Utopia

Yes. Yes. Lentrall finished off the last of the soup in a single swallow, and got to his feet. The blanket still wrapped around his body, he made his way to his home office, in the far corner of the ground floor. Yes. Comet Grieg. That was what they would remember, not this afternoon’s foolish humiliation.

And the best way to wipe the memory of today’s disaster from his mind would be to get back to work, immediately, on the Comet Grieg project. Kaelor had been quite right to point out there were a large number of unresolved problems to deal with. No time like the present to deal with them. He could call up the appropriate computer files from here and set to work on them.

It, of course, never so much as crossed Davlo’s mind to consider where, precisely, the computer files actually were. It had never so much as dawned on him that they had an actually physical location, a position in space that held them. They were simply there, in the massively interlinked comm and computer system that interlinked all the comm terminals in the city and all the planet’s outposts of civilization. He could call them up from any place, any time, and set to work on them, whenever he liked.

He had never given the matter much consideration, any more than he would have stopped to remember that the air was there for him to breathe whenever he wanted, or that his household robots knew when to serve him soup.

Lentrall sat down at his home office comm station and activated his files on Comet Grieg. At least he tried to do so.

Because, quite suddenly, it was as if the air wasn’t there for him to breathe anymore.

THE FLIGHT OVER the Great Bay had been smooth as silk, the aircar leaving the storm behind with the coastline. That was not too surprising. The climate people had told Kresh that it was a typical pattern: warm, moist air dumping its moisture the moment it came in contact with the cool, dry air over land. Part of it had to do with the air being forced up by the mountain ranges just inland from the city of Hades. The wind blew the air up the side of the hill, and the higher the air went, the more its barometric pressure dropped and the less moisture it could hold. So the water came out of the air, and it rained. A rain shadow effect, they called it.

But if it could work on the mainland, it could work just as handily on the windward side of an island. Especially a nice, big island like Purgatory. The prevailing winds over the island were from the south. Oberon flew Kresh’ s aircar in from the northwest, up and over the central peak of the island-and then right back down into weather every bit as heavy as what they had left behind at Hades.

The aircar dropped down into the clouds, and was instantly engulfed by the raging storm. Kresh grabbed at his armrests again as the aircar bucked and heaved and bounced allover the sky, thunder booming all around as lightning lit up the storm-tossed skies outside his viewport. Suddenly Kresh was caught in the urge to get forward, to get to the cockpit and see what was going on, to grasp hold of the controls and take over. But if that was not panic talking, it was the next best thing.

Kresh forced himself to relax, to ease back. It was going to be all right. Oberon was a good pilot. He looked out the viewport, and down at the rain, far below. He could not help but think back to another storm on Purgatory, five years before. A storm brought on by the weatherfields, the huge forcefields generated at the Terraforming Center. A storm that had raged that night when Chanto Grieg was murdered. At least tonight, in this storm, there was no disaster waiting to strike. Kresh smiled to himself. Talk about misplaced confidence. How the devil could he know what schedules were kept by disasters? They tended to come up whenever they pleased, without bothering to consult the likes of Alvar Kresh.

There was a harder bump than any before, and suddenly the aircar had stopped moving. Startled, Kresh blinked and looked out the viewport. It took him a moment to realize they were on the ground.

The door to the aircar’s cockpit opened and Oberon stepped into the main cabin. “We have arrived, sir,” he said in his low, almost gravelly, voice. “As you can see, sir, the weather is extremely inclement. As there is no covered access between the landing pad and the entrance, perhaps you might wish to wait until the weather has cleared before you set out.”

Kresh peered through the viewport, using his hand to block the glare from the cabin’s interior lights. He spotted the entrance to the Terraforming Center. “It can’t be more than a hundred meters or so to the door,” Kresh said. “Why the devil should I wait?”

“As you see fit, sir. If you think it a wise idea to go immediately.”