Bob Shaw SF Gateway Omnibus

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the work of the award-winning Bob Shaw. Best known for his extraordinary novel of 'slow glass', Other Days, Other Eyes, Bob Shaw was a fan favourite at conventions for his hysterical 'serious scientific talks'. This omnibus contains three of his finest works: Orbitsville, A Wreath of Stars and The Ragged Astronauts. Orbitsville : Racing from the certain vengeance of Earth's tyrant ruler, space captain Vance Garamond flees the Solar System. And discovers the almost unimaginably vast spherical structure soon to become famous as 'Orbitsville' - a new home for Earth's huddled masses. A Wreath of Stars : Thornton's Planet is an anti-neutrino planet detected on its approach to Earth. It can be seen only through the newly developed magniluct lenses and its arrival causes a wave of panic. When its course carries it past the earth, interest in Thornton's Planet wanes. But the visit of Thornton's Planet has had effects on Earth further-ranging than anyone could have imagined. The Ragged Astronauts : Land and Overland - twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival - an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon.

Release date: August 15, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 536

Sample

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Bob Shaw was the working name of Northern Irish writer Robert Shaw (1931–1996). He worked in structural engineering until the age of twenty-seven, then aircraft design, then industrial public relations and journalism, becoming a full-time author in 1975. Shaw was early involved in sf FANDOM, his first book being The Enchanted Duplicator (1954) with Walt WILLIS, an allegory of fan and FANZINE activities, and he received HUGOS in 1979 and 1980 for his fan writing. Shaw published his first professional story, ‘Aspect’, with NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION in August 1954; during the mid-1950s he contributed several more stories to that magazine and one to AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION before ceasing to write for some years. After a strong ‘come-back’ tale – ‘… And Isles Where Good Men Lie’ (1965 NEW WORLDS) – he published ‘Light of Other Days’ (1966 ANALOG), which established his reputation as a writer of remarkable ingenuity. Built around the intriguing concept of SLOW GLASS, a kind of TIME VIEWER through which light can take years to travel – thus allowing people to view scenes from the past – this story remains his best known. He later incorporated it, together with two thematically-related examinations of the theme, into Other Days, Other Eyes (1974).

Shaw’s first novel was Night Walk (1967), a fast-moving chase story. A man who has been blinded and condemned to a penal colony on a far planet invents a device that enables him to see through other people’s and even animals’ eyes, and thus manages to escape. The Two-Timers (1968), a well written tale of PARALLEL WORLDS, DOPPELGANGERS and murder, demonstrates Shaw’s ability to handle characterization and, in particular, his talent for realistic dialogue. In The Palace of Eternity (1969) he still more impressively controls a wide canvas featuring interstellar warfare, the environmental degradation of an Edenic planet, and human TRANSCENDENCE; the central section of the novel, where the hero finds himself reincarnated as an ‘Egon’ or soul-like entity, displeased some critics, though it is in fact an effective handling of a traditional sf displacement of ideas from METAPHYSICS or RELIGION. This intelligent reworking of well worn sf topoi was from the first Shaw’s forte, as was demonstrated in his next novel, One Million Tomorrows (1970), an IMMORTALITY tale whose twist lies in the fact that the option of eternal youth entails sexual impotence.

All Shaw’s early books – which include also Shadow of Heaven (1969), involving ANTIGRAVITY, and Ground Zero Man (1971; revised as The Peace Machine 1985) – were published first (and sometimes solely) in the USA; and their efficient anonymity of venue may result from a highly competent attempt to appeal to a transatlantic audience. Only slowly did Shaw come to write tales whose placement and protagonists were distinctly UK in feel; and it could be argued, sadly, that his best work was his most impersonal. The fine first volume of the Orbitsville sequence – comprising Orbitsville (1975), Orbitsville Departure (1983) and Orbitsville Judgement (1990) – can almost certainly stand, after Other Days, Other Eyes, as his finest inspiration. Like Larry NIVEN’S Ringworld (1970) and Arthur C. CLARKE’S Rendezvous with Rama (1973), the Orbitsville books centre on the discovery of – and later developments within – a vast alien artefact in space, in this case a DYSON SPHERE. Within the living-space provided by the inner surface of this artificial shell – billions of times the surface area of the Earth – Shaw spins an exciting story of political intrigue and exploration, which in later volumes develops, perhaps revealing an undue impatience with the venue he had invented, into a heavily plotted move into another universe entirely. Orbitsville gained a 1976 BSFA AWARD.

A Wreath of Stars (1976) may be Shaw’s most original, and perhaps his finest, singleton. A rogue planet, composed entirely of antineutrino matter approaches the Earth. It passes nearby with no immediately discernible effect. However, it is soon discovered that an antineutrino ‘Earth’ exists within our planet whose orbit has been seriously perturbed by the passage of the interloper. This is an ingenious, almost a poetic, idea, to which the plot only just fails to do full justice. Other books followed quickly: the overcomplicated Medusa’s Children (1977); the Warren Peace sequence – comprising the successfully comic Who Goes Here? (1977) and its disappointing sequel Warren Peace (1993) – both being jeux d’esprit akin to Harry HARRISON’S Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965), and suffering, as did Harrison’s sequence, from rapidly diminishing inspiration; Ship of Strangers (1978), an homage to A. E. VAN VOGT in which the crew of the Stellar Survey Ship Sarafand, after some routine adventures, confront a striking COSMOLOGICAL issue; Vertigo (1978), an effective policier set in a world transformed by ANTIGRAVITY devices allowing personal flight; plus Dagger of the Mind (1979) and The Ceres Solution (1981), in both of which Shaw’s ingenuity declined, for a period, into something close to jumble. He had meanwhile been writing short stories – his collections include Tomorrow Lies in Ambush (1973), Cosmic Kaleidoscope (1976), A Better Mantrap (1982), Between Two Worlds (1986) and Dark Night in Toyland (1989) – which again demonstrate his professional skills but tend to lack a sense of commitment, to the point that some later stories seemed strained, frivolous, anecdotal.

However, with the Ragged Astronauts sequence – The Ragged Astronauts (1986), The Wooden Spaceships (1988) and The Fugitive Worlds (1989) – Shaw returned to his very best and most inventive form, creating an ALTERNATE COSMOS which allowed him to describe with joyful exactness the sensation of emigrating, via hot-air Balloon, up the hourglass funnel of atmosphere that connects two planets which orbit each other. After his pattern, later volumes lose some of the freshness and elation of the first, but the series as a whole emphasizes Shaw’s genuine stature in the genre as an entertainer who rarely failed to thrill the mind’s eye with a new prospect. At his best, Shaw was an ingenious fabricator and lover of the worlds of sf.

For a more detailed version of the above, see Bob Shaw’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shaw_bob

Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

 

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

The President was called Elizabeth, and it was thought by some that the mere coincidence of name had had a profound influence on her life-style. Certainly, she had – since the death of her father – made Starflight House into something which more resembled an historic royal court than the headquarters of a business enterprise. There was a suggestion of neo-Elizabethan ritual, of palace intrigue, of privilege and precedence about the way she ran her trillion-dollar empire. And the touch of antiquity which annoyed Garamond the most – although probably only because it was the one which affected him most – was her insistence on personal interviews with ship commanders before their exploratory missions.

He leaned on a carved stone balustrade and stared, with non-committal grey eyes, at the tiers of descending heated gardens which reached to the Atlantic Ocean four kilometres away. Starflight House capped what had once been a moderate-sized Icelandic hill; now the original contours were completely hidden under a frosting of loggias, terraces and pavilions. From the air it reminded Garamond of a gigantic, vulgar cake. He had been waiting almost two hours, time he would have preferred to spend with his wife and child, and there had been nothing to do but sip pale green drinks and fight to control his dangerous impatience with Elizabeth.

As a successful flickerwing captain he had been in her presence several times, and so his distaste for her was personified, physical. It influenced his attitude more pervasively than did his intellectual unease over the fact that she was the richest person who had ever lived, and so far above the law that she had been known to kill out of sheer petulance. Was it, he had often wondered, because she had the mind of a man that she chose to be an unattractive woman in an age when cosmetic surgery could correct all but the most gross physical defects? Were her splayed, imperfect teeth and pallid skin the insignia of total authority?

And as he watched the coloured fountains glitter in the stepped perspectives below, Garamond remembered his first visit to Starflight House. He had been about to undertake his third mission command and was still young enough to be self-conscious about the theatrical black uniform. The knowledge that he was entering the special relationship reputed to exist between President Lindstrom and her captains had made him taut and apprehensive, keyed up to meet any demand on his resourcefulness. But nobody in Fleet Command, nor in Admincom, had warned him in advance that Elizabeth gave off a sweet, soupy odour which closed the throat when one was most anxious to speak clearly.

None of his advisers on Starflight House protocol had given him a single clue which would have helped a young man, who had never seen anything but perfection in a female, to conceal his natural reaction to the President. Among his confused impressions, the predominant one had been of an abnormally curved spine at the lower end of which was slung a round, puffy abdomen like that of an insect. Garamond, frozen to attention, had avoided her eyes when she nuzzled the satin cushion of gut against his knuckles during her prolonged formal inspection of his appearance.

As he leaned on the artificially weathered balustrade, he could recall emerging from that first interview with a cool resentment towards the older captains who had told him none of the things which really mattered in personal dealings with the President; and yet – when his own turn came – he had allowed other raw Starflight commanders to go unprepared to the same inauguration. It had been easy to justify his inaction when he considered the possible consequences of explaining to a new captain that the coveted special relationship would involve him in exchanging looks of secret appreciation with Liz Lindstrom when – in the middle of a crowded Admincom flight briefing – she handed him a scrap of paper upon which she, the richest and most powerful human being in the universe, had printed a childish dirty joke. If the time for suicide ever came, Garamond decided, he would choose an easier and pleasanter way …

‘Captain Garamond,’ a man’s voice said from close behind him. ‘The President sends her compliments.’

Garamond turned and saw the tall, stooped figure of Vice-President Humboldt crossing the terrace towards him. Holding Humboldt’s hand was a child of about nine, a sturdy silver-haired boy dressed in pearlized cords. Garamond recognized him as the President’s son, Harald, and he nodded silently. The boy nodded in return, his eyes flickering over Garamond’s badges and service ribbons.

‘I’m sorry you have been kept waiting so long, Captain.’ Humboldt cleared his throat delicately to indicate that this was as far as he could go towards expressing views which were not those of Elizabeth. ‘Unfortunately, the President cannot disengage from her present commitment for another two hours. She requests you to wait.’

‘Then I’ll have to wait.’ Garamond shrugged and smiled to mask his impatience, even though the tachyonic reports from the weather stations beyond Pluto had predicted that the favourable, ion-rich tide which was sweeping through the Solar System would shortly ebb. He had planned to sail on that tide and boost his ship to lightspeed in the shortest possible time. Now it looked as though he would have to labour up the long gravity slope from Sol with his ship’s electromagnetic wings sweeping the vacuum for a meagre harvest of reaction mass. ‘Yes.

You’ll have to wait.’

‘Of course, I could always leave – and see the President when I get back.’

Humboldt smiled faintly in appreciation of the joke and glanced down at Harald, making sure the boy’s attention was elsewhere before he replied. ‘That would never do. I am sure Liz would be so disappointed that she would send a fast ship to bring you back for a special interview.’

‘Then I won’t put her to that inconvenience,’ Garamond said. He knew they had both been referring to a certain Captain Witsch, a headstrong youngster who had grown restless after waiting two days in Starflight House and had taken off quietly at night without Elizabeth’s blessing. He had been brought back in a high-speed interceptor, and his interview with the President must have been a very special one, because no trace of his body had ever been found. Garamond had no way of knowing how apocryphal the story might be – the Starflight fleet which siphoned off Earth’s excess population was so huge that one captain could never know all the others – but it was illustrative of certain realities.

‘There is a compensation for you, Captain.’ Humboldt placed one of his pink-scrubbed hands on Harald’s silver head. ‘Harald has been showing a renewed interest in the flickerwing fleet lately and has been asking questions on subjects which loosely come under the heading of spaceflight theory and practice. Liz wants you to talk to him about it.’

Garamond looked doubtfully at the boy whose attention seemed absorbed by a group of metal statues further along the terrace. ‘Has he any flair for mathematics?’

‘He isn’t expected to qualify for a master’s papers this afternoon.’ Humboldt laughed drily. ‘Simply encourage his interest, Captain. I know admirals who would give their right arms for such a public token of the President’s trust. Now I must return to the board-room.’

‘You’re leaving me alone with him?’

‘Yes – Liz has a high regard for you, Captain Garamond. Is it the responsibility …?’

‘No. I’ve looked after children before now.’ Garamond thought of his own six-year-old son who had shaken his fist rather than wave goodbye, expressing his sense of loss and resentment over having a father who left him in answer to greater demands. This extra delay the President had announced meant that he had left home four hours too early, time in which he might have been able to heal the boy’s tear-bruised eyes. On top of that, there were the reports of the ion wind failing, fading away to the level of spatial background activity, while he stood uselessly on an ornate terrace and played nursemaid to a child who might be as neurosis-ridden as his mother. Garamond tried to smile as the Vice-President withdrew, but he had a feeling he had not made a convincing job of it.

‘Well, Harald,’ he said, turning to the silver-and-pearl boy, ‘you want to ride a flickerwing, do you?’

Harald examined him coolly. ‘Starflight employees of less than Board status usually address me as Master Lindstrom.’

Garamond raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ll tell you something about space-flying, Harald. Up there the most minor technician is more important than all your Admincom executives put together. Do you understand that, Harald? Harry?’ I’m more of a child than he is, he thought in amazement.

Unexpectedly, Harald smiled. ‘I’m not interested in space-flying.’

‘But I thought …’

‘I told them that because they wanted to hear it, but I don’t have to pretend with you, do I?’

‘No, you don’t have to pretend with me, son. What are we going to do for the next two hours, though?’

‘I’d like to run,’ Harald said with a sudden eagerness which – in Garamond’s mind – restored him to full membership of the brotherhood of small boys.

‘You want to run?’ Garamond managed a genuine smile. ‘That’s a modest ambition.’

‘I’m not allowed to run or climb in case I hurt myself. My mother has forbidden it, and everybody else around here is so afraid of her that they hardly let me blink, but …’ Harald looked up at Garamond, triumphantly ingenuous, ‘… you’re a flickerwing commander.’

Garamond realized belatedly that the boy had been manoeuvring him into a corner from the second they met, but he felt no annoyance. ‘That’s right – I am. Now let’s see how quickly you can make it from here to those statues and back.’

‘Right!’

‘Well, don’t stand around. Go!’ Garamond watched with a mixture of amusement and concern as Harald set off in a lopsided, clopping run, elbows pumping rapidly. He rounded the bronze statues and returned to Garamond at the same pace, with his eyes shining like lamps.

‘Again?’

‘As many times as you want.’ As Harald resumed his inefficient expenditure of energy Garamond went back to the stone balustrade of the terrace and stared down across the gardens. In spite of the late afternoon sunshine, the Atlantic was charcoal grey and tendrils of mist from it were wreathing the belvederes and waterfalls in sadness. A lone gull twinkled like a star in its distant fight.

I don’t want to go, he thought. It’s as simple as that.

In the early days he had been sustained by the conviction that he, Vance Garamond, would be the one who would find the third world. But interstellar flight was almost a century old now and Man’s empire still included only one habitable planet apart from Earth, and all of Garamond’s enthusiasm and certitude had achieved nothing. If he could accept that he would never reach a habitable new planet then he would be far better to do as Aileen wanted, to take a commission on the shuttle run and be sure of some time at home every month. Ferrying shiploads of colonists to Terranova would be dull, but safe and convenient. The ion winds were fairly predictable along that route and the well-established chain of weather stations had eliminated any possibility of being becalmed …

‘Look at me!’

Garamond turned, for an instant was unable to locate Harald, then saw him perched dangerously high on the shoulders of one of the statues. The boy waved eagerly.

‘You’d better come down from there.’ Garamond tried to find a diplomatic way to hide his concern over the way in which Harald had increased his demands – emotional blackmailers used the same techniques as ordinary criminals – from permission to run on the terrace to the right to make risky climbs, thus putting Garamond in a difficult position with the President. Difficult? It occurred to Garamond that his career would be ended if Harald were to so much as sprain an ankle.

‘But I’m a good climber. Watch.’ Harald threw his leg across a patient bronze face as he reached for the statue’s upraised arm.

‘I know you can climb, but don’t go any higher till I get there.’ Garamond began to walk towards the statues, moving casually but adding inches to each stride by thrusting from the back foot. His alarm increased. Elizabeth Lindstrom, whose title of President was derived from her inherited ownership of the greatest financial and industrial empire ever known, was the most important person alive. Her son was destined to inherit Starflight from her, to control all construction of starships and all movement between Earth and the one other world available to Man. And he, Vance Garamond, an insignificant flickerwing captain, had put himself in a position where he was almost certain to incur the anger of one or the other.

‘Up we go,’ Harald called.

‘Don’t!’ Garamond broke into an undisguised run. ‘Please, don’t.’

He surged forward through maliciously thick air which seemed to congeal around him like resin. Harald laughed delightedly and scrambled towards the upright column of metal which was the statue’s arm, but he lost his grip and tilted backwards.

One of his feet lodged momentarily in the sculpted collar, acting as a pivot, turning him upside down. Garamond, trapped in a different continuum, saw the event on a leisurely timescale, like the slow blossoming of a spiral nebula. He saw the first fatal millimetre of daylight open up between Harald’s fingers and the metal construction. He saw the boy seemingly hanging in the air, then gathering speed in the fall. He saw and heard the brutal impact with which Harald’s head struck the base of the statuary group.

Garamond dropped to his knees beside the small body and knew, on the instant, that Harald was dead. His skull was crushed, driven inwards on the brain.

‘You’re not a good climber,’ Garamond whispered numbly, accusingly, to the immobile face which was still dewed with perspiration. ‘You’ve killed us both. And my family as well.’

He stood up and looked towards the entrance of the main building, preparing to face the officials and domestics who would come running. The terrace remained quiet but for the murmur of its fountains. High in the stratosphere an invisible aircraft drew a slow, silent wake across the sky. Each passing second was a massive hammer-blow on the anvil of Garamond’s mind, and he had been standing perfectly still for perhaps a minute before accepting that the accident had not been noticed by others.

Breaking out of the stasis, he gathered up Harald’s body, marvelling at its lightness, and carried it to a clump of flowering shrubs. The dark green foliage clattered like metal foil as he lowered the dead child into a place of concealment.

Garamond turned his back on Starflight House, and began to run.

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

He had, if he was very lucky, about one hundred minutes.

The figure was arrived at by assuming the President had been precise when she told Garamond to wait an extra two hours. There was a further proviso – that it had been her intention to leave her son alone with him all that time. With the full span of a hundred minutes at: his disposal, Garamond decided, he had a chance; but any one of a dozen personal servants had only to go looking for Harald, any one of a thousand visitors had only to notice a bloodstain …

The numbers in the game of death were trembling and tumbling behind his eyes as he stepped off the outward bound slideway where it reached the main reception area. His official transport was waiting to take him straight to the shuttle terminal at North Field, and – in spite of the risks associated with the driver being in radio contact with Starflight House – that still seemed the quickest and most certain way of reaching his ship. The vast ice-green hall of the concourse was crowded with men and women coming off their afternoon shifts in the surrounding administrative buildings. They seemed relaxed and happy, bemused by the generosity of the lingering sunlight. Garamond swore inwardly as he shouldered through conflicting currents and eddies of people, doing his best to move quickly without attracting attention.

I’m a dead man, he kept thinking in detached wonderment. No matter what I do, no matter how my luck holds out in the next couple of hours… I’m a dead man. And my wife is a dead woman. And my son is a dead child. Even if the ion tide holds strong and fills my wings, we’re all dead – because there’s no place to hide. There’s only one other world, and Elizabeth’s ships will be waiting there …

A face turned towards him from the crowd, curiously, and Garamond realized he had made a sound. He smiled – recreating himself in his own image of a successful flickerwing captain, clothed in the black-and-silver which was symbolic of star oceans – and the face slid away, satisfied that it had made a mistake in locating the source of the despairing murmur. Garamond gnawed his lip while he covered the remaining distance to his transport which was stacked in one of the reserved magazines near the concourse. The sharp-eyed middle-aged driver saw him approaching, and had the vehicle brought up to ground level by the time Garamond reached the silo.

‘Thanks.’ Garamond answered the man’s salute, grateful for the small saving in time, and got inside the upholstered shell.

‘I thought you’d be in a hurry, sir.’ The driver’s eyes stared knowingly at him from the rear view mirror.

‘Oh?’ Garamond controlled a spasm of unreasonable fear – this was not the way his arrest would come about. He eyed the back of the driver’s neck which was ruddy, deeply creased and had a number of long-established blackheads.

‘Yes, sir. All the Starflight commanders are in a hurry to reach the field today. The weather reports aren’t good, I hear.’

Garamond nodded and tried to look at ease as the vehicle surged forward with a barely perceptible whine from its magnetic engines. ‘I think I’ll catch the tide,’ he said evenly. ‘At least, I hope so – my family are coming to see me off.’

The driver’s narrow face showed some surprise. ‘I thought you were going direct …’

‘A slight change of plan – we’re calling for my wife and son. You remember the address?’

‘Yes, sir. I have it here.’

‘Good. Get there as quickly as you can.’ With a casual movement Garamond broke the audio connection between the vehicle’s two compartments and picked up the nearest communicator set. He punched in his home code and held the instrument steady with his knees while he waited for the screen to come to life and show that his call had been accepted. Supposing Aileen and Chris had gone out? The boy had been upset – again Garamond remembered him shaking his fist instead of waving goodbye, expressing in the slight change of gesture all the emotions which racked his small frame – and Aileen could have taken him away for an afternoon of distraction and appeasement. If that were the case …

‘Vance!’ Aileen’s face crystallized in miniature between his hands. ‘I was sure you’d gone. Where are you?’

‘I’m on my way back to the house, be there in ten minutes.’

‘Back here? But …’

‘Something has happened, Aileen. I’m bringing you and Chris with me to the field. Is he there?’

‘He’s out on the patio. But, Vance, you never let us see you off.’

‘I …’ Garamond hesitated, and decided it could be better all round if his wife were to be kept in ignorance at this stage. ‘I’ve changed my mind about some things. Now, get Chris ready to leave the house as soon as I get there.’

Aileen raised her shoulders uncertainly. ‘Vance, do you think it’s the best thing for him? I mean you’ve been away from the house for three hours and he’s just begun to get over his first reactions – now you’re going to put him through it all again.’

‘I told you something has come up.’ How many pet dogs, Garamond asked himself, did I see around the Presidential suite this afternoon? Five? Six?

‘What has come up?’

‘I’ll explain later.’ At what range can a dog scent a corpse? Liz’s brood of pets could be the biggest threat of all.‘Please get Chris ready.’

Aileen shook her head slightly. ‘I’m sorry, Vance, but I don’t …’

‘Aileen!’ Garamond deliberately allowed an edge of panic to show in his voice, using it to penetrate the separate universe of normalcy in which his wife still existed. ‘I can’t explain it now, but you and Chris must be ready to come to the field with me within the next few minutes. Don’t argue any more, just do what I’m asking.’

He broke the connection and forced himself to sit back, wondering if he had already said too much for the benefit of any communications snoops who could be monitoring the public band. The car was travelling west on the main Akranes auto-link, surging irregularly as it jockeyed for position in the traffic. It occurred to Garamond that the driver’s performance was not as good as it had been on the way out to Starflight House, perhaps through lack of concentration. On an impulse he reconnected the vehicle’s intercom.

‘… at his home,’ the driver was saying. ‘Expect to reach North Field in about twenty minutes.’

Garamond cleared his throat. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Reporting in, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘Standing orders. All the fleet drivers keep Starflight Centra-data informed about their movements.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘Sir?’

‘What did you say about my movements?’

The driver’s shoulders stirred uneasily, causing his Starflight sunburst emblems to blink redly with reflected light. ‘I just said you decided to pick up your family on the way to North Field.’

‘Don’t make any further reports.’

‘Sir?’

‘As a captain in the Starflight Exploratory Arm I think I can make my way around this part of Iceland without a nursemaid.’

‘I’m sorry, but …’

‘Just drive the car.’ Garamond fought to control the unreasoning anger he felt against the man in front. ‘And go faster.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The creases in the driver’s weather-beaten neck deepened as he hunched over the wheel.

Garamond made himself sit quietly, with closed eyes, motionless except for a slight rubbing of his palms against his knees which failed completely to remove the perspiration. He tried to visualize what was happening back on the hill. Was the routine of Elizabeth’s court proceeding as on any other afternoon, with the boards and committees and tribunals deliberating in the pillared halls, and the President moving among them, complacently deflecting and vibrating the webstrands of empire with her very presence? Or had someone begun to not