“All right,” she said in faint annoyance. “Is it dangerous?”
“There’s quite a heavy gamma and X-ray burst each time, yes. But Half Way’s atmosphere will protect us from the worst. You perhaps wouldn’t want to stay out here for a week, though.”
“I’ll try to remember.” She marched off toward the waiting flying boat, irritated by the way he’d switched into his lecturer persona.
The Carbon Goose was standing on its triple undercarriage, with aluminum air stairs extended from a forward airlock hatch. A long cargo hold was open amidships, with loaderbots transferring crates on board. As Mellanie drew closer she got a clear view of the sea behind the vast aircraft as it rippled against the inlet’s natural ramp of rock. It wasn’t perfectly still after all; the surface undulated slowly as it was stirred by the gentle currents of air that passed for wind on this world. A fringe of mushy ice lapped slothfully against the rock all around the shoreline, never quite managing to agglutinate into a solid sheet. The terminal glaciers that had emerged five million years ago to cap the northern and southern zones of the planet had slowly drained vast quantities of pure water out of the oceans, leaving a residue of water that became ever more salty with each passing century, correspondingly lowering its freezing point. Neither of the massive planetary encrustations had grown any larger for millennia now. With the star in its current state, Half Way’s environment had reached an equilibrium that would probably last for geological ages.
The airlock in the flying boat was large enough to hold all five passengers simultaneously as the atmosphere cycled. Mellanie took her helmet off as she walked into the forward cabin on the first deck. Her first impression was rows and rows of huge chairs stretching away down the brightly lit interior, like a small theater auditorium. There was a staff of eight waiting for them, and three times that many bots. She’d never seen anything like it before.
They were helped off with their suits and told to sit wherever they liked. Mellanie chose a window seat near the front, and was given a glass of bucks fizz by one of the stewardesses. “Now this is the way to travel,” she declared as the seat slid back and its footrest extended. Dudley looked around uncertainly, then gingerly allowed himself to sink back into the thick leather cushioning.
There were all the usual dull thuds associated with an aircraft preparing to take off, crates being loaded and secured, cargo hold doors closing, turbines starting up. The ends of the wings slowly bent down to the vertical, lowering the long bulbous tip floats ready for the water takeoff. Then they were rolling down the rock slope into the sea. More thuds as the undercarriage retracted, leaving them floating. They taxied sedately out of the inlet. The pilot used the PA to announce their ten-hour flight time and wished them a pleasant journey, and the nuclear turbines wound up to full thrust.
It was a surprisingly short takeoff run. Mellanie grinned excitedly as huge fans of spray curved out from behind the wingtip floats. Then they were surging up into the pink sky, applauded by the silent dazzling flashes of collapsing ions as they crashed into the neutron star forty million kilometers above them.
There was only one break in the monotony of the flight. Three hours in, the pilot spotted a pod of white whurwals far below, and lost altitude so the bored passengers could see them. They were little more than vermilion dots sliding through the darkling sea, almost twice the size of Earth’s blue whales. Unlike those terrestrial whales these were fantastically aggressive, pack creatures hunting down the gradually dwindling stocks of fish they shared their last arctic ocean with. They even fought with other pods as they swam around and around the equator between the constricting walls of Half Way’s terminal glaciers.
Twice Mellanie and Dudley left the forward cabin to consummate their membership in the mile-high club. They didn’t even have to use the cramped toilets for privacy. The middle and rear cabins on all three decks were empty and dark, giving them plenty of scope for misbehavior amid the long rows of vacant seats.
Port Evergreen was situated on an island covering forty thousand square kilometers, all of it naked rock. No plant life had ever been discovered on Half Way; there were no traces of soil, even sand was virtually nonexistent thanks to the lack of a moon and any tides; and nobody had ever chipped out any fossils from island strata. Planetary scientists argued that evolution had never pushed out of the aquatic stage, not that the Commonwealth was interested. Half Way was the ultimate nowhere planet.
