Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

At the fifth floor he deflected himself into the corridor and got to the door of his own room just as the elevator’s arrival light came on. He stabbed his key into the lock, sidestepped into the room, began to bolt the door behind him then realised that doing so would be a clear indication of where he was. The desk clerk spent much of her time in the back office and would not have been able to tell his pursuers for sure whether he was in or out, and it was up to him to make them believe they had been unlucky.

He ran to the window, threw it open and climbed out on to the ledge. Cold breezes tugged at his clothing as he closed the window, and when he turned the shifting of parallax made the steel skeleton of the adjacent structure appear to sway like the masts of a ship.

Lorrest stared at the nearest floor beam, mesmerised. It was perhaps three good paces away from him, a distance he knew he could leap with ease, but a measurement in paces implied the reassuring support of the ground. Here there would be nothing but cold clear air beneath him, and if he were to make a bad jump—perhaps hampered by his overcoat—he would go down and down, and there would be lots of time to anticipate what was going to happen to him when he hit the pavement, or perhaps a perimeter fence and then the pavement, or perhaps a ledge and a perimeter fence and then the pavement…

This must be the main feature , he thought in bemused wonderment as he saw angular patterns flow beneath, evidence that he had made the leap and was flying through space. His feet came down on rusted metal. He caught hold of a stanchion for momentary support and, now totally committed, ran along the narrow aerial pathway of a floor beam to where the massive stump of an incompleted central column offered some concealment. Belatedly aware that he could have attracted the attention of other residents of the hotel, he worked his way round to the far side of the column, hunkered down and nestled into the boxlike space between its flanges.

A sudden eye-of-the-storm calm descended over him as he realised he had done all that was possible for the time being. If he had been seen by the Mollanians he would know about it soon enough, and if any Terrans had noticed him there would be some kind of outcry—but for the present all he could do was crouch in his strange geometrical eyrie and survey the deserted wasteland of the building site below. And force himself not to think about falling.

As the protracted minutes went by he gradually came to accept that he had eluded the Bureau’s agents. They would certainly have gone into and searched his room, but Mollanian conditioning would have prevented them from considering the vertiginous metal pathway to freedom. Unfortunately, one problem led to another. If the Mollanians believed he would soon return to his hotel they were bound to keep watch on all the entrances, and if he wanted to clamber down to the ground inconspicuously he would have to wait for the cover of nightfall.

The thought of making the climb in darkness caused Lorrest to press himself closer to the chilling metal of the column and he diverted his thoughts to the problem of getting safely through the next three days. Haran had been right when he said that Vekrynn would spend unlimited amounts of money to pick up a key member of 2H before it was too late. There were not enough Bureau agents on Earth to form a really effective search team, but there was little doubt that the Warden would have enlisted every conceivable Terran agency, legal and illegal, to track him down. A trumped-up criminal charge would be enough to bring in the police, and the lure of really big money would take care of the rest.

Trying to ignore the cold which was spreading through his body. Lorrest analysed his chances of remaining undetected in the city for the greater part of a week and decided they were dangerously low. His best course would be to get off the planet altogether, but as that was impossible he would have to consider isolating himself in a rural area, even though the weather was against him. At another time of the year it would have been easy enough to fill his pockets with canned food and spend the time hiding out in the forest land on the eastern side of the Allegheny range, but there was a limit to what even a Mollanian constitution could stand. It looked as though he would have to find and move into a disused house, and that had its own set of risks.

All this should have been arranged in advance, he thought. We’re a bunch of amateurs, behaving like amateurs. I suppose our excuse has to be that there aren’t any experts in this line—nobody has ever done to a world what we’re going to do to this one.

To his surprise, Lorrest managed to doze for short periods during the two hours he had to wait for nightfall. When he finally decided to return to the ground the steel framework on which he was suspended had become a cube of mysterious darkness, its components patchily illuminated by greenish glimmers from the street. Telling himself that the lack of visibility would help dispel vertigo, he straightened up tentatively. His legs were numb and a tingling stab of pain hinted that the return of blood circulation would be far from pleasant. He gripped the flanges of the column, began a shuffling turn in preparation for climbing down it, then made the appalling discovery that he was getting no nerve signals from his feet. It was quite impossible for him to decide if he was standing squarely on a floor beam or teetering on its extreme edge.

He shifted his weight slightly, trying to assess the situation, and suddenly—there was no perceptible lapse of time—flaking corners of metal were ripping upwards in his hands like saw-blades.

Before he had time to understand that he was falling, before he had time to scream, the beam on which he had been standing smashed into his outflung left arm just above the elbow. Brutal though the impact was, it checked his descent sufficiently to let him throw his legs and right arm around the column. He clung to it with a desperate ardour, pressing his loins and torso and face against the abrasive steel, while he fought to damp down the panic that was exploding through his system.

Reality…nightmare…reality. As the giddy swings in his perception faded away he moved his left arm and knew at once that he was badly hurt. The pain that invaded his body by way of the shoulder left no doubt that a bone had been fractured. With it came the uncompromising message that if he was to complete the long climb to the ground he would have to do it immediately and quickly before the anaesthesia of shock wore off and the real pain began.

Moaning quietly, he slightly relaxed his grip on the flanges of the column and allowed himself to slide to the floor below, checking his descent often enough to prevent a lethal build-up of speed. Windows in the hotel glowed with placid light, a group of youths ran noisily through the fenced-off alley at the rear of the building site, and the siren of a nuclear engine sounded dolefully in the distance, but Lorrest remained locked in a private purgatory.

By the time he neared the ground his right hand was slipping on a copious lubrication of blood. He dropped to the rough concrete of the column’s foundation, almost fell, and stood swaying in the darkness while he tried to formulate new plans for a future that had suddenly become very much more dangerous.

A panel of food manufacturers and health officers were defending the new practice of introducing insect protein—discreetly tagged as “approved natural ingredients”—into products intended for human consumption.

Gretana had been trying to follow the arguments, particularly those of an assertive man who kept popping live mealworms into his mouth, but her television set was losing its ability to cope with serious power fluctuations, and the picture size and sound levels were changing almost continuously. She had forgotten to buy new batteries, which meant it was hardly worth the trouble of switching over to internal power. Her living room, illuminated by the mandatory low-wattage fluorescent tubes, seemed cheerless and uninviting, but she knew there was little chance of sleep if she went to bed.