When they got out of the car to look around they were even more puzzled. The field they were in was low-lying and boggy so that the ground was wet even after the fine summer weather. The earth was so soft that even the sheep left hoof-prints in it. Yet there were no tyre-tracks behind the car, no sign that they’d ever actually driven there at all. It was as though the vehicle had been plucked up by a giant hand and then gently deposited here where it was now parked.
The other strange thing was that they couldn’t see any mountains. They’d been driving in their own part of the country where the mountains were always visible on the horizon at least. Yet here there were none to be seen.
The man and the woman also noticed that their watches had stopped, and stopped at precisely the same time: 3.57am.
The woman grew frightened. The man grew frightened too, but didn’t want the woman to see this. So he tried to look tough. He stared up at the sky, where there was nothing much to see beyond an old crow flapping lazily on its way to nowhere in particular, which must be a special place for crows because they always look as though they’re going there.
‘I’ve seen this kind of thing before,’ the man said.
This came as a surprise to the woman – he’d never struck her as a man who’d had a single odd thing happen to him in his whole life. But it turned out that he meant he’d seen it on television.
‘Mary,’ the man said gravely, ‘I suspect we were abducted by a You Eff Oh.’
‘Lord save us!’ the woman said, and shivered.
Quite a number of people were having odd awakenings that Monday morning, and all of their experiences had several things in common. Firstly, they woke up in places that they knew full well they hadn’t gone to sleep in. Secondly, they were miles from their homes. Thirdly, when they did wake they found themselves dressed in whatever they’d been wearing at about four o’clock that morning: nightclothes, mainly. And fourthly and finally, not one of them could remember a single thing about how they’d got to where they were. They were found wandering the roads by early-morning travellers, or blundered dazed into half-awake villages and towns, or turned up, scared and bleary-eyed, in the yards of scattered farmhouses. They woke in fields and on top of haystacks. They woke in town squares or parks. They woke – someone soon noticed – in reasonably safe places, away from roads, where nothing dangerous would be likely to happen to them while they slept. It was as though someone had deliberately placed them. It was all extremely spooky, and it got spookier the more you thought about it.
Gradually, as dawn became morning and the country of Ireland woke up, word spread that something very strange had taken place in one of its less populated areas. At the very least a great epidemic of sleepwalking (and in a couple of cases the even stranger sleepdriving) seemed to have broken out. And as the reports of the sufferers became better known, an even weirder fact became clear: whatever had happened, it had happened in a relatively small area around the mountains to the northwest. Every one of the sufferers either lived in that area or had been passing through it at 4am that morning, when the strange thing – whatever it was – seemed to have taken place.
It soon became clear that in the middle of the previous night, in a corner of Ireland, while nobody was looking, something terribly, terribly odd had taken place. Someone, or something, had evicted all the people. Nobody knew why or how, least of all those who’d been evicted. And naturally everyone was puzzled, because it’s not the sort of thing that happens every day.
Naturally too, the police were interested immediately. Everybody was. The first reporters arrived in the area within the hour. Strange and garbled and downright foolish reports were broadcast from the northwest itself – because, of course, it hadn’t taken long before people began to wonder what exactly was going on up there, and a few hardy souls had gone to take a look. And soon the rumours flew, and grew as they flew, as rumours will. And then the soldiers started coming, and the helicopters, and by noon the first of the international television crews. Cool-headed shopkeepers in villages close to the centre of events – those villages which still had anyone in them – began to take a longer view of things, and rubbed their hands, and raised their prices, and sat back to wait and watch.
19. Reputation One
At first the spectators saw only movement, a seething mass of … what? Earth? Water? No. Something alive. Some kind of insect? Ants? A beehive in enormous close-up?
Suddenly the camera zoomed in and the scene on the screen became clearer. There were gasps in the dark room as it became obvious that what they were seeing was a crowd of human beings. But such a crowd! Such a mass of pushing, shoving, clawing humanity! The camera, panning, showed no end to it.
The watchers could make out no details, only the struggling masses. Then the camera zoomed in again, still panning here and there, and they could spot individual areas of the crowd. Here was a large group, led by a figure in black, carrying banners with religious pictures on them. In fact, there were many such religious groups, some of them kneeling, obviously praying, while the crowd surged around them. A knot of orange-robed Krishna devotees banged drums and shook rattles and tambourines as they moved along. There was a tight group of what looked like film cameramen carrying big professional-looking video cameras on their shoulders. There were many different groups, but most of the great crowd seemed made up of individuals. And all of them, whether singly or in groups, were struggling in the same direction: forward.
‘The numbers have been growing from day one,’ said a voice in the darkness. ‘A trickle of sightseers began as soon as the first news reports were released. That trickle very quickly became a flood, as you can see. The pictures you see here were taken at eleven o’clock last night. The best available estimates put the numbers on the screen at something between fifteen and twenty thousand people. Thousands more will have arrived since then by every available means of transport. They’re coming from all over the world, and our port and airport facilities are already stretched to full capacity. They’ve never seen anything like this: that’s the problem – no one has.’
The speaker’s voice quivered on the final phrase. He cleared his throat.
‘There are gatherings this large or larger,’ he said, ‘at approximately twenty places along the perimeter. There are smaller crowds at an estimated sixteen further locations. All in all we estimate that as of noon today, there were well over half a million people gathered around The Phenomenon.’
The images had been filmed from a helicopter. Now the chopper swirled up and away from the crowd itself, the camera panning again to show the scene behind. Great banks of searchlights shone blinding beams of light, illuminating a gigantic campsite of caravans, marquees and tents, of all sorts of rickety shelters and thousands of sleeping bags thrown on the bare ground. Beside the campsite stood row upon row of mobile chip vans, and a great nomad city of stalls offering everything from fast food to holy relics to tarot card readings.
‘These scenes were filmed at a place called Doulapown,’ the voice said. ‘Until two days ago it had a permanent population of exactly zero and a part-time population composed largely of migratory birds. It now has a tourist information office, seventeen churches and temples based in tents and marquees, twenty illegal bars, two bureaux de change and a bank.’
Another voice came from the group of shadows sitting in the darkness. ‘What about crowd control?’
‘Watch.’
The camera panned again, to the front of the crowd this time. You could see that the whole mass was fringed by a thin line of police and soldiers who were struggling to hold it back. They were on a fool’s errand. It was hard to gauge how many of them there were, but compared to the numbers surging forward they were too few to offer more than token resistance. Slowly but surely they were being pushed back.
‘A good rainstorm would do more to clear the area than we can,’ the first voice said. ‘The army and police presence at Doulapown is higher than at any other location on the perimeter. But
as you can see, it’s completely ineffective. We have only so many soldiers and policemen, and they do have other duties. Secondment of police from the cities and the larger towns has already led to crime-levels in these reaching crisis point.’
‘What about water-cannon?’ the second voice asked. ‘Tear gas? There are methods, you know.’
This voice was brusque, clipped, American. Several throats were cleared uncomfortably at its words.
‘We’re aware that there are methods,’ the first voice replied. ‘We’re just not entirely comfortable with the idea of using them. Not with publicity being the way it is. You must realise that the Phenomenon is the lead story on every news bulletin on earth right now. Media people in the area probably outnumber clergy.’
‘But you can’t–’ began the American voice. Then, in mid-sentence, it broke into a gasp. The sound was lost in the simultaneous chorus of gasps that broke out in the darkness. Even the Irish government representatives present had trouble containing themselves, though they’d seen the thing before – had been watching pictures of it for two whole days. Some had seen it with their own eyes, and that was even more impressive. The others must have seen pictures of it too, of course, but early shots hadn’t conveyed its sheer…otherness.
The camera had continued its pan, past the crowd and past the soldiers. It had come to rest on The Phenomenon itself: vast, beautiful, inexplicable, terrifying, mystifying – and yet, to the eye at least, looking so fragile as to be hardly there.
Ahead of the crowd, lit by the banks of searchlights and the last light of the dying summer sun, an enormous wall of vaguely iridescent purple haze rose from the ground. It went up and up, its summit hidden in clouds. At ground level the haze stretched as far as the eye could see. It was indisputably there, and yet it looked no more substantial than a soap-bubble. It looked like a weather phenomenon, a bizarre trick of the light.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the first voice, which belonged to the Irish Minister for Defence. ‘May I introduce to you the reason for this meeting – the Bubble, the Barrier, the Purple Haze, call it what you will. The popular press are having competitions to find a name – the front-runner at the moment seems to be The Ball that’s a Wall.’
He paused, as though waiting for a laugh. None came.
‘For our purposes,’ the Minister said, ‘its name is The Phenomenon. Its official code-name is Reputation One.’
All eyes lingered on the impossible sight on the screen. The Phenomenon was translucent. Beyond the wall of purple could be seen the empty fields of a completely ordinary Irish countryside.
‘Sightings of animal life beyond the wall of The Phenomenon are common,’ the Minister said. ‘The animals show no signs of unease. That means things inside are at least reasonably normal – there’s air and so on.’
‘Any sightings of humans in there, or … you know… anything else?’
‘None that we know of.’
‘Have all the inhabitants of the area been accounted for?’
‘The, um, vast majority of them, yes.’
‘But not all?’
‘No. There’s … an abbey in the mountains there. It’s run by a rather peculiar order of monks based in Switzerland.’
‘Monks?’
‘Monks. We’ve contacted their headquarters in Berne. They say there should be four monks there in the abbey: a Swiss, a Belgian, an Irishman and a young Frenchman. Noone answering their descriptions has turned up among the displaced persons.’
‘You’ve tried phoning the abbey, I presume?’ someone asked.
The Irish Minister sighed patiently.
‘Yes, we have,’ he said. ‘There was no sound on the line at all. Nothing. There’s no sound on any line leading inside that area. No phonecalls can go in there, no radio signals can go in there, no people can go in there, no vehicles can go in there. To judge from the lack of any artificial light at night-time from anywhere inside, even electricity can’t go in. Nothing can go in!’
He looked again to where their eyes were all still fixed – the softly glowing haze on the screen. In the darkness he raised his arm and pointed a slightly shaky finger at the image.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, his voice quivering, ‘someone or something has emptied a part of my country of its people, and put that thing there to stop them from returning to their homes. We don’t know who’s done it, and we don’t know why. What we do know is that for several days now a part of Ireland has been seized and occupied, every bit as much as if a foreign army had landed. My country has been invaded, gentlemen, and we’ve asked you here because we badly need your advice.’
20. The Appliance of Science
The lights came up in the conference room, and the big screen went blank. The men – they were all men – sat with strained faces and looked at the podium beside the screen where the Minister for Defence stood leafing through a sheaf of papers in a file. They’d seen how close he’d come to losing control, but none of them thought any the worse of him for it. They imagined how they’d feel if this had happened in their own countries; then they imagined how much worse they’d feel if they were the person supposed to make sure that things like this didn’t happen.
‘We’ve been studying Reputation One almost since it first appeared,’ the Minister said. ‘A team of government scientists and engineers was sent to the area as soon as we realised the extent of the problem.’
The scientists hadn’t, he admitted, discovered much by way of useful information. They could see from both air and ground observation that the Phenomenon – visually at least – resembled nothing so much as a gigantic soap-bubble composed of a sort of purple mist. Tests made from helicopters suggested that its notable characteristics aloft were exactly the same as at ground level. As above, so below. Exploratory tunnelling at several sites seemed to confirm that these characteristics continued underground. The Phenomenon might very well be spherical, with only half of it visible above ground. And even that half was extremely impressive, effectively barring humanity from some three hundred square kilometres of the island of Ireland. As to what it was made of, nobody could determine. The haze might or might not be made of a material unknown to science, but the scientists couldn’t analyse it because they couldn’t obtain a sample.
‘You’ve tried using lasers?’ someone asked.
‘Of course we have! The beam simply bounced off – and came close to slicing our top scientist in half. Naturally he was in no hurry to repeat the experiment. We’ve also tried to penetrate the barrier using artillery.’
‘And?’
‘And it doesn’t work. Nothing works. The odd thing is that the haze is in no way hard or shell-like to the touch – I’ve touched it myself. It feel at first rather like dipping your hand into tepid water. But after that resistance grows very quickly. The deepest we’ve managed to penetrate so far is six centimetres. It should be noted too that only living or once-living organic material will penetrate the haze at all.’
They all looked queries at him.
‘A piece of dead wood, or a human limb, or even a bit of grass,’ the Minister said, ‘will penetrate further and more easily than a blade or a bullet – or an artillery shell.’
There was general muttering from his audience.
‘Our people have tried various on-site tests on the substance,’ the Minister went on. He sounded vaguely bitter. ‘Tests for chemical reactions and so on. Results ranged from the completely useless to the worse-than-useless. In fact, several reliable chemical tests strongly suggest that the Phenomenon isn’t actually there at all.’
Eyes strayed to the now-blank screen. None of them could forget the impact of that first real sight of the Bubble. It was there all right.
Generally speaking, the Minister went on, scientific investigation told them only three things, none very helpful. First, no one could say what Reputation One was made of. Second, they didn’t know who, or what, had put it there. Third, they didn’t know why they’d put it there. Which basically meant t
hey were no better off than they’d been two days ago when the thing first appeared. In short, the Irish government’s best scientific brains were baffled. Meanwhile, in the space of those two days the thing had become the biggest tourist attraction on the face of the planet. It had become a site of pilgrimage for half the religions in the world, and for all anyone knew it could at any moment grow, shrink, explode, or open up to release who knew what mayhem on the surrounding crowds, not to mention the rest of humankind.
The Minister’s voice had been growing shakier again as he spoke. By now he sounded almost tearful. He stopped and took control of himself again. He cleared his throat and fiddled with his tie. Then he filled a glass of water from a carafe beside him on the podium and drank it.
‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘we sent out a call to all friendly governments. Your presence here is the result of that appeal. This problem is located in Ireland, but it’s not simply an Irish problem. This thing may be the first of many, or it may contain something that will prove in time to be a danger to us all. The Phenomenon may represent a threat to all of humanity.’
He filled and gulped down another glass of water.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I come here today with a very simple but extremely heartfelt message from the Irish government and the Irish people, and the gist of that message is this: Help!’
21. Developments
The conference was being held in a network of underground rooms and bunkers lying below Government Buildings in Dublin. It was being held in secret, and was perhaps the only place in the whole country not overrun by film-crews. There were plenty of reporters and cameramen outside Government Buildings, of course, waiting to ask emerging politicians for the latest news. But the real news was happening, as it so often does, in quiet air-conditioned rooms underground, where middle-aged well-groomed men in expensive suits (guarded by squads of cold-eyed, younger, well-groomed men wearing ear-pieces, shiny shoes and a variety of government-issue sidearms) discussed the appropriate response to the Big Bubble.
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