The Fountains of Paradise

Morgan gave the battery an extra minute for luck. To his relief the motors responded strongly, with an encouraging surge of power. Spider got within half a kilometre of the Tower before stalling again.

"Next time does it," said Kingsley, though it seemed to Morgan that his friend's confidence now sounded somewhat forced. "Sorry for all these delays…

"Another ten minutes?" Morgan asked with resignation.

"I'm afraid so. And this time use thirty-second bursts, with a minute between them. That way, you'll get the last erg out of the battery."

And out of me, thought Morgan. Strange that CORA had been quiet for so long. Still, this time be had not exerted himself physically; it only felt that way.

In his preoccupation with Spider he had been neglecting himself. For the last hour he had quite forgotten his zero-residue glucose-based energy tablets and the little plastic bulb of fruit juice. After he had sampled both he felt much better, and only wished that he could transfer some of the surplus calories to the dying battery.

Now for the moment of truth – the final exertion. Failure was unthinkable, when he was so close to the goal. The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred metres to go…

He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed, when there were only millimetres to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.

The capsule heaved itself upwards in fits and starts, like a dying animal seeking its last haven. When the battery finally expired, the base of the Tower seemed to fill half the sky.

But it was still twenty metres above him.

54. Theory of Relativity

It was to Morgan's credit that he felt his own fate was sealed, in the desolating moment when the last dregs of power were exhausted, and the lights on Spider's display panel finally faded out. Not for several seconds did he remember that he had only to release the brakes and he would slide back to Earth. In three hours he could be safely back in bed. No-one would blame him for the failure of his mission; he had done all that was humanly possible.

For a brief while he stared in a kind of dull fury at that inaccessible square, with the shadow of Spider projected upon it. His mind revolved a host of crazy schemes, and rejected them all. If he still had his faithful little spinnerette – but there would have been no way of getting it to the Tower. If the refugees had possessed a spacesuit, someone could have lowered a rope to him – but there had been no time to collect a suit from the burning transporter.

Of course, if this was a videodrama, and not a real-life problem, some heroic volunteer could sacrifice himself – better still, herself – by going into the lock and tossing down a rope, using the fifteen seconds of vacuum consciousness to save the others. It was some measure of Morgan's desperation that, for a fleeting moment, he even considered this idea before commonsense reasserted itself.

From the time that Spider had given up the battle with gravity, until Morgan finally accepted that there was nothing more that he could do, probably less than a minute had elapsed. Then Warren Kingsley asked a question which, at such a moment, seemed an annoying irrelevance.

"Give us your distance again, Van – exactly how far are you from the Tower?"

"What the hell does it matter? It could be a light-year."

There was a brief silence from the ground; then Kingsley spoke again, in the sort of tone one uses to address a small child or a difficult invalid. "It makes all the difference in the world. Did you say twenty metres?"

"Yes – that's about it."

Incredibly – unmistakeably – Warren gave a clearly audible sigh of relief. There was even joy in his voice when he answered: "And all these years, Van, I thought that you were the Chief Engineer on this project. Suppose it is twenty metres exactly –"

Morgan's explosive shout prevented him from finishing the sentence. "What an idiot! Tell Sessui I'll dock in – oh, fifteen minutes."

"Fourteen point fIve, if you've guessed the distance right. And nothing on earth can stop you now."

That was still a risky statement, and Morgan wished that Kingsley hadn't made it. Docking adaptors sometimes failed to latch together properly, because of minute errors in manufacturing tolerances. And, of course, there had never been a chance of testing this particular system.

He felt only a slight embarrassment at his mental blackout. After all, under extreme stress a man could forget his own telephone number, even his own date of birth. And until this very moment the now dominant factor in the situation had been so unimportant that it could be completely ignored.