by Bob Shaw
Brannigan studied Nicklin as though he were some unpleasant primitive life form. "I bumped into young Maxy in the bar of the Victoria Hotel last night. Got to talking to him for a while." Brannigan increased the intensity of his stare, as though he had just said something very significant.
"Really?" Nicklin toyed nervously with his empty coffee cup as he divined what was coming next. "That was nice."
"When I asked him about my machine he said he didn't even know I'd brought it in. What have you to say to that?"
Nicklin mentally cursed his assistant for not having either the loyalty or the savvy to cover up for him. "You can't trust a word Maxy says when he's had a couple. Poor kid gets confused. I think his memory goes."
"It had gone last night, that's for sure," Brannigan growled, his gaze probing Nicklin's soul. "He couldn't even remember having any relatives over in Poynting – let alone a favourite uncle who had just died, and whose funeral he had just attended."
"My problem is that I trust people too much." Nicklin put on a disappointed expression, at the same time wondering what insane impulse had prompted him to blurt out that particular lie. To make matters worse, he had completely forgotten having done it, otherwise he might have been able to bribe Maxy into collusion.
"I let Maxy put just about anything over on me when he wants some extra time off," he went on. "You know what? I'm going to go over to the welding shop right now and fetch your machine, and while I'm there I'm going to give that kid the worst…"
Nicklin's voice faltered as he glanced out through the nearest window and saw the pear-shaped figure of Maxy approaching with the sewing-machine tucked under his arm. Maxy's bottle shoulders and wide, slabby hips made him look older than his nineteen years when he was seen at a distance. Like many slightly misshapen men, he had great physical strength, and was walking so energetically that he appeared to spring clear of the ground with every step. He had not bothered to put on his hat for the short walk between the two buildings, and his scalp – shaven to forestall premature baldness – shone in the sunlight with the whiteness of lard.
Nicklin, who had been hoping to keep Maxy and Brannigan apart, almost groaned aloud at the sight. Please, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he prayed inwardly, please allow Maxy to have developed some common sense, diplomacy, loyalty or compassion during the night. Make him keep his mouth shut about the dead uncle business. That's not too much to ask…
Maxy burst into the shop with unnecessary force, glaring at Nicklin with hostile eyes. "What for," he demanded, "did you tell Mr Brannigan I had an uncle in Poynting who died?"
Terrible sentence construction, Maxy, Nicklin thought, his mind trying to escape into irrelevances as he realised he was well and truly boxed in. His brow prickled with cool sweat.
"Yeah, that's what I'd like to know." Beneath its frosting of silver stubble, Brannigan's face was that of a man who was prepared to commit murder.
Confronted by his accusers, Nicklin was suddenly amazed by how angry they were. They were behaving as though he had committed some terrible crime against them … as though he had betrayed their trust in a matter of the utmost gravity … and, when it came down to it, who were they? Nobodies! He had no need of them. In fact, they were the ones who needed him! It was, now that he thought of it, rather like the trial scene at the end of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice is coming to her senses and realises that all the entities who are crowding and harassing her are nothing more than playing cards. There was absolutely nothing to prevent him from, as Alice had done, rising up and venting his irritation with one great shout of, Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!
"What are you grinning at?" Brannigan shot Maxy a can-you-believe-this? glance and leaned across the counter, coming so close that Nicklin received a warm gust of cinnamon from his breath. "I don't see anything funny."
Nicklin, who had not been aware of showing amusement, did his utmost to emit that single devastating shout which would scatter his oppressors as though they were leaves caught up in a tornado. His mouth opened, but no matter how he strained no sound was issued, and he realised amid an up-welling of despair that the simple act – natural to anyone who had any backbone to speak of – was beyond his capabilities. He was hemmed in, trapped, about to be humiliated, and could envisage no possible means of escape.
"There must be some misunderstanding here, gentlemen," he said, mind racing with the futility of an engine which has just snapped its load shaft. "I don't think I ever actually said anything about…"
He broke off, becoming aware of a new element in the scene, something which with a modicum of luck could terminate the current unpleasantness. Beyond the wide shady eaves of the building, the agile figure of Zindee White – aged thirteen and a bit – could be seen sprinting across the stretch of grass which separated her family's home from Nicklin's property. She was wearing a bright red T-shirt and orange shorts, and was moving so fast that a visible cloud of dust and pollen swirled in her wake. She was the most regular customer for Nicklin's library service, and – in spite of the age difference – possibly his best friend. It was obvious that she had some important news to impart to him. From past experience he knew that "important" could embrace anything from the acquisition of a desired toy to the discovery of a jewel-bug with exceptional markings. Whatever it was on this occasion, Nicklin vowed, he was going to find some way to make it his ticket to freedom.
Thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he thought while giving a theatrical start of surprise. "Here's young Zindee!" he exclaimed. "And just look at that speed. I hope there isn't anything wrong at home."
Before Brannigan and Maxy could reply, Zindee stormed in through the shop's open door, her sneakers slapping the floor with the force of her deceleration. "Jim! Have you heard the—?"
Realising that Nicklin was not alone, she stopped speaking, folded her hands behind her back and came around the counter to stand at his side. He saw it as a little gesture of solidarity, and was gratified. Zindee was breathing heavily after the run, and Nicklin detected from her the buttery smell of clean perspiration.
"What d'you want, kid?" Maxy said irritably.
Zindee gazed coldly at an old adversary. "Nothing to do with you, baldy."
A look of outrage appeared on Maxy's face, and Nicklin wished he had the child's casual facility with insults. It was a matter of ingrained principle with him that he would never make offensive remarks about any feature which had been foisted on a person by the lottery of birth. If people had unpleasant personality traits, something for which they could be held responsible, then on that score they were fair game – the only snag being that, even so, he found it almost impossible to inflict verbal wounds.
"That brat needs a lesson in manners," Brannigan said.
Zindee studied him for a moment, decided it could be imprudent to cross swords, and moved a little closer to Nicklin. "Have you heard the news, Jim?" she whispered.
Maxy cupped a hand to his ear, intruding. "What news? Speak up a bit, kid."
Zindee hesitated, but Nicklin – determined to develop the situation – gave her a nod of encouragement. "Go ahead, Zindee – what is it?"
"It's just been on our television – the world has moved!"
Nicklin half-smiled as he looked down at Zindee. Her face was round and freckled, with a chin which was tiny and yet determined, and with wide-set eyes which beaconed intelligence and integrity. Her features were perfect, those of an archetypal little girl as envisaged by generations of artists, and over the years Nicklin had learned how to read that face. His smile faded as he saw the anxiety there.
"What do you mean, Zindee?" he said. "How could the world move?"
"Somebody's been on the job," Maxy put in with a guffaw and switched to a falsetto voice. "Did the world move for you, darling?"
"It's just been on television," Zindee insisted. "All the stars are different, Jim. All the ships that were docked outside the portals have disappeared. There was a woman who had just arrived from Earth …
Silvia London, I think she was called … and she was crying a lot … and she said her ship had vanished…"
"The Council should never have allowed television to come into Orangefield," Brannigan said, shaking his huge head – in spite of his violent streak and weakness for alcohol, he was quite puritanical and righteous in most other aspects of his life. "It rots people's minds, that's all it does, with them trashy three-dees. That kid's a perfect example – she don't know what's real and what isn't."
Nicklin did not even subscribe to the sound service which was cabled in from Weston Bridge, but within the last few days he had heard talk of an odd phenomenon which was supposed to be affecting Orbitsville's great shell. It had been said that luminous green lines were moving across both surfaces of the sphere. There had been no way for him to verify the report in person, because the soil and rock strata were more than a thousand metres deep in the Orangefield region. In any case, he had a subconscious desire to forget that he lived in the interior of a shell of ylem which was 320 million kilometres in diameter and only eight centimetres thick.
A product of two centuries of migration, during which virtually the entire population of Earth had moved to Orbitsville, Nicklin thought of his environment simply as "the world" and lived his life exactly as he would have done on a normal planet. But the shining green lines had been something entirely new, and some of the townsfolk had mooted the idea that they were an omen, a prelude to some great event…
"Come on, Zindee!" Nicklin took the child's hand in his and walked with her towards the door of the shop, feeling more relief over his fortuitous escape than concern about any putative threat to his pleasantly humdrum existence. "Let's go over to your place and get ourselves a better idea of what this thing is all about."
"I was talking to you," Brannigan said, scowling.
Nicklin flicked Maxy's shoulder as he passed him. "See to Mr Brannigan for me – and don't forget to give him his bill."
CHAPTER 2
Cham and Nora White – Zindee's parents – had a veterinary practice which they operated from their home on the plot next to Nicklin's land. The fact that they dealt solely with small animals made the couple appear almost as idiosyncratic as Nicklin in the eyes of a sizeable section of the community. The farmers of the area adjudged maintaining the health of livestock to be a worthy occupation, but devoting one's energies to the care of sickly cats, hamsters and the like was regarded as – to say the least of it – a mildly eccentric form of behaviour.
Being classed as oddities had created something of a bond between Nicklin and the adult Whites, but that was almost as far as the relationship went. They were remarkably similar in appearance for a couple with no blood ties – medium build with a tendency to chubbiness, sharp noses, florid complexions and a general red-gold-brown coloration. Nicklin quite liked the Whites' squirrelly appearance, but their unfailing industriousness and lack of humour had deterred him from trying to build up a close friendship.
Unexpectedly, in view of their Calvinistic outlook, they were among the few people in Orangefield who subscribed to the television service which could be piped in at some expense from Weston Bridge. Nicklin knew that Cham and Nora atoned for the self-indulgence by restricting their viewing to the evening hours, and therefore he was surprised on entering the house to find them seated near the set in the main room. It was an indication that Zindee's obvious concern was justified, that something really serious was taking place.
"Morning, Jim!" Cham called out, gesturing for him to sit down. "What do you think of this caper?"
Nicklin nodded a greeting in response to Nora White's tense smile. "I don't know what to think yet. Zindee gave me the bare details."
"It was Zindee who alerted us – that's why we're in here at this time of the day," Cham said, defending himself against any possible charge of sinful sloth. "Can you credit this? They're saying that Orbitsville has moved!"
Nicklin released Zindee's hand and lowered himself into a plumply cushioned armchair. "How do they know?"
"Apparently it's either the universe or us. Look!"
Nicklin directed his attention to the televiewer stage which occupied one corner of the room. The scale control had been set for roughly half-size projection, with the result that the stage appeared to be populated by groups of perfectly formed midgets, male and female, some of whom were obviously distraught. The grassy surface on which they were standing was littered with discarded space suits, some of them resembling corpses. It was obvious that there had been little or no development of the area – the background, apart from a scattering of single-storey prefabs, was the featureless green of Orbitsville's ubiquitous savannahs.
"Where is that?" Nicklin said.
"Portal 36. There's nothing there but an agricultural research station." Cham paused as a series of ripples swept through the scene, momentarily distorting the human figures and reminding the viewers that those seemingly real and solid human figures were only bi-laser projections, holomorphs. "We were warned the image quality could be pretty poor. Apparently all the permanent outside antennae and reflector satellites have disappeared. The TV engineers are working with lash-ups."
"This is a kind of amateur broadcast, anyway," Nora White added as Zindee went to sit on her knee. "The network is showing it because those people were in the middle of disembarking when their ship vanished. They actually saw it happen."
Cham flapped one hand in an appeal for silence. "Listen to this guy – he was on before."
"We are about to have another word with Rick Renard, the owner of the Hawkshead, the cargo ship which was attempting to dock at Portal 36 when – literally – it vanished into nothingness," an invisible commentator said. The televiewer scene changed, flowing outwards around Renard until he occupied the centre of the stage. He was a curly-haired young man with the sort of buoyant and healthy plumpness which is underpinned by well-developed muscle.
"As has already been mentioned," he said in a high-income drawl, "my ship had attempted to dock in the normal manner, but Captain Lessen was unable to complete his manoeuvre. There appeared to be some kind of repulsive force acting on the ship and preventing it from getting to within thirty metres of the Orbitsville shell.
"The shell itself was in a highly unusual condition – it was shining with a greenish light which was pulsing on and off several times a second. It is possible that the radiation had something to do with repelling the ship. Perhaps it hadn't – I don't really know. It was all so … I mean…"
Renard smiled unhappily and Nicklin saw that his lips had begun to quiver. The man looked as though he would have the sleek arrogance of the very wealthy in normal circumstances, but it was obvious that he was now in a state of shock. He shook his head, bringing the interview to a premature end, and turned to a black-haired woman of striking appearance who was standing just behind him, looking equally distraught. He put his arms around her and she slowly inclined her head on to his shoulder.
"I've seen that woman before," Cham White announced triumphantly, as though claiming a prize. "She's connected with some so-called scientific organisation which says it has proof of life after death. Her name is Silvia … Silvia…"
"London," Zindee supplied.
"That's right. Of the … um … Anima Mundi Foundation. I wonder what she was doing on that ship."
"If you find her so fascinating, why don't you just take yourself off to Portal 36 and ask her?" Nora said tardy.
"There's no call for you to be jealous," Cham replied, looking gratified over what he saw as a compliment. "Besides, from what we've heard so far, it'll be quite some time before anybody will be able to travel between portals."
"Why is that?" Nicklin said.
"No ships! You're not paying attention, Jim. Everything, but everything, that was outside the shell has disappeared – and that includes all the interportal ships."
"I wasn't thinking," Nicklin mumbled, shrugging slightly in response to a sympathetic glance from Zindee. It came to him that he had
not really accepted the sensational news as being true. The portals, those kilometre-wide circular holes in the Orbitsville shell, were almost five million kilometres apart. Taking a direct interior route from one portal to another, even if Mach 2 aircraft were available, would entail ninety days of non-stop flying – the kind of odyssey which was ruled out by logistics and economics.
"I keep expecting somebody to discover that it's all been a hoax, or a mistake," Nicklin explained. "Two or three hundred years ago, back on Earth, somebody made a radio broadcast of a play about invaders from some nearby planet and it panicked a lot of people."
"H. G. Wells," Cham said knowledgeably. "It was H. G. Wells who made that broadcast."
"Whoever it was, he scared a lot of people and there was no need for it."
"This is different, Jim," Nora White said. "I wish they would skip all this human interest stuff and take us back to the scientists in Beachhead. At least they had some idea of what they were talking about."
As if responding to her wish, the scene on the platform faded and, after some sparkling swirls of colour, was replaced by a holomorphic group of men and women seated at a circular table. A female voice announced the return to the main OTTV studios in Beachhead City for further expert comment, then went on to name all the members of the panel and list their qualifications. The first speaker, named Carpenter, was a youthful professor of observational astronomy from the Garamond University.
"The events of the past few hours are unique in the history of Optima Thule," he began. "Incredible though it may seem…"
"You can easily tell that guy's a scientist," Cham said loudly. "Nobody else would be pompous enough to refer to the Big O as Optima Thule."
"Be quiet," Nora chided. "The rest of us want to hear what he's saying."
