Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

The nasal braying sound of Hargate’s breathing began to abate as the stealthy intangibles of the place started to affect him. Its noumenon had not changed either. There was the same solitude without loneliness, the sense of being removed from the world and yet somehow, in a way that defied his understanding, of being at one with all that lay beyond the world.

I’ve done the right thing , he thought, nodding. It’ll be all right in this place…

He grasped one edge of the red plaid travel rug and flicked it away from him, exposing the near-skeletal thinness of his legs, then unbuttoned his overcoat, jacket and shirt. The cold embraced him immediately, slipping intimate arms around his body, a practised lover who fully understood the principle of being cruel to be kind. Hargate endured the sensation without flinching, wondering how long the whole process was going to take. Others might have wanted time to review their lives and make final summations, but in his case there was no need for such embellishments. It was enough to have been Denny Hargate for thirty-two years. He was under no obligation to cap the experience with uninspired metaphors—non-starter in the Great Race, dealt a losing hand, etc—when all he yearned for was a quick exit.

Hargate closed his eyes and waited.

At first there was considerable pain, from the coldness itself and from the pins-and-needles at his extremities, then the numbness took over and brought an end to all sensation. He was still alive, yet felt free of physical restraint. In the dreamlike state of being, halfway between life and death, the laws of space-time no longer seemed quite so immutable. Perhaps, after all, there was a lingering trace of magic in the universe.

I wonder if I could do what she did , he thought, aware that he was sinking fast, and taking nothing but comfort from the knowledge. I wonder if I could follow her .

Gripped by a sudden fey elation, an irrational conviction that the best was yet to come, he raised his right hand and retraced—as closely as he could remember it after a lapse of two decades—the design that had been scribed on the air by the loveliest girl he had ever seen.

Nothing happened.

No miracle occurred.

You always were a fool , he told himself, deliberately selecting the past tense, jeering at his own disappointment. Right to the end…

“He did something like this…” The tired-looking young man hesitantly moved his right hand through a complex downward curve. “Then he wasn’t there any more.”

Gretana, who had been watching the television relay from the Cape with some interest, felt a near-physical impact as the content of the young man’s words and actions stormed through her mind. She froze in the act of unbuttoning her blouse, went to the set and pressed the retro-record switch. Her second and third viewings of the crucial part of the interview proved superfluous—she had known first time round, with jarring certainty, that Phil Barren had been imitating a Mollanian transfer symbol. His claim that the spacesuited figure had then vanished, rendering his story incredible to almost any other listener, was all the proof she needed. The inescapable conclusion was that the Aristotle space colony had been sabotaged by a Mollanian.

She sat down on the pliant edge of her bed, staring with unfocused eyes, forgetting the summary of the news about the abandonment of Aristotle and the fierce international recriminations it was causing. Lorrest had told her to pay attention to the news, to be on the alert for evidence of 2H’s activities—and there was no doubt that sabotaging the colony was interference with IgTerran affairs on a grand scale. It was almost certain that the renegades had located a minor transient node—a fortuitous, drifting Intersection of local skord lines—which had enabled one of their lumber to carry out a guerrilla attack on Aristotle. Even Barren’s assertion that the saboteur had stopped short of killing him was [indirect evidence that he had encountered a Mollanian, but that jnly served to deepen the central mystery.

Why had they done it?

In what way could the destruction of Earth’s first and only beachhead in space serve the aims of Lorrest and his organisation? Given that he was acting from some kind of misguided altruism, she would have expected him to assist the Terrans to spread into space and away from the chaotic third-order forces of the Earth-Moon system. It seemed to her that Lorrest had slammed a door on the Terrans, trapping them on the ill-starred planet as effectively as he was.

She remained motionless, blouse partly undone, more convinced with each passing second that she was caught up in something far beyond her understanding, and that there were vast ramifications she had not even glimpsed. Everybody in the world will know about it when it happens , Lorrest had told her. Vekrynn is going to take this planet apart to find us . Was this what he had meant? Was this pnough to prompt the Warden to institute a determined manhunt—or was it only a beginning?

The abrupt realisation that she was completely out of her depth brought Gretana an unexpected sense of relief. Changing her mind about undressing, she stood up and went to the bedroom closet to fetch her overnight bag, comforted by the fact that her duties were now so clearly defined.

It was time to report to Warden Vekrynn.

The batteries of the rented car were growing weak by the time she reached Carsewell in the grainy light of dawn.

Lingering fears about being followed by Lorrest had led her to take a circuitous route and to expend extra energy by completing most of the journey at night. The result was that by the time she reached the southern approach to Carsewell her lack of speed was beginning to make the car conspicuous. Anxious though she was to reach the nodal point, she knew better than to break one of the most basic rules of her trade. She called in at a suburban service station to exchange batteries, only to be told by a grinning, Zapata-moustached attendant that a local power failure had depleted the stock of ready-units. All he could offer was a recharge which was going to take at least an hour.

Gretana, suddenly aware of how tired she was after the protracted drive, decided to accept the recharge. She went into the deserted coffee shop, determined to relax until the car was ready. The attendant, perhaps under the impression that her decision not to press on had something to do with his personal charm, followed her to the counter and straddled the stool next to her. Gretana spoke to him quietly and earnestly for some thirty seconds, at the end of which he stood up and walked away with a thoughtful expression.

Again it occurred to Gretana that she was not the person she had been twenty-three years earlier. A sudden yearning to go home, to be done with Earth and all its futility, turned her thoughts towards Vekrynn. While sipping black coffee she wondered if what she had to report would be sufficiently important to guarantee a meeting with him. The prospect of seeing the Warden again in person was both exciting and unnerving, a foretaste and at the same time a reaffirmation of all that the future promised. Lately, in spite of all her efforts, her vision of that endless golden Sunday afternoon…no, that had been Lorrest’s derogatory phrase…of that succession of calmly joyful decades had been growing strangely two-dimensional, and she needed Vekrynn to restore its solidity.

As soon as the car was ready she drove through Carsewell to the west side of the city and parked on a little-used dirt track near the perimeter of the Greenways housing development. Ten minutes of brisk walking in the diamond-faceted morning air brought her to where nothing but the old highway separated her from the sloping pasture which led up to Cotter’s Edge. She crossed over, negotiated the snow-filled drainage ditch and began the ascent towards the nodal point. The flawlessness of the white curvatures ahead of her, proof that she was the first to take that path since the snow had fallen, raised the question of how many Mollanian observers used the same route to Station 23. She guessed the number would have to be quite small to prevent the area of the node attracting too much local interest and perhaps acquiring an odd reputation.