Copyright

Published by Golden Apple, Wallasey.

Copyright © 2002 by John Rankine

A Golden Apple Production 2002

Cover design by John R. Mason

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this ebook or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

ISBN: 1-904073-20-4

Not for Resale

Table of Contents

Copyright

About

Free Fishers

The Free Fishers

The Last Shuttle from Earth’s first and only satellite city was searching for a landfall. Harry Elliman reckoned he had fuel and spares to keep her moving for one more circuit of the blue-whorled planet, when he brought her down between low dunes on the Dee estuary.

He made all fast. It was dusk. No light showed. They could have been anywhere flat and desolate with a glimmer of water and a blur of distant hills. He cranked open a direct vision port. Barbara Maynell, his hostage to fortune, shivered delicately in the damp, salt air.

“Must you do that?”

“Not if you don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it.”

She still had a sizeable chip on her shoulder. But it was understandable. He had taken her from the satellite against her will to cover his escape. He wondered when, if ever, he would have worked off that debt. But there was no going back. Like the man said - living is struggling - she would just have to get to like it …

Written in 1977, this is the original unpublished short story which was used as the starting point for 'Last Shuttle to Planet Earth'.

Published by Golden Apple, Wallasey.

The Free Fishers

The Last Shuttle from Earth’s first and only satellite city was searching for a landfall. Harry Elliman reckoned he had fuel and spares to keep her moving for one more circuit of the blue-whorled planet, when he brought her down between low dunes on the Dee estuary.

He made all fast. It was dusk. No light showed. They could have been anywhere flat and desolate with a glimmer of water and a blur of distant hills. He cranked open a direct vision port. Barbara Maynell, his hostage to fortune, shivered delicately in the damp, salt air.

“Must you do that?”

“Not if you don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it.”

She still had a sizeable chip on her shoulder. But it was understandable. He had taken her from the satellite against her will to cover his escape. He wondered when, if ever, he would have worked off that debt. But there was no going back. Like the man said - living is struggling - she would just have to get to like it …

Barbara Maynell threw a long shadow. Her feet were still tender enough to feel every ripple ridge left by the ebb tides, but she did not stop to slip on the white sandals she carried looped to her shoulder pack. Even after the trauma of the last months, she was open as a flower to new experience and walking barefoot on a seashore that went on for ever was still new enough. In her sling bag, she had an assortment of shell fish and a couple of fantastically veined pebbles, which she wanted an opinion on. Harry Elliman might be the King Rat of all time, but he was a well-informed rat. He was also the only person she was ever likely to meet who would know what it had been like to live on the satellite, Wirral City.

She was walking back to the line of low dunes which concealed the battered space shuttle Winkler Three. She turned for a last look over the estuary and stood erect, facing a low sun which plated the shallow sea and the immense sands with instant gold leaf. It was so spectacular and so amazing that she wanted to cheer for being alive and being there present to see it.

A cool cats-paw ruffled her hair. It was time to go. As she turned smartly on her heel, she saw the dark squares of a net, black against gold. Then it fell with a heavy, dank weight over her head and shoulders. She struggled to get her hands to the belt of her white coveralls. It was not possible. In any case, she remembered, too late, that she had ignored Elliman’s advice that whenever they moved away from the shuttle they should carry a blaster. It was irritating to know that he was right yet again …

Any further speculation cut off abruptly. She heard the thud of a blunt club striking into the thick pad of dark hair at the back of her head. Jagged light seared every-which-way. She fell forward on the sand, under the net, arms outspread. She did not hear a guttural voice, full of honest praise, say, “Well done, Ginger. You done it fair an’ square. Right on the button. I only ’ope you aint bin a shade too ’andy with that shillelagh. If you’ve done for ’er, you’ll lave to answer to the Fisher. ’E’s not goin’ to take it well and that’s a fact, if you’ve killed off a prime female.”

Ginger had a supporter. A querulous, whining voice said, “Don’t get at the lad, Danny. ’E’s a good lad. Ginger is. Quick. ’E was up with ’is jack in a flash. What now, Danny?”

There were three. Danny was the top hand. Squat, toad-like, standing splay footed, he looked at the prone figure.

“What now? We take ’er back. What else. Fingers?”

Fingers brushed his forehead nervously with the back of a seven fingered hand. He was old and uncertain, tall and thin to the point of emaciation with a white face that never took a tan in spite of his outdoor life. He mumbled, “We don’t ’ave no quota …”

“Quota? Quota! Do you think the Fisher is going to give a beat turd for any quota, when ’e sees this one? It’ll set us all up in the ’all of fame. Careful now, Ginger. I’ll shift the net easy like. It she does anything nasty, you be ready with that jack. Then pick ’er up and lay ’er over your shoulder like she was a roll of sail.”

Ginger the chore horse of the outfit, short on brain in his small round head, but muscled like a gorilla, bent patiently to his task. When he straightened up, Barbara Maynell, onetime golden girl of the ultimate condominium hung over his massive shoulder like a rag doll. Her fingers brushed the back of his knees, her hair fell in a blue-black rope as though a freak of evolution had given him a lustrous tail. The net was rolled and lifted onto his spare shoulder - “For balance.” - as Danny said. The trio moved off warily to the creek where their cutter lay concealed.

Back at the shuttle, Harry Elliman completed the check he had been running on the auxiliary power pack. Over the months, he was building a rivet by rivet familiarity with Winkler Three. As a trained technician, he had a head start. Added to that, his years as a random reader in the library silo of the satellite had given him a theoretical neck lock on the technology of space craft. He could have built the ship from a blue print. If there had been one and if there had been a workshop left anywhere on Earth’s devastated shores.

He recognised, soberly, that time was running out. Fuel was nudging the bottom fifth. For atmosphere flight, that was hardly enough to take her round the planet. Any chance of getting back to the satellite was long gone, unless he could find some cache of special fuel that had survived the destructive mayhem of the twenty first century. Even then, the ship was showing her age. Small failures were becoming more common. There were no spares. Any day, they could be grounded for good and all.

He checked his time disk and recognised that he had done it several times over the last quarter hour. It added up to a growing sense of worry. Barbara had been away longer than usual. It would soon be dusk. He heaved himself aboard the shuttle and took his service belt from the rack above the pilot squab. Her belt, rolled around the holster and blaster was still there. She had not gone armed. She still had no sense of personal danger in spite of the experiences of the last twelve months. She still carried an aura of privileged status. It was still evident in the positive, self-regarding voice of one whose place in the social fabric was ensured by divine right.

Elliman was half way out of the hatch, when the nudge of reason told him it would be a whole lot smarter to let advanced technology do some of the legwork. He leaned over the rear of the bucket seat and made a long arm to shove down switches on the console. An antenna crept from the stub above the cone and rose slowly to twenty metres. Its tip opened like a flower in time lapse. A picture of the estuary beyond the dunce appeared on the main scanner.

Even in black and white, it was a fine, Turneresqe spectacle. There was, however, no sign of the girl. He panned across the horizon. A couple of white seabirds doing a crash lift off caught his eye. He went for magnification. The top section of a rough mast was moving along in a narrow channel between sandbanks. As he watched, the triangular corner of a dung hued sail was heaved aloft.

So there was a deep cutting and a boat was moving out along it. Back tracking, he hit a point in the bank where scuffed sand marked what could be the embarkation point. He spun a knurled wheel for maximum magnification, passed the omega point to an eyeful of distortion and worked forward until he had it hard-edged and clear. There were three sets of prints. One set was deeply cut. Big feet. A man carrying a load?

Tracking farther in, he picked up another area of confusion. It was a meeting point. A faint set of neat, barefoot prints came in from one direction. Three sets angled in for the RV. At the knot of meeting there was a well defined oblong of disturbed sand. Three tracks only went forward. It was an open and shut case. Barbara had been stalked and taken. Experience made him cautious. If he stormed up in the shuttle, the gang would, as like as not, stick a knife in the girl and drop her over the side. On the other hand, if he delayed, they could reach base and there would be the problem of springing her from some kind of fortified camp.

The balance of advantage lay with an early strike. He shoved down the lever to fire the main motors. Every dial on the spread stayed on zero and the priming charge faltered to an apologetic cough. It was the first time Winkler Three had refused to answer. His mind raced coldly over the angles. Without the ship, he had no chance. He was one man. He could not guard his back. Even with the fire power of a blaster, he was vulnerable to any youth with a stone in a sling. The warring groups, left picking over the remnants on Midden Earth were vicious. Those found fittest to survive the self induced holocaust, were the most violent of a violent race.

A single, red telltale had winked in on the damage report cluster. The robot fault finder was doing its best. The breakdown was located in the clutter of multicore leads which ran from the auxiliary motors. In servicing that area, he had shifted them aside. The old cable was brittle and liable to crack. Something had gone dis. It could take an hour or a week to sort it out.

While the decision making sector of his brain sifted through the options, he used the scanner again. He saw the mast lengthen as the cutting ran shallow to meet the open sea. An ancient ship’s boat, off-white, with a crazy pattern of raw wood patches clamped to her carvel hull appeared in the widening channel. With magnification at the top, he could pick out an arm in a white coverall lying limp along the transom. For the rest, there were three men. A comedy trio. One lanky oldster. One muscle man, bare to the waist, with an upstanding quiff of wiry hair set on a small, round head like a handle on a pot. One squat toadshape, standing in the bow and conning the ship through the banks and shoals of the shallows.

They were making up the coast towards the tip of the Peninsula. But from the knowledge he had of the groups which divided up the territory between them, he could not even guess at their home base. Survival clans had formed from the ruins of the old multinationals which had once dominated the political scene in the Western Federation of Cantons. G.E.F.Y had territory which ran down to the sea. But the Good-Eating-For-You clan was as shy as a pygmy tribe. They were not known to make sea-borne forays in search of food. They had their own methods of keep the stock pot at a bubble. Ritual cannibalism was one.

Go-Go-Motors had no sea frontage. D.P. - the Duralumin Plexiglas conglomerate was the largest clan. But It was a spit and polish outfit. It was not into raiding the coast with antiquated ship’s boats. The robotic enclave, Mechanicals Inc. had been sorted out in the confrontation that had left him for dead. The only remaining group was the Adhesives Felt and Ceramics empire. But they had had developed a self-sufficient unit in the high raise glasshouse that had served as the northern headquarters for the company. Using the materials they knew, they had gone for hydroponics and a no growth population curve.

Scrawled on the counter of the old lifeboat was the legend ‘Free Fishers’. Maybe it was a jokey reference to the crew? On the other hand, it stirred a piece of recall. Harry Elliman had a mind which absorbed information and filed it away. He remembered having been told, in the early, traumatic days of their arrival, that some small groups lived offshore on drill platforms. One such was the Free Fishers. So Barbara was off to another piece of artificial real estate.

Elliman watched the cutter out of sight. Her course was right for a location in the mouth of the Mersey estuary. He could only let her go and concentrate on repairing the ship. Cursing in a monotone, he swung out from the hatch and shifted the sections of cladding which he had just fixed. He worked for a good hour and had to run out an inspection lamp on a roving lead. When he located the dis, it was totally dark.

There was no moon. Out at sea, a breeze wrinkled and slid over the shallow waters. It was still a pleasure to feel the movement of real air and sense the vast distances around him. But the Pleasure was overweighed by concern for Barbara. He raced through the lift off drills. The motor delivered with a banshee howl. Winkler Three rose from the dunes in a flurry of sand and small trash. The sea showed as a pallor against the darkness of the land. Not a light showed. People in the small enclaves were cautious. It was still good sense to darken windows before the lamps were lit.

He crossed the sand spit and made out to sea at zero height with the hydraulic jacks retracted and the water moving barely half a metre below the transparent floor of the command cabin. Winkler Three ghosted at minimum thrust over a glass calm. He dropped her into the sea. Compressed air from a directional fishtail put her under way at a gentle three knots. She crawled over the water like a grey sea slug. Micro grooving on the hull made her difficult to see in daytime. In this light, she was no more than a faint shadow. He rounded the point into Liverpool Bay with the sonar bouncing ahead to give him a picture on the main scanner.

Out in the approaches, he could pick out three lights. Open gas flares burned from a cluster of three gaunt rigs. It figured. A community could make it viable. Food from the sea. Heat and light on tap. Shelter in the living quarters. Security against sudden attack. Closer in, he could see that there was a pool of light around each rig. That was good and bad. Looking out from behind the light, they would not see him approach. But in the end, he would have to cross that lighted strip.

Using the periscope, he checked out the nearest rig. It was marked with a huge figure three in red rust. There was no sign of life. No boats were tied below in the shelter of the towering legs. He circled out to the second. This was in better shape, Labelled HQ, it had been the command unit of the operating company. The ragged cutter was there. She had taken a long time to beat back to base. She was tied up to a pontoon which was moored between two piers in such a way that it could freely rise and tall with the tide. In the light of the flares, Elliman saw the big pinhead pick Barbara from the sternsheets. She was now tied ankles and wrists and could only manage a salmon-like flip as she was hoisted to his shoulder. One hand clamping her in place, Ginger went up the long companion with the practised ease of a matelot in the piping days of sail.

After the first kick of protest, Barbara Maynell reckoned that it was only good sense to lie still. Balanced on a sweaty shoulder and staring down the side of the rig in the flickering light of the flares, she could see that if she jerked free, she would either drown or break her neck. She was thrown back on the old gag that the most helpful words in any language are wait and hope.

Neither one wan an easy option. Ginger ducked through a hatch and a rusty lintel scraped her buttocks. Inside, there was a stench compounded of fish heads, gas and the refuse of communal living which was enough to numb the five wits. Ginger ploughed on up two further flights of internal stairway. Finally, he reached a middle deck which was sealed off from the weather in the streets. It was set out like a long house in a forest clearing. Over the years, a succession of scavengers had stripped out all the original fittings. The Free Fishers had built on a virgin site, improvising with driftwood and flotsam. Old buoyancy rafts with cork hand grips served an seats and divans. Canvas dodgers divided the space into family territories.

The room was a long oblong. It had once been the recreation centre for the crews of the cluster of rigs. Now it was a village of degenerates. Ginger stalked down the centre where there was a fairly clear aisle. On either side, the alcoves were open. Privacy was not encouraged. A large bore gas pipe had been run along the bulkhead at the back of the alcoves. From this, supply pipes led to heated grids for barbecue type cooking and fishtail jets for a raw, blue light. Overall, a blue-green glow gave a corpse pallor to the gaunt faces of the villagers. To Barbara Maynell’s upside down view, it was an ascent into hell.

Ginger marched to the top end. The top man had a treble area alcove which crossed the width. There was a black leather armchair whitened by sea salt, a large bed with green canvas side curtains, a rack of knives, axes and whips - all the tokens of wealth and power. He dropped Barbara on her feet and turned her to face the end of the room. A dark mass that could have been a giant squid skulking in the corner of a tank dragged itself into the light and was resolved as human in a general sense. It was the Fisher in person.

Work in the alcoves stopped. It was not every day that a foraging party brought in such a piece of white fish. There was no move to crowd The Fisher at his high table, but the centre aisle was lined with avid faces as they leaned out to watch the action. Barbara could not see them, but she could feel the electric tension of the crowd at her back. Her own attention was split two ways. She was trying to make visual sense of the figure up ahead and she was trying to keep her balance. Ginger stabilised her by grabbing a handful of hair.

Danny and Fingers fell in one at either side. Danny put on a wheedling tone as he said, “’re’s a thing now, Fisher. Brought ’er straight back, knowin’ ’ow you’d value a thing like this. Picked ’er up walkin’ on the shore Neston way. Plump tan fresh as a trout.”

The Fisher shambled forward into the light. To Barbara Maynell’s eye, sick and dizzy as she was, he refused to gell into a recognisable shape. The Fisher had a huge, bloated trunk on which was balanced a nodding bladder of a head. Legs and arms were ridiculous stumps. He was a Humpty Dumpty figure, but not genial with it. This was no grinning, nursery rhyme egg. He had never grown to like the way he was. Anything half way normal was a standing reproach to him. It was no accident that the clan gathered in the long house was a collection of deviants. Any normal child was thrown into the sea by his order. He was High Priest of Deviation. He qualified for the top slot by a towering talent for sadistic evil, allied to the will and power to carry it out on a scale that commanded respect. The voice that wheezed from the shapeless bundle of ragged cloth was falsetto.

“Let me see.”

It was the scrape of thin gut more than a voice, but it triggered action. Danny growled, “Hold the bitch still.” At the same time, he drew a broad bladed seaman’s knife and she felt the cold steel at the nape of her neck. The astringent contact cleared her head. She had her pride. If it was the end of the road, she would not give anybody the satisfaction of seeing her cringe.

But the cutting edge was away from the skin. Danny sliced down the back of her coverall as though filleting a fish. Leaving a livid pressure mark on her skin, he worked down through every layer of fabric and finally sheared the thongs. Fingers peeled away the packaging. She emerged in the gaslight like a pale kernel cleared of its husk.

The Maynell skin was fine grained and without a flaw. Body type was sturdy but elegant, a recognisable Venus in the European tradition. There was a hiss of indrawn breath from the gallery. Nothing like it had been seen in living memory. But it was not popular. It set impossible standards. The Fisher was doing no more than expressing the voice of the people, when he said. “You have done well. Here is powerful magic. Hang her like a flying bird. She shall die by the dawn tide.”

Elliman drifted. He was outside the circle of light. The wine dark sea moved with a small, sullen swell. He could hear it slap and withdraw from the rusting piers of the rigs. Barbara was in full view. Naked as a needle and tied to a jagged upthrust girder of slotted angle. Her feet, which were pointed down in a manner which touched him to the heart, were half a metre from the water. The level was rising. At the high point of the swell, the gap between her neat toes and the shifting sea was closed to a handbreadth. She was tied by rough sinnet, wrists crossed overhead. Gradual immersion in the rising tide might well kill her from loss of body heat before the water finally closed over her mouth.

He had a dilemma. It he moved too soon, they would have time to kill her. If he held out for an underwater bid, he might cut her free before he was seen, but then it would be too late. Looking more closely, he could see that she had already suffered. There was a line of dried blood from sternum to crotch. Whip lash marks crisscrossed her shoulders. Her head was hanging forward and her hair fell straight down, hiding her face behind a dark curtain. She was still as a stone. A red tide of anger flooded through his head. When he could see again, it was no longer a matter of setting her free, it was a matter of destroying the silent assembly of watchers on the rig platform.

He took Winkler Three back from the edge of the circle of light. Carefully, he manoeuvred round to approach the third rig. It was numbered with a massive figure two. Like number three it was unused. Spindly walkways like bamboo bridges ran out to connect the outlying rigs to the centre. All hands were on the landward side of the HQ rig where the girl was meeting her cold destiny. He came in from the sea and moored to a pontoon at the rear of Number Two.

When he climbed to the platform, he reckoned soberly that it was made to order. It was the salvage dump of the outfit. It was a store of sea wrack. There was timber, oil drums, cordage, canvas-white with sea salt, broken furniture, bales of cotton waste.

He worked fast. Searching out dry timber, he buried two signal flares on two minute fuses. Winkler Three was sidling up to the pontoon on Number Three rig when the first visible tongues of flame licked out through the ports.

For a count of ten, it went unnoticed. Attention was all one way on the pale figure of Andromeda on her stake. Then the furnace heat reached an oil barrel and it passed its flash point with a thump that shook the old rig to its foundations. Crimson flares jetted from every rusting gap. It was a winner. It was a display that could even challenge the appeal of sadism. There was a rush of feet to the rear of the main rig. Elliman, hung around with spare flares and two blasters on their lanyards went up the companion like a cat and out along the swaying walkway to the centre rig.

Number Two rig burned like a torch. The heat was tangible even across seventy five metres of open sea. There was no question of anyone turning around. They knew, anyway, that there was a time lag before the victim’s last agonies were on schedule. Elliman reckoned he could have gone in beating a tambourine. He met one lopsided mutant who had been in a drunken sleep and was still sorting out what was o’clock. It could have been an object lesson in the dangers of alcohol. Elliman picked him up by throat and crotch and pitched him over the rail for a long drop. The splash was lost in the furnace roar.

Barbara Maynell had surfaced from her cloud of unknowing and wished that she had stayed deeply inside it. Salt spray on her scourged skin bit like acid. Arms ached beyond all previous imagination of pain. She was cold, shocked out of her mind, beaten down from her high pedestal of personal worth. She had finally been brought to scream and plead. She had grovelled in front of her torturers. She had known that there was nothing at all, on the far shores of depravity that she would not have done to bring an end to the ordeal. She had been taken to the outer limit of self loathing and was still alive to carry a record of it in the holographic web of memory.

Tears ran down her stiff cheeks and fell like pellets on her cold breasts. Water surged sluggishly over her thighs. Realization came of where she was at in her personal odyssey. In a way, it was welcome - if it could only be quick. The aseptic, the wine dark sea, could wash over her, end her pain, scour out the memory of the obscene rituals of the Free Fishers.

Elliman swung himself out to the girder on a thick cable hooked on the underside of the platform. He got a foothold in the slotted angle and climbed down to reach her. As he passed her head, on his way to the holdfast at her feet, he said, “What is a Grade A Citizen doing in a place like this, then?”

The pebble stare he got, told him that she was fresh out of repartee. There was also something else in her eyes. It was abject fear. It seemed to her that she was to be denied the kindness of oblivion and heaved back up top for a further session of torment. Even when he was recognised, it was not too clear that he was welcome. She mumbled through swollen lips, “Leave me … leave me ... I want to die.”

Elliman was back level with her head. He reached up and severed the cord at her wrists. She tried to throw herself away from him into the sea, but her body could not answer her signals. He heaved her over his shoulder and swung back to the ladder. There was too much to do to give time for full consultation. He put an edge on his voice and said, “Keep still or sure as hell I’ll thump you.”

Harshness was, in fact, all that would work. If he had said anything of a kindly nature, she would have been away. As it was, she went limp as pasta. She was still conditioned to obey. At main deck level, he set her on her feet. She crumpled. It was no good. He would have to carry her. He paused to pitch two flares into the long house, then he was away for the spidery catwalk.

There was still twenty metres to go for the platform of Number Three rig when the howl went up. A cherub faced Free Fisher, who had decided that he preferred to see a girl drown than watch a bonfire had limped back to the observation deck. When he saw that she had gone, he checked around for the reason. Elliman and his bundle were silhouetted against the sky. A shrill scream of disappointment alerted the Free Fisher himself.

At the same time, the flares found fuel in the house. All the fat soaked soft furnishings burst into instant flame. Two women who had been incensed by Barbara Maynell’s simple perfection, grabbed axes and went to work on the end of the catwalk. They had it sheared away as Elliman grabbed a stanchion and heaved himself off at the far end. Arrows and a well thrown harpoon rattled against the corroded cladding as he transferred to the ladder and dropped to the deck-head of Winkler Three.

The long catwalk fell away and thrashed into the sea.

The Fisher, insane with rage, lay about him with the seven thronged whip which he had used on Barbara Maynell. He knew the work there would be in straining fresh cables over the gap. He also saw that there would be no way to catch the intruder with a sail craft. But he reckoned he still had an ace up his sleeve. There was one diesel launch kept for emergency use. She was the last mechanically powered vessel in the estuary. He called for her to be swung out on her davits. There was a scatter of all who could be spared from the fire-fighting chore. She was the pride of the village, painted yellow overall, with her name in a scroll on the counter. The Royal Iris.

Harry Elliman dumped his burden on the co-pilot squab in the command cabin of the old space shuttle and raced back to the platform of Number Three rig.

There was enough combustible junk lying about to make it burn. When he returned, Barbara had not moved. She was staring fixedly ahead through the forward direct vision port. The Royal Iris was already pulling away from HQ with the Fisher himself at the helm. He was out and away beyond all rational thought. His aim was to plough right through the shuttle and take the launch down with her, if that was to be the way of it. The old launch was powered by twin diesels that shook every last rivet of her ancient hull as he shoved down the lever for full thrust. A white wave boiled at the bow. She lifted her foot and hurled herself across the narrow strait.

Elliman swung to face her and watched her cold eyed. He knew to a split second what to expect from Winkler Three. When he went for a crash lift off, there was barely a handsbreadth between the landing skids of the shuttle and the deckhead of the bridge of the storming launch. An incandescent fireball from the howling rocket motors played over the superstructure of The Royal Iris like St. Elmo’s fire. Winkler Three clawed off into a night sky lit by lurid flame. The three rigs were torches burning down to the sea. Nothing could live on any one. The launch was a funeral pyre, a ship of death. The community of the Free Fishers had lost its gradient and ground to a dead stop.

Elliman cruised along the coastline of the peninsula to a small island. He set the shuttle down inside the ruined shell of an old meteorology centre. To the north, there was an arc of blood red on the horizon where the fires still burned. He turned to Barbara Maynell to see how she was making out with her unexpected bonus of living time.

She was asleep. Slumped against the broad holding straps, she had opted out. He thumped the release stud, lifted her, carried her through to the passenger module which she had claimed as her own place. Patient and gentle, he was all of two hours cleaning her up and fixing her cut skin with patent sutures from the medikit. Her mind was out of reach of therapy, but he reckoned that sleep was the best ally he had. For good measure, he took a hypo gun and shot in a full phial of the standard tranquilliser used on the satellite to counter every mental ill.

Before she woke up, he would change the scene, make her ready to believe that the nightmare was something from another place and another time. He had once seen a travelogue tape about flamingos on Lake Nakuru. He reckoned that two million pink birds all standing on one leg ought to take a shocked girl out of herself. He settled himself at the pilot desk and began to feed instructions to the flight computer.

Winkler Three rose in a flurry of sand and small trash, hovered, turned slowly until her blunt nose cone came round to the course line designated by the computer. There was a pause, as though she was mulling over the information and making up her mind. Then she arrowed away for the warm south. Elliman felt tiredness drain his last fraction of free will. He tipped back the squab, his eyes closed, he slept.

The shuttle fled on from darkness into broad daylight across the turning world.