by Bob Shaw
Montane had remained kneeling by the grave for more than an hour – his mind poised like a hovering kestrel half-way between divine inspiration and insanity – and when finally he had stood up on aching legs he had been a different man.
People with medical knowledge had later told him that his transformation had been a consequence of delayed shock, rather than a profound religious experience, but Montane had known better. Much better. Infinitely better.
Even while sitting, as he now was, sipping tea on Orangefield's sun-dappled common, the principal element of his thoughts was bafflement over the fact that virtually nobody else was aware of having fallen into a devilish trap. What kind of mass insanity, what form of collective blindness, had suddenly afflicted humanity upon the discovery of Orbitsville?
The people of two centuries ago were products of a civilisation which had always been forced to fight tooth-and-nail simply to remain in existence. They were hard, cynical and suspicious; they knew the cosmos provided no free lunches – and yet when Orbitsville had been found they had swarmed to it like wasps to the honey pot.
Nobody had said: Wait a minute! Let's think this thing over before we do anything hasty. What we have here is a huge sphere made of some material which defies analysis, but which has artificial gravity. It also has force lines around its sun in the form of a cage which has been beautifully engineered to provide night and day, and a progression of seasons. The thing is obviously an artefact! It seduces us by promising to meet all our needs, to fulfil all our dreams. It is too good to be true – therefore it has to be a TRAP!
Montane had no idea who had created Orbitsville, but he knew in his heart and soul that the makers – those who had schemed to pervert the course of human destiny – were no friends of God. Orbitsville had remained quiescent for what men regarded as a long time, two whole centuries, but that was a brief span in the context of the history of the universe. A carnivorous flower always remained motionless until its victim was far back in its throat, beyond any possibility of escape.
There had been reports recently of glowing green lines moving across the surface of the great sphere, and to Montane they were the equivalent of the first hungry quiverings of a Venus fly-trap's jaws, just before the trap was sprung…
His thoughts returned to more mundane matters as he again caught sight of Nibs Affleck in the distance. A fleck of white showed that he had obtained the newspaper, and a rapid change of position indicated that he was still running. Montane half-smiled as he tried to recall the times when he too had been blessed with so much physical energy that he could afford to burn some of it off in needless exertion. At sixty, he still looked vigorous – with his glossy dark hair, unlined face and straight back – but recently his capacity for manual work had been greatly diminished. He did not suspect any furtively gnawing illness; it was just that his mental burden seemed to weigh him down more with each passing year. Mettle fatigue, he had dubbed it. The spirit could become poisoned with the toxins of weariness in the same way as an overworked body.
Affleck slid to a halt beside him, his complexion rendered even more hectic through running in the heat. "Here's your paper, Corey. I got you one."
"I can see you did." Montane set his cup on the ground. "How much did it cost?"
"I wouldn't take any money from you, Corey," Affleck said, looking offended. "It was nothing anyhows – only a quarter."
"Thank you, Nibs." Montane considered pressing the money on Affleck, then realised the youngster would get the maximum value out of it in the form of the giving pleasure. He raised a hand to acknowledge Affleck's departure in the direction of the marquee, then turned his attention to the newspaper. It was large and unwieldy, like those in historic videos, but it had been laser-printed in a modern open typeface – the publishers had not gone overboard in their devotion to the past and its ways. Montane, having no wish to strain his eyes, nodded in approval.
The front page lead – headlined MAIN STREET TO STAY IN THE DARK – was a long piece about a wrangle in the town council caused by some local businessmen applying for permission to erect illuminated signs on the façades of their stores. The other reports dealt with such issues as an unfamiliar type of tough ground-hugging weed being found on a farm, and the mayor's wife putting on an exhibition of her own water-colours.
Montane scanned the columns with indulgent interest, and was about to go to the next page when he noticed a very brief story right at the bottom of the sheet. It was the mention of astronomers in the sub-heading which caught his eye – he had long been sensitised to anything dealing with Orbitsville's relationship to the natural galaxy. The piece read:
EMBARRASSED ASTRONOMERS
If anybody notices a pink glow on the horizon tonight, in the general direction of Beachhead, it will not be caused by that city's surfeit of stoplights. Instead, it will be emanating from the red faces of our overpaid stargazers who today were forced to admit that they have lost visual contact with our known universe!
Professor Carpenter of the Garamond University tried to explain away this minor act of carelessness – after all, anybody could mislay a few billion galaxies – by claiming that Orbitsville has moved to a new position in space!
Take heart anybody who noticed a peculiar lurching sensation during the night. It was not the foundations of your houses shifting – just the foundations of science!
Montane's heart had begun a powerful thudding as he lowered the newspaper to his lap and stared blindly into the distance. He was neither deceived nor reassured by the anti-science, debunking tone of the report. He would have to verify the story, of course, but it was evident to him that some astounding cosmic event had occurred. The all-important questions now were: Had the Orbitsville trap been fully sprung, or was this some preliminary stage? Were all of Orbitsville's inhabitants doomed, or could there yet be time for a few of them to escape by starship to a natural and God-given planet? Was he, by virtue of not having done enough during his six years of awareness, responsible for the ultimate demise of the human race?
Racked by guilt and dread, he rose to his feet and walked quickly towards the marquee, where his followers were laughing as their day's labours came to an end.
CHAPTER 4
In preparation for leaving the library, Nicklin checked over his list of deliveries and found there were three that he could conveniently drop off at customers' houses on his way into town. They were softbacks – a Western by Jack Schaefer; a slim volume on the design and making of different shapes of paper gliders; and a cheerfully illustrated treatise on the railways of Victorian England. The books were slightly bulkier than they would have been when first printed, because of the permatome coating which made the pages virtually indestructible, but otherwise it was hard to tell from their condition that they were well over two centuries old.
It occurred to Nicklin that the library trade might be adversely affected if the astronomers took any length of time to sort themselves and their equipment out and re-establish contact with Earth. Like most other library operators, he dealt mainly with the past. Orbitsville had produced practically no literature of distinction, or even works of passing interest – a consequence, the experts claimed, of all social pressures and constraints having been removed. Competition and conflict had always been the mainsprings of great art, and on Orbitsville – with free land equivalent to five billion Earths available – there was little reason for people to compete for anything, and even less for going to war. As an inevitable result, the experts went on, the few individuals who bothered to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, were unable to produce anything that was not passionless, shallow and trivial.
Nicklin doubted if his customers in low-tech Orangefield had bothered to analyse their tastes in reading matter to that extent, but he knew they showed a solid preference for books which had been published on pre-migration Earth. They seemed to be motivated by nostalgia, not for the Old World itself but for the feel of a period characterised by cosy security and comfortable cer
titudes. The market was too diffuse to interest publishers on Orbitsville, so the small commercial vacuum had been filled by LOG – the Library Owners' Guild – which imported containers of miscellaneous books scavenged from the abandoned towns and cities of Earth.
Turning his attention to more immediate concerns, Nicklin set out the notepad which would enable late callers to help themselves to books and record the details for him. He gave the counter a final wipe with a duster and, without locking the door, went outside to wait for Zindee.
She must have been watching from her window because she appeared at once, bounding across the intervening grass with her usual display of energy. With her parents' permission, Nicklin was taking Zindee into town for a sundae, and she had acknowledged the specialness of the occasion by putting on her best sunhat, the pink one with the pictures of Toby the Tortoise speeding around the rim in a manner which no real life chelonian could emulate. Nicklin put on his own hat – a flat cone of reflective gold – as soon as he moved out from under the broad eaves of his shop, and was grateful for the protection it provided. Orbitsville's sun was always directly overhead, night coming only when it was eclipsed by the next bar of the solar cage, and as a result the heat from it built up steadily throughout the day. To venture out at any time of the day without donning suitable headgear was to invite a severe case of sunstroke, but the period still referred to as "evening" was the riskiest.
"Hi, Jim!" Zindee arrived at his side in a perceptible swirl of air currents. "Know something? I could eat the biggest sundae in the whole world."
"You'll have to graft for it," Nicklin said, putting on a tough voice as he handed over his three books. "I'm going to trust you to deliver those, and each time you drop one you'll forfeit a scoop of ice cream. Is that clear?"
"Yes, boss." Zindee gave him a kind of cringing salute and they set off in the direction of the town centre. They crossed the bridge and were walking in the shade of the tall whistle trees which lined the road when Nicklin noticed that the child seemed slightly subdued. Praying that it was nothing to do with Orbitsville's supposed change of location, he asked what was on her mind.
"I keep thinking about all those weird things they said on TV this morning," she replied.
He snorted with amusement. "I wouldn't worry about it."
"But it's scary, Jim. Doesn't it bother you?"
"About the world having moved?" He gave another snort. "I'm a light sleeper, Zindee – I think I would have noticed something if the world had moved during the night."
"But what about the stars? They're all different."
"How do we know that?" Nicklin, who had never seen a star and whose knowledge of astronomy was sketchy, began to invent new theories of cosmic physics. "I read that astronomers sometimes discover a cluster of a dozen or so really distant galaxies. Then they look a bit harder and find that the so-called cluster is actually just one galaxy. The light coming from it gets bent this way and bent that way as it is travelling towards the wise men. So they run around squawking, getting themselves into a state over discovering eleven galaxies that don't even exist!"
Zindee frowned. "What has that got to do with…?"
"It shows that when it comes to stars and the like you just can't trust your eyes. Light rays can bend. It could be that space … that space…" Nicklin felt a surge of the old heady, guilty elation which often gripped him when he found that what had started off as a rubble of words was cementing itself into a lofty edifice. "…is not homogenous, not the same everywhere. There could be inclusions, anomalous regions where light gets really twisted up, where what you see is all-scrambled. If Orbitsville has drifted into one of those regions the outside universe is bound to look different. It's only natural."
"Jim," Zindee looked up at him with the absurdly solemn face of a thirteen-year-old professor of logic, "to me that sounds like a load of male ox."
"It explains the facts better than all that stuff about Orbitsville having moved millions of light years during the night."
"Yeah? And what about all the ships and docks that have disappeared?"
"The anomaly doesn't confine itself to affecting light," Nicklin went on, still on a creative high. "It's a kind of a storm, a spatial tornado which whips interstellar dust particles up to near the speed of light. That increases their mass, you see … builds up their energy … Particles in that state could scour Orbitsville clean in a few seconds, like a giant sandblaster."
"And what about…?" Zindee closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. "I wonder if Mr Chickley has got in a fresh supply of chopped walnuts. He didn't have them last time – remember? – and you can't make a sundae that's worth a doodle without chopped walnuts."
"Very smooth change of subject," Nicklin said. "Almost imperceptible."
"I got bored talking about … all that stuff."
"I told you at the start that it was pretty dull." Nicklin nudged Zindee with his elbow, putting her off her stride, and she came back at him by shoving hard with her shoulder. They continued walking towards the town centre, their progress slowed by sporadic horseplay and the three small detours needed for the book deliveries. The district was quite typical of Orangefield, with its hushed avenues and masses of ornamental vegetation screening low houses which were roofed with red or green tiles. The scene, Nicklin decided, could have been some privileged part of Earth, except that at this time of the day the sun would have been low in the sky, sinking to the western horizon. He tried to imagine living in an environment in which the sun wandered right across the dome of the heavens during the course of the day, but he only succeeded in conjuring up a queasy sensation, a feeling of balancing on a slowly tilting platform.
"I hear something," Zindee said. "What do I hear?"
They were still a few minutes' walk from the town common, but when Nicklin concentrated he became aware of a grumbly, low-frequency agitation of the air, a disturbance which was alien to Orangefield's sleepy suburbs. "It's the holy rollers. They didn't waste much time getting started on the spiel, but they're not getting any money out of me, and I'll tell you that for nothing."
"What's a spiel?"
"It's when some character sets out to persuade you that things would be much better if you transferred all the money in your pocket into his pocket."
To Nicklin's surprise, Zindee looked up at him in sudden eagerness. "Let's go and hear what they're saying."
"What about your ice cream?"
"It won't melt." She moved slightly ahead of him, tugging his arm. "Come on, Jim!"
Nicklin shrugged and compliantly quickened his pace. The sound of amplified speech grew louder as they neared the common, and when the open space came into view he saw that a large tent had been erected at the centre. It seemed to have been intended only for use in rainy weather, because in front of it there was some low staging supporting a platform. On the platform was a tall dark-haired man who was addressing an audience of perhaps four hundred, most of whom were seated on stacking chairs. The remainder were straggled in a rough circle, having chosen to stand although quite a few of the seats had not been taken. Hedging their bets, Nicklin thought approvingly. That way they can hear what's going on and still make a quick getaway before the collectors try to nab them.
When Zindee and he reached the perimeter of the crowd she made as if to squeeze through and claim a seat, but he held her back. She scowled up at him for a moment, but with a good-natured quirk to her lips, then took up a position where the human barricade was thin enough to let her get a good view of the speaker. Nicklin stood behind her, and it was only then that he was able to tune his senses into what the man on the platform was saying.
"…this evening's edition of the Orangefield Recorder. The piece I am referring to was very witty. It was well written, in a sarcastic style. Perhaps its author is here with us tonight? No? It doesn't really matter too-much if he or she is here or not, because I have no bones to pick with the anonymous scribe. That journalist was simply doing a job, stating the newspaper
's point of view on what no doubt appeared to be yet another classic case of the learned scientist revealing that he hasn't enough sense to come in out of the rain.
"We have a saying back in Pewterspear – that being educated doesn't stop you being stupid – so I have some sympathy with the popular vision of the scientist who splits his pants as often as he splits atoms."
The speaker paused to allow gratified laughter from the audience to subside – then his mood changed. His stance was unaltered, even his expression remained the same, but everyone who was there knew at once that the jokes were over, that it was time to get down to the serious business of the meeting. In spite of himself, Nicklin was impressed. Assuming that the speaker was Corey Montane, Nicklin took note of the fact that he was dressed in very ordinary clothes – a plain grey coolie hat, blue short-sleeved shirt, grey slacks – not the robe or ultra-respectable business suit usually associated with hawkers of faith. Montane also spoke in normal tones, his speech completely devoid of showy mannerisms. He appeared to rely on the direct, unvarnished communication of thoughts. Nicklin liked that and, against his expectations, found himself waiting with genuine interest for the main content of Montane's message.
"But on this occasion, my friends, I have to tell you something you have no wish to hear." Montane's voice, picked up by outfacing loudspeakers, could be heard rolling away into the distance through the immaculate gardens and around the redundant chimneys of Orangefield. "On this occasion, my friends, I have to tell you that not only were the astronomers in Beachhead City perfectly justified in sounding a warning – they have failed, completely, to appreciate the terrible dangers facing every man, woman and child on this huge bubble that they so naively think of as 'the world'.
"How do I know this? I'll tell you how I know. I know because I have been expecting an event like this for the past six years. I have been expecting it ever since I came to the realisation that Orbitsville is the Devil's trap. It was carefully laid out by the Devil, it was oh so carefully baited by the Devil – and now it is in the process of being sprung by the Devil!"
