into a difficult situation, and facing up to Dallen was going to be the worst ever, the ultimate bad scene. The elevator was waiting, and with almost no lapse of time he was in the lobby, working his way through barriers of people, all of whom were facing the door of a room which had once been used by commissionaires, back in the days when Madison had been booming. Vik Costain, as though telepathically forewarned, opened the door as Mathieu reached it, quickly drew him inside and clicked the lock.
'We're all going to roast over this one,' Costain said, the folds of his grey face set like rippled lava. 'Frank has been griping about security for months.'
'I know,' Mathieu mumbled, moving further into the room to become part of its central tableau. Cona Dallen was stretched out on her back on the floor, hands making random little pawing movements in the air. Her lightweight saffron dress was in disarray, showing her conical thighs, but the display was asexual because her face was blank and serene, unmarked by identity, and her eyes were those of a baby — bright, humorous, uncomprehending. A bubbled ribbon of saliva ran from one corner of her mouth. Carry Dallen was kneeling beside her, rocking gently with his son gathered in his arms, his face hidden in the boy's hair. Mathieu said a silent farewell to joy.
Costain touched Mathieu's arm. 'Who would do a thing like this?'
'I know who did it,' Dallen announced in a leaden, abstracted voice. He raised his head and slowly looked around the half-dozen men in the room. Mathieu's heart juddered to a standstill as the grey, tear-lensed eyes locked with is own, but — miraculously — Dallen's gaze wandered away from him without pause. It was as if they had become strangers.
'I did this,' Dallen continued.
One of the policemen in the group moved uneasily. 'Carry, I don't think you should…'
Dallen silenced him with a look. 'I brought my family to this place… I handled the job wrong… pushed too hard… ignored the threats…' A muscular spasm pulled his mouth downwards at the corners, producing a caricature of an urchin who had just been thrashed, and when he spoke each word was the snapping of a glass rod. 'Why couldn't I have been with them? I don't deserve a brain…'
'I'm going to see what's holding the ambulance,' Costain said, striding to the door.
'Good idea.' Mathieu went through the doorway on the heels of the older man, anxious to leave the emotional -autoclave of the room. Instead of following Costain to the lobby's outer doors he turned right along the corridor and went into a washroom. It was cool and empty, heavily perfumed with soap. In the furtive privacy of a cubicle he took the gold pen from his pocket, reset the point and drew it across his tongue, making a line twice as long as was usual for him.
I might be lucky he thought. Perhaps I’m going to get away with it.
He closed his eyes retreating inwards, waiting for chemical absolution.
Chapter 5
The accident occurred about eighty minutes into the flight.
Jean Antony's first intimation that something serious was happening came when instrumentation panels began to go dead without any accompanying warning signals. Her Type 83 freighter was more than a century old and some of its systems were afflicted with a land of electronic gangrene, but the fault indicator circuits were supposed to be in good shape. The fact that some had failed could be trivial or catastrophic. She knew it could involve as tittle as an annoying extra maintenance charge, or as much as…
Dear God! The prayer was instinctive, unconnected with religious belief. Dear God, don't let this cargo kill me.
The ship's antiquated ion thrusters were creating only a fifth of normal gravity, enabling Jean to cross the control gallery in one floating stride. She glanced at the master status indicator — an array of glowing block diagrams, most of them in the form of longitudinal sections through the hull — and saw a spreading blackness which could only mean that a Bessemon-D container had ruptured in the cargo hold. For a moment she allowed herself to feel shocked at the sheer unfairness of what had happened, a series of supposedly perfect fail-safe devices failing so dangerously, then came the realisation that she was lingering in a spacecraft which could literally be dissolving around her.
Bessemon-D was a solvent gas which had displaced nine-tenths of the capital equipment traditionally associated with metal foundries. In normal circumstances it was inimical life, but drifting free within a spacecraft it was capable of ending Jean Antony's existence in a dozen different ways. Destruction of the pressure hull was the obvious danger, but for ail she knew the first lethal wisps could already be swirling towards her through ventilation ducts, speeded on their way by plastic impellers. There was no time to waste. 'Code Zero-zero-one!' she shouted as she hurled herself towards the emergency capsule compartment. No acknowledgement came from the on- board computer. As she opened the door to the compartment most of the lights on the control panel began to flicker and a sudden queasiness in her stomach told her the ship's thrust controllers were behaving erratically. She stepped into the capsule and allowed the door to slam and seal behind her. A shuddering unlike anything she had previously encountered in twenty years of astrogation stirred the capsule into life, bringing with it the conviction that it was too late to escape whatever fate was overtaking the mother ship. The capsule's activator button sprang into ruby brilliance, splintering the claustrophobic darkness.
Jean hit the button with the heel of her right hand. There was an explosion, a wrenching jolt and a second later she was adrift in space, only fifty kilometres above the inconceivable vastness of Orbitsville.
Jean's first reflexive action was to check that the capsule's radio beacon was functioning properly. She located the pulsing green rectangle on the miniature instrument panel, touched it for reassurance, then raised her eyes to see how the doomed freighter was faring. The coffin-sized capsule had all-round visibility, and from its viewpoint the universe was divided into two equal parts. 'Above' was a hemisphere of stars, many of them individually brilliant against fainter swarms and the frozen luminous clouds of the Milky Way; 'below' there appeared to be nothing.
In spite of her years of plying the two-hundred-plus equatorial portals, Jean's brain still tended to interpret the scene as though she were in a low-flying plane which was skimming the surface of a dark ocean. She scanned the region directly below the capsule, expecting to pick out the lights of the freighter at once, and was surprised and only faintly alarmed to observe unbroken night. Did it mean that every power source on the ship had failed, dousing even the astrogation lights?
That can't be, she told herself. Not so soon.
She frowned, still puzzled rather than worried, turning her head from side to side to take in larger areas of the blackness below her. Then, from a corner of her eye, she became aware of something huge occulting the star fields above her. She twisted around in the confined space and verified what the first intuitive shock had already told her — that the opaque mass was the freighter sliding ahead on its own course.
Refusing to allow herself to panic, Jean studied the larger vessel and tried to decide what had gone wrong with the escape. The answer came quickly. Astrogation and marker lights were slipping across the long silhouette at increasing speed, which meant that the dysfunction of its thrust controllers had caused the ship to rotate. And instead of the capsule having been ejected upwards, to carry it into space and clear of the equatorial trade lanes, it had been fired downwards in the direction of Orbitsville. She was bound for a grazing collision with the unseen surface a mere fifty kilometres below.
Until that moment Jean's principal concern had been the loss of the Atkinson Grimshaw, the old ship — named after a favourite Victorian artist — which was on the point of annihilating both itself and most of her assets. With the skimpiness of her insurance coverage, the incident probably meant the end of the one-woman transport business she had been operating for eight years, ever since her mother had died, but now such considerations were trivial. The capsule was travelling downwards at about forty kilometres an hour, and also had a forward component of about thirty thousand — the speed at which it had parted company with the ship. These velocities, relative to the Orbitsville shell, were small compared to normal operational speeds, but they were enough to destroy the thin-walled capsule in the collision which was due in approximately seventy-five minutes.
