A Wreath of Stars

Chapter Twelve

Snook had just set off down the hill to the mine when an unfamiliar car pulled up beside him, its wheel arches cascading yellowish muddy water. The passenger door opened and he saw Prudence leaning across the seat towards him.

“Where’s Boyce?” she said. “I don’t see his car.”

“He’s at the mine setting up some new equipment. I’m on my way to see him now.”

“Jump in and I’ll take you—it’s too wet for walking.” Prudence hesitated after Snook had got in. “Will it be safe for me to go to the mine?”

“It’s all right—my friends drove off in their jeeps about an hour ago.”

“They weren’t your friends, Gil. I shouldn’t have said anything like that.”

“I shouldn’t have raked it up again. It’s just…” Snook held back the words which would make him vulnerable.

“Just what?” Prudence’s eyes were steady on his own. She was still turned towards him, her skirt and blouse drawn tightly across her body in diagonal folds. Within the car, the dim afternoon light was reduced to a scented gloaming, the rain-fogged windows were screening off the rest of the world, and Prudence was smiling one of her rueful, perfect smiles.

“It’s just,” Snook said, his heart assuming a slow, powerful rhythm, “that I keep thinking about you all the time.”

“Dreaming up fresh insults?”

Snook shook his head. “I’m jealous of you, and it’s something that never happened to me before. When I walked into the Commodore, and saw you sitting with Boyce, I felt this pang of jealousy. It doesn’t make any kind of sense, and yet I felt as if he’d robbed me. Since then…” Snook stopped speaking, finding it genuinely difficult to form words.

“What is it, Gil?”

“Do you know what’s happening how?” He smiled at her. “I’m trying to make love to you without touching you—and it isn’t easy.”

Prudence touched his hand and he saw in her face the beginnings of a special, unique softness. Her lips parted slowly, almost reluctantly, and he was leaning forward to claim fulfillment when a rear door of the car was thrown open and George Murphy exploded into their presence in a fluster of plastic clothing, rain splashes and mint-smelling breath. The car rocked on its suspension with the impact of his body.

“That was a bit of luck,” Murphy said breathlessly. “I . thought I’d have to walk all the way to the mine in that stuff. What a bloody day!”

“Hi, George.” Snook was oppressed by a sense of loss, of doors into the future closing with ponderous finality.

“You’re going to the mine, aren’t you?”

“Where else?” Prudence started the car moving down the hill and, in an immediate change of mood which filled Snook with an obscure pain, said, “Gil wants to try out a new plastic pick axe.”

“It’s bound to be better than the old-fashioned wood and steel jobs,” Murphy chuckled. “Unless…Unless…How would it be if we tried making the handles out of wood and the blades out of steel?”

“Too revolutionary.” Prudence flashed him a smile over her shoulder. “Everybody knows pick axes have to have wooden blades.”

Unable to match the levity. Snook said, “I’ve just had a call from Ogilvie—he has ordered us out of the mine.”

“Why’s that?”

“I suppose it’s a reasonable demand, from his point of view.” Snook got a grim pleasure from stating the opposition case. “Boyce was sent into the mine to lay ghosts, not to materialise them.”

They found Ambrose and Quig three hundred metres south of the mine head, working in a nondescript patch of flat ground which was used for the disposal of packing cases, scrap lumber and broken machine parts. Ambrose had calculated that the Avernians would attain an elevation of some two metres above ground at maximum, and he had constructed a makeshift platform of that height on which to place his equipment. He and Quig were soaked through, but were trudging about with a kind of water-logged cheerfulness which made Snook think of Great War soldiers giving thumbs-up signs for the benefit of correspondents’ cameras. Already in place on the platform, and covered by a plastic sheet, was a bulky cube with Snook took to be the Moncaster machine. Ambrose came forward to meet the car, smiling uncertainly when he saw Prudence.

“What are you doing here?” he said, opening the driver’s door.

Prudence took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed the rain from his face. “I’ve got a sense of history, man ami. I’ve no intention of missing this show—provided there is a show, that is.”

Ambrose frowned. “What does that mean?”

While Murphy got out of the car and distributed an armful of blue plastic raincoats, Snook gave Ambrose details of the telephone call from President Ogilvie. Ambrose accepted a raincoat, but made no move to put it on, and his mouth withered into a thin, hard line as he listened to Snook’s report. He had begun shaking his head—slowly and steadily as an automaton—long before Snook had finished speaking.

“I’m not stopping/ he said in a harsh, unrecognisable voice. “Not for President Paul Ogilvie. Not for anybody.”

Lieutenant Curt Freeborn listened to the words with a deep satisfaction which went a long way towards soothing the anguish which had been burning inside him for many hours.

He removed the headphones of the telebug system, being careful to avoid disturbing the patch of gauze over his right eye, and put them in the carrying case alongside the associated sighting scope. The foreigners were hundreds of paces away from him and completely wrapped up in their own affairs, but nevertheless he crawled on his hands and knees for quite a long distance to obviate the risk of being seen as he was leaving his observation post. When he had cleared the angular jungle of the dumping area, he got to his feet, brushed the clinging mud and grass from his slickers, and walked quickly to the entrance gate. None of the mine guards in the security building would have dared question his movements, but he waved to them in a friendly manner as he left the enclosure. He had evidence which would justify firm action against Snook and the others, and his spirits had improved at the prospect. More important, he had evidence of his own resourcefulness and value as an officer in the Leopard Regiment, evidence his uncle would have to accept.

Crossing the puddled surface of the street, he sheltered in a doorway and took his communicator from an inner pocket. There was a delay of only a few seconds while the local relay operator patched him through to his uncle’s office in Kisumu.

“This is Curt,” he said tersely on hearing his uncle’s identification. “Are you free to speak?”

“I’m free to speak to you, Lieutenant, but I have no inclination to do so.” Colonel Freeborn replied with the voice of a stranger, and the fact that he was using the formal mode of address was a bad omen.

“I’ve just carried out a solo reconnoitre at the mine,”

Curt said hurriedly. “I got close enough to hear what Snook and the daktari were saying, and…”

“How did you accomplish that?”

“Ah…I used one of the K.80 remote Listening sets.”

“I see—and did you bring it back with you?”

“Of course/ Curt said indignantly. “Why do you ask?”

“I merely wondered if Mister Snook or his friend Murphy had decided to relieve you of it. From what I hear, you’ve been setting them up in the ex-army supplies business.”

Curt felt a needle spray of ice on his forehead. “You’ve heard about…”

“I think everybody in Barandi has heard—including the President.”

The sensation of stinging coldness began to spread over Curt’s entire body, making him tremble. “It wasn’t my fault. My men were…”

“Don’t whine, Lieutenant. You went after a piece of white meat—regardless of my views on that sort of behaviour—and you let a couple of civilians disarm you in a public place.”

“I recovered the Uzis a few minutes later.” Curt did not mention that his automatic had not been found in the jeep.

“We can discuss the brilliance of your rearguard action at another time, when you’re explaining why you didn’t report the incident to me,” Colonel Freeborn snapped. “Now get off the air and stop wasting my time.”

“Wait,” Curt said desperately, “you haven’t heard my report about the mine.”

“What about it?”

“They aren’t leaving. They’re planning to work on.”

“So?”

“But the President wants them to leave.” Curt was baffled by his uncle’s reaction to his news. “Wasn’t it a firm order?”

“Firm orders have gone out of fashion in Barandi,” the Colonel said.

“With you, perhaps.” Curt could feel himself nearing a precipice, but he plunged onwards. “But some of us haven’t gone soft from sitting behind a desk all day.”

“You are hereby suspended from duty,” his uncle said in a cold, distant voice.

“If you can’t do this to me.”

“I’d have done it sooner if I’d known where you were hiding. I’ve already awarded floggings to the three soldiers you contaminated with your ineptness and reduced them to kitchen patrol. In your case, though, I think a court martial is called for.”

“No, uncle, no!”

“Do not address me in that manner.”

“But I can get them out of the mine for you,” Curt said, struggling against the wheedling note which was creeping into his voice. “The President will be pleased, and that’ll make everything…”

“Wipe your nose, Lieutenant,” the Colonel ordered. “And when you have finished wiping it, report to barracks. That is all.”

Curt Freeborn stared incredulously at his communicator for a moment, then he opened his fingers and let it fall to the concrete at his feet. Its pea-sized function indicator light continued to glow like a cigarette end in the gathering dimness. He smashed a metal-shod heel down on it, then stepped out into the rain, his smooth young face as impenetrable as that of an ebony carving.

At nightfall Ambrose called a temporary halt to the work and the group moved under the platform to drink coffee which he shared out from a huge flask. The rain had begun to ease off slightly and the presence of refreshments, coupled with the jostling comradeship, made the crude shelter seem cosy. They had been joined by. Gene Helig, who added to the picnic atmosphere by producing a paper bag full of chocolate bars and a bottle of South African brandy. Culver and Quig became cheerfully intoxicated almost at once.

Twice during the amiable scrimmage Snook found himself standing next to Prudence. Selfconsciously, like a schoolboy, he attempted to touch her hand—hoping to recreate something of the former moment of intimacy—but each time she moved away, seemingly oblivious to his presence, leaving him feeling thwarted and lonely.

Automatically, he countered with the defence measures which had served him without fail for many years in many countries. He threw the coffee from his cup, filled it to the brim with brandy, retreated to the outer edge of the shelter and lit a cigarette. The neat spirit kindled a fire inside him, but it was fighting a losing battle with the darkness which pressed in from the wilderness outside. Snook began to develop a gloomy conviction that Ambrose’s enterprise was about to go disastrously wrong. He glanced around without interest as Ambrose came to stand beside him.

“Don’t weaken,” Ambrose said. “We’ll be pulling out in the morning.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Positive. I had planned to follow later top dead centres up into the sky, but it’s all becoming too difficult—I cancelled the helicopter today. I doubt if I would have been allowed to use it anyway.”

Snook swallowed more brandy. “Boyce, what makes you so positive that Felleth will be ready to attempt a transfer next time around?”

“He’s a scientist. He knows as well as I do that tomorrow morning we’ll have optimum conditions for the experiment.”

“Optimum, but not unique. I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I can see that when the surface of Avernus comes out through the Earth there’ll be two top dead centres, one heading north and one heading south, but that only applies to this longitude, doesn’t it? And what if they are moving? With a bit of time in hand, and international funding, you could beat that problem. And what about the poles? There must be very little movement there—just the .sideslip.”

“You have been thinking, haven’t you?” Ambrose raised his cup in a mock toast. “Where would the international funding come from? It’s the UN that’s trying to block us right now.”

“But that’s only their first reaction.”

“You want to bet?”

“All right—but what about the other points?”

“Can the Avernians travel round their equator at will?

Have they got land in their temperate zones? Can they even reach their north and south poles?”

Snook delved into his fragmentary second memory. “I don’t think so, but…”

“Believe me, Gil, tomorrow morning is the right time for this experiment.”

Snook was raising his cup to his lips when the significance of Ambrose’s final word reached him. “Wait a minute—that’s the second time you’ve called it an experiment. Do you mean it isn’t all cut and dried?”

“Hardly.” Ambrose gave Snook a strangely wan smile. “That piece of paper you wrote on will advance our nuclear science by twenty years when I get it back to the States, but your friend Felleth is pushing his theoretical physics to the limit. I’ve looked at his equations and interactions, but—quite frankly—I’m not good enough to predict whether they’ll work or not. They seem all right to me, but I’m not sure if Felleth will get through. There’s also the possibility that he could make it and be dead on arrival.”

Snook was appalled by the new information. “And you’re still going to try it?”

“I thought you would understand, Gil,” Ambrose said. “Felleth has to take this one ideal chance to prove that transfers are possible. His people need a ray of hope, and they need it fast. That’s why we’re committed.”

“Then…you think that if you get proof the system works Earth will let them in later on?”

Ambrose grinned handsomely, tilting his cigarette with his lips like a matinee idol. “Learn to think big, Gil. Times change—and there’s almost a century to play with. Fifty years from now we might be ferrying Avernians down out of the sky in spaceships.”

“Well, I’ll be…” Snook was impelled to grip the other man’s hand. “You know, I had you down as a self-centred bastard.”

“I am,” Ambrose assured him. “It’s just pure luck that this time I get a chance to disguise the fact.”

At that moment they were joined by George Murphy, who was nursing his bandaged right hand. “I’m going over to the medical building to get myself a shot of something for this hand. I think I’ve toted too many bales with it, whatever that means.”

“I’ll drive you there,” Ambrose said.

“No. I can do it on foot in a couple of minutes, and the rain has almost stopped.” Murphy set off into the blackness.

“I’ll go with you,” Snook called after him, running to catch up. When they passed out of range of Ambrose’s portable lights the going became treacherous and both men had to walk carefully, even with their Amplites on, until they reached the misty green radiance which surrounded the mine buildings. The medical building was as dark and lifeless as all the others in the vicinity.

“Here’s the keys.” Murphy handed Snook a jingling cluster. “Can you pick out number eight for me?”

“I expect so. If I can rebuild an aero engine I ought to be able…” Snook held still for a second, his senses probing the shadowed environment, then he lowered his voice. “Don’t look round, George—there’s somebody behind you.”

“That’s funny,” Murphy whispered, his left hand fumbling with the fastenings of his raincoat. “I was going to say the same thing to you.”

“Don’t move /’ The command came from a tall young man who had stepped into view around a corner of the low building. He was wearing army slickers and a helmet with a lieutenant’s bars on it, and there was a patch of white gauze over his right eye. A deep sadness welled up in Snook as he recognised Curt Freeborn. He glanced around him, assessing the chances of getting away, and saw three soldiers with drawn bush knives hemming them in. They were the same men he had encountered at the Cullinan, and they gave the impression of being determined that things would work out differently this time.

“What a stroke of luck!” Freeborn said. “My two favourite people—the funny white man, and his Uncle Tom.”

Snook and Murphy looked at each other without speaking. “No funny remarks, Mister Snook?” Freeborn began to smile. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

“What I’d like to know,” Murphy said, his left hand still working with the stiff, slippery plastic fastenings of his coat, “is why four so-called Leopards are crawling around in the dark like rats.”

“I wasn’t speaking to you, trash.”

“Take it easy, George,” Snook said anxiously.

“But this is an interesting point,” Murphy pressed on. “The Colonel, for instance, would have come in with lights blazing. It seems to me that…”

Freeborn gave a slight nod of his head, and almost immediately something struck Murphy in the back. The blow was so noisy, accompanied by a flapping crack of plastic, that Snook thought the corporal had slapped the big man down with the flat of his bush knife. Then he saw Murphy going down on his knees and, from a corner of his eye, the corporal pulling the blade back with difficulty. He caught hold of Murphy and felt the dreadful looseness of muscle and limb, a dead weight which pulled him inexorably downwards. Snook knelt, cradling Murphy in his left arm, and ripped open his coat. He slid his hand inside, feeling for a heartbeat, and was horrified to discover—even though the thrust had been at the back—that the whole chest region was bathed in a hot wetness. Murphy’s mouth sagged open and, even in death, he smelled of mint.

“That was too quick,” Freeborn said to the corporal, his voice mildly reproachful, face impassive behind his Amplites. “You let the Uncle Tom out too soon.”

“You…” Snook tried to speak, but his throat closed on the words, the words which in any case would have failed to express his grief and hatred. He hugged Murphy’s body to him and his right hand, sliding in blood, encountered a hard-edged, familiar shape. At that moment it was the most beautiful shape in the world, with a metallic perfection far beyond that of a priceless sculpture. Keeping his head lowered. Snook looked around him. He could see four pairs of legs, and—as he had prayed for them to be—they were all in the one quadrant of his vision. In one movement, he released Murphy’s body and stood up with the automatic in his hand.

There was a long moment of throbbing, ringing silence as he faced the four men.

“We can come to an arrangement,” Lieutenant Freeborn said calmly. “I know you’re not going to pull that trigger, because you’ve waited too long. Your type needs to act on the spur of the moment, What happened just now was unfortunate, I’ll admit, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t fix up…”

Snook shot him through the stomach, sending the doubled-up body hurtling against the wall, then wheeled on the three soldiers who had already begun to flee. Holding the automatic steady in a two-handed grip, he ranged on the corporal and squeezed the trigger again. The shot went through the corporal’s shoulder, freakishly spinning him round so that he was facing the way he had come. Snook fired two more shots, each time seeing the plastic of the corporal’s coat flap like a storm-caught sail, and he held the firing stance until his man had fallen, until he was certain that no further action was required of him. The two remaining soldiers disappeared from view.

All sound and movement ceased.

When humanity eventually returned to Snook, he took a deep quavering breath and dropped the automatic into his pocket. Without looking at Murphy again, he walked back to the area where he had left the group. When he got close they came forward to meet him, their faces watchful.

“What happened?” Ambrose said. “Where’s George?”

Snook kept walking until he was near enough to Quig to take the brandy bottle from his unresisting fingers. “George is dead. We ran into Freeborn Junior and three of his men, and they killed George.”

“Oh, no,” Prudence murmured, and Snook wondered if she had guessed it had been the same group she had met.

“But this can’t be.” Ambrose’s face was grim and pale. “Why should they shoot George?”

Snook took a drink from the bottle before he shook his head. “They used a panga on George. I did the shooting -with this.” He took the automatic from his pocket and held it in the light where it could be seen. His hand was dark with blood.

“Did you hit anybody?” Helig said in a businesslike voice.

Prudence looked at Snook’s face. “You did, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “I hit Freeborn Junior. And the man who killed George. I hit them square on.”

“I don’t like the sound of this, old boy. Do you mind?” Helig retrieved his bottle, poured some brandy into a cup and gave the bottle back to Snook. “This place will be swarming with troops in half an hour.”

“That’s it then,” Ambrose said in a dull voice. “It’s all over.”

“Especially for George.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Gil—but George Murphy wanted this project to go on.”

Snook thought about Murphy, the man with whom he had become friendly only a few days earlier, and was surprised by how little he knew about him. He had no idea where Murphy lived or even if he had any family. All he knew for certain was that Murphy had got himself killed because he was brave and honest, and because he cared about his friends and the miners who worked for him. George Murphy would have liked the transfer project to go on, and the more startling the end result the better, because the greater the world interest that was aroused the less opportunity there would be for force to be used on his miners.

“There might still be time,” Snook said. “I don’t think young Freeborn and his gang were acting under orders. If it was some kind of a private raid, they mightn’t be missed until some time tomorrow.”

Helig frowned his doubt. “I wouldn’t count on it, old boy. The guards at the gate are bound to have heard the shooting. Anything could happen.”

“Anybody who wants to leave should go now,” Ambrose commented, “but I’m staying as long as possible. We could be lucky.”

Lucky! Snook thought, wondering just how relative the meaning of a word could become. The brandy bottle was still one-third full and, laying tacit claim to it, he retreated to the same corner where he had stood with Ambrose only ten minutes earlier. Ten minutes was only a short span of time, and yet, because it separated him from a personal epoch in which Murphy had been alive, it could have been years or centuries. His own luck, he now realised, had begun to desert him that day in Malaq three years earlier when he had answered the emergency call to go to the airfield. Looking even more closely at the chain of circumstance, the emergency which had been sparked off by the passing of Thornton’s Planet had not been an isolated event. He had quickly forgotten his single look at the livid globe in the sky, but the ancients and today’s primitives were wise enough to regard such things as portents of calamities to come. Avernus had suffered at that time, been dragged out of her orbit, and he -without being aware of it—had been caught in the same gravitational maelstrom. Boyce Ambrose, Prudence, George Murphy, Felleth, Curt Freeborn, Helig, Culver, Quig—these were merely the names of asteroids which had been drawn into a deadly spiral, the motive forces of which emanated from another universe.

Looking out into the darkness, taking small regular sips from the bottle, Snook found it hard to credit that astronomy—that most remote and inhuman of the sciences—should have had such a devastating effect on his life. But he was, of course, wrong in thinking of the subject as being remote, especially now that—at points along the equator—the era of close-range astronomy was being ushered in. People could now look at another world from a distance of only a few metres. And in several years’ time, when a large crescent of Avernus had emerged through the Earth, astronomy could even become a mass entertainment. It would be possible to stand on a hilltop on a dark night, wearing Amplites, and see the vast, luminous dome of the alien planet spanning the horizons and looming high into the sky. The rotation of the Earth would carry watchers closer and closer to the translucent enormity of the planet—revealing details of its land masses, the houses, the people—and finally plunge them under its surface, to emerge some time later on the daylight side, where Avernus would be rendered invisible.

Marshalling unfamiliar thoughts, Snook found, gave him some respite from the anguish he felt over Murphy’s death. He tried to visualise the position some thirty-five years ahead when the two worlds were overlapping by only half a planetary diameter. Near the equatorial regions the two great spheres would be intersecting at right angles, in which case the spectators would see a vertical wall sweeping towards them at supersonic speed. On the face of that wall, fountaining upwards into the sky—also at supersonic speed—would be a steady procession of Avernian landmarks seen from directly above. It would require nerve not to close one’s eyes at the moment of silent intersection; but a greater spectacle would come thirty-five years beyond that again when the two worlds fully separated from each other. The directions of rotational movement would be opposed to each other at the point of final contact. By that time magniluct glasses might have been improved to the point at which they made Avernus appear completely solid. If so, there would come dizzy, mind-exploding minutes when it would be possible to see the surface of an upside-down world streaming past, just above one’s head, at a combined speed of over three thousand kilometres an hour, bombarding the eyesight with inverted buildings and trees which—although insubstantial—would rip through a man’s awareness like the teeth on a cosmic circular saw.

And following that, in the year of 2091, would come the ultimate spectacle, with the return of Thornton’s Planet.

The separating gap would have increased to less than four thousand kilometres by that time, which meant that—for wearers of Amplites—Avernus would fill the entire sky. Earth would have a ringside seat for the destruction of a world…

Snook abruptly pulled back into the present, where he had enough problems of his own. He wondered if the rest of the group. Prudence in particular, understood that he was to die soon. If they did, if she did, no signs were being given to him. He could have done without a show of sympathy from the others, but it would have been good, very good, if Prudence had come to him with words of regret and love, and allowed him to cradle her neat golden head in the crook of his left arm. Thy. navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor, the ancient words ran in his mind, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. •

Thinking back on it, Snook found himself beginning to doubt that the moment of closeness in Prudence’s car had actually occurred. Another possibility was that she had responded to him as momentarily and casually as if she had been patting a stray puppy on the head, and with no more meaning. The irony was that he was supposed to have a rare telepathic gift—yet he was less able to divine the workings of a girl’s mind than any clumsy adolescent on his first date. Unless one was surrounded by like beings, he decided, telepathy would be an intensifier of loneliness. No apartment is as lonely as the one in which can be heard faint sounds of a party next door.

It occurred to Snook that he was rapidly becoming drunk, but he continued to sip the brandy. A certain degree of intoxication made it easier to accept the fact that there was no way he could get out of Barandi alive. It also made it easier to reach a relevant decision. When Colonel Freeborn came he would be looking for Gilbert Snook—not the other members of the group—and, once he had Snook, he was likely to devote all his attention to him for quite a long time, during which Ambrose might be able to complete the big experiment.

It was a perfectly logical decision, therefore, that—when the Leopards arrived at the mine—he should go forward and give himself up to them.