Orbitsville

“Is Christopher’s room on this side of the building?”

“Yes. I…”

“Where is it? Show me the exact place?”

Aileen pointed at a wall section two to the left of where Elizabeth had been standing. The fallen guard got to his feet and came forward with outstretched hands, while his companion stood by uncertainly. Garamond pointed at the power setting on the rifle, showing it to be at the lethal maximum. The guard backed off shaking his head. Garamond raised the weapon again, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The needle-fine laser ray pierced the transparent plastic and, as he swung the rifle, took out an irregular smoking area which tumbled flashing to the ground. A second later, as Garamond had prayed it would, a small pyjama-clad figure appeared at the opening. Christopher Garamond rubbed his eyes, peering sleepily into space. Garamond dropped the rifle and ran forward, waving his arms.

“Jump, Christopher, jump!” The sound of his hoarse, frightened voice almost obliterated the thought: He won’t do it; nobody would do it. “Come on, son — I’ll catch you.”

Christopher drew back his shoulders. A pale shape appeared behind him, grasping. Christopher jumped cleanly through the opening, into sunlit air.

As had happened once before, on a quiet terrace on Earth, Garamond saw the childish figure falling and turning, falling and turning, faster and faster. As had happened once before, he found himself running in a slow- motion nightmare, wading, struggling through molasses-thick tides of air. He sobbed his despair as he lunged forward.

Something solid and incredibly weighty hit him on the upper chest, tried to smash his arms from their sockets. He went down into dusty grass rolling with the priceless burden locked against his body. From a corner of his eye he saw a flash of laser fire stab downwards and expire harmlessly. Garamond stood up, treasuring the feel of the boy’s arms locked around his neck.

“All right, son?” he whispered. “All right?”

Christopher nodded and pressed his face into Garamond’s shoulder, clinging like a baby. Garamond estimated he was beyond the effective range of Elizabeth’s ring weapons and ran towards the gate without looking back at the Lindstrom Centre. Aileen, who had been standing with her hands over her mouth, ran with him until they had reached the perimeter. The guards, frozen within their kiosk, watched them with uncomprehending eyes. Colbert Mason was standing beside his car holding up a scene recorder. He glanced at a dial on the side of the machine. “That took two minutes all but fifteen seconds,” he said admiringly, then kissed the recorder ecstatically. “And it was all good stuff.”

“The best is yet to come,” Garamond assured him, as they crowded into the car.

* * *

Garamond, made sensitive to the nature of the benevolent trap, never again went far into the interior of Orbitsville.

Not even when Elizabeth Lindstrom had been deposed and removed from all contact with society; not even when the Starflight enterprise had made way for communal transport schemes as natural and all-embracing as the yearly migration of birds to warmer climes; not even when geodesic networks of commerce were stretched across the outer surface of Orbitsville.

He chose to live with his family on the edges of space, from which viewpoint he could best observe, and also forget, that time was drawing to a close for the rest of humanity.

Time is a measurement of change, evolution is a product of competition — concepts which were without meaning or relevance in the context of the Big O, Absolved of the need to fight or flee, to feel hunger or fear, to build or destroy, to hope or to dream, humanity had to cease being human - even though metamorphosis could not take place within a single season.

During Garamond’s lifetime there was a last flare-up of that special kind of organized activity which, had Man not been drawn like a wasp into the honeypot, might have enabled his descendants to straddle the universe. There was a magical period when, centred on a thousand star-pools, a thousand new nations were born. All of them felt free to develop and flower in their own separate ways, but all were destined to become as one under the influence of Orbitsville’s changeless savannahs.

In time even the flickerwing ships ceased to ply the trade lanes between the entrance portals, because there can be no reward for the traveller when departure point cannot be distinguished from destination.

The quietness of the last long Sunday fell over an entire region of space.

Orbitsville had achieved its purpose.