Adding to Nicklin’s sense of helplessness was the fact that, in spite of all appearances, the ship was actually flying backwards. It was aimed at the world cloud, its drive unit was thrusting it in the direction of the world cloud, but such was the speed previously attained that—two drawn-out days after entering retardation—the Tara was still receding from its goal.
“There’s no point in fuming about it,” Fleischer had told him. “Personally, I thank God for every hour that the drive keeps on functioning.”
I suppose that’s one way to cheer yourself up, Nicklin had thought, tiredly wondering if he would be able to recognise the moment at which the ship eventually came to a standstill and began the return flight proper. It was decelerating continuously, which was why he had a certain amount of weight, but there had to come the instant of turnaround, during which the ship—by definition—would not be moving at all. If it was not moving at all, neither accelerating nor decelerating, it would have to cease generating gravity even though the drive had not been shut down.
But that doesn’t sound right. I must be too dog-tired to think properly. I’ll just have to go over it again…
He struggled out of sleep to the uneasy awareness that something had altered in the ambience of the control deck.
It took him a few bleary seconds to identify the change—the level of noise from the communications system had fallen. His uneasiness increased as he realised that the sounds of radio traffic had been diminishing for some time. Ever since Fleischer had been forced to computerise and regulate the flood of incoming calls, the speakers had been emitting a near-continuous series of code signals between actual messages. Now, however, they were quite silent.
Nicklin sat up straighter and glanced across the other chairs. Voorsanger was absent, but Fleischer was frozen in an attitude of utter concentration, staring at the image of the world cloud. Nicklin’s heart lurched as he noted the pilot’s expression. “What’s happening?” he cried. “Is there—” She silenced him by raising one hand while she addressed the communications panel with the other.
“…is definite,” a man’s voice was saying. “We’ve got it! The residual sphere is being stripped from the outside. There are five skim-off bands—call them whatever you like—two in the northern hemisphere, two in the southern, and one very close to the equator. All the bands are widening rapidly, God help us! There is no way of predicting how long it will be before this station is…” The silence in the control room became total. Nicklin focused his gaze on the world cloud, and—now that he knew exactly where to look—he could see evidence of the Good Fairy’s handiwork. There was a subtle, twinkling agitation along the equator. But in essence it was the opposite of twinkling. It was a disturbance in a motionless pattern caused by the progressive disappearance of tiny light sources.
The world cloud was visibly being unwound… like a vast ball of wool… into nothingness.
“They’ve gone,” Fleischer said in the voice of a timid child. “The spaceports have all gone.”
“We don’t need spaceports,” Nicklin shouted, refusing to play the game of logic. “We can keep on going! We can go into orbit around any fucking planet!”
“What good would that do? If we can never land?” “It would be better than being left out… herel” “Perhaps you’re right.” Fleischer nodded as she considered the proposition, and then—incredibly—her face lit up with perverse triumph as she saw how to refute it.
“The trouble is, Mr Nicklin, that we can’t reach any—as you put it—fucking planet. Things have changed for the worse out there. The disappearances speeded up while you were asleep… and they’re still speeding up… and within a matter of hours there’ll be no planets left—fucking or otherwise!”
Chapter 22
There was a peculiar rightness about what he was doing now, Nicklin decided.
For a period of some twelve hours he had sat in the control room, mesmerised, watching the world cloud disappear at an ever-increasing rate. In the beginning the process had been almost imperceptible, then a darkening sparsity had become noticeable in five widening strips. The effect had added to the awful beauty of the spectacle, giving the cloud the semblance of a pointillist painting of one gigantic banded planet. After that the dissolution had become all too apparent, as swath after swath thinned out into a blackness through which remote stars were beginning to show. At some point in the progression the Tara had finally discarded its outward velocity and begun the painfully slow return, but nobody in the control room had noticed its change of status. It had been impossible for the watchers to do anything but watch. Even their ability to think seemed to have been suspended as the discrete entity which had once been Orbitsville was reduced to filmy wisps, to fast-fading strands of gossamer, and finally to nothing. Nothing at all. The 650-million new-born worlds had been dematerialised, and only a small sun remained, the lone source of light and heat in a region of emptiness which extended for many light years all around.
What comes next? Nicklin had thought numbly. Where do we go from here?
What had come next, within a matter of seconds, was an intercom message for Nicklin from a woman who had been bathing her children in the communal washrooms on 24 Deck. She was angry because the water temperature in the showers had become erratic, and she wanted the fault corrected without delay. She also wanted to know why Nicklin spent all his time lounging around on the control deck instead of attending to his duties.
The reminder that life would make its quotidian demands until the very end had come as a blessing to Nicklin. He had left the seclusion of the control room immediately, and now—a man with an important mission—he was working his way down through the most populated levels of the ship. Because the Tara was carrying only half of its projected complement, the passengers had largely been free to decide where they would be accommodated, and the majority—obeying their instincts—had chosen the forward section, as far as possible from the engine cylinders.
By the time he reached 14 Deck, the first to give access to the engine cylinders, the sounds of human activity were fading above him. He continued his downward drift, fingers barely touching the stringers of the ladder, and was passing 17 Deck when, almost of their own accord, his hands clamped on thedural bars, bringing him to an abrupt halt. There followed a moment of total confusion, then he realised what had caused the autonomous reaction.
A short distance to his right, in the curving primary wall of the passenger cylinder, there was a door leading into the adjacent engine cylinder.
To someone not so well acquainted with the metallic bones and guts and nerves of the Tara the sight of that door would have had little or no significance, but for Nicklin it came as a psychic hammer blow—because he knew there was no engine access door on 17 Deck.
He froze in place on the ladder, looking around him. The rest of the small landing was exactly as it should have been. Behind him there were two doors leading into passenger suites, and stencilled signs clearly proclaimed that he was on what he knew to be 17 Deck. He had no need of the signs to tell him where he was—the surrounding rivet and weld patterns would have been enough—but he was confronted by an engine access door where no engine access door had any right to exist.