by Eric Brown
He thought of Sally as he drove. She’d booked a five-day leave period, and said she’d take him west, to the Murchison Falls National Park. Zoologists there were working to reintroduce elephants back into the wild, and this was the reason his magazine had sent him out here. He’d spend the next few days catching up with Sally and taking a little time out to shoot the elephant story.
And in May, she had promised, she would leave Africa and come back to England, and they would set up home together somewhere in London.
The thought was still fresh enough to amaze him.
He was still thinking of Sally Walsh, half an hour later, when he saw his first dome from the ground.
It perfectly encapsulated a small town to the right of the road, perhaps two kilometres away. Its parabolic curve caught the light of the sun, its modernistic architecture striking him as bizarre out here in the African bush.
He decided to take a detour and turned along the sandy road that headed towards the town, steering around huge potholes in the approach road. Ten minutes later he braked suddenly and stared through the windscreen.
The wall of the dome cut across the road, effectively barring the way. A truck had halted before the sheer transparent wall, along with a couple of motorbikes and a battered police car. A dozen bewildered Ugandans stood before the rearing wall, staring through at the town.
On the other side, perhaps a hundred citizens, men woman and children, stared mutely out, imprisoned.
He opened his holdall, retrieved his camera, and took a dozen shots through the windscreen, then climbed out and approached the dome, stopping to take more shots.
He halted a foot from the glass — or whatever material it was — and found it to be perfectly clear, allowing him to see through without distortion. He reached out and laid a hand on the warm membrane, then knocked on it experimentally. It was not like knocking on a thin pane of glass — a window, say — but seemed much more solid, substantial. He looked down, then knelt and dug a trench in the fine sand at the foot of the dome. He reached the depth of a couple of feet, and still the membrane continued.
He’d thought the idea of the Chinese dropping them from the air ludicrous, but it seemed even more so now that he had seen a dome with his own eyes. And yet how to explain the phenomenon?
A young girl, perhaps ten years old, approached him on the other side of the glass. She stood mutely, watching him as he knelt beside the hole he’d dug. He reached out and splayed his fingers on the glass, and she laughed suddenly, silently, turned and ran away.
“Hello there!”
A portly Ugandan police sergeant was waddling across to him, smiling. “Good day to you, sir. You want to go to Morvani?” he asked, gesturing through the dome.
“Kallani,” Allen said.
The sergeant shook his head woefully. “Bad luck, sir. Kallani just the same. All towns and villages north of here the same. All covered by these…” He reached out and slapped the glass.
Allen shook his head. “That’s impossible.”
“Not impossible, sir. Here they are. It has happened. Radio reports say that the Chinese dropped them on all our towns, but I tell you that is not so.”
“No, of course not.”
“No, my friend here saw what happened. Akiki!” he shouted towards the gathered Ugandans. A bare-chested old man in baggy shorts trotted across to them on stick-thin legs, bobbing his head at Allen. He clutched a malnourished brown goat on a length of twine.
The police officer quizzed him in the local language, and the man replied.
The sergeant translated, “Akiki says he was out here at dawn, looking for a goat that had escaped. He came into the bush, then turned to look back at his house. And he saw between himself and his house this thick glass wall. It appeared in seconds with no noise at all. In seconds…” The sergeant laughed. “And Akiki is most upset, for his wife said that his breakfast is ready and she will eat it if he does not return by noon.”
Akiki gestured to a toothy, fat woman on the other side of the glass.
The sergeant said, “Akiki says that he has not eaten since midday yesterday, and he is starving. He says his wife does not need the food.”
Allen backed away from the dome and stared up at the great rearing bubble. It stood perhaps five hundred metres high at its apex, and was approximately a kilometre in diameter. It appeared to contain the town neatly, as if positioned with care to include every building within its circumference.
The policeman called, “Akiki thinks it’s a sign from god.”
Allen looked at him. “And you?”
The Ugandan shrugged. “Who am I to know, sir? Perhaps Akiki is right.”
Allen waved in farewell, climbed back into the car and U-turned. He rejoined the main road and continued north.
As he drove, he could not dismiss the fantastic notion — which had occurred to him while the policeman was speaking — that the arrival of the domes and his episode aboard the plane were in some way related.
Over the course of the next couple of hours he made out a dozen other domes, near and far, scattered across the face of the Ugandan bush. They were of differing sizes and shapes; some, like the ones he had seen from the air, were classically-shaped geodesics, perfect half-spheres, while others appeared lower and wider, more resembling watch-glasses.
Despite telling himself that there had to be some logical explanation for the sudden appearance of the domes, he could think of none. A one-off dome he might have put down to some elaborate and expensive art installation, though quite how it might have been achieved was beyond him. But this mass endoming of entire towns and villages, stretching from the Sahara in the north, thousands of miles south to Uganda…
Do not be afraid… the voice — no, the thought — had appeared in his head, along with the visions…
TWO HOURS LATER he arrived on the outskirts of Kallani.
It was a sizable town of some six thousand citizens, its population swelled by the influx of Red Cross and UN aid workers. It was also one of the poorest centres of habitation in an infamously poor region of the country. A collection of two story sand-coloured buildings, a mile square, comprised the town’s centre, but a wave of slum dwellings constructed from flattened biscuit tins and hessian sacking extended south for a couple of kilometres.
A line of vehicles — Allen counted thirty before giving up — blocked the approach road. He tried getting through to Sally again on his ’screen and mobile, but the lines were still dead.
He left his car at the back of the queue, locked it and strode down the road towards the silvery wall of the dome.
Citizens were lined two deep around its southern circumference, and on the inside as many people were pressed up against the concave membrane. Husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers… all separated by a few inches of clear, impermeable membrane.
The silence was what struck Allen as strange. Normally such a gathering would have been attended by noise, chatter, laughter. But the people assembled here in their hundreds were absolutely mute, staring, some mouthing in the hope of being understood while others silently pressed palms to the glass, their gestures matched by partners and friends on the other side.
Allen left the road and walked around the curve of the dome, peering over the heads of the citizens gathered there.
Again, every building in the town had been contained. There were no outlying, individual buildings, no matter how small, not under glass. It was as if the positioning of the domes had been planned… he smiled at the absurdity of the idea.
He came to a section of the wall not thronged by citizens. On the other side, a gaggle of schoolgirls, in bright blue uniforms but barefoot, giggled out at him. He had an idea, unrolled his softscreen, summoned the word processing programme and tapped in twenty-four point font: Dr Sally Walsh, Medical Centre. Can you please tell her that Geoff Allen is here. He fished a twenty shilling note from his wallet and held it up beside the ’screen.
The girls read the message in
an eager scrimmage, smiling all the time, then waved at him and ran off on the errand.
They were gone for what seemed like a long time. He chastised himself for his impatience. Sally might very well be working, pressed into service despite today being, technically, the first day of her holiday. It was an aspect of her job he found exasperating if understandable: the fact that she was on constant call, liable at any minute of the day or night to be summoned to minister to the need of her patients.
Twenty minutes later the girls returned, accompanied, Allen saw with alarm, by a khaki-uniformed police officer.
What followed was a ridiculous pantomime that might, in other circumstances, have struck him as comical.
The policeman approached the glass wall, accompanied by the schoolgirls, and peered through at him. Allen raised the screen again, probably needlessly, he thought. The officer read the words, nodded and regarded Allen with an odd expression combining unease with uncertainty.
Allen gestured, a pantomime shrug as if to say, “Where is she?”
The officer turned and spoke to a lanky schoolgirl, whose face expressed exaggerated alarm.
Allen rapped on the dome, attracting their attention. “What?” he mouthed at them.
The policeman shrugged helplessly, then said something, speaking slowly so that Allen might read the words.
He followed the man’s lips, but the movements meant nothing to him.
A schoolgirl tapped the policeman on the shoulder, then dug around in her satchel. She produced an exercise book and a pencil, which the officer took with what Allen interpreted as a sheepish expression.
Tongue-tip showing in concentration, the officer wrote a line of laborious capital letters and pressed it against the wall of the dome.
Medical centre closed — Allen read — attacked yesterday by terrorists. I will go and try to find out more.
Allen nodded, a cold feeling of numbness spreading upwards from his chest.
The policeman hurried away.
Allen slumped to the ground and leaned against the sun-warmed wall of the dome, watched in silent sympathy by the schoolgirls on the other side.
CHAPTER THREE
JAMES MORWELL JNR. liked to think of himself as an altruist.
As a billionaire, his opponents and detractors liked to say, he could afford to be. But the fact was that many of his rich friends and colleagues hoarded their wealth like misers, pathologically opposed to giving away the odd few hundred thousand to good causes. Not James Morwell Jnr… He had a slush fund of five million US dollars which, every year, he dispensed with the largesse of a Victorian philanthropist, bestowing tens of thousands on charities and good causes around the world — tax deductible though it might be.
His father, who had risen from working-class obscurity in inner-city Toronto to become a multi-millionaire before the age of thirty, had insisted that James’s philanthropy was nothing more than a sop to his conscience. “You’re a lily-livered milksop, boy, and you don’t like the darker side of what we do…”
Which was wrong, James had tried to argue to no avail. He had no qualms about the millions he invested in the arms industry, and certainly none about the millions he took from it in profits. War was a function of what it meant to be a human being, and always had been; if people were willing to fight, then Morwell Enterprises was more than willing to furnish them with the means to do so. And anyway, these days the arms that he supplied to various regimes around the world functioned often as a deterrent against military aggressors — so his detractors had no moral legs to stand on.
Not that the arms industry was the only arrow in Morwell Enterprises’ well-stocked quiver. He owned, at the last reckoning, over a thousand companies worldwide which traded in everything from cosmetics to couture, oil to nuclear energy. He even owned three of the top ten sub-orbital airlines.
But his abiding pride — perhaps because it had been the branch of Morwell Enterprises that his father had been least interested in — were the dozen companies which gave citizens the information they needed to make judgements about the world in which they lived and worked. He owned the world’s largest internet newsfeed, TV channels in every continent, a thousand newspapers globally, and three of the biggest publishing companies in the West.
It was said, and Morwell was proud to quote the statistic, that on average nine out of ten individuals on the face of the planet digested news put out by some organ of Morwell Enterprises every day.
Little wonder that he was a personal friend of the current US president, the Republican Lucas Blanchfield, and counted several of the British royal family as intimate acquaintances.
Even his father, a famous misanthropist who guarded his privacy with the same suspicion as he hoarded his millions, had not had anything like the degree of influence that his son, over the years, had carefully acquired.
Morwell Jnr. was young, healthy, and fabulously rich, and his greatest fear in life was losing what he had.
He was still in his early thirties — an age when the spectre of mortality was yet to appear above the mental horizon; he had rude good health maintained by well-monitored physical exercise and the country’s finest doctors; and his business ventures had never been in better shape.
HE WAS IN his penthouse office when the dome appeared miraculously over New York.
He had just stepped from the gym where he kept a rubber effigy of his father, which he cathartically beat with a baseball bat every morning. In consequence he was feeling revitalised and ready for whatever the day might bring.
In thirty minutes, at eleven, he had an informal get-together with his team of advisers, specialists who kept him abreast of world events. He enjoyed these sessions, enjoyed listening to experts expounding. He had a keen analytical mind himself, and an ability to synthesise what he learned at these meetings and then recycle it, at swish Manhattan soirées, as his own original observations.
He crossed to his desk and was about to summon Lal, his personal assistant — or facilitator, as he liked to call the young Indian — when he caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Something coruscated a matter of metres above Morwell Tower, the country’s tallest building.
It looked, for all the world, like the inner curve of a dome seen from just beneath its apex. As if all New York had been placed under a mammoth bell-jar.
He noticed his softscreen flashing on his desk, and said, “Activate.”
Lal’s thin, keen face flashed onto the screen. “Sir, I think you should take a look through the window.”
“So I’m not hallucinating, Lal. What in God’s name is going on?”
“I… I don’t know, sir. It happened around thirty minutes ago. I tried to summon you.” Lal hesitated. “There have been other… ah, developments.”
“Go on.”
“I think it would be best if I were to show you, sir.”
Morwell was in a mood to humour his facilitator. “Very well, Lal. We have a little time before the think-tank cranks in to action.”
“I think they’ll have a lot to talk about,” Lal said cryptically. “I’m on my way.”
While Lal took the elevator up from the seventy-fifth floor, Morwell turned to the window and stared out. He could see, in the distance, the great convex arc of the bell-jar sweeping out over Long Island, and in the other direction over New Jersey… So what was it? Some vast and ingenious prank? A fabulous and daring work of improvisational art? Whatever it was, he reasoned, it was not real… in the sense that it not was a solid, physical thing, but more likely a projection of some kind.
“Sir.”
Lal crossed the penthouse office and stood before the desk, his carob-brown eyes ranging over its surface as if in search of something.
Lal was in his mid-twenties and a direct beneficiary of one of Morwell Enterprises’ humanitarian projects. Morwell funded schools and academies across the world, and from them drew the finest pupils to work in his m
any companies. Lal had been plucked from the slums of Calcutta at the age of fifteen, educated to a high standard and processed through the Morwell business empire. Five years ago James Morwell had installed Lal as a researcher in one of his newsfeed companies. In three years he’d worked himself up to become its editor, at which point Morwell swooped again and promoted Lal to the role of his PA.
Now Lal took up Morwell’s stiletto letter opener and slapped his palm with its blade.
Morwell gestured to the bell-jar. “Any ideas?”
“I have people working on it, sir. But one thing is for certain — it’s not an illusion, as I first thought. Reports are coming in from Long Island, sir. People are reporting that the dome is solid, a wall that has cut off the entire city of New York. But not only that, sir — the domes have covered all areas of population, no matter how large or small, starting in northern Canada and sweeping the globe. There are reports from every northern continent… every village, town and city is at present under a similar dome to this one. And as I speak, they are appearing over areas to the south of here.”
Morwell sat down in his swivel chair.
Not likely, then, to be a daring work of art…
“You said there have been other developments?”
“That is right, sir. Observe.” Lal placed his left hand flat on the table top and — before Morwell could stop him — raised the paper-knife and made to bring it down on his palm.
Morwell winced, then looked up and saw Lal’s oddly comic grimace of effort. The man was shaking.
“Lal? What the hell…?”
“I… am trying… sir… to stab… my… hand!”
“Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t want blood all over my…”
Lal lowered the knife. “I cannot do it, sir. That is the thing. It is impossible. Reports from all across the northern hemisphere — acts of violence are no more. Boxing matches have ended in farce, with opponents unable to trade punches. Police report aborted bank raids and gunmen unable to pull the trigger…”
