posterity, Dallen released his wife at once and stood facing his reflection. 'Bastard,' he whispered. 'The bastard has to pay.'
Chapter 16
As a preliminary to the execution Dallen kept a close watch on Mathieu's movements.
He was quickly rewarded by the discovery that Mathieu, even when he had a freedom of choice, preferred a fixed pattern of activity. The work schedule called for each person in Renard's team to be responsible for two adjacent stacks of grass trays, the most tedious task being the rotation of the sunlight panels to give a reasonable simulation of night and day. Each tray also had to be lightly watered at some time during its 'night' period. There was no hard-and-fast rule about exactly when the watering should be carried out, but Mathieu liked to do it as soon as he had removed each sunlight panel, starting at the top of the stacks and methodically working down to deck level. Every morning at eleven, ship time, he climbed a twenty-metre alloy ladder attached to the front of one stack and serviced its top layer of trays. That done, he stretched all the way across the aisle and worked on his other stack from its rear, taking advantage of his long reach to avoid making two separate ascents. It was a technique of which Renard did not approve, but he had contented himself by sourly reminding Mathieu he was not covered by industrial insurance. And Dallen had listened to that particular exchange with satisfaction, knowing it would help smooth his way through what was to follow…
On the fifth morning of the voyage he awoke early. Cona was snoring peacefully in her bed at the other side of the prefab, and Mikel was fast asleep in his cot, one foot projecting through the bars. There was little in the peaceful tallowy dimness of the cabin to indicate that it was part of an engineered structure which was hurtling through distorted geometries of space. Were it not for near-subliminal, amniotic fluttering in the air Dallen could have believed himself to be in a holiday chalet anywhere on Earth or Orbitsville. His thoughts turned at once to Silvia London, only a few paces and partitions away on the same deck, but he hurriedly blanked out a vision of how she might look in bed. His morning erections were becoming painfully insistent, and on this crucial day all his mental and physical energies had to be directed elsewhere.
He quietly got out of bed and took stock of his emotions, trying to ascertain how he felt about his decision to proceed immediately with Mathieu's execution. There was a certain sense of disbelief mingled with a cold sadness and fears for his own safety — but the bask resolution was still there, intact, a dominating force which excluded compassion or regrets.
That's all right, he thought, unaccountably relieved. Nothing has changed.
Taking care not to disturb Cona or Mikel, he used the radiation shower cubicle — wishing it could have been a stinging water spray — and got dressed in the soft shirt and slacks which were his usual working attire. He brought the travel bag out of a closet and took from it the small container of special paint, which he put in his breast pocket.
There was nobody else abroad on Deck 5 when he left his cabin, so we went straight to the tubular elevator cage, dropped himself to the bottom of the cargo hold and stepped out into an angular jungle of scaffolding. Tall stacks of grass trays, half of them glowing under artificial sunlight, created a three-dimensional confusion of brilliance and shadow. There were puddles on the floor and the air was warm and humid, rich with meadow scents, dulling metal surfaces with condensation.
It took Dallen less than a minute to make sure no others had showed up early for work, then he went to Mathieu's two stacks and climbed the innermost ladder, the one always used by Mathieu. At the top, precisely when it was necessary for him to be alert and at peak efficiency, he was numbed by an awareness that he was at the point of maximum danger. He was only a few metres below the ring-shaped Deck 5, in a position readily visible to anyone who might emerge from a passenger cabin, and now his scheme — so foolproof when evaluated in the security of his bed — seemed reckless beyond belief.
With a final swinging glance at the circular guard rail above, he took the paint container out of his shirt pocket and sprayed a colourless fluid on to the ladder's top rung. Highly nervous, fighting off a tendency to shake, he returned the container to his pocket and slid commando-fashion to the foot of the ladder. The greenhouse stillness of the bottom deck was heavy and undisturbed. Dallen ran to the elevator, took it up to Deck 5 and within a matter of seconds was back in the sanctuary of his cabin, where Cona and Mikel were still asleep. The entire sortie had taken approximately three minutes.
Dallen sat down at the table and considered what he had done. The emulsion with which he had sprayed the ladder was manufactured for law enforcement bothes under the brand name of Pietzoff, and it was peculiarly suitable for his purpose. It was used to prevent people clinging to security vehicles and the vulnerable wing generator tubes of aircraft. Finger pressure on the deposited crystals would produce a neural shock which would affect Mathieu's whole body, not only repelling him from the ladder but preventing him from grasping anything which might lessen his fall.
There was no absolute guarantee that the impact with deck would kill him, but Dallen intended to be close to the scene of the 'accident', first to reach the fallen man, and would need only the briefest moment to complete his work. An extra shearing of the neck vertebrae would go unnoticed among Mathieu's other injuries. 'The final step would be to ascend the ladder, ostensibly checking for faults, and wipe away the Pietzoff emulsion with the solvent sponge already in his pocket.
At that point, justice having been done, he could return to a normal life.
Dallen spread his hands on the table and frowned down at them as — for the first time — he tried to envisage the future which lay beyond Mathieu's death. What would constitute a 'normal' life in his case? A Metagov job sufficiently undemanding that he would be able to devote most of his time to rehabilitating Cona? Perhaps he would be provided with a pension on compassionate grounds and given a house on the edge of one of those heroic developments which straggled a short distance into Orbitsville's endless oceans of grass. That way he could make Cona his life's work — and what would the career landmarks be? The day she learned to flush the toilet for herself? The day she completed her first sentence? The first night on which, in the mental chaos of the dark hours, be foiled to turn her away from his bed?
Abruptly Dallen felt that he was drowning. He dismissed the feeling as a psychological effect, then realised he had breathed out and had actually omitted to initiate the next inhalation, as though his autonomous nervous system had gone on strike. He snatched air in two noisy sighs and sprang to his feet, feeling trapped within the confines of the cabin. The time display on the wall showed that it was not yet eight in the morning. Food? Would breakfast help? Dallen felt his diaphragm heave gently at the thought of eating, but coffee seemed a reasonably inviting prospect, a way of getting through a few minutes.
He made sure that Cona and Mikel were not likely to awaken, let himself out of the cabin and went upstairs to Deck 4, the first full deck. There was nobody in the mealomat area, although he could hear some crew members talking in the adjoining canteen.
Dallen drew himself a cup of black coffee, considered taking it into the canteen, then on impulse walked up another flight of stairs and went into the small observation gallery. It was deserted. Such vantage points tended to be used only during normal-space manoeuvring in the vicinity of Earth or Orbitsville — in mid-voyage, cocooned in a ship's private continuum, there was little to see outside. The universe presented itself as an intense spot of blue ahead of the ship and an equally bright locus of red astern. On the rare occasions when a vessel passed dose to a star an ultra-thin ring of light would expand out of the forward spot, slide by the ship on all sides like a conjurer's hoop and shrink into the speck of ruby brilliance behind.
Unconcerned about the lack of spectacle, Dallen dropped into a chair and sat in the theatrical darkness sipping his coffee, his thoughts still dominated by the future. Fixing the time of Mathieu's execution seemed to have removed a short-term goal which had acted as a barrier. Now the shutters had been lifted and decades lay ahead of him in a blur of shifting probabilities — and from what he could see of the temporal landscape it looked bleak. To be more analytical, without Silvia London it looked bleak. To be even more analytical — and to add a dash of honesty and self-interest — without Cona and without Silvia it looked bleak. And that came the insidious thought, is a circumstance that can easily be changed.
All he had to do was quit being stubborn and accept what qualified physicians had been telling him all along — that Cona Dallen, author and historian, no longer existed. That meant he had no moral obligations to her, that
