Bob Shaw - Vertigo

By the time he got back to his seat he was woozy again, ready to fall asleep, but he had the spare satisfaction that always came from refusing to compromise. He was not the Robert Hasson he used to be, or had imagined himself to be. He felt incomplete, wounded, flawed — but his future was his own personal property, and there was to be no side-stepping of any problems it would bring.

Technical difficulties had dosed the transcontinental air corridor west of Regina, so Hasson completed his journey by rail.

It was mid-morning when he reached Edmonton, and on stepping down from the train he was immediately struck by the coldness of the sun-glittering air which washed around him like the waters of a mountain stream. In his previous experience such temperatures allied with brilliant sunshine had only been encountered when patrolling high above the Pennines on a spring morning. For an instant he was flying again, dangerously poised, with a flight of gulls twinkling like stars far below, and the weakness returned to his knees. He looked around the rail station, anchoring himself to the ground, taking in details of his surroundings. The platform extended a long way beyond the girdered roof, dipping into hard-packed snow which was criss-crossed with tyre tracks. City buildings formed a blocky palisade against the snowfields he could sense to the north. Hasson, wondering how he was going to recognise his escort, examined the people nearest to him. The men seemed huge and dauntingly jovial, many of them dressed in reddish tartan jackets as though conforming to tourists” preconceived notions of how Canadians should look.

Hasson, suddenly feeling overwhelmed and afraid, picked up his cases and moved towards the station exit. As he did so an almost handsome, olive-skinned man with a pencil-line moustache and exceptionally bright eyes came towards him, hands extended. The stranger’s expression of friendliness and pleasure was so intense that Hasson moved out of his way, fearful of perhaps obstructing a family reunion. He glanced back over his shoulder and was surprised to find there was nobody close behind him.

“Rob I” The stranger gripped both of Hasson’s shoulders. “Rob Hasson I It’s great to see you again. Really great!”

“I …” Hasson gazed into the varnish-coloured eyes which stared back at him with such intemperate affection and was forced to the conclusion that this was his Canadian host, Al Werry. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Come on, Rob — you look like you could do with a drink.” Werry took the cases from Hasson’s unresisting fingers and set off with them towards the exit barrier. “I’ve got a bottle of scotch in the car outside — and guess what.”

“It’s your favourite. Lockhart’s.”

Hasson was taken aback. “Thanks, but how did you…?”

“That was quite a night we had in that pub — you know the one about ten minutes along the highway from Air Police HQ. What was it called?”

“I can’t remember.”

“The Haywain.” Werry supplied. “You were drinking Lockhart whisky. Lloyd Inglis was on vodka, and I was learning to drink your Boddington’s ale. What a night!” Werry reached a sleek-looking car which had a city crest on its side, opened its trunk and began loading the four cases, thus giving Hasson a moment in which to think. He had the vaguest memory of an occasion seven or eight years earlier when he had became involved with providing hospitality for a group of Canadian police officers, but every detail of the evening was lost to him. Now it was obvious that Werry had been one of the visitors and he felt both embarrassed and alarmed by the other man’s ability to recall an unimportant event with such clarity.

“Hop in there, Rob, and we’ll shake this place — I want to get you to Tripletree in time for lunch. May is cooking up moose steaks for us, and I’ll bet you never tasted moose.” While he was speaking Werry slipped out of his overcoat, folded it carefully and placed it on the car’s rear seat. His chocolate-brown uniform, which carried the insignia of a city reeve, was crisply immaculate and when he sat down he spent some time smoothing the cloth of the tunic behind him to prevent it being wrinkled by the driving seat. Hasson opened the passenger door and got in, taking equal care to ensure that his spine was straight and well supported in the lumbar region.

“Here’s what you need,” Werry said, taking a flat bottle from a dash compartment and handing it to Hasson. He smiled indulgently, showing square healthy teeth.

“Thanks.” Hasson dutifully accepted the bottle and took a swig from it, noticing as he tilted his head that there was a police style counter-gravity harness flying suit lying on the rear seat beside Werry’s coat. The neat spirit tasted warmish, flat and unnaturally strong, but he pretended to savour it, a task which became Herculean when it seared into one of the mouth ulcers which had been troubling him for weeks.

“You hold on to that — it’s more’n an hour’s run to Tripletree.” Werry spun up the car’s turbine as he spoke and a few seconds later they were surging into a northbound traffic stream. As the car emerged from among the downtown buildings expanses of blue sky became visible and Hasson saw above him a fantastic complex of aerial highways. The bilaser images looked real but not real — curves, ramps, straights, trumpet-shaped entrances and exits, all apparently carved from coloured gelatine and bannered across the sky to guide and control the flux of individual fliers whose business brought them into the city. Thousands of dark specks moved along the insubstantial ducts, like the representation of a gas flow in a physics text.

“Pretty, isn’t it? Some system!” Werry leaned forward, peering upwards with enthusiasm.

“Very nice.” Hasson tried to find a comfortable posture in the car’s too pliant upholstery as he studied the three-dimensional pastel-coloured projections. Similar traffic control techniques had been tried in Britain back in the days when there still had been hope of reserving some territory for conventional aircraft, but they had been abandoned as too costly and too complicated. With million of individuals airborne above a small island, many of them highly resistant to discipline, it had been found most expedient to go for a simple arrangement of columnar route markers with bands of colour at different altitudes. The most basic bilaser installations could cope with the task of projecting the solid-seeming columns, and they had a further advantage in that they left the aerial environment looking comparatively uncluttered. To Hasson’s eyes, the confection hovering above Edmonton resembled the entrails of some vast semi- transparent mollusc.

“You feeling all right, Rob?” Werry said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Hasson shook his head. “I’ve been travelling too long, that’s…”

“They told me you got yourself all smashed up.”

“Just a broken skeleton,” Hasson said, modifying an old joke. “How much did they tell you, anyway?”

“Not much. It’s better that way, I guess. I’m telling everybody you’re my cousin from England, that your name’s Robert Haldane, that you’re an insurance salesman and you’re convalescing from a bad car smash.”

“It sounds plausible enough.”

“I hope so,” Werry drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, signalling his dissatisfaction. “It’s a funny sort of set-up, though. With England having separate air police, I mean. I never thought you’d get mixed up with big-time organised crime.”

“It was just the way things worked out. Lloyd Inglis and I were busting a gang of young angels, and when Lloyd got killed the…” Hasson broke off as the car swerved slightly. “I’m sorry. Didn’t they say?”