon as I put my mind at rest about this pile of junk.”
“Junk?”
“Yes. I don’t think it’s working.”
Garamond glanced at the detector’s control panel. “According to the operating light it’s working.”
“I know, but look at this.” Yamoto clicked the switch of the main power supply to the detector box up and down several times in succession. The orange letters which spelled, SYSTEM FUNCTIONING, continued to glow steadily in their dark recess.
“What a botch,” Yamoto said bitterly. “You know, I might never have caught on if a generator hadn’t cut itself out during the night. I was sitting here about two hours later when, all of a sudden, it hit me — the lights on the detector panel hadn’t blinked with all the others.”
“Does that prove it isn’t working?”
“Not necessarily — but it makes me doubt the quality of the whole assembly. Litman deserves to be shot.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Garamond lowered himself into the supernumerary seat. “Not at this stage anyway — we have to call off the flight.”
“Dennis?”
“Yes. It’s killing him.”
“I don’t want to seem callous, but…” Yamoto paused to force a multi-connector into place, “…don’t you think he could die anyway?”
“I can’t take that chance.”
“Now I
Garamond raised his eyebrows. “What have you done to it?”
“All I’ve done is fix it.” Yamoto gave a quivering, triumphant grin as two more tapping sounds were heard almost simultaneously.
“Then what are those noises?”
“Those, my friend, are delta particles going through our screen.” The astronomer’s words were punctuated by further noises from the machine. “And their frequency indicates that we are close to their source.”
“Close? How close?” Yamoto took out a calculator and his fingers flickered over it. “I’d say about twenty or thirty thousand kilometres.”
A cool breeze from nowhere played on Garamond’s forehead. “You don’t mean from Beachhead City.”
“Beachhead City is the only source we know. That’s what it’s all about.”
“But…” A fresh staccato outburst came from the detector as Garamond, knowing he should have been excited, looked out through the front windshield of the aircraft at a range of low mountains perhaps an hour’s flying time ahead. They seemed no more and no less familiar than all the others he had seen.
“Is this possible?” he said. “Could we have overestimated the flight time by two years?”
Yamoto turned an adjusting screw on the delton detector, decreasing the sound level of its irregular tattoo. “Anything is possible on Orbitsville.”
It was late on the following day when the two stiff-winged, ungainly birds began to gain altitude to cross the final green ridges. All crew members, including a fever-eyed O’Hagan, were gathered to watch as the mountain crests began to sink in submission to their combined wills. Changing parallaxes made the high ground below them appear to shift like sand.
Yamoto switched off the detector’s incessant roar with a flourish. “The instrument is no longer of any use to us. Astronomically speaking, we have reached our destination.”
“How far would you say it is, Sammy?”
“A hundred kilometres. Perhaps less.”
Joe Braunek squirmed in his seat, but his hands and feet were steady on the flying controls. “Then we have to see Beachhead City as soon as we clear this range.”
Garamond felt the conviction which had been growing in him achieve a leaden solidity. “It won’t be there,” he announced. “I don’t remember seeing a mountain range this close to the city.”
“It’s a pretty low range,” Yamoto said uncertainly. “You wouldn’t have noticed it unless you had a specific…”
His voice faded as the ground tilted and sloped away beneath them to reveal one of Orbitsville’s mind-stilling prairies. In the hard clean light of the sun they could see to the edges of infinity, across oceans of grass and scrub, and there was no sign of Beachhead City.
“What do we do now?” Braunek spoke with a curious timidity as he looked back at the other three men. The resilience which all the months of flight had not been able to sap now seemed to have left him. “Do we just fly on?”
Garamond, unable to feel shock or disappointment, turned to Yamoto. “Switch the detector on again.”
“Right.” The astronomer reactivated the black box and the cabin immediately filled with its roar. “But we
