A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (5 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

THE METEOR

There were fireworks on the evening after the great pyrotechnic tower was capped by the dome-shaped life compartment; the assembly of the space vehicle was complete. Bronwyn watched the fiery celebration with her usual gloomy foreboding, thinking that the spectacularly-erupting rockets were perhaps in fact doleful harbingers of a coming catastrophe, the disastrous nature of which would be all too obviously personal. Lit from all sides by the flashing, multicolored explosions, the hundred-foot-tall hexagonal prism looked translucent, like a looming crystal of quartz, too massive and monumental to ever be capable of leaving the earth, at the same time too ethereal to be dangerous. Yet, she knew all too well that the rocket was more than capable, were all of its tubes to explode simultaneously (something she had been assured was impossible more times than she cared to count, an assurance she doubted more with each earnest repetition), of fearful devastation.

She was watching the display from the window of the small apartment she had fitted up for herself in one of the corner turrets of the Academy, a kind of cozy oriel that had been used as a lumber room until the princess had reclaimed it. It was not only a home away from home (
And just where
is
this home I’m supposed to be away from?
), it was where she spent three or four or sometimes even five days out of every week. The semicircular chamber was untidily filled with tottering stacks of books, piles of clothing, clean and dirty, trunks and wardrobes, with barely enough room for the folding camp bed she had requisitioned from the palace barracks. For all essential purposes, she no longer lived in the palace. Most of her meals were consumed in the small cafeteria maintained in the ground floor of the Academy, in the company of the scientists. She enjoyed sitting at a table where a dozen men and women were zealously discussing a dozen different topics in an exhilirating if incomprehensible potpourri.

Since returning to Londeac from Tamlaght, she had seen little of her uncle, King Felix. The elderly man was more ill than ever, she knew, but she suspected that the real reason he avoided unnecessary or prolonged contact with his niece was embarrassment for having allowed the Church to coerce him into betraying her to her enemies. She knew that he had been given little choice in the matter and did not particularly hold his actions against him, although evidently Felix thought that she had some cause to. She was little bothered by the matter, since Felix saw that she was provided for extravagantly (whether this kindness was engendered by thoughtfulness or guilt was of little moment to her) and she had in any case always found conversation with her ailing uncle tedious, he now was almost completely engulfed in throbbing, hissing, pumping machinery, and did not particularly miss it.

She had not originally intended to remain so long in Toth. When she and Gyven had first arrived, the intention was simply to take the least amount of time that was necessary to regroup her resources before setting out on a rather nebulously planned world tour. Gyven, however, had found one distraction after another, as already mentioned above, each one discouraging him from encouraging their departure. Delay after delay had allowed first weeks then months to slip by like jellyfish through a net. And as each month went by, she had grown increasingly comfortable and settled and, she feared, increasingly comfortable with Gyven’s absences. She found herself resenting her complacency at the same time feeling a peculiar satisfaction she had never before experienced. She was not so unperceptive as to not realize that a great deal of her wanderlust had been dissipated, if not eradicated, by her adventures of the previous two or three years. Yet while much of the passion may have been satiated, there still remained a restlessness and unfulfillment, an uneasy discontent that made her sulky, petulant and dreamy.

She was growing increasingly resentful of the comfort and protection she was enjoying; the longer she remained in Toth, the more secure she felt and the more perversely disgruntled she was with that security.

This past year was not at all what she had originally had in mind.

She leaned on the sill of the open window, her legs folded under her on the rumpled sheets of her bed, her sharp, pensive face alive with the flickering rocketlight, her russet hair sparkling like incandescent steel wool. But the liveliness was an illusion temporarily lent to her immobile features and slack limbs by the moving, flickering lights. When the last of the rockets spent themselves and the last spark dribbled like a bright tear down the sky’s dusky cheek, she too faded into the murky half-light like a chilling ember, no more substantial than any of the hundred other vague shadows that filled the room. Her pallid form was a pale phosphorescence, like a self-luminous denizen of an unplumbed abyss electrochemically proclaiming its loneliness. She had removed her clothing against the heavy, sultry air, and was coiled bonelessly on the bed like one of the colorless snakes or eels that inhabit gloomy and lightless caverns. She had withdrawn like a shy reptile into her own gloomy and lightless cavern, and had shed color, ambition, impetuosity, desire, passion and appetite just as the weary blindworm shrugs off its outgrown and useless skin.

Professor Wittenoom was promoting an immediate departure for his rocket and his advisors were agreeing with him. Bronwyn glanced at the horizon, where a golden glow silhouetting the trees bordering the park heralded the rise of the doomed little moon. The minuscule disk rose rapidly, its auriferous light flickering wanly through the tangles of leaves and limbs, like golden fingers unwilling to relinquish their hold upon the earth, until it launched itself into the clear sky above like another of the professor’s rockets. Its color quickly faded to its usual soft, creamy hue. Accompanying its rise, like a fanfare, were the sparkling streaks of the meteors that perversely announced not only the moon’s appearance but its impending disappearance. After the woosh and crackling of the rockets, the silence of the aeroliths was uncanny. The princess kept a pair of powerful binoculars on a table beside her bed and she now reached for them. Bracing her elbows against the sill, she quickly found the moon. Its ivory disk filled more than half of her field of view. It was in a fat gibbous phase, halfway between quarter and crescent. The dark part was not really dark at all, she could see, but was instead a silvery grey, illuminated by light reflected from its sister moon (still below the horizon) and to a lesser degree the earth. There were only soft smudges on the sunlit surface but the terminator was sawtoothed with detail. She knew from both maps and photographs that this detail was in reality a chaos of tiny craters and craggy mountains. She suddenly felt that she was no longer looking up at the moon but rather that she was looking down upon it, that she was like a bird hovering above the luminous surface, that the merest push against her bed would be enough to precipitate a 350,000-mile fall, no doubt to eventually create but one more anonymous crater. How big a hole, she wondered, would a 145-pound mass excavate, arriving at terminal velocity? She would have to ask someone to make the calculation.

This last thought recalled the one great tragedy of the past year, the one serious blemish on the face of the Project. One of the rocket scientists, Doctor W. Pavel Sale, had become obsessed with the prospect of flying by reaction propulsion. Against all of the cautionary advice of his associates, he had constructed a complicated device that was to be attached to his back by means of a heavy leather harness. Sale envisioned whole aerial armies equipped with his invention. Unlike the rockets that were to form the bulk of the spaceship, which combined the safety, reliability and simplicity of solid fuels, Doctor Sale’s rocket was based upon an entirely new and not very well tested principle: liquid fuels. In addition to the beautifully turned metal nozzle that protruded from beneath a maze of copper and steel plumbing were two large, spherical aluminum tanks, each the size of a medicine ball. In these the inventor planned to place the two hypergolic liquids that, upon combining, would instantly ignite and burn with enormous violence. The inventor argued that his system allowed for far greater exhaust velocities than possible with solid fuels (which the princess knew would allow the new rocket system to attain far greater accelerations) but the rocket could also be throttled and even turned off and reignited, two advantages impossible with solid fuels. Against this, his colleagues pointed to the increased complexity, to say nothing of the inherent danger of the chemicals involved, which burned upon mutual contact.

Bronwyn remembered the day on which was to occur the doctor’s trial flight. He had gone to the middle of the great field in which the big rocket was now standing but which at that time was still empty. The day was a beautiful one in early winter, the atmosphere as clear as a vacuum. Dressed entirely in heavily-padded leather, hard leather helmet and goggles, the scientist had two or three of his skeptical friends, who even at this last moment were still trying to dissuade the stubborn inventor, help him attach the rocket to his back. With a last attempt at dissuasion, they backed off to what they hoped was a prudent distance, among the several score others who had abandoned their work to witness their colleague’s pioneering ascent.

Doctor Sale pulled his goggles down over his face, clumsily pivoted once, to make certain that everyone was safely clear, reached to one side and then the other to twiddle with the valves that were located there, placed his hands on the master controls that were mounted on a panel that hung from his chest, gave these a gentle twist, then crouched slightly as a wisp of yellowish vapor began to drift from the gleaming nozzle. This was almost instantly replaced by a burst of yellowish flame and a gout of black smoke. A dull roar reached Bronwyn’s ears, a sound entirely out of proportion to the size of the flame. The inventor adjusted his valves and the flame narrowed to an almost invisible blue tongue, like a glass knifeblade glinting in the sun. Beneath the exhaust a cloud of dust and shredded grass billowed. The violence seemed out of all proportion to the size of the device. The sound raised in pitch to a dreadful scream and the man lifted slowly from his feet, rising above the obscuring cloud of dust. Cries of astonishment and elation, enhanced by their previous doubts, circled through the crowd. The inventor’s rate of ascent quickly accelerated and, traveling ever faster, he disappeared from sight. All that remained was a thin trail of smoke, rapidly becoming twisted and knotted by the wind, and a pair of shoes in the middle of a circle of scorched lawn.

Bronwyn only learned later what happened. For some reason, Sale never moderated his ever-increasing velocity. Why this happened may never be known. Perhaps his controls froze, perhaps he became afraid to throttle his engine at such a tremendous altitude. Whatever the reason, he apparently continued to accelerate, gaining altitude until his fuel was exhausted. Some of the mathematicians calculated that the inventor described a huge parabola that covered fifty miles or more in horizontal distance and perhaps as much as one hundred and fifty or two hundred miles vertically. A frustrating uncertainty marred their calculations since they had to guess at Sales’ final, or terminal, velocity. In any case, he came plummeting out of the otherwise unremarkable sky that glimmered above the distant village of Clarence-up-the-Grady. The only witnesses to his descent described a kind of prolonged hoot that first attracted their attention, thinking that perhaps it might be some peculiar sort of turkey (a species of these, native to the area, is known for its sometimes startling vocalizations during mating season). They then saw a dark object streak almost vertically from the sky, followed almost immediately by the sound of an explosion and a cloud of dust and débris that billowed above the squat mass of the local church. By the time these witnesses and others, attracted by both the sound and sight of the detonation, arrived there was nothing left to see but a crater where the community churchyard had been. Gravestones were scattered willy nilly like spilled aspirin tablets, and the macabre effect was not at all lost upon the primitively superstitious people.

By the time authorities from Toth and the Academy arrived seepage had already filled the crater with water and a small shrine had been erected at the pond’s edge. Prayers and token sacrifices were being made to the saint who had singled out Clarence-up-the-Grady for his wrathful attention. Since no one was certain which saint it might have been, prayers and offerings were being made to all the testier occupants of the pantheon. Contained within the rustic shrine, carefully sealed in a canning jar, which had its original label changed thus:

, was the sole and mysterious relic that had been discovered after the rubble had been cleared away and all of the known débris accounted for: a small disk of red metal bearing the cabalistic and inexplicable monogram ABFDFW (which Bronwyn of course recognized as the well-known trademark of the Aackly Button Foundry and Drop Forge Works). Most of the villagers, however, including the vicar, were of a mind that this represented the personal talisman of Saint Aughrim Boop-Fite ti of the Fine Weasels. That left a D unaccounted for, but, as the elderly vicar pointed out, some of Musrum’s ways were no doubt meant to remain mysterious to mortals. It was a kind of test, he was certain, though when asked he was not sure what the test was supposed to prove. There was still a great deal of discussion about
why
Clarence-up-the-Grady had deserved to have a hole punched in its graveyard and the theological debates continued, in fact, for decades and were, ultimately, never resolved and, at last, forgotten.