Bob Shaw - Orbitsville Judgement

Lifeboat, Nicklin mused. LIFEboat. The character who thought up that name knew exactly what he…

He lost track of the thought as the radio speakers gave their preliminary click well in advance of the four-minute interval which had been anticipated.

“This is spaceport control at Hilversum, formerly Portal 16,” a male voice said tentatively. “We are receiving an autoscan transmission. Please identify yourself. Over.”

“He sounds more scared than we are.” Fleischer gave the others a wry smile which warmed Nicklin towards her. “I wonder who he thinks is calling.”

“Answer the man,” Voorsanger said impatiently.

“This is spacecraft W-602874 answering your call, Hilversum. Are you receiving me? Over.” Fleischer glanced at the communications panel then settled back in her chair. “That’s the call I was hoping for. We’ll soon know how we stand.”

Voorsanger moved into the chair beside her. “How long will it take?”

“Hilversum is farther away along the equator. The range is nearly seventy-five miks this time, so the round-trip delay will be over eight minutes.”

“That’s too long,” Voorsanger said in sepulchral tones. “We should have been tachyonic.”

“I can wait eight minutes. Every reply we get increases our chances of getting out of this alive—and I’m hoping to raise a hundred spaceports in the next few hours. If two of them are functioning there’s no reason every port there is shouldn’t come on the air.”

As he listened to the pilot Nicklin felt a growing respect for her tough-minded style of thinking. Whereas he was allowing himself to swing between optimism and despair, she appeared to be holding steady, concentrating her experience, talent and mental energies on maximising their chances of survival. There had been 207 portals on Orbitsville’s equator, virtually all of them developed as spaceports, and they represented a vast reserve of hardware and manpower which could be tapped to bring the Tara in from the cold.

The big battalions are on our side, he thought. Now, if only I could forget about… He tried to fend off a secondary thought, but it was coming with too much speed, too much power. If only I could forget about the time limit. The world cloud is thinning out—just the way Blackhead Hepworth said it would. The new planets are going somewhere, and—according to the Benign Hypothesis—it’s somewhere good. And if we don’t get ourselves bedded down on one of them pretty damn quick it’s going to be lonely out here…

He tried not to think about the prospects for all those on board the Tara if the ship were to be left in orbit around a barren sun. The food would last two years, but would anybody in his right mind want to hang on right to the end, in a drifting tomb in which the dead were beginning to outnumber the living? And in which the taboos against cannibalism were outmoded? It would be better to steer the ship into the sun long before that unimaginable degree of horror was attained, but even that would result in protracted and agonising deaths for the little ones. The best plan might be to override all the safety mechanisms and vent the ship, thus ensuring that suffering was kept to a minimum.

Nicklin, suddenly beset by feelings of suffocation, pulled air deeply into his lungs and wrenched his thoughts on to a different course. He was grateful to discover that Voorsanger had asked Fleischer about the procedures for putting the ship into parking orbit about a planet and transferring its company to the surface. The subject was life-oriented, and he poured his consciousness into it, managing to lose track of the minutes until—with heart-stopping abruptness—the speakers again emitted their now-familiar preliminary click.

“This is space traffic control at Amsterdam, formerly based on P3,” a woman’s voice said. “We are receiving your autoscan signal on the general band. Please identify yourself. Over.”

“Things are looking up,” Fleischer said calmly.

She was reaching towards the communications panel when the speakers were activated yet again. This time the call was from Peking P205. Nicklin listened in a kind of pleasurable bemusement as Fleischer dealt with the two new contacts. The family of communities on Orbitsville’s equator had survived the dissolution, and were reaching out across space to gather in their prodigals and strays. The only appropriate response was to acknowledge hope—anything else would be a betrayal of the human spirit.

Within moments of Fleischer having sent identification messages there came a second response from Hilversum.

“Hilversum calling in answer to your query, Tara,” the man’s voice said, “we have two Type-II pinnaces in land dock. Both have transfer facilities compatible with the Explorer class, and both can be operational within three or four days. We foresee no difficulty in evacuating one hundred personnel, so set your mind at rest on that score. We will get you out of there, and that is a promise, but before I end this transmission I have another message for you.”

There was a brief pause—during which Nicklin, Fleischer and Voorsanger exchanged looks of surmise—then a different male voice was heard.

“Tara, this is Cavan Gomery. I’m head of the astronomical section here at STC. I want to back up everything my colleague has just said—all you have to do is get into orbit and we’ll take care of the rest. In the mean time, I’m asking for your assistance with another problem.

“You don’t need to be told that something very big has happened to Orbitsville, but you may not know that the residual planets are reducing in number. We don’t even know how to begin explaining this, but we need as much data as we can get to help us put a handle on the problem—and you are in a unique position in that respect.

“Can you send us a wide-angle, general view of the residual sphere? We need a good picture from you, and we need it for as long as possible to help us make the best computer predictions about the rate of disappearance.

“I will stand by for your answer. Over.”

For the remainder of the “night” period Nicklin watched and listened as Fleischer dealt with an increasing volume of radio traffic—each new contact adding to the proof of Hepworth’s Benign Hypothesis.

Eventually calls were coming in from spaceports which identified themselves with P numbers in the region of 100. Those calls, originating on the far side of the world cloud, were subject to a forty-minute delay in responses—a chastening reminder of the scale upon which Orbitsville had been built. As the electronic babel built up to a level where Fleischer had to institute computer procedures to impose order, it came to Nicklin that what he was hearing represented only a tiny fraction of the newly created worlds which filled the main screen.

Radio communications had never been possible within the Orbitsville shell, and therefore only those planets which happened to have former spaceports had a voice in the new congress. A far greater number had library access to the relevant technology, and Nicklin had no doubt they were hastily building the equipment which would allow them to speak to their neighbours in the close-packed sky. He also had no doubt that they would be seeking some kind of reassurance.

That was the common factor in all communications being received by the Tara. The radio messages, beneath the terseness and jargon, gave a composite picture of a civilisation which had been jarred out of its age-old complacency. Nicklin had been so preoccupied with his own traumatic experiences that he had spared no thought for the vast majority of humanity who had been going about their humdrum daily lives when the transformation had come. But the voices on the control-room radio gave him an inkling of what it had been like to live through the ultimate bad dream.