“But…” Garamond’s attention was fully captured. “How is it going to be done?”

“Mike Moncaster, our particles man, came up with the idea. You know about delta particles?”

“I’ve heard of delta rays.”

“No, that’s historic stuff. Delta particles — deltons — are a component of cosmic rays discovered only a few years ago. During his last leave Mike got himself seconded on to the team investigating cosmic ray refraction by the force field which seals Beachhead City aperture. They were glad to have him because he’s pretty good on the Conservation of Strangeness and…”

“Denise! You started to tell me how you were going to get a bearing.”

“That’s what I’m doing. Deltons don’t interact much. That’s why it took so long to find them, but it also means they could travel ten or fifteen million kilometres through the air. Mike is fairly certain they get refracted by the force lens, just like other components of cosmic rays, so we’re going to build a big delton detector. Two of them, in fact. One behind the other to give us co-ordinates. All we need then is to pick up a delton, just one, and going back the way it came will give us a straight line home.”

“Do you think it’ll work?”

“I think so.” Denise’s voice was kind. “What we still have to determine is how long we’re likely to wait before a particle comes this way. It could be quite a while if things aren’t in our favour, but we can swing the odds by making the detectors as big as possible, or by erecting a whole bank of them.”

Garamond felt the distance between himself and Elizabeth Lindstrom shrink a little and the joyful sickness spurted within him. “This… is good news.”

“I know,” Denise said. “My dowry.”

“You’ll have to explain that one.” “The first time you ever noticed me was on board ship, when I gave the news you wanted to hear about going through the aperture.” She laughed ruefully. “Being a pragmatist, I must have decided that if it worked once it would work again.”

Garamond moved his hand uncertainly in the dimness and touched her cheek. “Denise, I…”

“Let’s not play games, Vance.” She pushed his hand away and stood up. “I was childish, that’s all.”

Later, while waiting for sleep to relieve him of the burden of identity, Garamond was acutely aware — for the first time in months — that the hard, angry vacuum of space began only a short distance beneath his cot. The feeling persisted into surrealistic dreams in which he had a sense of being poised, dangerously, on the rim of a precipice, with a kind of moral vertigo drawing him over the edge.

fifteen

On his way to the airstrip Garamond was surprised to notice one of his crewmen wearing what could only be described as a coolie hat. He eyed the young man curiously, received a halfhearted salute, and decided the unusual headgear must be a personal souvenir of a tourist trip to the Orient. A minute later, while passing the workshop area, he saw two more men wearing similar hats, which he now realized were woven from fresh silver-green straw. The ancient peasant-styling, with all that it symbolized in Earth’s history, was repugnant to Garamond and he hoped it would not become a full-blown fad such as occasionally swept through the crew levels. When he reached the test site, the glinting of flat green triangles in the distance told him that coolie hats were being worn by at least half the men who were clearing grass at the far end of the airstrip.

Cliff Napier was waiting for him at the door to the operations shed, his shoulder-heavy bulk filling the entrance. “Morning, Vance. We’re nearly ready to fly.”

“Good.” Garamond eyed the first aircraft appraisingly then turned his gaze back along the strip. “It looks like a paddy field down there — why are the men wearing those sunhats?”

“Would you believe,” Napier said impassively, “to protect them from the sun?”

“But why that sort of hat?” Garamond ignored the sarcasm.

“I guess it’s because they’re light and easy to make. And it’s a good shape if the sun’s directly above you and you’re working in the dirt all day.”

“I still don’t like them.”

“You’re not working in the dirt all day.” This time there was no mistaking the coldness in the big man’s manner.

Garamond locked eyes with Napier and was shaken to feel a momentary surge of anger and dislike. This can’t be, he thought. Aloud he said, “Do you expect me to? Do you think I’m not making the most efficient use of human resources?”

“From your point of view, you are.”

“And from their point of view?”

“The cold season’s coming down soon. Most of the crew are staying here, remember. They’d rather be building houses and processing grass into protein cakes.”

Garamond decided against answering immediately in case he damaged a working relationship. He glanced up at the sky and saw that, behind the shield of brilliance, the broadest ribs of light blue were well in the ascendant in the west. They signified that summer was approaching the diametrically opposite point on Orbitsville’s shell, that Autumn was ending on the near side.

“This Orbitsville syndrome of yours,” he said after a pause. “An early symptom is that a man develops an aversion to taking orders, right?”

“That seems to come into it.”

“Then let’s sit down together and agree a common set of goals. That way…”

“That way we’d do everything you want and you wouldn’t even have to give the orders,” Napier said sharply, but this time he was smiling.

Garamond smiled in return. “Why do you think I suggested it?” Although the little crisis had passed, he had a feeling it carried significance for the future and he was determined to take appropriate action. “We’ll open a bottle tonight and get our ideas straightened out.”

“I thought we were out of whisky.”

“No. There’s plenty.”

“You’re on the stuff that Burton makes?”

“Why not?”

An incongruous primness appeared briefly on Napier’s dark features. “Maybe we can fix something up later. How about looking at this airplane?” “Certainly.” They walked out towards the waiting machine which was the biscuit colour of unpainted plastic. It was a high-wing monoplane, sitting nose-high on its skids and looking like something from a museum of aeronautics, but Garamond had no doubts about its capabilities. The ungainly ship would carry a crew of five at a maximum cruise of five hundred kilometres an hour for fifty days at a stretch, landing after that time to replenish food and water. Even this limitation was forced on it by the fact that more than two-thirds of the payload would be taken up by spares, an iron cow and other supplies.

Garamond glanced from the newly completed machine to the others of its kind further back on the open-air production line, and from them up to the black rectangular screen of the delton detector on the hillside. He felt a vague spasm of alarm over the extent to which his future was dependent on complex artifacts, but this was obliterated by the yearning hunger which kept him alive and was the motive force behind all his actions. It was ironic, he had often thought in the hours before sleep, how — in depriving him of all that was worth living for in his previous life — Elizabeth Lindstrom had provided, in herself, the single goal of his new existence. She had also given him the means of escaping from it, for he could foresee no way of long surviving the act of pulling the President’s ribcage apart with his bare hands and gripping the heaving redness within and…

“I know what you’re thinking, Vance.”

“Do you?” Garamond stared into the face of the stranger who had spoken to him, and he made the effort which allowed him to associate it with Cliff Napier. There was a psychic wrench and once again he was back into the sane world, walking towards the aircraft with his senior officer.