Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  Plateauing out at ten thousand, he then took her gently down to five hundred, before levelling off again. He waited until he was breathing normally then:

  'Alpha Foxtrot Baker to Fort York control.'

  'Fort York receiving you, Alpha Foxtrot Baker.'

  'Request clearance for intromission.'

  'Permission granted. God speed, Major Logan.'

  The greens and reds of the landscape began to be displaced by greys and blacks. Soon he was over Trenton and his heads-up radar display showed the flyswarm of stacked jets over Kennedy. To the left of the green dots a pulsating red light marked the beacon on Jersey City's Century Tower.

  He brought the Eagle round and tracked in towards it.

  The program's director, not an employee of TransPac news, switched to the camera viewing Valeur. Valeur was caught, slack jawed and wordless.

  Surprisingly, it was Keneally who recovered first.

  'Say that again? Once more, please, to make sure we understood.'

  Verity nodded. 'I have removed every single warhead from all the nuclear weapons in the world.'

  'But there's over 40,000 of them.' Valeur was recovering.

  'Thirty thousand, three hundred and twenty-six to be precise, Mr. Valeur,' her overbite made a nonsense of his name. 'Even after all the so-called arms reductions over the past few decades, there were still nearly 27,000 warheads on ICBMs. Plus all the nuclear land-mines and depth charges, the artillery shells, as well as all the short-range tactical stuff. Oh, and sixty-five suitcase devices, one of which was in the hands of the Abu Nidal group. Plans were underway to plant it in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,' she looked across at Nkobe.

  'But how could you do that? How did you even get access? Even then... thirty-six thousand warheads...it would've taken you years.'

  'It took me a week. The dislocation of each warhead took just a fraction of a second...'

  'What do you mean by dislocation?' Keneally asked sharply.

  'Well Professor, I'm sure your familiar with the concept of the fourth dimension...'

  The five mile arc round Century Tower took him low over Jersey. He could imagine the frightened people below rushing to their rattling windows, or ducking down instinctively to cover their heads with their arms.

  A bright pinpoint sun was rising out of the broken skyline. He jammed on the power, banking harder. Just before Union City the light split into two green and one yellow dot.

  He glanced at the larger red dot circling at fifty thousand feet above Newark. Thanks, he thought. The AWAC was translating its own fix on the intromission markers into the reference frame of his display. The reflections of the three beams, projected across the Hudson into Manhattan, would otherwise have been undetectable.

  Out of the arc now his flight suit deflated slightly, bringing some relief. Ahead the apartments and office blocks, malls and parks could be seen sharply for an instant as they surged over his horizon before being consumed in a visual smear.

  Just as he cleared the last building, the plane shuddered once and the mounting roar of the engines crashed into a heavenly silence.

  As the Hudson streaked by below he focussed on the three points, automatically making the final adjustments. Two of the points framed a break in the Manhattan skyline. The third lay much deeper in. Easing the rudder until the point was central, he flicked the switch on the joystick. Below him the twelve one thousand pounders, the usurpers of the Sparrows and Sidewinders, silently came alive.

  By the time he came in above Hells Kitchen he was doing Mach 1.2.

  'But why? Why are you doing all this?' Nkobe was bearing up the best. Valeur and Keneally, perhaps because they were more scientifically literate, seemed stunned into silence by Verity's casual description of her 4-space manipulations.

  'Why have I taken away all the warheads? Why have I killed all those people? Because I had no choice. Because mankind faces extinction. And I don't mean nuclear war or anything like that. That wouldn't cause real extinction. What I am talking about is a far greater threat. Total species death, and within three generations.'

  'Wait,' Nkobe's fists were clenched, 'are you saying that you intend to kill us all?'

  'No,' Verity sighed loudly, 'I'm trying to stop that happening. In fact I'm the only one who can. I'm mankind's last hope!'

  There was no sound, no warning.

  The shockwave, which had merely hammered at the buildings up to 9th Avenue, now swept along the rest of 45th Street like two continuous explosions. Windows crystallised into shrapnel, hailing splinters into shops and houses and offices. Compression forces slammed into moveable objects, turning rooms into maelstroms of wood and metal that scythed down the blinded inhabitants.

  On the street below the pressure wave punched holes in eardrums, tumbling pedestrians along like sagebrush. The decompression followed, twisting the debris into crazy vortices that hoovered the street. Pedestrians still on their feet were lifted into the air, the lucky to fall back quickly, others to become debris themselves.

  On board the F-15 Logan was already almost unconscious. At 900 mph he was travelling too fast to be hit by his own rebounding shockwaves. But New York was windy, and unevennesses in his trailing vortices tugged at the aircraft, tumbling it and hammering him around like a pea in a whistle.

  A wingtip struck a building and sheared off instantly, whipping the Eagle round with terrible force. The last thing Logan heard was all his ribs snapping at once.

  The last thing he saw was the flat wall of the General Assembly building streaking towards him.

  Leith caught the movement of an agent by the security monitor. Peering closer, he could see the image of 45th Street on the screen. It looked strange. The Street seemed full of something. It was like two little clouds each growing rapidly bigger, billowing out like two explosions. Behind him he heard Nkobe's cynical laugh. 'That's grotesque! How could you save us?'

  Then he saw the pimple between the two clouds and the world turned to quicksand.

  Shoving people aside, lurching like a drunkard, arm outstretched, he found himself inside the hard circle of the studio lights. He opened his mouth to yell his warning.

  Then all was light and sound and death.

  The dome atop the Assembly fountained into shrapnel as a huge fist of flame punched its way out. Tons of rubble rained down on the crowds along Roosevelt Drive. The nose section of the Eagle smashed its way out of the back wall, forming a hundred metre finger of smoke and flame which drooped over into the East River. Where it hit a cloud of steam rose, followed by a thousand smaller splashes as more debris landed.

  Meanwhile the Assembly's four sides had disintegrated into grey-white waves. They washed out from the Plaza, obscuring the river and trees and buildings under a choking, deadening shroud of dust.

  The reverberations from the blast finally died away, leaving a dreadful silence

  PART 2

  God

  CHAPTER 19

  A Hair's Breadth ana Manhattan

  I guess I was born then in that inferno of exploding munitions. You could say I rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the General Assembly.

  A phoenix that was very busy throwing up at the time.

  Truth to tell I thought I'd died and gone to hell. And hell, it seemed, was to be an eternity of nausea and vomiting.

  4-space affects people like that. Some, like the very young, can handle it but only just. Most take it badly. To appreciate 3-space you need two flattish retinas stuffed with nerve endings. For 4-space, spherical retinas are a must, otherwise you drown in a warped acid nightmare.

  Closing your eyes doesn't help. Not unless you've got 4-dimensional eyelids.

  Fighting the tidal waves of nausea, I struggled to realign my shattered senses. My vision dipped and soared, focussing in and out as though under the control of a wild thing. For a while it was much too much and I lost myself in the convoluted perspectives of a new infinity.

  Then something touched my face and I felt the familiar
indentations of my ring against my cheek. Trying to fix one point in the perceptual vortex, I attempted to focus on my hand. At first it was unrecognisable in its mind-numbing complexity and mercifully indistinct. Then I moved my head slightly and it flashed into focus. It was suddenly open, more grotesquely open than any luckless rabbit pinned out on a dissection table. I saw the blood vessels worming their way through my flesh before exploding out into fine capillary webs and suffusing my meat. I must have jerked my head back, for then my hand was covered in a white glove of fat, barely hidden by a fine haze of skin.

  I thrust the revolting alien artefact away and by chance found myself looking directly along the axis of the new dimension. I saw the tiered infinities of stars, whole universes opened out like my hand and I roared my terror.

  The restructuring was instantaneous. I felt something solid beneath me and grasped it for dear life. I sucked in a vast lungful of air and closed my eyes and this time, to my infinite relief, everything went dark. I slowly opened them again.

  The woman was sitting in a chair, her eyes wide with concern as she looked intently at me.

  'I'm sorry, Dr. Leith,' she said, 'I had planned to help you prepare but events overtook me.' She indicated a door to my right. 'Perhaps you'd like to clean yourself up.'

  I realised I was lying on a well-carpeted floor, my fingers clawing into the thick pile. The whole room was luxuriously appointed with a huge picture window through which sunlight streamed. I must have still been in shock, for the next thing I knew I was looking through the glass, down onto Central Park a hundred feet below.

  Then I was in the bath, the soothing warmth bringing my scattered wits back together, healing me, making me loath to leave. Finally, after what seemed like hours of shameless wallowing, I reluctantly climbed out. There was a blue robe hanging on the back of the door. I noticed the Walton crest on the pocket, then became aware of it on all the packets of soap and shampoo and razor blades. The Walton was one of New York's most exclusive hotels. A suite of rooms like this must cost a fortune, I remember thinking.

  I glanced once at the white, stricken face in the mirror then looked quickly away.

  By the time I got back the room had changed. The bunched drapes had been lowered and the room was dark but for what at first I thought were TV's, twenty or thirty of them arranged in four banks.

  As I approached I saw that the screens weren't flat but three dimensional, like tanks of luminescent water. Several of the tanks shimmered then cleared, filling with scenes I eventually recognised as the UN Plaza— though little of it remained. Flames licked from the rubble where the General Assembly had been. Roosevelt Drive was dotted with the sparking lights of ambulances and fire trucks. The buildings facing the Plaza looked gap-toothed where glass had shattered. One view showed firemen and police heaving at some rubble.

  Verity cleared her throat and I realised my mind had begun to drift away, lost in the smoke and blackness and pain. 'It must have been a terrible shock to you, Dr. Leith, it certainly was to me. But you're quite safe here. You're literally invulnerable, as far as mankind is concerned anyway.'

  'Here?'

  'Here is a micron higher than the 3-space you're used to. A cigarette paper’s thickness from mankind's reality, but as unreachable as the furthest star.'

  'Just us, or the hotel room?'

  'The whole floor. In case you feel like some exercise.'

  I pointed to the view tanks and raised my eyebrows.

  'High-D perspectives, flattened out into 3-D representations. I can't handle the real thing either!'

  In one view tank I saw a woman crouching over the body of a man in a wrecked and smoke-blackened room. I guessed it was from some other building in the Plaza, maybe the Secretariat. As I watched I began to pick up the faint sounds of her weeping.

  'What happened?'

  Verity nibbled at her lip. ‘An assassination attempt, obviously. If you hadn't nearly been blown away too I would've suspected you, or some of the rest of your friends.'

  She shook her head. 'You know I've seen so much of this sort of thing, yet still the perfidy of mankind can take me by surprise.'

  'What about Carlsson, Nkobe, Valeur?'

  'They're all dead I'm afraid. Killed instantly. You were the only other survivor from the studio.'

  'Thanks,' I said, thinking: why?

  She indicated one of the chairs, a plush well-padded cream-coloured number, and I realised I'd been standing dithering. I sat down, decorously arranging the bathrobe to cover as much as possible. Still in shock, I had some crazy ideas about what she might be after.

  'Who did it?' I asked. I didn't sound angry. I didn't even feel angry. Shock is a strange thing.

  'Let's find out for sure,' she looked towards the central column of tanks. The light cast by them made her eye sockets, already deep, look like pits.

  The images on the screens froze. Then like a film being rewound, they started to move backwards.

  A cloud formed over the East River then, as though under the action of a grossly amplified gravity, it collapsed back in on itself. It crash-dived into the water where a maelstrom of ripples coalesced and projectiles of brick and mortar shot into the sky. The river spat out the wreckage of the jet. Inhaling flames as it arced above the water, the wreckage ate its way along the huge finger of smoke.

  Meanwhile rubble was dropping from the sky, condensing out to form the roof. Everything from the river converged on the huge conical hole in the back end of the building, then it was suddenly whole again. Another tank was showing the wreckage, which I now realised was the nose section of the fighter, reversing through wall after wall, pushing a cloud of smoke and flame behind it. Out of this people emerged unscathed.

  Now the flames vanished, leaving the jet complete and incongruous inside the building. Its speed and momentum had been so great that it had been carried well into the building before its armaments had had a chance to explode.

  I noticed then that the backward pace was being slowed and realised with a sinking feeling that Verity wanted me to witness the death of those near me.

  The jet was retreating so slowly now that I could make out the crazy reflections rippling along its burnished flanks. Even as I watched the ripples, the premonitors of the fuselage breaking up, were starting to subside. A plume of debris materialised behind the jet and was pushed back into the studio. Valeur, Keneally and Nkobe were magically reconstructed out of the rubble. As the plane disappeared behind a rapidly sewed up wall, I saw the look of puzzlement appear on Valeur's face. Then, expanding out of nothing, I saw myself appear in the spot that Valeur had been looking at.

  'How did...?'

  'The Cloud, my — colleague — that's where it pushed you out of 3-space.'

  'The Cloud?'

  'We'll save that for later.'

  'What about you? How did you survive? Did the 'cloud' push you out of the way too?'

  She continued to look at the tanks but I could see the furrows as her brow knitted. 'No,' she said tightly, 'that's the real irony. I was never there. What you saw was just a shadow. A three-dimensional shadow cast from 4-space. I've heard you use the Flatland analogy before. Think of a mirrored sheet penetrating Flatland at 45 degrees. You could project an image from outside the Flatland universe into it, a kind of transdimensional Pepper's Ghost.' I saw her hands twisting around the arms of her chair. 'So you see they murdered all those people, just to kill a phantom.'

  Another tank showed the jet still intact, but for a sheared wingtip emerging backwards out of the building towards 45th Street.

  Verity sat forward in her seat. 'Let's take a closer look at the pilot.'

  Four peripheral tanks filled with the cockpit. 45th Street could be seen shifting wildly through the cockpit window and I realised the jet must have started to spin before it hit the Assembly. Then one viewpoint shifted, almost as though the camera were climbing into the cockpit with the pilot. The viewpoint plunged through the blackened visor, dissolving it and revealing the pilot'
s magnified face. It was pale and very thin and the eyes seemed empty, uncaring even in the millisecond before his death.

  'Recognise him?'

  'No. He looks sick.'

  'Look at the neck. Those lumps below the jawbone, yet his face is so thin.' The man's clothes faded away and his body flattened out as though subject to unthinkable torsion, organs and bones sliding out and across one another. For a brief moment I tasted again the terrible vertigo of the high-D perspective. Gagging, I looked away.

  'Sorry,' Verity's tone sounded genuine, 'You can look again.'

  The cockpit was already receding as the viewpoint panned back.

  'Tumours,' Verity sat back in her chair and ran a finger down the bridge of her nose. 'He was riddled with tumours.'

  'Was it curable?'

  'Not with human technology, no.’

  'And with yours?'

  'It's not mine, but yes, The Cloud could probably have fixed it.'

  'Some of the wonders you're bringing to mankind?'

  Those dark, deep-set eyes regarded me coolly. 'Don't bet on it,' she said.

  I glanced back at the screens. The plane seemed to be pushing back two unravelling spirals of vapour and debris. Where the outlets of the vortices touched the sides of the buildings, instant reconstruction was taking place. Windows were reglazed; blinded office workers had their sight miraculously restored. Visual display units, which had imploded under the initial pressure wave, reassembled themselves out of the ether.

  I looked back at the woman. She seemed so unthreatening, rather like I remembered my mother in fact, though older and smaller.

  I sensed a tiredness and resignation about her. The deaths/resurrections we were watching seemed to leave her largely unmoved. That was not the case with me. As you will remember from the fiasco at Woodhaven mortuary, I didn't have a strong stomach. I turned away from the tanks to look at her, concentrating hard on her features.

  'Do you mind if I ask some questions?'

  She kept her eyes on the tanks. 'Go ahead.'