The questions gnawed steadily into Stirling’s resolve as the island loomed up ahead—rearing its masts and gantries into the sky. He moved his shoulders uneasily in the unfamiliar gray uniform and walked across the cargo hold to a spot where Bennett was staring moodily into an empty phosphates container.
“You’d better get in,” Bennett said. “We’ll be berthing in a couple of minutes.”
Stirling hesitated, imagining an uninterrupted arch of throbbing blue sky overhead and three merciless miles of thin air beneath his feet. An icy feeling started in his groin and crept upwards in a leisurely tide through his abdomen and stomach. He gripped the edge of the container, crushed the thick buttery plastic, then noticed Bennett staring up at him with open malice.
“What’s the matter, big man? Changing your mind?” “I’m not changing my mind.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. A guy would need to be sick before he would want to get up on that thing. There’s time to call it quits.”
“Forget it.” Stirling clambered into the container and hunkered down in its base to let Bennett fit the lid.
Bennett shrugged. “All right, big man, but don’t make any mistakes. Remember to check your watch as soon as you feel the elevator take off. The trip will take twelve minutes, give or take a few seconds. Then you’ll be shunted onto a transfer belt.
“I’ve kept this container near the end of the batch, so you’ll have a good five minutes before it reaches the openers. The blades slice off the top as clean as a whistle… . So don’t be in there too long.” Stirling nodded doggedly.
“We’ll give you two minutes from time of arrival—that is, exactly fourteen minutes from the second you take off— then you break out in a hurry. Fourteen minutes, remember. I’ll be in the monitoring room down here distracting the duty officer exactly then. But I won’t be able to keep his eyes off the screen more than about thirty seconds. You’ll have to move real fast. Understand?”
“Wait fourteen minutes and jump out,” Stirling said impatiently. “It’s hardly as abstruse as anti-grav field theory.” Bennett grinned. “Theory on the ground and practice up there are two different things. You’ll see.”
Stirling stared at him expressionlessly as Bennett fitted the yellow plastic lid, which shut out all light except for a dim mustard radiance from above. It occurred to him that Bennett might be lying about the sequence of operations up on the He and their timing. What if the phosphates containers were shunted off the elevator directly into an opening machine? Or even a crushing machine? After all, the containers were disposable; so there was no need to baby them around. And with Stirling dead there would be little to incriminate Bennett even if the monitoring team glimpsed his body. The guards at the shore checkpoints would hardly remember seeing the two men walk through together.
Negative thinking, Stirling told himself. He could not fully understand the pressures that were driving him up to the He in his brother’s footsteps; but he knew he was not turning back at this stage. Stirling spent a few minutes going through the small pack which he had prepared, at Bennett’s advice, and checking its contents. He had brought a foam-insulated sleeping bag, a supply of individually wrapped protein bars, and a powerful handlight. There was no telling how long it would take to find Johnny and persuade him to return, and he had tried to reconcile himself to the idea of being aloft for several days.
Getting back was a comparatively easy problem, because at this time of the year large daily consignments of lettuce and other leaf vegetables were taking the big drop every day. The cases were loaded out of range of the monitoring cameras; and Bennett had supplied a schedule of his own shift times for the coming week, plus instructions on how to mark the case in which they chose to hide.
Stirling felt the skimmer lurch as it reached the island and went up a ramp into its berth. There was a brief delay followed by a period of jolting and slithering sensations. Indecipherable shouts punctuated the querulous whining of servos, and he wondered just how many strings Bennett was pulling to circumvent the normal weight and irradiation checks which might have revealed his presence.
Crouched in the saffron twilight of the container, Stirling held his watch close to his eyes and waited for the ascent to begin. He wondered if he would be sure of the exact moment.
He was sure.
All anti-grav vehicles designed for passenger transport divert part of the frustrated gravitic force through a field reversal stage, in effect creating an artificial gravity on the upper side of the craft. This was an unnecessary refinement on a vehicle intended purely for freight work: it was cheaper and simpler to ensure that the cargo was either in secured containers or netted in position to prevent it drifting. Stirling’s first intimation that the’ elevator had begun to rise was a sudden feeling that he was falling, hurtling downwards just as fast as the Earth could suck him in. He drifted up from the base of the container, vainly grabbed for an anchor point, and brushed gently against its lid. All the ancient instincts in his body told him to scream because, since the dawn of life, every creature that had ever experienced this sensation was destined to die within seconds.
An indeterminate time went by before cool-fingered logic told him that he could not be falling and that he was merely being screened from the force of gravity. Stirling forced himself to relax, then realized he had not noted the take-off time on his watch. He looked at the jerking sweep-hand—the blind present tapping its way into eternity—and wondered, ten, twenty, thirty, seconds? Settling for twenty, he got his back against a wall of waxy plastic, braced his feet on the opposite one, and waited out the long climb to Heaven.
On reflection, he should have expected the weightlessness. It was that very phenomenon which had been a major factor in halting the spread of the International Land Extensions. In the panic years which followed 1992, money had been no barrier and the Big Three’s first impulse had been to create an air-borne agriculture—if necessary, to span seas and oceans with anti-grav rafts. A start had actually been made on such a program; but the new science of anti-gravities had run foul of man’s oldest —astronomy. It became clear that raft construction on the scale proposed would have screened off a sizable proportion of the mutual attraction of Earth and sun, and would have sent the planet into a widening spiral away from the celestial hearth. A new start was made with lies in which only the supporting structural grid was screened—a vastly more difficult engineering proposition—but by then the F.T.A. was already getting results from the ocean, and the He program lost way.
Stirling’s next indication that the elevator was gaining altitude came when he began to feel the cold, but the drop in temperature was one thing he had expected: even as boys he and Johnny had realized the need for big boots when walking the uplands of Heaven. He slipped the straps of the pack over his shoulders and struggled into a kneeling position, ready to burst through the lid of the container. His watch was showing just over twelve minutes gone when there was an abrupt return of weight and a sense of trundling, lateral movement. A variety of overlapping mechanical sounds filtered through to him: hydraulic moans, the dull thunder of pumps and meshing gears, occasional shrill squeaks.