Oliver Marland was an ordinary crew man on a routine flight before disaster overtook the 5X5. The strange sequence of events affected the minds of the entire ship's company - Marland alone was capable of getting them home safely.
The changes had come to Oliver in a different way. They had set him apart from the others. He was feared and distrusted - not without reason! This was the paradox; they needed him - he needed them; but both sides feared the other too much for compromise.
The only chance of breaking the deadlock lay with the unknown inhabitants of the planet they had been sent to survey - and the natives were not renowned for their generous amiability!
Release date:
August 28, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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MEN sat in an octagonal chamber watching pointers move on dials, watching needles registering first one reading and then another. Sometimes the men who watched the dials pressed buttons of different colours. Sometimes they ted sheets of thin plastic, perforated in strange patterns, into slots at the sides of the dials, meters and gauges. A tall, rather slender individual got to his feet, gave a final glance at the dial beside him, raised one semi-quizzical, semi-humorous eyebrow and sauntered across to a translucent dome set in the centre of the octagonal chamber.
“All ready for hyper drive, gentlemen?”
There was something about the captain, thought Oliver Marland, something that set him slightly apart from the others. He could ask a question in the politest terms and yet leave no real doubt in anybody’s mind that he was in actual fact issuing an order. Perhaps it was protocol. Perhaps, thought Oliver, it was simply the way John Anderson was built.
The Captain strolled around the translucent dome, like an architect strolling around a cathedral for which he is responsible, which has just been acclaimed the finest of its kind that has been built for centuries. He might have been an artist, standing back to admire a revolutionary technique in oils that he had just perfected. In a sense, thought Oliver, John was an artist, that rare combination of artist and scientist that goes to make up the successful astrogator, particularly the successful hyper-drive astrogator.
“What’s the reading, Henry?”
Anderson cast a careful glance in the direction of Henry Peters. Peters was short, inclined to fat, and almost totally devoid of hair. His stubby fingers pressed a key and his eyes watched the movement of the needle like the eyes of an old hen following progress of a lame chick, as it scratches pathetically with its inadequate claws.
“7079 abz.”
“Does it satisfy you?” Anderson’s face expected an affirmative.
“Well within both margins.”
“Conrad?” Again there was interrogation in the captain’s voice. Dick Conrad checked his co-ordinates, like a man who recites a poem he has known since infancy.
“14.23.9/z.”
“That seems to align nicely with what Henry said. Dick nodded. Somehow Oliver, second engineer, felt strangely like an outsider. The astrogator, the first engineer, the captain, seemed more than capable of running the whole show without him. Perhaps a second engineer was only a glorified office boy, an underpaid trainee. Oliver felt just a little bitter, but the feeling passed. You had to start as second engineer; there was no short cut. You trained on flight after flight, journey after journey. You trained on hyper drive until the whole incredible, four-dimensional magic of the process had become something of a routine, everyday affair.
“Stand by.” Anderson’s voice was as calm as the metallic commandment to stand clear of the doors that was still to be heard in the best background railway systems and the best lifts.
Oliver looked with a soupçon of interest at the glowing incandescence of the translucent dome. It assumed an opalescent quality, then the whole phenomena of hyper-drive transition enveloped the 5X5 and the men inside her. Marland wondered how the passengers were taking it. Some of the surveyors were new men, fresh from college. First-class surveyors, no doubt, but dubious spacemen. Everything vibrated at an untenably high frequency for perhaps a fifth of a second. It was long enough to feel unbearably uncomfortable, but not long enough to destroy the mind. Like a dental drill touching a naked nerve the feeling came and went. The lights lost their colour, then they went out altogether. A flickering black-and-white endured for a minute or so; the lights came once more, but outside was nothing but greyness. The 5X5 was in hyperspace.
“This is my first trip to Azorb,” remarked Anderson. “None of you were on the previous expeditions, were you?”
“Not me,” answered Conrad. I was first engineer on the 5X2, but I missed the Azorb run, fortunately.” He patted the top of his bald head, as though reassuring himself that the downy stubble where his hair had once been, remained in place.
“How about you, Henry?”
The astrogator shook his head.
“I was on the 5X4 before I came to you.”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
Oliver Marland was seized by an almost irresistible desire to pretend that he had visited Azorb, to manufacture fictitious exploits with imaginary Azorbites.
“You may be interested in these.” Anderson ran a series of slides through the 3-D viewer. “There it is approaching its apogee. Somewhere in the region of a hundred and twenty million from Betelgeuse. It’s a little like Mars, a little like Earth, but mainly like nowhere except Azorb. I’ve got a dossier on it so thick I don’t know whether to read it or use it for ballast. The first hand reports we’ve had on the place are so stupidly confusing, so incredibly contradictory, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to know what to make of them. One of the few things that survivors of earlier expeditions are agreed on, is that the Azorbites are a very strange looking race; angular, feathered creatures who once had the power of flight, but are now vaguely reminiscent of a dodo bird, except for their intelligence. Their bird-like qualities, however, appear evident in their excitability and semi-hostility.”
“I seem to remember reading somewhere, captain, that they are still affected by ancient bird instincts.”
“Yes, yes; there is a chapter or two about that in the report,” said Anderson.
“I’ve read that, somewhere,” said Peterson, “they migrate, don’t they?”
“I haven’t heard anything about that; it sounds almost funny.”
“Do you mean funny ‘ha-ha’, or funny ‘peculiar’?” asked Marland.
“Bit of both, I suppose. It’s true, nevertheless,” said Anderson, “if one is to believe the reports, and this is one of the things they agree on. Evidence of a sort of mass migration.”
Something like the lemmings, you mean?” Those queer little animals who commit mass suicide?”
“Yes—yes, you could say that.” Anderson stroked his chin, thoughtfully.
“These Azorbites,” asked Peterson, “how do they breed then? Are they mammalian or——”
“No, this is another of their ornithological characteristics,” said Anderson.
“You don’t mean they lay eggs!” said Marland in amazement.
“According to the reports Azorbite eggs have been seen.”
“Well I’m damned!” said Marland. He didn’t know whether to laugh or feel strangely revolted.
“Furthermore,” drawled Anderson, “they appear to have a definite nesting season!”
Conrad was shaking his head in bewilderment.
There was a deferential knock on the door of the octagonal control room.
George Foster, leader of the survey party, opened the door and looked enquiringly from one crewman to the other.
“Everything all right, Captain Anderson?”
“Yes, professor, everything is splendid.”
“I don’t mean to sound edgy.” There was something nervy about Foster. He had a slight tick in one eye and his hands were never still, as though constantly straying to an invisible theodolite in need of perpetual adjustment.
“It’s just that. Well——”
“I know. The earlier expeditions, 5X2 and so on——” Anderson smiled and tried not to look condescending.
“You are very understanding. Thank you, Captain.” Foster was stuttering unashamedly.
“Why don’t you go back to the other passengers, professor, and check through the final details of your survey? We shall be coming out of hyperdrive in a few seconds and let’s say it’s difficult if there are any distractions. We might say it would contribute to the safety of the expedition as a whole if you would comply with my suggestion.”
Anderson was being dutifully polite, but there was no escaping the firmness of his tone. Foster blushed a little, gulped, and made his way out of the control room like an embarrassed schoolboy who has walked into the Staff Room by accident.
“Beats me how a man like Foster survives in pioneer surveying,” said Peterson, not unkindly. He was genuinely surprised.
“I know,” said Conrad, “the poor devil’s nerves are shot to pieces.”
“What happened, did he crash?”
“Nobody seems to be quite certain. He was on an expedition somewhere, and adrift. I think he was the only survivor. Spent days in a life capsule … enough to destroy the strongest nerves. It seems to be catching up with him in recent years, the after-effects … But I don’t suppose any of us can really see into another man’s mind. We don’t know how we ourselves would have reacted in the circumstances, whether we would have taken it any better or any worse than the man we are considering.”
Those are very charitable sentiments,” commented John Anderson. Peters grinned and patted his balding dome, it seemed to be a characteristic gesture with him. The 5X5 continued biting into the grey vistas of hyperspace with almost incalculable speed. There was a warning buzz on the indicator connected to the translucent central dome by means of platinum rods.
“Stand by for transition out.”
Anderson went back to the control levers; Peters looked to his astrogational equipment; Conrad checked the co-ordinates. Marland watched them all; knowing the captain’s job, the astrogator’s calculations, and the engineering co-ordinates. I could replace any of them, he thought, any of them—even the captain.
For the first time he began to see just a little point in the system of having second engineers at all. It had always struck him as a singularly useless aspect of the flight training procedure. The 5X5 began drifting out of hyperspace. There was a light and colour change; it was rather like flying under a rainbow, and then diving through grey mist.
Lights came and went. Colours of indescribable tint and variety came and went with them. The peculiar, painful, super-vibration bit into them all until Anderson wanted to wince. Then it was over. They were out of hyperdrive altogether, cruising in a leisurely fashion through ordinary, three-dimensional space, well within the orbit of Azorb and with the great disc of Betelgeuse, shining like a hundred suns owing to the magnification of the visiport.
“For God’s sake, turn the thing down!” Anderson’s voice lost its usual dry control. Marland moved quickly and efficiently towards the visiport control switch, long, lean, bronzed fingers snapped down the lumen regulator until the radiant light of Betelgeuse was tolerable.
“That’s better,” his eyes looked quite rheumy, as Anderson dabbed at the corners with absorbent plastic tissue. “That was something I could well have done without! I was looking right at the blasted thing as we came out! Should have known better. No fool like an old fool, you know. You moved pretty quickly then, Marland, well done! That’s something you’ve learnt from practical experience.”
“Would you like something from the First Aid cabinet to bathe your eyes, captain?”
“Yes,. . .
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