The Shadow of Heaven

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Those who tried never returned, and those who didn't, always wondered what they were missing by not attempting the perilous journey to 'Heaven'. The official designation of the giant anti-gravity floating disc was 'International Land Extension U.S.23'. But to the people living like sardines in the fam-apts and dormitories on the ground below, it was known as 'Heaven'. Government regulations meant that it was almost impossible for a human being to get to 'Heaven' - almost, but no quite, as Vic Sterling found out when he began to hunt for his missing half-brother Johnny Considine. For Johnny, along with over a hundred other rebels, had decided they could no longer stand the living conditions on Earth and had hitched a ride to 'Heaven', a 'Heaven' full of unexpected dangers for Vic when he decided to follow.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 166

Sample

Stirling’s first story of the day was a routine job. The bodies of a young man and woman, hand-cuffed together, had been fished out of the Merrimack during the night. It was worth two or three paragraphs as it stood, more when he had established who and why – but nothing was working out that morning.

His best contacts at police control and the morgue were off for the day, and his second-best contacts really were second-best – probably because they were getting better sweeteners from some other newspaper. Stirling had wasted thirty minutes on futile phone calls when one of the copy girls dropped a note from the news editor, Sam McLeod, onto his desk. McLeod was a gloomy little man who, in a lifetime in the newspaper business, had put a million slips of copy through his hands, yet never failed to summon up a fresh look of savage hatred for each new sheet that was handed to him. He sat within fifteen feet of Stirling and the other city reporters, but always communicated by means of hand-written notes. This one said:

‘What’s the holdup on the John and Jane Doe story?’

Stirling swore despairingly and crammed paper into his machine. ‘Tell Sam I’m gummed up on it. I’ll put through a holding story for the noon edition.’ He glanced up at the copy girl and sniffed. ‘Nice perfume, Jean. Smells expensive. What is it?’

Jean smiled, highlights moving on her fashionably pearlized skin. ‘It’s called Roast Beef.’

Stirling sniffed again, even more appreciatively, because he had once smelled real roast beef when he was a boy.

‘It beats me how you can buy that sort of merchandise on a copy girl’s salary.’ Stirling raised one eyebrow speculatively. ‘Do you work nights?’

Jean compressed her lips and stalked away haughtily on invisible, paramagnetic high heels. Stirling called after her to wait for his copy, but she ignored him and vanished from sight among the seriate desks and screens of the long room. Huge, oblong prisms of morning sunlight sloped from the side windows, picked out columns of cigarette smoke, and occasionally exploded silently over the white-shirted figures.

Stirling savored the spaciousness of the Record’s editorial offices. The room was about one-hundred-feet-by-forty and housed a staff of two hundred – which meant that each member of the editorial team had a five-foot-by-four space to himself. He guessed that a hundred years earlier, in the twentieth century, that area would have seemed impossibly cramped; but when he compared it to the choking claustrophobia of his apartment he felt like staying in the office till bedtime. He had actually tried it a few times, but when the place emptied in the evening it began to seem too big. At those times he was glad he had been born after the Compression, and not before.

Stirling typed two single-sentence paragraphs giving the facts he had and carried the copy slips to the news desk himself. McLeod picked up the sheets and stared at them in professional disgust.

‘Is that it? Is that one hour’s output for a supposedly senior and experienced reporter on the Record?’ He buried his face in cupped hands and sat waiting for an answer.

‘I can’t make the stuff up, Sam. That’s all I’ve been able to get so far.’

‘Have you checked the files?’ McLeod’s voice was blurred as it filtered through his fingers.

‘We haven’t got the names,’ Stirling said patiently. ‘We file people under their names, and when we have no names we can’t check the files. It’s an inherent flaw in the system, Sam.’

‘Don’t try to be smart with me, Victor.’ McLeod raised his slightly yellowed eyes and stared at a point on Stirling’s collar. ‘Have you checked the latest missing-persons cards?’

Stirling felt his grip on his temper begin to slide a little. ‘Well, you see, Sam, there’s this name business again. I hate to bring it up since it seems to bother you, but the missing-persons cards are indexed by name as well. Names are really catching on, you know. Nearly everybody has one now.’

An unexpectedly angelic smile spread over McLeod’s face, and Stirling knew the little man was going to score a point.

‘I know that, Victor. And they’re cross-indexed as well. If two people who are connected in some way disappear, it shows on our cards. Doesn’t it? You just might get a lead on the identities that way, Victor. That’s why the Record goes to the trouble of getting stats from police headquarters every day. Have you checked the cards from that angle?’

‘Of course, I have,’ Stirling lied. ‘I’ll go over them again though, if it’ll make you happy.’

McLeod’s smile grew even more seraphic, showing he had not been deceived. ‘That’s my boy,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll make a reporter of you yet.’ He raised a white cup of synthejuice to his lips and stared over the rim with jaundiced eyes as Stirling threaded his way across to the file bank.

Stirling checked himself from swearing as he squeezed his huge and rather overweight body through the crowded aisles. He treated swearing as being like antibiotics: indiscriminate use produced a tolerance which left the patient stranded when a real emergency cropped up. And he had a feeling he was going to need some reserves before the day was over.

Technically speaking, McLeod was right about the cards. They were cross-referenced to show up the connections between two or more missing persons, but usually only when they were related to each other, worked for the same business, or were members of the same organization. Stirling had not bothered to check the cards because his instincts told him the only connection between the two pitiful human shells taken from the river was that they had once looked on each other with love. In spite of the conditioning, some people still wanted to set up house together and bring up their children together – the way it had been before the Compression – and they were not prepared to settle for anything less. Feelings like these were not recorded in the stat-computers; so, Stirling had not checked the cards. He had to admit, however, that John and Jane Doe might have met each other while working in the same plant, in which case there was a chance of getting something on them.

As the card sorter went through that week’s heavy crop of missing persons, Stirling wondered how anybody’s emotions could get so much out of control that they would jump into a river. The choice of method was significant, of course. Just as the ancient Roman aristocracy had regarded it as a privilege to run onto their swords when they found circumstances intolerable, so a citizen of the Twenty-first Century could slip quietly away from life, peacefully, almost pleasantly, with the aid of a handful of pills. And hardly anyone would notice his departure. But this couple must have wanted to make a protest – and so they had done it the old-fashioned way, the hard way – choking as the black, stinking waters slopped into their lungs.

The fools, Stirling thought, angry at himself for getting involved even to this extent. All that their big, dramatic protest was going to get them was a few column-inches on a middle page of that day’s Record. Less than that if he failed to get a lead on their identities before McLeod handed him a bigger story.

As he waited for the sorter to nominate any likely couples it might have, Stirling absent-mindedly lifted a bundle of the rejected cards and riffled through them. The undistinguished names flickered under his thumb, each name representing an undistinguished life, or death. Feeling himself sink further into depression, Stirling squared the cards up and dropped them back in the tray. As he did so, one of the names registered, belatedly, on the part of his mind that was always alert for such things.

John Considine.

My mother is called Considine now, he thought mechanically. And my half-brother is called John – but it couldn’t be. Considine is a common enough name; besides, somebody would have been in touch with me. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the cards, and went through them again.

The card was four days old, and it contained very little information. John Considine, aged 31, unemployed mathematician, reported missing by family, no criminal record, no reason to suspect foul play. Stirling skipped the vague description and read the address: Fam-apt 126–46, Flat-block 353, Res-area 93N-54W.

When Johnny and he were boys, they had joked about that string of numerals and butchered words. (It isn’t much, but we call it home. I always think a good address is so important, don’t you?) Now they served to confirm that the missing person was a flesh-and-blood reality, not just a few magnetic ink marks on a comp-card, but the only human being Stirling had ever really known.

He worked his way back to his desk, lifted a phone, and rang his mother’s number. The fluffy ringing tone dragged on for a couple of minutes before he accepted there was going to be no reply. Stirling set the phone down and began struggling through the ant-heap activity of the editorial office to reach the door.

McLeod looked up in surprise. ‘Victor?’

‘Can’t stop. I’m going out.’

‘I want to talk to you, Victor.’ McLeod’s voice had developed a metallic edge.

‘Send me a note. I’ll read it when I get back.’

Stirling went out through the doorway and thumbed the elevator button, wondering if he had pushed McLeod too far. It was more than a year since a reporter had been sacked from the Record, and McLeod never allowed the big axe to get too rusty.

When the elevator had carried him up to the sixth level, Stirling went out onto the street and signaled for a cab. It was a clean, jewel-bright morning in May and – as there was only one street level above the sixth – sunlight was flooding freely over the shuttling traffic. It gave him a feeling of airy warmth.

A cab obligingly slowed down, but at that moment three men in the immaculate white uniforms of Food Technologists emerged from another entrance. The cab speeded up again to pass Stirling and picked up the three Techs.

‘Hold it,’ Stirling shouted angrily. ‘That’s my cab.’

He ran a few paces towards the waiting automobile, but the men got in and were whisked away. One of them was grinning as he glanced back. Halting his ungainly run, Stirling squandered most of the day’s ration of swear serum, although he knew the cab driver had only been looking out for his own interest. The Food Techs were flush with money and could be big tippers; they were also flush with power and a complaint from one of them, no matter how groundless, would be enough to deprive a hack of his license. About once a month Stirling gave up some of his spare time to write feature articles about this sort of occurrence but, not surprisingly, the Record never printed them. The East Coast Government kept a pretty tight hold over what appeared in the newspapers – and the Food Technologists kept a pretty tight hold over the Government.

A few minutes later another cab appeared and Stirling got in. When he had given the driver his mother’s address, he settled down in the back seat and stared morosely through the bubble’s sides at the unfolding vistas of multilayered cityscape. The cab was skimming along two thousand feet above what had once been the smallish manufacturing center of Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimack River. Now the original city was buried in the massive East Coast conurbation, which was effectively a single building stretching from above Boston right down to Miami, and which included New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore in its basement layer.

Roughly one-third of the population of the United States had lived there since the Compression.

Stirling tried to visualize the region as it had been in the bright, brave past when the whole country had been available for living space, but his mind balked at the task. In 1992, almost a century ago, World War III had come and gone, and none of the theoreticians had been able to predict the form it would take. It had always been assumed that the Big War would annihilate most of the population and turn the major countries into vast uninhabited areas similar to what they had been in pre-history. That had been the first misconception. Humanity had survived practically unscathed – the only real casualty had been the land itself.

The second mistake had been in the assumption that – if war came – America, Russia and China would fight it out among themselves in one or another of the few simple permutations possible. In the real event, America, Russia, and China had found themselves on the same side; and they never did find out for certain who the opposition was. The enemy had assembled his forces, struck, and retired to safety before any of the Big Three discovered the war had started.

The first indications had come when the soil began to die.

Soil sterility occurred in great swathes from coast to coast and removed traditional agriculture from the tally of meaningful human activities in a matter of months. In the beginning, China had seemed a possible culprit because she was suffering slightly less than Russia and the States; but it was quickly established that this was a lucky accident due solely to the fact that her airline services were underdeveloped in comparison to those of the other two powers concerned – for the unknown enemy had used each country’s civil aircraft as weapons carriers.

The annihilation of the soil had been accomplished by widespread dissemination of one of the bipyridylium herbicides, paraquat dichloride, modified to protect its characteristic flat molecules from becoming inactivated through interaction with clay minerals. The beauty of the technique – or the ugliness, depending on how one looked at it – was that the modification enabled the chemical entity to perpetuate itself, even in the harshly inimical environment of jet fuel. At some time in the early part of 1992, the herbicide had been introduced into major fuel depots; and the big jets had obligingly dusted whole continents with it as their exhaust trails drifted downwards in gigantic, invisible, rolling clouds of death.

Only massive technological resources had prevented the extinction of the multitudes the soil supported. When it had become apparent that the work of reclaiming the land would take centuries, the big powers turned to the sea for their food. Whole populations had been transferred to the coastal regions, partly so that they could be more efficiently suckled by the mother of all life, mainly because human existence had become too difficult to maintain under the seething ocher blankets of continent-wide dust bowls.

This was the world in which Victor Stirling had grown up. He had never known any other. But that did not prevent him from occasionally feeling nostalgia for a way of life he was scarcely able to comprehend.

‘Oh, it’s you. What do you want?’

Mrs Mary Considine glanced up briefly, saw her older son for the first time in two years, and returned her eyes, unimpressed, to a bouquet of artificial ferns she was building from a kit. She was a big woman, heavy-boned, with red forearms and slightly thinning brown hair. Her fifty-five years, the last thirty-five of them in Fam-apt 126–46, had left her practically unmarked on the outside. But sometimes, as she looked out of the apartment’s single window and down through the clouds drifting in the street canyons below, her eyes were like those of a sniper, sorrowful and yet intent.

‘What do I want? Stirling squeezed his way into the living-room and closed the door behind him. ‘What do you mean, what do I want?’

‘We don’t see much of you these days. Or should I say these years?’

‘I’ve been busy,’ Stirling said inadequately, aware of his guilt. ‘Why didn’t you send me word about Johnny?’

‘Didn’t know you’d be interested.’

‘No, mother, don’t talk that way. I want to. . .