Whatever the future held he could only be glad that this period of waiting, with all its divisiveness and bitterness, was over. After the moving of the Raft, society had disintegrated rapidly. It had been a race to complete their preparations before things fell apart completely; and as time had passed — and more delays and problems had been encountered — Rees had felt the pressure build until it seemed he could hardly bear it.
The amount of personal animosity he had encountered had astonished him. He longed to explain to people that it was not he who was causing the Nebula to fail; that it was not he who decreed the physical laws which constrained the number of evacuees.
…And it had not been he — alone — who had drawn up the list.
The preparation of that list had been agonizing. The idea of a ballot had been rejected quickly; the composition of this colony could not be left to chance. But how to select humans — families, chains of descendants — for life or extinction? They had tried to be scientific, and so had applied criteria like physical fitness, intelligence, adaptabilty, breeding age… And Rees, embarrassed and disgusted by the whole process, had found himself on most of the candidate lists.
But he had stayed with it; not, he prayed, merely in order to ensure his own survival, but to do the best job he could. The selection process had left him feeling soiled and shabby, unsure even of his own motivations.
In the end a final list had emerged, an amalgam of dozens of others drawn together by Decker’s harsh arbitration. Rees was on it. Roch wasn’t. And so, Rees reflected with a fresh burst of self-loathing, he had finished by neatly fulfilling the worst expectations of Roch and his like.
He walked to the perimeter fence. Perhaps he would see Pallis, get a last chance to say goodbye. Burly guards patrolled, hefting clubs uncertainly. Rees felt depressed as he stared along the length of the fence. Yet more resources diverted from the main objective… but there had been riots already; who was to say what might have happened if not for the protection of the fence and its guards? A guard caught his eye and nodded, his broad face impassive; Rees wondered how easy it would be for this man to fight off his own people in order to save a privileged few…
An explosion somewhere on the other side of the Bridge, like a massive heel stamping into the deck. A pall of smoke rose over the scaffolding.
The guards near Rees turned to stare. Rees hurried around the Bridge.
Distant shouts, a scream… and the fence was down and burning along ten feet of its length. Guards ran to the breach, but the mob beyond seemed overwhelming, both in numbers and in ferocity; Rees saw a wall of faces, old and young, male and female, united by a desperate, vicious anger. Now fire bombs rained toward the Bridge, splashing over the deck.
“What the hell are you doing here?” It was Decker; the big man took Rees’s arm and pulled him back toward the Bridge.
“Decker, can’t they understand? They can’t be saved; there simply isn’t room. If they attack now the mission will fail and nobody will—”
“Lad.” Decker took his shoulders and shook him, hard. “The time for talk is over. We can’t hold off that lot for long… You have to get in there and launch. Right now.”
Rees shook his head. “That’s impossible.”
“I’ll show you what’s bloody impossible.” A small fire burned amid the ruins of a fire bomb; Decker bent, lit a chunk of scrap wood, and hurled it into the scaffolding surrounding the Bridge. Soon flames were licking at the dry wood.
Rees stared. “Decker—”
“No more discussion, damn you!” Decker roared into his face, spittle spraying. “Take what you can and get out of here—”
Rees turned to run.
He looked back once. Decker was already lost in the melee at the breach.
Rees reached the port. The orderly queue of a few minutes earlier had disintegrated; people were trying to force their way through the doorway, screaming and holding their absurd packages of luggage above their heads. Rees used his fists and elbows to fight his way through to the interior. The Observatory was a cage of noisy chaos, with equipment and people jumbled and crushed together; the single remaining large instrument — the Telescope — loomed over the crowd like some aloof robot.
Rees rammed his way through the crowd until he found Gord and Nead. He pulled them close. “We launch in five minutes!”
“Rees, that’s impossible,” Gord said. “You can see the state of things. We’d cause injury, death even, to the passengers and those outside—”
Rees pointed to the transparent hull. “Look out there. See that smoke? Decker has fired the damn scaffolding. So your precious explosive bolts are going to blow in five minutes anyway. Right?”
Gord paled.
Suddenly the noise outside grew to a roar; Rees saw that more sections of the fence were failing. The few guards still fighting were being overwhelmed by a wave of humanity.
“When they reach us we’re finished,” Rees said. “We have to launch. Not in five minutes. Now.”
Nead shook his head. “Rees, there are still people—”
“Close the damn door!” Rees grabbed the young man’s shoulder and shoved him toward a wall-mounted control panel. “Gord, fire those bolts. Just do it—”
His eyes narrow, his cheeks trembling with fear, the little engineer disappeared into the crush.
Rees forced his way to the Telescope. He clambered up the old instrument’s mount until he was looking down over a confused sea of people. “Listen to me!” he bellowed. “You can see what’s happening outside. We have to launch. Lie down if you can. Help your neighbors; watch the children—”
Now fists were battering against the hull, desperate faces pressing to the clear wall—
— and, with a synchronized crackle, the scaffolding’s explosive bolts ignited. The fragile wooden frame disintegrated rapidly; now nothing held the Bridge to the Raft.
The floor dipped. Screams rose like flames; the passengers clung to each other. Beyond the clear hull the Raft deck rose around the Bridge like a liquid, and the Raft’s gravitational field hauled the passengers into the air, bumping them almost comically against the roof.
A crescendo of cries came from the doorway. Nead had failed to close the port in time; stragglers were leaping across the widening chasm between Bridge and deck. A last man clattered through the closing door; his ankle was trapped in the jamb and Rees heard the shin snap with sickening suddenness. Now a whole family tumbled off the Raft deck and impacted against the hull, sliding into infinity with looks of surprise…
Rees closed his eyes and clung to the Telescope.
At last it was over. The Raft turned into a ceiling above them, distant and abstract; the thin rain of humans against the hull ceased, and four hundred people had suddenly entered free fall for the first time in their lives.
There was a yell, as if from very far away. Rees looked up. Roch, burning club in hand, had leapt through the hole in the heart of the Raft. He fell through the intervening yards spreadeagled; he stared, eyes bulging, in through the glass at horrified passengers.
The huge miner smashed face-down into the clear roof of the Observatory. He dropped his club and scrabbled for a handhold against the slick wall; but helplessly he slid over the surface, leaving a trail of blood from his crushed nose and mouth. Finally he tumbled over the side — then, at the last second, he grabbed at the rough protrusion of a steam jet.