Happiness: A Planet (17 page)

Once plugged into the platform’s internal communication system she called the technician’s quarters, received no answer, was about to go and physically search for someone when a throaty male voice asked her if she knew what time it was. Tulla, realising, apologised. Since she had been on Ben the hours that she had kept had been so irregular that she had come to disregard normal hours, sleeping only when her work and travels allowed it.

She introduced herself, gave her profession, explained that she had come to the platform to conduct some research into the sun, asked where it would be most convenient to dock. The surly voice told her to go to any of the top right hand bays: they had just been seeded. Before signing off Tulla asked how long it was before the platform’s machine records were overwritten.

“What d’you wanna know that for?” the voice snarled at her.

“My
research.”

“Leave it till morning willya?” The line went dead on Tulla.

“Charming,” she said.

She moved her ship to the docking bay in the uppermost right hand corner of the platform. Once her ship’s tanks had refilled with water from the platform she showered, had some breakfast. There was little point in rushing: she’d have to wait for the technician to wake to give her the codes she needed.

Tulla had not been on a platform before. She took this opportunity to satisfy her curiosity. First, on leaving the ship, she encountered — as expected — the prickly humidity of all platforms:  it is the standard grouse of all who have ever visited a platform. From the walkway she could see, through the clear screens at the far end of the sloping up fields, the yellow-white disc of the sun. The inner walkway screens were dimmed.

In the fields at the top level, as the technician had said, were line upon spiky line of green seedlings in the furrowed dark soil. The two metre depth of the spongy soil surprised Tulla: she had expected it to be much shallower.

The elevator took her down three levels before she began to see fields of full grown crops; legumes, pulses, brassicas, tomatoes, flooded rice fields, grapes, groundnuts, berries of all sizes and colours... Three fields were darkened to create a frost for germination — so much she remembered from her school biology. In some fields machines were harvesting root crops, conveyors transporting the bulbous vegetables to silos between each docking bay. Four fields were given over to the growing of medicinal and nutritious fungi; and, opposite the central docking bay, were the pungent yeast tanks.

The machine room was beside the central docking bay. The technician was waiting there for her. His greeting was unceremonious,

“What d’you want?”

Tulla was used to dealing with misanthropic technicians; although this one, round and wispy-bearded, did seem even more uncommunicative than most. She told him that she was looking for any increase in the sun’s radiation, therefore needed the records of the screen adjusters.

At that moment a buzzer sounded, heralding the arrival of a freighter.

“Gotta go,” the technician said.

“What about the code?” Tulla called after him.

“Find it yourself!” the technician shouted back.

Shaking her head with amazement at his appalling manners, Tulla looked about the machine room for the code book. The machine room was as disorderly and as grubby as the technician. Below some of the consoles were several dirty piles of manuals. The pages within their protective transparent sleeves were sweat and grease stained, and limp from the humidity. After an hour of leafing through the manuals, and wiping the dust from her hands onto her tunic, Tulla was certain that the code book wasn’t there.

The buzzer had twice sounded while she had been searching. The technician appeared suddenly in the machine room doorway.

“Can you move your ship to C5? I got a load of seed coming I forgot about.” And before Tulla could ask him for the code book he had again gone.

Fingers impatiently tapping her thigh Tulla rode up in the elevator, then marched angrily along the walkway to her ship. Three other ships were now docked. She could hear the bubbling slurp of their tanks emptying sludge into the platform’s compost processors. (Inside those processors the city and station waste would be treated with bacteria, the resultant compost used for fertiliser, the derivative methane made liquid and dispatched to various factories.) From inside the first ship to have arrived came the gurgling screaming hiss of pressurised steam as its emptied holds were being washed and sterilised.

Tulla, however, saw not one crew member. That puzzled her: most freighter crews like to escape the confines of their ship as soon as they dock. But, Tulla assumed, the custom was different on platforms. Probably, her scientific mind decided on a reason for the difference, because of the uncomfortable humidity.

Having moved her ship she returned to the machine room, looking to the walkways above and below her for the technician. The machine room was locked.

Tulla frowned, studied almost with disbelief the locked door, then she picked up a walkway phone and called the technician. No answer. She went to his quarters. Locked. She tried the nearest freighter. Locked. Nor did that freighter crew, nor any of the others, answer their phone.

Technicians have a reputation for playing practical jokes. This, Tulla deduced, along with his hiding of the code book, was the technician’s petty revenge for his being woken in the middle of the night. Tulla, though, couldn’t afford the time to play his silly games. Deciding that she had already wasted enough time on this platform she resolved to leave immediately for one of the other two platforms, whose technicians she hoped would have less of a sense of humour and where she could begin on a better footing. Her ship was locked.

For a full three minutes Tulla stormed back and forth along the walk-way screaming abuse at the technician and the freighter crews. That had no effect. She took the elevator down to the machine room, found it still locked. She strode along to the technician’s quarters. Locked. Nor did he answer his phone.

The anger left Tulla: she realised that she would have to wait it out. The maximum discomfort inflicted on the victim, she supposed, the funnier the practical joke. Casting about for somewhere to sit, she started to lower herself onto the floor beside the technician’s door when she recalled the urgency of her research and she was on her feet again banging on the technician’s door and red-faced screaming with all the power of her lungs, although she knew that the door was totally soundproofed.

What Tulla didn’t know was that the platform that she had so randomly chosen was implicated in the fraud that Inspector Eldon Boone was investigating. Two of his police officers, masquerading as horticulturists, had already visited the platform during the course of that enquiry. Their lack of horticultural expertise had soon made their real identity apparent to the corrupt technician. The technician believed that he had successfully thwarted them. But, his dishonest nature seeing subterfuge everywhere, he had immediately suspected Tulla of being another police agent; one cleverer than the previous two because she had seemed to know what she was talking about.

His first stratagem had been to be openly uncooperative. The crew of the first freighter to arrive were also involved in the fraud; and, after a frantic consultation, they had decided to lock Tulla out until they could decide on a better plan. Of all six ships to call at the platform that day all of the crews had some part in the fraud, were readily appraised of Tulla’s supposed identity, and all conspired in locking their doors to her.

At the arrival of the fourth and fifth freighters Tulla hastened to their docking bays. To find their doors locked and their phones unanswered. Each time she gave vent to her frustration in a howling stream of curses and, still under the misapprehension that she was the hapless victim of a practical joke, each time she bustled back to the technician’s quarters muttering,

“Funny. Yes. Very funny.”

Surely, Tulla thought after another hour’s inactivity, he’d had sufficient revenge now. Enough was enough. Going up to the camera at the end of a walkway she, though she knew it had no microphone, shouted at him. Pleaded with him. With mime admitted good-natured defeat. Still no doors opened. She knew that he was watching. She made a universal gesture of extreme rudeness and returned balefully to the locked machine room.

She moved to the technician’s quarters; and sitting outside his door she recalled childhood games from which, on the whim of her schoolfriends, she had been excluded. She had done the same to other children. Sitting on
that uncomfortable grid she repented her cruelty.

The door of the first freighter to have arrived that morning opened and a woman laughed. That showy laugh was aimed at Tulla.

“Yes!” Tulla screamed at her down the walkways, “Very funny!”‘

The sixth, and last freighter to arrive, docked below Tulla. She raced down to it, arrived panting at its locked door.

“Please,” she slapped its door. Up above her the first freighter’s door opened and again came that woman’s vindictive cackle.

“Look,” Tulla kept her temper in check this time, “my work is extremely urgent.” She hurried to the elevator, “It is imperative that I be allowed to do my research.” For reply the woman loosed her laugh again; and, as Tulla entered the elevator, she heard the freighter’s door close.

For the rest of that day Tulla was left alone with the predominate sound of all platforms — dripping water. And beyond the unrelenting and unpredictable dripping the occasional clump and clatter of machines rolling along walkways, to pad softly off into the fields. She listened to the sound of raking, hoeing, harvesting; was there alone so long that she learnt to distinguish the whirr of the conveyers from that of the vacuum swish of the silos as they emptied into the locked freighters.

Tulla was used to solitude, but not to this hostile unseen presence. She found herself flaring up with frustration, which dwindled to a fatalistic stoicism as she reminded herself that she had no option but to wait, told herself that the joke had to be played out to their perverse satisfaction. Only to rise instantly to indignant fury whenever she recalled that woman’s mocking laughter. To find herself frustrated again, because she had nothing against which she could direct her fury. Instead, faced with an insoluble dilemma, her imagination embarked upon fantastic conjectures, dredging up from the buried dregs of her mind every morbid tale that she had ever heard, that she had ever half-listening overheard.

In the loneliness of the smaller outstations many a grotesque paranoia finds, in unremitting solitude, fertile soil. Living alone, or cheek by jowl day in day out with just a few other fallible human beings, many a mind cracks. Most into harmless eccentricities, but on occasion police patrols come upon corpses inexplicably and brutally butchered, open their ship doors to behold a scene of carnage as bizarre as it is grisly. Which is why the police, like Sergeant Alger Deaver and Constable Drin Ligure, make regular patrols of all outstations within their Department.

All outstation police are trained to identify latent group conflicts, to spot the onset of stress symptoms. The outstation patrol had called at this platform 31 days before; and they had been amicably welcomed. The technician had had nothing to fear from the patrol except curiosity; and Sergeant Alger Deaver and his retiring partner, Drin Ligure’s predecessor, were not trained in the detection of fraud.

Tulla, however, was unaware of any criminal conspiracy. She found herself wondering if the grumpy technician was feeding some lethal gas into the freighters as they docked. Was he in cahoots with that mad-laughing woman? Or was it him laughing? Or had the woman killed him? The entire length of one walkway she kept whirling around expecting to find someone creeping up behind her. Her hair and tunic damp with the humidity she sat with her back to a field screen, tried to stop herself thinking gruesome thoughts, and shivered.

Two of the freighters left. Something odd about their departure bothered her. When the third freighter left she realised that they had not left in the order of their arrival. The first freighter to arrive was still docked. The technician, she deduced, was in that freighter and not, as she had supposed, in his quarters. That first freighter was closer to the machine room than were his quarters. That was where he had disappeared to when she had last seen him. That freighter could not leave with him aboard; and the freighter, she saw with hope, must already be behind schedule. The cameras at the ends of each walkway kept track of the machines.

The freighter could easily have plugged into the platform’s viewing system, have kept track not only of the machines but also of her own movements. That explained, Tulla told herself, how that woman had known when it was safe to open the freighter’s door.

Grabbing up a handful of wet dirt from one of the fields Tulla made her way to the ends of the walkway which passed that first freighter’s docking bay. Over the lens of each camera she slapped some dirt, then hurried to the docking bay and climbed, feeling melodramatic and silly, onto some wide trunking above the freighter’s door. Lying there she heard the other two freighters leave. Then, at last, almost an hour after she had climbed onto the trunking, the freighter’s door opened.

Tulla held her breath. Below her she glimpsed a woman’s long loose black hair emerging from the open door. The woman looked in both directions along the walkway. A man’s voice in the ship urged her outwards. Glancing to either side the woman advanced cautiously onto the walkway, from where she could look up and down to the other levels. Tulla dropped off the trunking and half sprang, half sprawled through the freighter’s open door.