from Koriel’s voice. “I’ll have the rescue boys back from Gorda
before you know it.”
The figure in red raised a feeble arm. Just a whisper came through.
“You-you tried. . . . Nobody could have. . .” Koriel clasped the
gauntlet with both hands.
“Mustn’t give up. That’s no good. You just have to hang on a
while.” Inside his helmet the granite cheeks were wet. He backed to
the entrance and made a final salute. “So long, soldier.” And then
he was gone.
Outside he built a small cairn of stones to mark the position of
the hole. He would mark the trail to Gorda with such cairns. At
last he straightened up and turned defiantly to face the desolation
surrounding him. The rocks seemed to scream down in soundless
laughing mockery. The stars above remained unmoved. Koriel glowered
up at the cleft, rising up toward the tiers of crags and terraces
that guarded the ridge, still soaring in the distance. His lips
curled back to show his teeth.
“So-it’s just you and me now, is it?” he snarled at the Universe.
“Okay, you bastard-let’s see you take this round!”
With his legs driving like slow pistons, he attacked the ever
steepening slope.
chapter one
Accompanied by a mild but powerful whine, a gigantic silver torpedo
rose slowly upward to hang two thousand feet above the sugar-cube
huddle of central London. Over three hundred yards long, it spread
at the tail into a slim delta topped by two sharply swept fins. For
a while the ship hovered, as if savoring the air of its newfound
freedom, its nose swinging smoothly around to seek the north. At
last, with the sound growing, imperceptibly at first but with
steadily increasing speed, it began to slide forward and upward. At
ten thousand feet its engines erupted into full power, hurling the
suborbital skyliner eagerly toward the fringes of space. Sitting in
row thirty-one of C deck was Dr. Victor Hunt, head of Theoretical
Studies at the Metadyne Nucleonic Instrument Company of Reading,
Berkshire-itself a subsidiary of the mammoth Intercontinental Data
and Control Corporation, headquartered at Portland, Oregon, USA. He
absently surveyed the diminishing view of Hendon that crawled
across the cabin wall-display screen and tried again to fit some
kind of explanation to the events of the last few days.
His experiments with matter-antimatter particle extinctions had
been progressing well. Forsyth-Scott had followed Hunt’s reports
with evident interest and therefore knew that the tests were
progressing well. That made it all the more strange for him to call
Hunt to his office one morning to ask him simply to drop everything
and get over to IDCC Portland as quickly as could be arranged. From
the managing director’s tone and manner it had been obvious that
the request was couched as such mainly for reasons of politeness;
in reality this was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had no
say in the matter.
To Hunt’s questions, Forsyth-Scott had stated quite frankly that he
didn’t know what it was that made Hunt’s immediate presence at IDCC
so imperative. The previous evening he had received a videocall
from Felix Borlan, the president of IDCC, who had told him that as
a matter of priority he required the only working prototype of the
scope prepared for immediate shipment to the USA and an
installation team ready to go with it. Also, he had insisted that
Hunt personally come over for an indefinite period to take charge
of some project involving the scope, which could not wait. For
Hunt’s benefit, Forsyth-Scott had replayed Borlan’s call on his
desk display and allowed him to verify for himself that
Forsyth-Scott in turn was acting under a thinly disguised
directive. Even stranger, Borlan too had seemed unable to say
precisely what it was that the instrument and its inventor were
needed for.
The Trimagniscope, developed as a consequence of a two-year
investigation by Hunt into certain aspects of neutrino physics,
promised to be perhaps the most successful venture ever undertaken
by the company. Hunt had established that a neutrino beam that
passed through a solid object underwent certain interactions in the
close vicinity of atomic nuclei, which produced measurable changes