(eng) Michael G. Coney - SSC by Peninsula

Author:Peninsula [Peninsula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel

Early that damp December morning I drove to the northernmost tip of the Peninsula where the ferry leaves for the short journey across the Strait. Despite the hour, the queue was long, and I was forced to park on the highway outside the ferry entrance. I was scanning my Newspocket to pass away the time, when my interest was suddenly caught by a new item.

The derelict ships at Pacific Northwest had been sold. A wrecking team was arriving today to start work, and before long a notable landmark—some say an eyesore—would be lost. Other news items followed, flicking across the portovee screen as I sat waiting and the rain slanted against the windows, but I don’t recollect them. I was thinking about those ships, and my youth, and how it is that we keep losing little bits of our life without realizing they are gone.

In due course, the ferry arrived, and the long line of ground-effect vehicles stirred like an awakening snake and inched their way into the protective belly of a hoverferry big enough to ride the choppy waves of the Strait. As I sat in the coffee lounge watching the distant mountains while the ferry weaved through the archipelago of islets, a huge silver antigrav vehicle slid silently by at an altitude of about a thousand feet and reminded me that even this ship on which I rode would shortly be phased out—like the shuttle ships at Pacific Northwest. The lounge was crowded and the customers as grey and apathetic as travellers always are at this hour. I wondered what they thought I looked like.

I imagine I looked as well as could be expected, for a man who had just seen a ghost on his portovee …

The weather was clearing by the time we docked at the mainland, and the clouds were lifting from the nearer mountains, although still shrouding the gaunt thousand-mile-long escarpment which marks forever the line of the Western Seaboard Slide. My consignment at Sentry Down was not due to arrive until midafternoon, and so I had time to kill; I had taken the early ferry to make sure of getting a place, and as had happened before, I was regretting it. There was not much of interest in this part of the country for a man with a few hours to spare.

As I waited in line in the dim hold of the hoverferry, I debated whether to drive straight to Sentry Down and spend the rest of the morning in the observation lounge watching the arrivals and departures. There had been definite signs of blue sky in that direction, and the terminal would be busy and therefore interesting—or lonely, according to the mood I was in. Then I recalled that Sentry Down was always busy; the antigrav shuttles could descend from the orbiting starships at any speed they chose, hovering in crowded columns of traffic, reversing direction if necessary, inching down through the heaviest cloud.

Unlike the obsolete liquid-fuel

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.