Land and Overland - Omnibus (74 page)

Cassyll looked impatient. "All this is premature. You will live to be a hundred, if not more."

"Your vow, Cassyll!"

"I swear that I will accept the title on that far-off day when it eventually falls my due."

"Thank you," Toller said earnestly. "Now, the management of the estate. If at all possible I want you to perpetuate the system of peppercorn rents for our tenants. I take it that the revenues from the mines, foundries and metal works are still increasing and will be ample for the family requirements."

"Family?" Cassyll gave a half-smile to show that he considered the word inappropriate. "My mother and I are financially secure."

Toller allowed the tacit challenge to pass and spent more time on practicalities connected with the estate and its industrial associations, but all the while he was aware that he was delaying the moment when he would have to admit his most important motive in arranging the meeting with his son. At last, after a tense silence had developed and looked like continuing indefinitely, he accepted that it was necessary for him to speak out.

"Cassyll," he said, "I met my father for the first time only a few minutes before he died by his own hand. There was so much …
waste
in both our lives, but we were united before the end. I … I don't want to leave you without putting things right between us. Can you forgive me for the wrongs I have done you and your mother?"

"Wrongs?" Cassyll spoke lightly, affecting puzzlement. He stooped and picked up a pebble which was heavily banded with gold, examined it briefly and hurled it into the nearby pool. The image of Land mirrored on the water broke up into jostling curved fragments.

"What wrongs do you speak of, father?"

Toller could not be put off. "I have neglected you both because I can never be content with what I have. It's as simple as that. My indictment takes but a few words—none of them fancy or abstruse."

"I never felt neglected, because I believed you would love us both for ever," Cassyll said slowly. "Now my mother is alone."

"She has you."

"She is
alone."

"No more than I am," Toller said, "but there is no remedy. Your mother understands that better than I. If you could learn to understand you might also learn to forgive."

Cassyll suddenly looked younger than his twenty-two years. "You're asking me to understand that love dies?"

"It
can
die, or it can refuse to die; or a man or a woman can change, or a man or a woman can remain changeless; and when a person does not change with time the effect—from the viewpoint of a person who is changing—is as if the unchanging person is actually the one who is undergoing the greatest change…" Toller broke off and stared helplessly at his son. "How can I know what I'm asking you to understand when I don't understand it myself?"

"Father…" Cassyll moved a step closer to Toller. "I see so much pain inside you. I hadn't realised…"

Toller tried to check the tears which had begun to blur his vision. "I welcome the pain. There is not enough of it for my needs."

"Father, don't…"

Toller opened his arms to his son and they embraced, and for the fleeting period of the embrace he could almost remember what it had been like to be a whole man.

"Put the ship on its side," Toller ordered, his breath rolling whitely in the chill air.

Bartan Drumme, who was at the controls because he took every possible opportunity to practise skyship handling techniques, nodded and began firing short bursts on a lateral jet. As the thrust gradually overcame the inertia of the gondola, Overland slid up the sky and the great disk of Land emerged from behind the brown curvature of the balloon. Bartan halted the ship's rotation by means of the opposing jet, stabilising it in the new attitude, with an entire world on view on either side of the gondola. The sun was close to Land's eastern rim, illuminating a slim crescent of the planet and leaving the rest of it in comparative darkness.

Against the dim background of Land, the waiting spaceship, now less than a mile away, was visible as a tiny bar of light. It was attended by several lesser motes, representing the few habitats and stores which King Chakkell had permitted to remain in the weightless zone to service the newly completed vessel. The group was an undistinguished feature of the crowded heavens, almost unnoticeable, but the sight of it caused a stealthy quickening of Toller's pulse.

Sixty days had passed since he had received the royal assent for the expedition to Farland, and now he was finding it hard to accept that the hour of departure was at hand. Trying to dispel a slight sense of unreality, he raised his binoculars and studied the spaceship.

There had been one major amendment to the design which Zavotle had sketched out during their meeting in the Bluebird Inn. The foremost of the ship's five sections had originally been designated as the detachable module, but the arrangement had posed too many problems in connection with obtaining a view ahead of the vessel. After some unsatisfactory experiments with mirrors it had been decided to use the aft section as the landing module. Its engine would power the flight to Farland, and when the section was separated from the mother craft a second engine would be exposed, ready for the return to Overland.

Toller lowered the binoculars and glanced around the other members of the crew, all of them swaddled in their quilted suits, all of them deep in their own thoughts. Apart from Zavotle and Bartan, there was Berise Narrinder, Tipp Gotlon and another ex-fighter pilot, a soft-spoken young man called Dakan Wraker. Toller had been surprised by the large number of volunteers for the expedition, and he had selected Wraker because of his imperturbable nature and wide range of mechanical skills.

The conversation among the crew members had been lively in the preceding hour, but now, suddenly, the magnitude of what lay ahead seemed to have impressed itself on them, stilling their tongues.

"Spare me the long faces," Toller said, grimly jovial. "Why, we might find Farland so much to our liking that none of us will ever want to return!"

As commander of the spaceship, Toller would have liked to have been at the controls when the
Kolcorron
burned its way out of the weightless zone at the beginning of the voyage to Farland.

During training sessions, however, it had become apparent that he was the least talented of the crew when it came to the new style of flying. The ship's length was five times its diameter, and keeping it in a stable attitude while under way required precise and delicate use of the lateral jets, an ability to detect and correct yawing movements almost before they had begun. Gotlon, Wraker and Berise seemed to do it without effort, using infrequent split-second blasts on the jets to keep the crosshairs of the steering telescope centred on a target star. Zavotle and Bartan Drumme were competent, though more heavy handed; but Toller—much to his annoyance—was prone to make overcorrections which involved him in series of minor adjustments, bringing grins to the faces of the other fliers.

He had therefore given Tipp Gotlon, the youngest of the crew, the responsibility for taking the ship out of the twin planets' atmosphere.

Gotlon was strapped into a seat near the centre of the circular topmost deck. He was looking into the prismatic eyepiece of the low-powered telescope which was aimed vertically through a port in the ship's nose. His hands were on the control levers, from which rods ran down through the various decks to the main engine and the lateral thrusters. The fierceness of his gap-toothed grin showed that he was keyed up, anxiously waiting for the order to begin the flight.

Toller glanced around the nose section, which in addition to accommodating the pilot's station was also intended as living and sleeping quarters. Zavotle, Berise and Bartan were floating near the perimeter in various attitudes, keeping themselves in place by gripping handrails. It was quite dim in the compartment, the only illumination coming from a porthole on the sunward side, but Toller could see the others' faces well enough to know that they shared his mood.

The flight would possibly last two hundred days—a dauntingly long period of boredom, deprivation and discomfort—and, regardless of how dedicated a person might be, it was only natural to experience qualms at such a moment. Things would be easier after the main engine had begun to fire, finally committing everybody to the venture, but until that psychological first step had been taken he and the crew were bound to be racked by doubt and apprehension.

Growing impatient, Toller drew himself to the ladder well and looked down into the ship. The cylindrical space was punctuated by narrow rays of sunlight from portholes which created confusing patterns of brightness and shadow in the internal bracing and among the bins which housed the supplies of food and water, firesalt and power crystals. There was a movement far down in the strange netherworld and Wraker, who had been checking the fuel hoppers and pneumatic feed system, appeared at the bottom of the ladder. He came up it at speed, agile in spite of his bulky suit, and nodded as he saw Toller waiting for him.

"The power unit is in readiness," he said quietly.

"And we are likewise," Toller replied, turning to meet Gotlon's attentive eyes. "Take us away from here."

Gotlon advanced the throttle without hesitation. The engine sounded at the rear of the ship, its roar muted by distance and the intervening partitions, and the crew members gradually floated downwards to take up standing positions on the deck. Toller looked out of the nearest porthole just in time to see the cluster of store sections and habitats slide away behind the ship. Some heavily muffled auxiliary workers were hanging in the air near the structures, all of them vigorously waving their farewells.

"This is quite touching," Toller said. "We're being given a rousing send-off."

Zavotle sniffed to show his scepticism. "They are merely expressing heartfelt relief at our departure. Now, at last, they can quit the weightless zone and return to their families—which is what we would be doing if we had any sense."

"You forget one thing," Bartan Drumme said, smiling. "Which is…?"

"I
am
returning to my family." Bartan's boyish smile widened. "I get the best of both worlds, so to speak—because my wife is waiting for me on Farland."

"Son, it is my considered opinion that
you
should be the captain of this ship," Zavotle said solemnly. "A man needs to be crazy to set out on a journey such as this—and you are the craziest of us all."

The
Kolcorron
had been under way for a little more than an hour when Toller began to feel uneasy.

He visited every compartment of the ship, checking that all was as it should be, but in spite of his being unable to find anything wrong, his sense of disquiet remained. Unable to attribute it to any definite cause, he chose not to confide in Zavotle or any of the others—as commander he had to provide resolute leadership, not undermine the crew's morale with vague apprehensions. In contrast to his own mood, the others seemed to be relaxing and growing more confident, as was evidenced by the sprightliness of the conversation on the top deck.

Finding the talk distracting, Toller went back down the ladder and, feeling oddly furtive, positioned himself at a midships porthole, in a narrow space between two storage lockers. It was the sort of thing he had sometimes done in childhood when he needed to shut off the outside world, and in the contrived solitude he tried to pinpoint the source of his forebodings.

Could it be the fact that the sky had unaccountably turned black? Or could it be a deep-seated worry, an instinctive emotional protest, over the idea of building up to a speed of thousands of miles an hour? The main engine had been firing almost continuously since the start of the voyage, and therefore—according to Zavotle—the ship's speed already had to be far in excess of anything in man's previous experience. At first there had been a clearly audible rush of air against the hull, but as the sky darkened that sound had gradually faded away. Sunlight slanting in through the porthole made it difficult for Toller to perceive the outside universe clearly, but the eternal calm seemed to reign as always, yielding no evidence that the ship was hurtling through space at many hundreds of miles an hour.

Could
that
fact be related to his unease? Was some part of his mind troubled by the discrepancy between what he observed to be happening and what he knew to be happening?

Toller considered the notion briefly and pushed it aside—he had never been unduly sensitive, and travelling in space was not going to alter his basic nature. If he was going to be nervous it was more likely to be over some practical matter, such as having positioned himself so close to a porthole. The planking of the
Kolcorron's
hull was reinforced with extra steel hoops on the outside and layers of tar and canvas on the inside, imparting great strength to the ship's structure as a whole, but there were areas of vulnerability around the portholes and hatches. On one early test flight a porthole had blown out and a mechanic's eardrums had been ruptured, even though the accident had not occurred in true vacuum.

A brief hissing sound from the upper deck indicated that somebody had mixed a measure of firesalt and water to renew the air's life-giving properties. Perhaps a minute later its distinctive odour—reminiscent of seaweed—reached Toller's nostrils, mingling with the smell of tar which seemed to have been growing stronger.

He sniffed the air, realising that the tarry smell was indeed more noticeable, and his sense of alarm suddenly intensified itself. On impulse he removed one of his gauntlets and touched the black surface of the hull beside him. It felt warm. The degree of heat was far short of what would have been needed to soften the tar, less than his skin temperature, but it was strikingly in contrast with the chill he had expected. The discovery burst open a gateway in his mind, and all at once he knew exactly what had occasioned all his vague forebodings…

His entire body felt uncomfortably warm!

The quilted skysuit had been designed to keep the fierce cold of the weightless zone at bay, and had been barely adequate for its purpose, but now it was proving so efficient that he was on the verge of breaking into a sweat.