Bob Shaw - Vertigo

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Vertigo

Bob Shaw was born in Belfast in 1931 and had a technical education which led to several years' work in

structural design offices in Ireland, England and Canada. At the age of twenty-seven he escaped into

public relations. Since then he has worked as a journalist, a full-time author and as press officer for an

aircraft firm. Married with three children, Bob Shaw's hobbies - apart from writing are reading, crafts,

and 'sitting with my feet up while drinking beer and yarning with kindred spirits'. He sold his first science

fiction story to the New York Post when he was nineteen, and is now the author of several novels and

many short stories. His hooks include The Two-Timers, Other Days, Other Eyes, The Palace of Eternity,

One Million Tomorrows, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush and Orbitsville which won the British Science

Fiction Award for the best novel of 1975 -all published in Pan.

Also by Bob Shaw in Pan Books

The Two-Timers

The Palace of Eternity

One Million Tomorrows

Other Days, Other Eyes

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

Orbitsville

Cosmic Kaleidoscope

A Wreath of Stars

Medusa's Children

Who Goes Here?

Ship of Strangers

Bob Shaw

Vertigo

Pan Books London and Sydney

First published 1978 by Victor Gollano, Ltd

This edition published 1980 by Pan Books Ltd,

Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG

ISBN 0 330 25990 3

Made and printed in Great Britain by

C. Nicholls & Company Ltd, Philips Park Press, Manchester

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,

hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover

other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser

To Chris Priest - counsellor and friend.

one

The drive to Chivenor had been long and tiring. As it had progressed the pain in Hasson's back had

grown worse, and with the pain had come a steady deterioration of his mood. At first there had been

stray misgivings, hints of sadness which anybody might have felt on passing through a series of towns and

villages where all commerce and community life seemed to have been vanquished by the chill grey rains

of Match. By the time they had reached the north Devon coast, however, Hasson felt more than normally

dejected, and later when the car surmounted a rise giving its three occupants a glimpse of the Taw

estuary - he realized he was terrified of the journey that lay ahead.

How can this be? he thought, unable to reconcile his feelings with those he would have experienced

six weeks earlier in similar circumstances. I'm being given a free trip to Canada, three months' leave on

full pay, all the time I need to rest and recuperate

'I always think there's something right about the principle of the flying boat,' said Colebrook, the

police surgeon, who was sitting in the rear seat with Hasson. 'The whole idea of flying over the sea in

ships, having four-fifths of the globe for a landing place

It all seems natural, if you know what I mean - technology and nature going hand-in-hand.'

Hasson nodded. 'I see what you're getting at.'

'Just look at those things.' A gesture of Colebrook's plump, strong hand took in the slate-blue strip of

water and the apparently haphazard scattering of flying boats. 'Silver birds, as our Polynesian cousins

might say. Do you know why they aren't painted?'

Hasson shook his head, trying to take an interest in the surgeon's conversation. 'Can't think.'

The load factor. Economics. The weight of the paint would be equal to the weight of an extra

passenger.'

'Is that right?' Hasson smiled, hopelessly, and saw the boyish enthusiasm fade from Colebrook's face

to be replaced by a look of professional concern. He cursed himself for not having made a greater effort

to cover up.

'Problems, Rob?' Colebrook turned bodily to get a better look at his patient, pulling his suit into silky

diagonal folds across his stomach. 'How do you feel?' 'A bit tired that's all. A few aches and pains. I'll

hang together.'

'I'm not asking about that side of it. Have you taken any Serenix today?'

'Well .. ." Hasson abandoned the attempt to lie. 'I don't like taking pills.'

'What's that got to do with anything,' Colebrook said impatiently. 'I don't like brushing my teeth, but if

I stop the result will be a lot of pain and a mouth full of delph - so I brush my teeth.'

'It's hardly the same thing,' Hasson protested.

'it's exactly the same thing, man. Your nervous system is bound to give you hell for a month or two,

maybe longer, but the fact that a thing is natural doesn't mean you have to put up with it. There aren't any

medals for this Rob - no Misery Cross or Depression Diploma...'

Hasson raised a finger. 'That's good, doc. I like that.'

'Swallow a couple of those caps, Rob. Don't be a fool.' Colebrook, who had too much medical

experience to allow himself to be upset by a wayward patient, leaned forward and tapped Air Police

Captain Nun on his shoulder, his expansive mood returning. Why don't we all go to Canada, Wilbur? We

could all do with a break.'

Nun had been at the wheel most of the way from Coventry and was showing signs of strain. 'Some of

us can't be spared,' he said, refusing to be captivated by pleasantries. 'Anyway, it's too early in the year

for me. I'd rather wait till the Iceland-Greenland corridor is cleared.'

'That could take months.'

'I know, but some of us can't be spared.' Nunn transferred the weight of his forearms on to the

steering wheel, managing to convey his disinclination to talk. The sky ahead had cleared to an antiseptic

pale blue, but the ground was still wet, and the car's wheels made swishing sounds on the tarmac curves

as it descended towards the airfield and flying boat terminal at Chivenor. Nunn continued to drive fast,

with broody concentration, as the view of the estuary was lost behind a row of dripping evergreens.

Hasson, slouched uncomfortably in the rear seat, stared at the 8 back of his chief's neck and wished

there had been no reference to the clearing of the flight corridors. His plane was due to take off in little

more than an hour and the last thing he wanted was to think about the possibility of it smashing into any

human bodies which might be drifting through the low cloud and fog that often obscured the Atlantic air

lines.

Nobody in the west had any clear idea of what was going on in the vast tracts of land spanning the

eastern hemisphere from the Zemlayas to Siberia, but each winter a sparse, slow blizzard of frozen

bodies - kept aloft by their CG harnesses - came swirling down over the pole, endangering air cargo

traffic between Britain and North America.

The general belief was that they were Asian peasants, ignorant of the dangers of boosting to even a

modest altitude in a continental winter, or victims of sudden weather changes who had been claimed by

frostbite without realising what was happening to them. A hysterical faction, small but vociferous, claimed

they were political expendables deliberately cast loose on the geostrophic winds to hinder, even

marginally, the flow of western commerce. Hasson had always regarded the latter idea as being unworthy

of his consideration, and the fact that it had entered his mind now was yet another pointer to his state of

health. He slid his hand into his coat pocket and gripped the container of Serenix capsules, reassuring

himself they were available.

In a few minutes the car had reached the airfield and was skirting its perimeter on the way to the flying

boat docks. The tall silvery fins of the boats could be seen here and there above the complex of quayside

sheds and portable offices. A number of men, their clothing marked with dayglo panels, were flying

between the quay and the boats anchored further out in the estuary, registering on the edge of Hasson's

vision as a constant agitation of colourful specks.

Nunn brought the car to a halt in a parking bay which was outside the mesh fence of the departure

area. As Hasson's department head, he had been burdened with most of the behind-the scenes work

associated with smuggling Hasson out of the country and finding a place where he could live in safe

obscurity for three months. No formal machinery existed for hiding and protecting key witnesses whose

lives could be under threat, and 9 Captain Nunn had been put to considerable trouble to find a suitable

host for Hasson in another country. In the end he had come to an arrangement with a Canadian police

officer who had been on an exchange visit to the Coventry force some years earlier. Nun was a man who

hated anything to upset his administrative routine and now he was anxious to get Hasson off his hands.

'We won't go in with you, Rob," he said, switching off the engine. 'The Less we're seen together the

better. No point in taking any chances.'

'Chances!' Hasson snorted to show his disapproval of what he thought of as a charade. 'What

chances? Sullivan is a mobster, but he's also a business man and he knows he'll be finished if he starts

killing cops.'

Nun drummed with his fingers on the serrated rim of the steering wheel. 'We're not cops Rob - we're

air cops. And people kill us all the time. How many of your original squad are still alive?"

'Not many.' Hasson turned his head away to hide an unexpected, unmanning quiver of his lower lip.

'I'm sorry - I shouldn't have said that.' Nunn sounded irritated rather than apologetic.

Colebrook, ever watchful, gripped Hasson's arm just above the elbow and squeezed it firmly. 'Take

two capsules right now, Rob. That's an order.'

Embarrassed and shamed, Hasson brought the plastic dispenser out of his pocket, fed two

green-and-gold capsules into his palm and swallowed them. They felt dry and weightless in his mouth,

like the blown-out eggs of tiny birds.

Nun cleared his throat. 'The point I was making is that the Sullivan case is out of the hands of the Air

Police and we have to do what SCQ tells us. If they think your evidence is worth the Sullivan

organisation's trying to shut you up for good we have to accept what they say. It's their patch.'

'I know, but it's all so ...' Hasson gazed around him helplessly. 'I mean ... fake identity, fake passport!

How am I going to get used to calling myself Haldane?'

'That doesn't seem much of a problem to me,' Nunn said brusquely, compressing his lips. 'Try to

adopt a more positive attitude, Rob. Get yourself off to Canada and do a lot of sleeping and eating and

drinking, and enjoy it while you have the chance. We'll send for you when you have to testify.'

'Speaking as a medical man, that sounds like good advice.' Colebrook opened the door at his side,

got out and went to the back of the car. He lifted the lid of the trunk and began unloading Hasson's

cases.

'I won't get out,' Nunn said, reaching a hand into the rear seat. 'Take care of yourself, Rob.'

'Thanks.' Hasson shook the offered hand and let himself out of the car. The sky had completely

cleared now, to the palest wash of blue, and a searching breeze was whipping in from the Atlantic.

Hasson shivered as he thought of the thousands of kilometres of open sea that lay between him and his

destination. The journey seemed too great for any aircraft, and even more incredible was the idea that

only a few months ago he, Robert Hasson, faced with the task of getting to Canada, would have brashly

strapped on a counter-gravity harness and made the flight alone, with no protection other than a helmet

and heated suit. At the thought of going aloft again, of being able to fall, a looseness developed in

Hasson's knees and he leaned against the vehicle, taking care to make the action look casual. The

enamelled metal chilled his fingers.

'I'll go with you as far as reception,' Colebrook said. 'Nobody's going to worry about seeing you with

a doctor.'

'I'd rather go in alone, thanks. I'm all right.'

Colebrook smiled approvingly. 'That's good. Just remember what the physiotherapist told you about

how to lift heavy weights.' Hasson nodded, said goodbye to the surgeon and went towards the gate

which led to the departure building. He carried a large and a small case in each hand, keeping his back

straight and the load in balance. The pain from his spine and the rebuilt joint of his left knee was

considerable, but he had learned that movement - no matter how uncomfortable - was his ally. The real

pain, the devasting and paralysing agony, came after he was forced to remain immobile for a long period,

and then had to perform a once simple action such as getting out of bed. It was as though his body,

denying the magic of surgery, had a masochistic yearning for crippledom.

He went to the passenger terminal where he and his baggage were subjected to a series of fairly

perfunctory checks. It turned out that there were about twenty other people on his particular flight, which

meant that the flying boat had almost its full quota of passengers. For the most part, they were

middle-aged couples who had the flustered, expectant look of people who were not used to

long-distance travel. Hasson guessed they were going abroad to visit relatives. He stood apart from

them, sipping machine-made coffee and wondering why anybody who had the option of remaining safely

at home would set out to cross a wintered ocean.

'Your attention, please,' called a stewardess who had razor- cut golden hair and neat, hard features.

'Flight Box 62 is scheduled to take off for St John's in approximately twenty minutes. Due to the strength

and direction of the breeze which has sprung up within the last few hours, we have been forced to anchor

the aircraft further out than is usual and our motor launches are having to cope with extra work - but we

can avoid delaying our departure if we fly out to the aircraft. Are there any passengers with boarding

cards for Flight Bo162 who are unable to make a personal flight of half a kilometre?'

Hasson's heart lurched sickeningly as he glanced around the group and saw that all of them were

nodding in tentative agreement.

'Very well,' the stewardess said, nodding her head. 'You will find standard CG harnesses on the rack

beside the...'

'I'm sorry,' Hasson cut in, 'I'm not allowed to use a harness.'

The girl's eyes flickered briefly and there was a disappointed murmur from the other passengers.

Several women glanced at Hasson, their eyes speculative and resentful. He turned away without

speaking, feeling the chill air rush upwards past him at terminal velocity as he bombed down into

Birmingham's crowded commuter levels after a fall of three thousand metres, and the lights of the city

expanded beneath him like a vast jewelled flower...

'In that case there's no point in any of us flying.' The stewardess's voice was neutral. 'If you will all

make yourselves comfortable I will call you as soon as a launch is available. We will do everything we

can to keep delays to a minimum. Thank you.' She went to a communications set in the corner of the

glass-walled lounge and began whispering into it.

Hasson set his cup down and, acutely conscious of being stared at, walked into the toilets. He locked

himself into a cubicle, leaned against the door for a moment, then took out his medicine dispenser and fed

two more capsules into his mouth. The two he had swallowed in the car had not yet taken effect, and as

he stood in the sad little closed universe of partitions and tiles, praying for tranquillity, it dawned on him

how complete his breakdown had been. He had seen other men crack up under the strain of too much

work, too many hours of cross-wind patrols at night when the danger of collision with a rogue flier made

the nerves sing like telephone wires in a gale, but always he had viewed the event with a kind of smug

incomprehension. Underlying his sympathy and intellectual appreciation of the medical facts had been a

faint contempt, a conviction that, given his mental stability, the wilted air cops, the sick birds, would have

been able to shrug off their woes and carry on as before. His sense of security had been so great that he

had totally failed to recognise his own warning symptoms -the moods of intense depression, the

irritability, the growing pessimism which drained life of its savour. Without realising it, Hasson had been

terribly vulnerable, and in that fragile condition-shorn of all his armour - he had gone into the arena

against a grinning opponent who wore a black cloak and carried a scythe...

A sudden claustrophobia caused Hasson to open the cubicle door. He went to a wash basin, put cold

water in it and was splashing some on his face when he became aware of somebody standing beside him.

It was one of the passengers from his own flight, a man of about sixty who had a florid complexion and

sardonically drooping eyelids.

'Nothing to be ashamed of,' the man said in a north country accent.

'What?' Hasson began drying his face.

'Nothing to be ashamed of. That's what I was telling them out there. Some people just can't use a

harness, and that's that.'

'I suppose you're right.' Hasson fought down an urge to tell the stranger he had done a great deal of

flying but was temporarily barred from it for medical reasons. If he started justifying himself to everybody

he met he would be doing it for the rest of his life and there was also the fact that the story was a lie.

There was no physical necessity for him to avoid personal flight.

'On the other hand,' the red-faced man continued, 'some people take to it like a duck takes to water.

I was nearly forty when I got my first harness, and within a week I was cloud- running with the best of

them.'

'Very good,' Hasson said, edging away.

'Yes, and I still fly in a tough area. Bradford The kids up there think nothing of coming in close,

deliberate-like, and dropping you twenty or thirty metres.' The stranger paused to chuckle. 'Doesn't

bother me, though. Strong stomach.'

'That's great.' Hasson hurried to the door, then it occurred to him that a garrulous companion might be

just what he needed to numb his mind during the Atlantic crossing. He paused and waited for the other

man to catch up with him. 'But you're going to Canada the easy way.'

'Have to,' the man said, tapping himself on the chest. 'Lungs won't take the cold any more - otherwise

I'd save myself the price of a plane ticket. Bloody robbery, that's what it is.'

Hasson nodded agreement as he walked back to the lounge with his new companion. Personal flying

was both easy and cheap, and with the advent of the counter-gravity harness conventional aviation had

fallen into an abrupt decline. At first it had been simply a matter of economics, then the skies had become

too clustered with people - millions of liberated, mobile, foolhardy, uncontrollable people - for aircraft to

operate safely, except in strictly policed corridors. The formerly lucrative passenger traffic across the

North Atlantic had been replaced by cargo planes carrying handfuls of passengers on sparse schedules,

and the cost per head had risen accordingly.

Rejoining the other passengers, Hasson leaned that the older man's name was Dawlish and that he

was on the way to Montreal to visit an ailing cousin, possibly in the hope of inheriting some money.

Hasson conversed with him for ten minutes, reassured by the sense of calmness that was spreading

radially through his system as the Serenix capsules began to do their work. His knowledge that the feeling

was artificially induced made it nonetheless precious, and by the time the launch arrived to take the

passengers on Flight Bo162 out to the plane he was experiencing a muted euphoria.

He sat near the front during the ride across choppy water to reach the flying boat, feeling a

pleasurable excitement at the thought of spending three months abroad. The boat looked prehistoric, with

grills over the turbine intakes and armour plating on the airfoil leading edges, but now Hasson had some

confidence in the looming machine's ability to take him anywhere in the world. He climbed on board -

inhaling the distinctive aroma of engine oil, brine-soaked rope and hot food - and got a window seat near

the rear of the passenger compartment. Dawlish sat down opposite him with his back to the movable

partition which allowed the cargo space to be expanded or contracted as required.

'Good machines these,' Dawlish said, looking knowledgeable. 'Based on the Thirties Empire boat

design. Very interesting story to them.'

As Hasson half-expected, Dawlish launched into a discourse an the romance of the flying boat, a

rambling account which took in its disappearance from world aviation in the Fifties because of the

difficulty of pressurising the hull for the high-altitude operation demanded by jet engines, its reappearance

in the 21st Century when, of necessity, all aircraft had to fly low and slow.

At another time he might have been bored or irritated, but on this occasion Dawlish was performing a

useful function and Hasson concentrated gratefully on the flow of words while the boat's four engines

were being started and it was taxied round into the wind. In spite of the capsules he felt a pang of unease

as the take-off run seemed to go on for ever, culminating in a thunderous hammering of wave-tops on the

underside of the keel, but all at once the noise ceased and the boat was in rock-steady flight. Hasson

looked at the solidity of the deck beneath his feet and felt safe.

'.... monopropellant turbines would work just as well at altitude,' Dawlish was saying, 'but if you fly

low anybody you run into is likely to be reasonably soft and the shielding will stand the impact. Just

imagine hitting a frozen body at nearly a thousand kilometres an hour! The Titanic wouldn't be .. .'

Dawlish broke off and touched Hasson's knee. 'I'm sorry, lad - I shouldn't be talking about that sort of

thing.'

'I'm all right,' Hasson said sleepily, making the belated discovery that for a man in his exhausted state

four Serenix capsules had been too much. 'You go right ahead. Get it out of your system.'

'What do you mean?'

'Nothing.' Hasson sincerely wished to be diplomatic, but it had become difficult to perceive shades of

meaning in his own words. 'You seem to know a lot about flying.'

Apparently annoyed at Hasson's tone, Dawlish glanced around him from below sagging eyelids. 'Of

course, this isn't real flying. Cloud-running, that's the thing! You don't know what real flying is until you've

strapped on a harness and gone up five hundred, six hundred metres with nothing under your feet but thin

air. I only wish I could tell you what it's like.'

'That would be ...' Hasson abandoned the attempt to speak as the conscious world tilted ponderously

away from him.

He was three thousand metres above Birmingham, as high as it was possible to go without special

heavy-duty suit heaters, at the centre of a sphere of milky radiance created by his flares... a short

distance away from him the body of his dead partner, Lloyd Inglis, floated upright on height-maintenance

power, performing a strange aerial shuffle ... and, just beyond the range of the flares, Lloyd's murderer

was waiting in ambush...

There was no human sound as the attack began - only the growing rush of air as the two men's CG

harnesses cancelled each other's fields, allowing then to drop like stones.,.

It took a minute for them to fall three thousand metres - a hideous, soul-withering minute in which the

howl of the terminal velocity wind, was the blast from the chimneys of hell. During that minute the

low-level commuter lanes, glowing like a galaxy with the personal lights of tens of thousands of fliers,

expanded hungrily beneath him, opening like a carnivorous flower. During that minute, pain and shock

robbed him of the powers of thought, and his mind was further obliterated by the obscene grinding of the

psychotic killer's body against his own...

And then - when it was so late, when it was so desperately late - came the successful disengagement,

the breaking free, followed by the futile upward drag of his harness ... and the impact ... the ghastly

impact with the round... the shattering of bone, and the explosive bursting of spinal discs.

Hasson opened his eyes and blinked uncomprehendingly at a world of sky-bright windows, curved

ceiling panels, luggage racks, and the subdued pulsing of aero engines. I'm in an aircraft he thought. What

am I doing in an aircraft. He sat upright, groggy as a boxer recovering from a knockout blow, and saw

that Dawlish had fallen asleep in the seat opposite him, a micro- reader still clasped in one blue-knuckled

hand. The realisation he had been unconscious for some time was accompanied by a rush of memories

and he rediscovered the fact that he was on his way to Canada, faced with the challenge of a new identity

and a new way of life.

The prospect was daunting, but not as daunting as the idea of meeting the challenge in his present

condition of drug-fuddled incapacity, held up by a psychotropic crutch. He waited for a few minutes,

breathing deeply, then got to his feet and walked to the toilet at the forward end of the passenger

compartment. The soundproofing within the toilet was not as good as in the rest of the aircraft, and for a

moment he was disconcerted by the pounding of atmospheric fists on the skin of the hull, but he braced

himself against the partition and took the medicine dispenser from his pocket. He wrenched the top off it

and, without giving himself time for second thoughts, poured a steam of green-and- gold capsules into the

toilet bowl.

By the time he got back to his seat he was woozy again, ready to fall asleep, but he had the spare

satisfaction that always came from refusing to compromise. He was not the Robert Hasson he used to

be, or had imagined himself to be. He felt incomplete, wounded, flawed - but his future was his own

personal property, and there was to be no side-stepping of any problems it would bring.

two

Technical difficulties had dosed the transcontinental air corridor west of Regina, so Hasson completed his

journey by rail.

It was mid-morning when he reached Edmonton, and on stepping down from the train he was

immediately struck by the coldness of the sun-glittering air which washed around him like the waters of a

mountain stream. In his previous experience such temperatures allied with brilliant sunshine had only been

encountered when patrolling high above the Pennines on a spring morning. For an instant he was flying

again, dangerously poised, with a flight of gulls twinkling like stars far below, and the weakness returned

to his knees. He looked around the rail station, anchoring himself to the ground, taking in details of his

surroundings. The platform extended a long way beyond the girdered roof, dipping into hard-packed

snow which was criss-crossed with tyre tracks. City buildings formed a blocky palisade against the

snowfields he could sense to the north. Hasson, wondering how he was going to recognise his escort,

examined the people nearest to him. The men seemed huge and dauntingly jovial, many of them dressed

in reddish tartan jackets as though conforming to tourists' preconceived notions of how Canadians should

look.

Hasson, suddenly feeling overwhelmed and afraid, picked up his cases and moved towards the station

exit. As he did so an almost handsome, olive-skinned man with a pencil-line moustache and exceptionally

bright eyes came towards him, hands extended. The stranger's expression of friendliness and pleasure

was so intense that Hasson moved out of his way, fearful of perhaps obstructing a family reunion. He

glanced back over his shoulder and was surprised to find there was nobody close behind him.

'Rob I' The stranger gripped both of Hasson's shoulders. 'Rob Hasson I It's great to see you again.

Really great!'

'I ...' Hasson gazed into the varnish-coloured eyes which stared back at him with such intemperate

affection and was forced to the conclusion that this was his Canadian host, Al Werry. 'It's good to see

you again.'

'Come on, Rob - you look like you could do with a drink.' Werry took the cases from Hasson's

unresisting fingers and set off with them towards the exit barrier. 'I've got a bottle of scotch in the car

outside - and guess what.'

'It's your favourite. Lockhart's.'

Hasson was taken aback. 'Thanks, but how did you...?'

'That was quite a night we had in that pub - you know the one about ten minutes along the highway

from Air Police HQ. What was it called?'

'I can't remember.'

'The Haywain.' Werry supplied. 'You were drinking Lockhart whisky. Lloyd Inglis was on vodka,

and I was learning to drink your Boddington's ale. What a night!' Werry reached a sleek-looking car

which had a city crest on its side, opened its trunk and began loading the four cases, thus giving Hasson a

moment in which to think. He had the vaguest memory of an occasion seven or eight years earlier when

he had became involved with providing hospitality for a group of Canadian police officers, but every

detail of the evening was lost to him. Now it was obvious that Werry had been one of the visitors and he

felt both embarrassed and alarmed by the other man's ability to recall an unimportant event with such

clarity.

'Hop in there, Rob, and we'll shake this place - I want to get you to Tripletree in time for lunch. May

is cooking up moose steaks for us, and I'll bet you never tasted moose.' While he was speaking Werry

slipped out of his overcoat, folded it carefully and placed it on the car's rear seat. His chocolate-brown

uniform, which carried the insignia of a city reeve, was crisply immaculate and when he sat down he spent

some time smoothing the cloth of the tunic behind him to prevent it being wrinkled by the driving seat.

Hasson opened the passenger door and got in, taking equal care to ensure that his spine was straight and

well supported in the lumbar region.

'Here's what you need,' Werry said, taking a flat bottle from a dash compartment and handing it to

Hasson. He smiled indulgently, showing square healthy teeth.

'Thanks.' Hasson dutifully accepted the bottle and took a swig from it, noticing as he tilted his head

that there was a police style counter-gravity harness flying suit lying on the rear seat beside Werry's coat.

The neat spirit tasted warmish, flat and unnaturally strong, but he pretended to savour it, a task which

became Herculean when it seared into one of the mouth ulcers which had been troubling him for weeks.

'You hold on to that - it's more'n an hour's run to Tripletree.' Werry spun up the car's turbine as he

spoke and a few seconds later they were surging into a northbound traffic stream. As the car emerged

from among the downtown buildings expanses of blue sky became visible and Hasson saw above him a

fantastic complex of aerial highways. The bilaser images looked real but not real - curves, ramps,

straights, trumpet-shaped entrances and exits, all apparently carved from coloured gelatine and bannered

across the sky to guide and control the flux of individual fliers whose business brought them into the city.

Thousands of dark specks moved along the insubstantial ducts, like the representation of a gas flow in a

physics text.

'Pretty, isn't it? Some system!' Werry leaned forward, peering upwards with enthusiasm.

'Very nice.' Hasson tried to find a comfortable posture in the car's too pliant upholstery as he studied

the three-dimensional pastel-coloured projections. Similar traffic control techniques had been tried in

Britain back in the days when there still had been hope of reserving some territory for conventional

aircraft, but they had been abandoned as too costly and too complicated. With million of individuals

airborne above a small island, many of them highly resistant to discipline, it had been found most

expedient to go for a simple arrangement of columnar route markers with bands of colour at different

altitudes. The most basic bilaser installations could cope with the task of projecting the solid-seeming

columns, and they had a further advantage in that they left the aerial environment looking comparatively

uncluttered. To Hasson's eyes, the confection hovering above Edmonton resembled the entrails of some

vast semi- transparent mollusc.

'You feeling all right, Rob?' Werry said. 'Is there anything I can do for you?'

Hasson shook his head. 'I've been travelling too long, that's

'They told me you got yourself all smashed up.'

'Just a broken skeleton,' Hasson said, modifying an old joke. 'How much did they tell you, anyway?'

'Not much. It's better that way, I guess. I'm telling everybody you're my cousin from England, that

your name's Robert Haldane, that you're an insurance salesman and you're convalescing from a bad car

smash.'

'It sounds plausible enough.'

'I hope so,' Werry drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, signalling his dissatisfaction. 'It's a funny

sort of set-up, though. With England having separate air police, I mean. I never thought you'd get mixed

up with big-time organised crime.'

'It was just the way things worked out. Lloyd Inglis and I were busting a gang of young angels, and

when Lloyd got killed the...' Hasson broke off as the car swerved slightly. 'I'm sorry. Didn't they say?'

'I didn't know Lloyd was dead.'

'I can't take it myself yet.' Hasson stared at the road ahead, which was like a black canal banked with

snow. 'One of the gang was the son of a mob chief who was buying up respectability as if it was

developed land, and the boy was carrying papers which were going to wipe out his old man's investment.

It's a long story, and complicated ...' Hasson, tired of talking, hoped he had said enough to satisfy

Werry's professional curiosity.

'Okay, let's forget all that sort of stuff, cousin.' Werry smiled and gave Hasson an exaggerated wink.

'All I want is for you to relax and get yourself built up again. You're goin' to have the time of your life in

the next three months. Believe me.'

'I do.' Hasson glanced discreetly, gratefully, at his new companion. Werry's body was hard and flat,

with a buoyant curvature to the muscles which suggested a natural strength carefully maintained by

exercise. He seemed to take an ingenuous pleasure in the perfection of his uniform, something which

combined with his Latin-American looks to give him the aura of a swaggering young colonel in a

revolutionary republic. Even his handling of the car - slightly aggressive, slightly flamboyant - spoke of a

man who was perfectly at home in his environment, taking up its challenges with a zestful confidence.

Hasson, envious of the other man's intact and gleaming psychological armour, wondered how it had

been possible for him to forget his first meeting with Werry.

'By the way,' Werry said, 'I didn't tell the folks at home - that's May and Ginny, and my boy Theo -

anything about you. Anything apart from the official story, that is. Thought it better just to keep things to

ourselves. It's simpler that way.'

'You're probably right.' Hasson mulled over the new information for a moment. 'Didn't your wife think

it a bit odd when you produced a brand-new cousin out of thin air?"

'May isn't my wife - not yet anyway. Sybil left me about a year ago, May and her mother only moved

in last month, so it's all right - I could have cousins all over the world, for all they know.'

'I see.' Hasson felt a throb of unease at the prospect of having to meet and cohabit with three more

strangers, and it came to him once again that he had joined the ranks of life's walking wounded. The car

was now speeding along a straight highway which cut through immensities of sun-blinding snow. He

fumbled in his breast pocket, produced a pair of darkened glasses and put them on, glad of the barrier

they set up against the pressures of an unmanageable universe. He shifted to an easier position in his seat,

cradling the unwanted bottle of whisky, and tried to come to terms with the new Robert Hasson.

The deceptively commonplace term 'nervous breakdown', he had discovered, was a catch-all for a

host of devasting mental and physical symptoms - but the knowledge that he was suffering from a

classical and curable illness did nothing to alleviate those symptoms. No matter how often he told himself

he would be back to normal in the not too distant future, his depressions and fears remained implacable

enemies, swift to strike, tenacious, slow to relinquish their grip. In his own case, he appeared to have

regressed emotionally to relive the turmoils of adolescence.

His father, Desmond Hasson, had been a West Country village storekeeper driven by circumstances

to work in the city, and had never even begun to adapt to his new surroundings. Naive, awkward,

pathologically shy, he had lived out the life of a hopeless exile a mere two hundred kilometres from his

birthplace, bound by the rigidity of his outlook, always whispering when in public lest the difference in his

accent should draw curious glances. His marriage to a tough-minded city girl had served only to let the

incomprehensible strangeness of the world of factories and office blocks invade his home, and he had

become perpetually reserved and uncommunicative. It had come as a bitter disappointment to him to find

that his son responded naturally and easily to an ur- ban environment, and for some years he had done

his best to correct what he regarded as a serious character defect. There had been the long,

uninformative walks in the country (Desmond Hasson knew surprisingly little about the world of nature he

espoused); the futile hours of fishing in polluted streams; the boredom of enforced labour in a vegetable

garden. Young Rob Hasson had disliked all of those things, but the real psychological marks had been

caused by his father's attempts to mould his essential nature.

He had been a gregarious boy, not averse to speaking his mind, and the worst personality conflicts

had arisen from this fact. Time after time he had been quelled, humbled, desolated by the admonition -

always delivered in a shocked and betrayed undertone - that a proposed course of action would cause

people to look at him. He had grown up with the implanted conviction that the most scandalous thing he

could ever do would be to draw the attention of others in public. There had been other strictures, notably

those concerned with sex, but the principal one, the one which clung longest and made life most difficult,

had been that concerning the need for self-effacement. Even as a young adult, at college and during a

brief spell in the army, each time he had been called upon to get up on his feet and address any kind of

assembly he had been plagued and undermined by visions of panic-stricken blue eyes and by the parental

voice whispering, 'Everybody will look at you!'

Hasson had eventually broken the conditioning, and - with his father long dead - had thought himself

free of it for ever, but the impact of nervous illness appeared to have shattered his adult character like a

glass figurine. It was as if his father had begun to achieve a posthumous victory, recreating himself in his

only son. He found it intensely difficult to sustain any kind of a conversation, and the thought of having to

enter a house of strangers filled him with a cool dread. Hasson stared sombrely at the unfolding alien

snowscapes and yearned desperately to be back in his two-roomed flat in Warwick, with the door

locked and the undemanding companionship of a television set for solace.

Al Werry, as though sensing his need, remained silent in the following hour except for the passing on

of scraps of information about local geography. In between times, the police radio made occasional

popping and growling noises, but no calls came through on it. Hasson took the opportunity to recharge

his spiritual batteries and was feeling slightly more competent when a tangle of pale-glowing aerial

sculptures appeared above the horizon, letting him know they were drawing close to Tripletree. He was

taking in the broad outlines of the traffic control system when his eye was caught by the silhouette of a

peculiar structure close to the city, stark against the background of luminous pastels. From the distance it

resembled a monstrous, single-stemmed flower, grown to a height of perhaps four hundred metres. He

speculated briefly about its purpose, then turned to Werry.

'What's that thing?' he said. 'It can't be a water tower, or can it?'

'There's nothing wrong with your eyes, Rob.' Werry spent a few seconds staring straight ahead,

satisfying himself that he too could see the object clearly. 'That's our local landmark, Morlacher's Folly -

otherwise known as the Chinook Hotel.'

'Strange architecture for a hotel.'

'Yeah, but not as strange as you would think. You know what a chinook is?'

'A warm breeze you get in the wintertime.'

'That's right, except that we don't always get it. Around here it has a habit of streaming over us at a

height of a hundred or two hundred metres. Sometimes as low as fifty. It can be ten below zero at ground

level, so we're going around freezing, and up there the bird's are sunbathing at ten and fifteen degrees

above. That's what was in old Harry Morlacher's mind when he built the hotel - the residential part is

right up there in the warm air stream. It was meant to be a high-priced R&R spot for oil execs from all

over Athabasca.'

'Something went wrong?'

'Everything went wrong.' Werry gave a quiet snort, a sound which might have been indicative of

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摘要：

VertigoBobShawwasborninBelfastin1931andhadatechnicaleducationwhichledtoseveralyears'workinstructuraldesignofficesinIreland,EnglandandCanada.Attheageoftwenty-sevenheescapedintopublicrelations.Sincethenhehasworkedasajournalist,afull-timeauthorandaspressofficerforanaircraftfirm.Marriedwiththreechildren...

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Bob Shaw - Vertigo

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