Skyport, page 19
But the key did not fit the keyhole. Startled, Kettner looked at the apartment number. It had not changed. In quiet anger he rang the bell. As the chimes struck their silvery scale, he heard the sound of a chain being removed from its catch. Then the door opened and Angela stood in the frame, dressed only in a smock that reached the middle of her thighs. Her hair was disheveled and she looked as if she had just awakened.
“Come in,” she said, pushing her hair back with a graceful, impatient gesture. She walked ahead of him, her long legs bare, her hips swinging, her feet encased in transparent, high-heeled slippers.
The small lobby was empty but for the Klee which hung, now by itself, on the wall. There was a smell of wrapping paper and moth disinfectant. The living room was filled with packing cases.
Kettner stopped, furious at this evidence of her rebellion.
“What’s this?” he asked, throwing his soft hat on a chair. “Moving out again?”
Angela sank deeply into a couch and picked up a cigarette.
“I’m tired of being company property,” she replied, keeping her eyes fixed on him, a slight equivocal smile on her lips.
Kettner sat down. He chose a small straight-backed chair, which he placed near her. He realized that he was tired of fighting.
“Where are you going to live?” he asked flatly.
“In Paris for a while. Then I think I’ll take a small house on the Italian Riviera. I’ve always wanted to live there.” Her large eyes reflected calculation and judgment, as if her thoughts were entirely different from her words.
“One of your moods.” Kettner spoke slowly, fearful of arousing further irritation. He took the small jeweler’s package from his pocket, then decided against it and hid it in his hand.
“Perhaps,” Angela conceded, tilting her head. The expression in her eyes shocked Kettner. It was cold and despising.
“What happened?” he begged.
“Nothing special. I’ve just had enough. A good reason, isn’t it?” She got up in her sliding naked walk, closed her robe with one hand, and picked up his hat with the other. Wordlessly, she held it out to him.
“This is not a way to say good-by,” Kettner said, suddenly becoming frightened. “I need a little more clarification, don’t you think, after all those years?”
“I left the Klee for you—you always liked it,” Angela said, unmoved. “Take it with you.”
Kettner got to his feet and took a step toward her. As he lifted his hands toward her shoulders, she stepped back.
“Listen,” she said, “keep away! Isn’t that clear?”
“It is,” Kettner said. “I’ve lived through your moods many times and taken them with grace. But I think even moods should have their limits.”
“I’m just tired of an old man like you.” Her words hit him like a whip. “Tired of pretending, tired of being shut up in a back street, and tired of your fear of being seen with me, tired of catering to your whims,N tired of your mind, which is sick with suspicions, envies, and hatreds. I’m through, that’s all. Now have I made myself clear?”
Numbly Kettner stared at her. Never since he had known her had she talked to him this way.
“Are you sure you know what you’re saying? I must have hurt you somehow. Listen, Angela!” He took another small step toward her, only to see her withdraw. For a moment he closed his eyes.
“I must not lose her,” he said frantically to himself, shocked by a decision he had not expected in her, a decision which must have matured in her mind for a long time without his knowledge. “A few harsh words can’t end our relationship, Angela. I need you.”
Her expression of abhorrence and loathing did not change.
“I want to marry you,” he said finally. “Though I’m older than you, my position might make up for that. I know I can be happy with you. That’s what I came for tonight—to ask you to marry me.”
“You’re a few hours too late,” Angela said and called out, “Guy, come in!”
The bedroom door was thrown open and Kettner saw Storm standing in the doorway, wearing his, Kettner’s, dressing gown.
“Meet my husband,” Angela said, her voice even.
Slowly Kettner bent down and picked up the hat which she had dropped. When he righted himself he had his features under control.
“Congratulations, Storm,” he said with ease. “Keep the dressing gown as a wedding present from me. It fits you.”
Storm walked across the room and opened the door to the small entrance. Kettner saw the same cold, despising look in Storm’s face which had shocked him in Angela’s.
“Thank you. I’m sure to find my way out. I used to find it in the dark.”
As Kettner passed the Klee picture, he looked at the childish contours and pale colors, which conveyed a world he had sought but never entered. Lifting the painting from its hook, he studied it, his mouth dry, his jaw slack. Carefully he hung it back in place.
As he opened the door leading to the stairs, he met a waiter bearing a big silver tray with a domed cover.
“They’re waiting,” Kettner said, stepping aside to let the man pass. “They’re hungry.”
As he walked down the back alley, sweat ran down his cheeks and he clenched his teeth in a sudden chill.
“I’ve lost her,” he told himself. “I’ve lost Margret’s image. If Monica had died …” Terror gripped him at the thought. “If she too leaves me, I’ll have lost the last reminder of Margret on earth.”
24
The susurrus of small motors, the low mutter of high frequency generators, vibrated the flower-scented air in the control room at Project Sky. Lee looked into space through the transparent Rylane walls. The Sky Wharton was finished.
He watched the five Lancets tow the huge wheel of the hotel, and the two cargo ferries pull the observatory and the space mirror, like ants carrying away giant caterpillars. The eight sentinels, the moons trailing long cables, traveled under their own power, shooting off streams of ions from reactors which looked like blunderbusses. They swayed and turned their multicolored surfaces, correcting their rotation with jet-couples which acted like a steering apparatus.
Project Sky had been completed at 22,500 miles altitude, where the orbital period comprised a full day and night. Now, Sky Wharton was on its journey to a calculated height of 1,075 miles above the earth. At that distance it would revolve around the globe every two hours.
Lee sat behind Harrison’s desk, his hands in his lap. He felt like a runner after a long, arduous sprint, whose blood still speeds through his veins, though, through exhaustion, he has lost the will to move. Harrison walked up to Lee, pushing his red baseball cap onto his forehead.
“Harbor bound, aren’t we, Doctor?”
“Yes. It was quite a trip,” Lee said. “I’m running empty. Having nothing to do but wait is a waste of time and life.” Impatiently he got up and walked past the row of violet-clad operators who watched the multitudinous instrument dials.
“Air pressure one-point-two,” a young engineer at his elbow chanted. “Close air vents.”
“Lowering air pressure to one-point-zero,” a voice whispered from a tiny loud-speaker grill.
“One-point-zero,” the engineer acknowledged, tense and concentrated. “Okay, keep it there.”
Harrison checked the dials over the operator’s shoulder and turned to Lee.
“We should arrive at our destination in about an hour. You’d better change into your evening clothes, Doctor.
You’re the welcoming committee, and you’ll have to glad-hand the passengers and pose for photographs. And if I know Kettner, he’ll have ferries shooting at us from all sides, pouring travelers into the hotel and filling up the hospital with patients. Remember how he insisted upon having an operating room up here? I bet the medics are already sharpening their scalpels. Headline: ‘First operation performed ten minutes after opening of Sky Wharton.’ ” He laughed, but his face froze as Lee walked past him without response to his gay mood.
Lee entered the long spoke of the wheel which led to the hospital wing and to his office. He slipped into a pair of thin magnetic shoes which held him tightly to the floor. As the gravity diminished, his blood started to flow more easily through his veins.
In a room behind transparent doors a group of nurses and young doctors sat around a table which was fastened to the round ceiling by aluminum strips. The nurses were dressed in fetching coveralls Sven had designed. They looked as gay as chorus girls in a Broadway musical. But they had not completely accustomed themselves to the vagaries of the lack of gravity despite their months of training. They laughed and joked, squeezing liquids out of plastic containers into their mouths. A squirt got astray and the girls chased the elusive globes, which slowly sank to the table and floor, rolling about like marbles.
Half-floating, half-walking, Louis Derret entered the corridor from a side door, setting down his magnetic shoes with caution.
“I finally caught up with you,” he said accusingly. He grinned as he bobbed up like a cork in water. “Up here nobody needs to diet because nobody weighs anything. Say-why are you evading me?”
“I let you come up here before the other journalists, didn’t I?” Lee replied curtly, with preoccupation.
“I appreciate that,” Derret said, surprised at Lee’s harshness. “But I’m not interested in writing copy about Sky Wharton. This I leave up to the boys. Something is eating you, Lee. What is it? I haven’t seen you smile in months.”
They had reached the hospital wing. Small compartments opened toward the view. Beds hung from the ceiling. The walls, painted in pastel colors, blended with the violet darkness of the limitless depth. A battery of colored buttons at the head of each bed controlled the oxygen intake, the light filtration, the television screen and radio. Other buttons activated voices reading from the holy books of every denomination in every living language; signaled for nurses, messengers, or waiters; plunged the room into darkness; tilted the bed, or turned it in the opposite direction to face the long corridor; or piped music into the room. Any telephone on earth could be dialed directly from a patient’s bed.
Lee watched the electricians test the intricate switchboard, which relayed the electric impulses from the hospital rooms.
‘“I’ll need you, Louis,” he said finally, without looking at the journalist. “You’re going to cover a very important event. I wouldn’t trust anybody else but you to write it up properly.”
He fell silent, his lips closed tightly and his eyes cold and deliberate.
Derret was disturbed by the withered, grim lines in Lee’s face.
“And what is this event?” he asked.
Suddenly Lee made a peculiar move. To Derret’s consternation, he kicked off his magnetic shoes and floated hurriedly away down the corridor, where he reached the floor as the gravitation increased. Then he walked away without looking back.
25
“Flight eighteen. Skylark from Bombay landing at Sentinel Seven,” the voice said conversationally from hidden loudspeakers in Sky Wharton’s vestibule. It was a silky voice, soothing and feminine. “Flight to Hong Kong leaving from Sentinel One in fifteen minutes. Duration of the flight eighteen minutes. The air-taxi for Sentinel One will be at Gate One. All aboard, please. Passengers to San Francisco, please be ready for departure. Skylark will leave from Sentinel Eight in thirty minutes. Duration of flight to San Francisco twenty-one minutes.”
The voice whispered on, gathering names of cities and countries, bunching them together like flowers, wrapping the globe into a tight bouquet of arrivals and departures. Voices murmured in other languages, dispatching the same information in French, English, Spanish, and the language of the particular ferry’s destination.
Guides in tight rose-colored coveralls were taking visitors through the hotel part of Sky Wharton, but were keeping them out of the antigravity wings.
The giant wheel turned slowly on its axis, generating the one g of the earth. It was crowded with tourists talking with the varied voices of the Babylonian tower. Through the Rylane windows they could look down at the earth which they had left only minutes before.
Laying out its body generously, the earth turned in subdued colors, the sharply defined continents kaleidoscopically passing; oceans alternating with masses of land formed a gigantic relief map which turned up the same face every two hours. The visitors saw night enwrap the western Hemisphere by quickly spreading over Europe, invading the Americas, and veiling the oceanic islands. The day broke in sharp cleavage, the sun-drenched half swallowing the night, brilliantly reflecting light from the waste plains of Siberia, the Gobi Desert, the sandy expanses of northern Africa. The visitors watched storms gather, whirling hurricanes and tornadoes, ragged patches of destruction moving in screwlike contortions over the Atlantic or the Middle West.
Sky ferries, painted brilliantly in red, green and yellow, dove out of the earth’s haze. They seemed to be propelled by magic, for their exhausts did not register in the airless space.
The tourists walked through Sky Wharton in awe and wonder. They inhaled the scented air, marveled at the softness of the deep, fluffy carpeting, the gossamer transparency of the ceiling, the smooth shininess of the Rylane walls. They wondered about the hotel’s stability and expressed surprise that they felt none of the insecurity they had secretly expected and feared.
It was quiet in Sky Wharton as the chattering throng passed through. Voices and sounds were swallowed up, for Sven had achieved a complete absence of echo.
At the end of the corridor beyond which they were forbidden to go, they admired his replica of the galaxies suspended in antigravity, semi-precious stones reflecting lights from hidden sources. They looked through a transparent wall into the hub of the wheel, and watched mechanics floating about weightlessly, men in yellow coveralls servicing a luminous wall of lights. It was the central computer, the pulsing heart of the intricate satellite.
The visitors sat in the television theater and watched, on a large screen, the land over which they moved. Electric telescopes brought the views so close they felt they could almost touch the rushing people in New York City or the sharp horns of the bulls in the Argentine pampas. For a fleeting moment they glimpsed a gathering of pilgrims in front of the Vatican, and surveyed a flower festival in Japan. A lonely radar station on the south pole stuck its antennae into the television theater. A few minutes later they saw fish jumping out of the Indian Ocean and small boats pulling them in with square nets.
They entered the dining room to taste new dishes prepared from algae after Dr. Baumgardt’s recipes. They stared and marveled and postponed their departure, to drink in more of the wonders of which they had read so much but which surpassed their most extravagant expectations.
Kettner arrived in a Lancet A-4, a luxury ship built especially for him. He brought McDougal, the head of the Federal Space Agency, and Dr. LaVerne; Monica was not with him. Still under the psychiatrist’s supervision, she had decided to stay behind with Sven. Sven had also refused to accompany Kettner, having sworn never to leave firm ground again. Dressed in his flowery Turkish robe, he watched the opening in front of the television screen with Monica. His job completed, Sven had no more interest in the project. A new project, to build a city in the middle of the Sahara Desert, now occupied his mind.
Tortured by her memories, Monica shut off the set when her father appeared with his entourage.
It was the last time Monica saw him alive.
Kettner walked through the vestibule, smiling at the television cameras which broadcast the moment of his triumph. He harvested compliments, accepted congratulations as a matter of course, and all with the modesty of a commanding general who was never in doubt about his victory. He shook hands with government officials and exchanged amenities with people he had never seen before.
But Lee was not present to receive him. Kettner felt an anger which mixed uncomfortably with this moment of triumph. However, Lee had been strange and uncommunicative since the day of the disaster, and Kettner was certain that his employee suffered from shock.
A page stepped up and handed him a note, a yellow envelope which he recognized, since he wrote his own messages on similar paper.
“From the desk of Lee F. Powers,” was printed in the left-hand corner, and in handwriting: “Will you please see me at my office at the hotel.” The message was signed “L.P.”!
Slowly Kettner folded the note and hid it in his pocket. It had been Powers’ duty to wait for him on his arrival. Or, in case of an emergency, to contact him by radio-telephone. Kettner had been as close to Lee as the nearest telephone receiver, and so Lee’s action smacked of disrespect and insubordination.
“Powers has outlived his usefulness,” Kettner silently concluded. “People are born with a store of energy. When that store is exhausted, one has to get new ones, young ones, people with drive and enthusiasm. Powers has drained his energies; so have Tomlinson, Lester, Low, Ives—”
Names flashed through his mind, and he discarded them, throwing them away, putting them out of his life. “A purge is essential—new blood will bring new ideas. I must surround myself with youth.” So his thoughts ran while he talked to the British ambassador and two tall Indians in colorful puggrees. A score of photographers trailed him, and television announcers trained their portable camera on him and spoke into minute telephones. Kettner smiled, knowing that his face was appearing on hundreds of millions of television screens in homes, on ships, in planes, in cars, and in theaters all over the world. “At this moment,” he thought with relish and amusement, “I’m the most advertised man in history!”
But he felt a mounting discomfort about the message which lay crumpled in his pocket.
“Why didn’t you bring your lovely daughter?” the ambassador asked, scanning Kettner’s face, aware of his sudden change of mood.
“Monica will be here with one of the next ferries,” Kettner lied easily. “Please excuse me. I must see my manager. I’d like to take you along, but I’m afraid the office is in the antigravity belt.”
