running.”
“I’ll do it,” Varnett volunteered. “I can sleep here on this flyer and you all can go back in the other two. If anything comes up I’ll let you know. Then someone can spell me tomorrow.”
They all agreed to this, so after a short while everyone but Varnett headed back to base camp.
Almost all went to sleep immediately, only Skander and Dunna taking the extra time to feed their records into the data bank. Then both went off to their own quarters.
Skander sat on the edge of his bunk, too excited to feel tired. Curiously, he felt exhilarated instead, adrenalin pumping through him.
I must take the gamble, he told himself. I must assume that this is indeed the gateway to the brain. In less than fifty days this crew will be replaced, and they’ll go home to blab the secret. Then everyone will be in, and the Statists of the Confederacy will gain the power.
Was that what had happened to the Markovians? Had they become so much a communal paradise that they stagnated and died out?
He went first to the lab and wiped all information from the data banks. There was nothing left when he finished; then he wrecked the machinery so none could retrieve the faintest clue. Next he went to the master control center. There the atmospheric conditions were set. Slowly, methodically, he turned off all the systems except oxygen. He waited there almost an hour until the gauges read that the atmosphere was now almost entirely oxygen everywhere in the tents.
That done, he made his way carefully to the air lock, anxious not to scrape against anything or to cause any sort of spark. Although nervous at the prospect that one of the sleepers would wake up and make that spark, he took the time to don his pressure suit and then take all the other such suits outside.
Next he took from the emergency kit of one of the flyers a small box and opened it.
Premanufactured items for all occasions. It was a flare gun.
The puncture it would make would be sealed in seconds by the automated equipment, but not before it ignited the oxygen inside.
It was over in one sudden flare, like flash paper.
After, he could see the vacuum-exposed remains of the sleepers whose charred bodies were still in their beds.
Seven down, one to go, he thought without remorse.
He boarded a flyer and headed toward the north pole. He glanced at his chronometer. It took nine hours to fly back, he had been three doing his work, and now there was another nine to return to the pole.
About an hour to spare until that hole opened up again.
Enough time for Varnett.
It seemed like days until he got there, but the chronometer said just a little over nine hours.
As he came over the horizon he searched for Varnett’s flyer. It wasn’t to be seen.
Suddenly Skander spotted it—down, down on that flat plain at the pole. He braked and hovered over it. Slowly, in the gloom, he made out a tiny white dot near the center of the plain.
Varnett! He was going to be the first in!
Varnett detected movement and looked up at the flyer. Suddenly he started running for his own.
Skander came down on him, skirting the ground so low that he was afraid he would crash himself. Varnett ducked and rolled, but was unhurt.
Skander cursed himself, then decided to set it down. He still had the knife, and that might just be enough. He took the flare pistol which, while it wouldn’t necessarily penetrate the suit, might cause a blinding distraction. He was not a large man, but he was a head taller than the boy and the odds were otherwise even in his mind.
Landing near Varnett’s flyer, he got out quickly, flare gun in his right hand, knife in his left. Cursing the almost total absence of light and the fact that he had had to take his eyes off Varnett to land, Skander looked cautiously around.
Varnett had vanished.
Before this could sink in, a white figure jumped from atop the other flyer and hit him in the back. He went down, dropping the flare gun.
The two figures, rolling across the rocky landscape, grappled for the knife. Skander was larger, but older and in worse physical condition than Varnett. Finally, with a shove, Skander pushed Varnett away from him and came upon the boy with the knife. Varnett let him get very close; then, as the knife made a quick stab, the boy’s arm reached out and caught the older man’s wrist. The two struggled and groaned in their suits as Skander tried to press the knife home.
They were in that frozen tableau when, suddenly, the hole opened.
They were both already in it.
Both vanished.
ANOTHER PART OF THE FIELD
Nathan Brazil stretched back in his huge, pillowy lounge chair aboard the bridge of the freighter
The crew consisted only of Brazil. The ships were now automated, so he was there just in case something went wrong. Food had been prepared for all before takeoff and had been loaded into the automated kitchen. A tiny wardroom was used on those occasions when someone wanted to eat outside of his stateroom or with the captain.
Actually, the passengers had more contempt for him than he for them. In an age of extreme conformity, men like Nathan Brazil were the mavericks, the loners, the ones who didn’t fit. Recruited mostly off the barbarian worlds of the frontier, they could take the loneliness of the job, the endless weeks often without human company. Most psychologists called them sociopaths, people alienated from society.
Brazil liked people all right, but not the factory-made ones. He would rather sit here in his domain, the stars showing on the great three-dimensional screens in front of him, and reflect on why society had become alienated from him.
He was a small man, around 170 centimeters tall, slight and thin. His skin was dark-complexioned. Two bright, brown eyes flanked a conspicuous Roman nose which sat atop a mouth very wide, rubbery, and full of teeth. His black hair hung long to his shoulders, but was stringy and looked overgreased and underwashed. He had a thin mustache and thinner full beard that looked as if someone had attempted to grow a full brush and hadn’t made it. He was dressed in a loose-fitting but loudly colorful tunic and matching pants, and wore sandals of a sickly green.
The passengers, he knew, were scared stiff of him, and he liked it that way. Unfortunately, they were still almost thirty days out and their boredom and claustrophobia would sooner or later drive them meddling into his lap.
Oh, hell, he thought. Might as well get everybody together. They have huddled back in that small lounge in the stern long enough.
He reached up and flicked a switch.
“The captain,” he intoned in a tenor voice that nonetheless had a gravelly undertone to it, making it sound a little harsh and unintentionally sarcastic, “requests the pleasure of your company at dinner today. If you like, you may join me in the wardroom forward in thirty minutes. Don’t feel put out if you don’t want to come. I won’t,” he concluded, and switched off the speaker, chuckling softly.
