Against Garamond’s expectations, he was able to raise two crews of four to continue the flight. Again making use of the extra lift to be gained from cold air, the two machines took off at dawn and, without circling or giving any aerial signal of goodbye, they flew quietly into the east.

eighteen

Day 193. Estimated range: 2,160,000 kilometres

This may be my last journal entry. Words seem to be losing their meaning, the act of writing them is losing all significance, and I notice that we have virtually stopped speaking to each other. The silence does not imply or induce separateness — the eight of us have compacted into one. It is simply that there is something embarrassing about watching a man go through the whole pointless performance of shaping his lips and activating his tongue in order to push sound vibrations out on the air. It is peculiar, too, how a spoken word resolves itself into meaningless syllables, and how a single syllable can hang resonating in the air, in your mind, long after the speaker has turned away.

I fancy, sometimes, that the same phenomenon takes place with images. We have steered our ships above a thousand seas, ten thousand mountain ranges, all of which have promised to be different — but which are all becoming the same. A distinctive peak or river bend, a curious group of islands, the coloration of a wooded valley — geographical features appear before us with the promise of something new and, having cheated us, fall behind. Were it not for the certainty of the inertial guidance system I might imagine we were flying in circles. No, that isn’t correct, for we have learned to steer a constant course against the stripings of the sky. We seem to exist, embedded, in a huge crystal paperweight and one of the advantages, perhaps the only one, is that we can tell where we are going by reference to its millefiori design. If I hold the milk-blue curvatures in a certain precise relationship, crossing windshield and prow just so, I can fly for as long as thirty minutes before the black box chimes and edges me to left or right. The other black box, the portable delton detector, remains inert even after all this time. (Dennis was right when he said we were lucky to find that first particle so soon.) The up-curving horizon provides a constant reference for level flying. It occurred to me recently that Orbitsville is so big that we should not be able to detect any upward curvature in the horizon. As usual, Dennis was able to explain that it was an optical illusion — the horizon is straight but, through a trick of perception, appears to sag in the middle. He told me that the ancient Greeks compensated for this when building their temples.

The two aircraft are behaving as well as can be expected within their design limits. Each is carrying a reserve power-plant which takes up a high proportion of its payload, but this is unavoidable. A gyromagnetic engine is little more than a block of metal in which most of the atoms have been orchestrated to resonate in tune. It is without doubt one of the best general-purpose medium-sized power-plants ever conceived, but it has a fault in that — without warning and for no apparent reason — the orchestra can fall into discord and the power output drops to zero. When that happens there is no option than to install a new engine, so we can afford it to happen only twice. We have also had minor mechanical troubles. As yet there has been nothing serious enough to cause an unscheduled landing, but the potential is always there and grows daily.

The biggest cause for concern, however, is the biological machinery on board — our own bodies. Everybodys except for young Braunek, is subject to headaches, constipation, dizziness and nausea. Many of the symptoms are probably due to prolonged stress but, with increasingly unreliable aircraft to fly, we dare not resort to tranquillizers. Dennis, in particular, is causing me alarm and an equal amount of guilt over having brought him along. He gets greyer and more tired every day, and less and less able to do his stint at the controls. The protein and yeast cakes on which we live are not appetizing at the best of times, but Dennis is finding it almost impossible to keep them down and his weight is decreasing rapidly.

I am reaching the conclusion that the mission should be abandoned, and this time there are no emotional undertones in my thinking. I know it is not worth the expenditure of human lives.

A short time ago I could not have made such an admission — but that was before we had fully begun to pay for our mistake of challenging the Big O. The journey we attempted was perhaps only a hundredth of O’s circumference, and of that tiny fraction we have completed only a fraction. My personal punishment for this presumption is that O has scoured out my soul. I can think of my dead wife and child; I can think of Denise Serra; I can think of Elizabeth Lindstrom… and nothing happens.

I feel nothing.

This is my last diary entry.

There is nothing more to write.

There is nothing more to say.

Kneeling on the thrumming floor beside O’Hagan’s bunk, Garamond said, “It’s summertime down there, Dennis. We’ve flown right into summer.”

“I don’t care.” Beneath its covering of sheets, the scientist’s body seemed as frail and fleshless as that of a mummified woman.

“I’m positive we could find fruit trees.”

O’Hagan gave a skeletal grin. “You know what you can do with your fruit trees.”

“But if you could eat something you’d be all right.”

“I’m just fine — all I need is a rest.” O’Hagan caught Garamond’s wrist. “Vance, you’re not going to call off the flight on my account. Promise me that.”

“I promise.” Garamond disengaged the white, too-clean fingers one by one and stood up. The decision, now that it had come, was strangely easy to make. “I’m calling it off on my own account.”

He ignored the other man’s protests and went forward along the narrow aisle to the blinding arena of the cockpit. Braunke was at the controls and Sammy Yamoto was beside him in the second pilot’s seat. He had removed a cover from the delton detector and was probing inside it. Garamond tapped him on the shoulder.

“Why aren’t you asleep, Sammy? You were on duty most of the night.”

Yamoto adjusted his dark glasses. “I’m going to kip down in a minute — as soon as I put my mind at rest about this pile of junk.”

“Junk?”

“Yes. I don’t think it’s working.”

Garamond glanced at the detector’s control panel. “According to the operating light it’s working.”

“I know, but look at this.” Yamoto clicked the switch of the main power supply to the detector box up and down several times in succession. The orange letters which spelled, SYSTEM FUNCTIONING, continued to glow steadily in their dark recess.

“What a botch,” Yamoto said bitterly. “You know, I might never have caught on if a generator hadn’t cut itself out during the night. I was sitting here about two hours later when, all of a sudden, it hit me — the lights on the detector panel hadn’t blinked with all the others.”

“Does that prove it isn’t working?”

“Not necessarily — but it makes me doubt the quality of the whole assembly. Litman deserves to be shot.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Garamond lowered himself into the supernumerary seat. “Not at this stage anyway — we have to call off the flight.”

“Dennis?”

“Yes. It’s killing him.”

“I don’t want to seem callous, but…” Yamoto paused to force a multi-connector into place, “…don’t you think he could die anyway?”

“I can’t take that chance.”

“Now I have to sound callous. There are seven other men on this -” Yamoto stopped speaking as the delton detector emitted a sharp tap, like a steel ball dropped on to a metal plate. He instinctively jerked his hand away from the exposed wiring.