There were no flaws in the system of double entries — anguish against anguish, love against love — and this realization had given Elizabeth the strength to go on, even when it appeared that the Garamonds had chosen to die in the black deeps of space. That episode had been nothing more and nothing less than God’s way of telling her that he was simply building up the Garamond’s credit to the point at which it could be used to wipe out all their debts. In retrospect, it had been fortunate that she had not been able to extract payment immediately, because there would still have been an imbalance and she would never have found her heart’s ease. A child is a focus, a repository of love which is added to in each year of its life, and it was crystal-clear that the death of a boy of nine could never be compensated for by the death of a boy of…

“I have the latest computations for you, My Lady.” The projected voice of Lord Nettleton broke in on Elizabeth’s thoughts. “The impact will occur in exactly three minutes from… now.”

“Three minutes,” Elizabeth said aloud, knowing that the accurately beamed sound would not have reached the other woman’s ears. Without giving any sign that she had heard, Aileen picked her son up and her face was screened by the boy’s body. Elizabeth moved quietly to the other side, as was her due, and waited.

She waited through eons and eternities.

And the ribbed canopy of the sky ceased to turn.

Time was dead…

The lightning bolt came first. An arrow-straight line of hell, searing upwards at an angle into the heavens, isolated for the first perceptible instant, then joined by writhing offshoots, tributaries and deltas of violet fire which flickered and froze on the retina. Faint shadows fled across the sky as the air above Beachhead City was hurled outwards by the fountain of energy. Appalling though the general display was, there existed at its core — on the threshold of vision — a sense of even greater forces in the shock of opposition. There was a feeling of cataclysmic upward movement, then a bright star burned briefly and dwindled in the south-west. The day returned to normalcy, but seemingly darker than it had been before.

Elizabeth drew a deep quavering breath — no other death she had ever witnessed had been so final. She turned her gaze on to Aileen Garamond’s face, and was shocked to see there a look of serenity.

“It was to be expected,” she said. “I know.” Aileen nodded contentedly, and hugged her child. “I told you.”

Elizabeth gaped at her. “You fool! You don’t think he’s still alive after what you’ve just…” She was forced to stop speaking as the waves of thunder rolling out from Beachhead City, slow moving in the low-pressure air of Orbitsville, engulfed the building. Reflections of lights stretched and shrank and stretched again as the transparent walls absorbed energy, and small objects throughout the room stirred uneasily in their places. Christopher buried his face in his mother’s hair.

“Your husband is dead,” Elizabeth announced when silence was restored to the room, “but because you are the widow of the most distinguished of all my S.E.A. captains, you will remain here as my guest. No other arrangement would be acceptable.”

Aileen faced her, pale but immovable. “My Lady, you are mistaken. You see — I know.”

Elizabeth shook her head incredulously and a little sadly. She had been planning to spend perhaps a year in a game of subtleties and suggestions, watching the other woman’s slow progression from doubt to certainty about her son’s eventual fate. But it was obvious now — in view of Aileen Garamond’s mentality, or lack of it — that such strategies would be ineffective. If the full payment were to be extracted, as God had decreed it should be, she would have to speak plainly, in words a child could understand. Elizabeth touched a beautiful micro-engineered ring on her left hand, ensuring that no listening devices could remain in operation nearby, and then explained the accountancy of retribution which demanded that Christopher Garamond should be allowed another three years. He was to have the same lifespan as Harald Lindstrom — but not a day longer.

When she had finished she summoned her physician. “Captain Garamond’s death has left Mrs. Garamond in a state of hysteria. Give her suitable sedation.”

Aileen opened her mouth to scream but the physician, an experienced man, touched her wrist in a quick movement which did not even disturb the boy she was holding in her arms. As the cloud of instant-acting drug sighed through her skin Aileen relaxed and allowed herself to be led away.

Alone again, Elizabeth Lindstrom stood looking out across the western grasslands and was aware — for the first time in over a year — of something approaching happiness. She began to smile.

thirteen

The integrity of the Bissendorf’s design was so great, and the onboard preparation had been so thorough, that less than a tenth of the crew died as a result of the passage through the eye of the needle.

Every available man and woman had been co-opted on to the teams which had welded into place a new computer-designed structure, creating load paths which actually utilized the forces of the impact to give the shell enough strength to survive. Until only a matter of minutes before the hellish transit, other gangs had swarmed on the outside of the ship, adding hundreds of sacrificial anodes to those which were already in place serving as focal points for the ion exchange which would otherwise have eaten away the hull during normal flight. The new anodes, massive slabs of pure metal, withstood the brief but incredibly fierce attrition of the lightning which wreathed the ship as it passed along the atmospheric tunnel created by its electron gun. On emerging from its ordeal the Bissendorf’s principal dimensions had altered, in some cases by several metres, but it had gone in with all pressure doors sealed — in effect it had been converted into dozens of separate, self-contained spaceships — and there was no loss of life due to decompression.

The entire crew had donned spacesuits for primary protection. Each person had been injected with metallic salts and the ship’s restraint fields stepped up to overload intensity, creating an environment in which any sudden movement of human tissue would be resisted by a pervasive jelly-like pressure from all sides. This measure, while undoubtedly a major factor in crew survival, also caused an unavoidable number of deaths. In the few sections where severe structural failure occurred some of the occupants had fallen varying distances under multiple gravities, and the heat induced by electromotive interaction had caused their blood to boil. But, for the vast majority, the internal bracing of their organs against immense G-shocks had meant the difference between life and death.

And yet, all the preparation all the frenzied activity, would have amounted to nothing more than a temporary stay of execution had it not been for the exotic nature of Orbitsville itself.

The synthetic gravity of the shell material attenuated much more rapidly than that of a solid mass. Although the Bissendorf’s slanting course was drawn into the shape of a parabola the curve remained flat, and the crew had sufficient time to control their re-entry into the atmosphere from the inner vacuum of Orbitsville. The vessel’s ion tubes and short-term reaction motors were effective against the weak pull of the shell, and it was possible for the Bissendorf to skip along the upper fringes of the air shield, gradually shedding velocity. It was even possible, using the fading reserves of reaction mass, to bring the ship down in one piece, with no further loss of life.

What was manifestly impossible, however, was to make the ship fly again.