A Wreath of Stars

Chapter Two

On the morning of March 25, 1993, Gilbert Snook-the human neutrino—was sitting in a bar, quietly enjoying a cigarette and a suitably chill gin-and-water. He was a lean man of medium height, with black crew-cut hair and neat, hard features. The unusually crisp definition of his muscles, even those around his mouth, suggested physical power, but otherwise his appearance was unremarkable.

His sense of contentment derived from a combination of factors, one of them being that he was having his first day of idleness in two weeks. In the daytime temperatures of the lower Arabian Peninsula the maintenance of light aircraft was an occupation which induced a fine appreciation of luxuries such as merely being cool. Inside the metal shell of a plane the heat was unbearable—metal surfaces had to be covered with rags to stop them inflicting burns, and engine oil thinned out so much that experienced mechanics threw away manufacturers’ viscosity recommendations and chose lubricants which would have behaved like treacle in normal circumstances.

The working conditions in Malaq discouraged most foreign technicians from staying long, but they suited Snook’s temperament. It was one of several statelets which had been formed after the break-up of the ancient Sultanate of Oman, and the principal attraction to Snook was that it contained only about two people per square kilometre. The mental pressures he disliked in densely populated areas were virtually absent in Malaq. It was even possible for him to avoid newspapers, fax sheets and broadcasts. All that was required of him was his assistance in keeping the ruler’s small fleet of military transports and ageing jet fighters in an airworthy condition, in return for which he was accommodated in the country’s only hotel and given a generous tax-free salary. Habitually, he sent most of the money to a bank in his native Ontario.

The day had begun well for Snook. He had awakened fresh from a long sleep, enjoyed a western-style breakfast, drifted in

the swimming pool for a couple of hours, and now was having a pre-lunch drink. The airfield and native township, five kilometres away, were hidden behind a low headland, making it easy for Snook to convince himself there was nothing in the whole world but the hotel, the broad blue ocean, and the scimitars of white sand curving away on each side of the bay. From time to time he thought about the date he had that evening with Eva, an interpreter with a German engineering consultancy in the town, but for the moment he was concentrating on becoming mildly and happily drunk.

He was puzzled, therefore, to discover a sense of unease growing within himself as the sun passed its zenith. Snook had learned to trust his premonitions—he sometimes suspected he was slightly prescient—but as he looked around the spacious and almost empty lounge he could think of nothing which might have triggered subconscious alarms. From his seat at the window, Snook could see into a small storeroom behind the bar and he was surprised to notice the white-coated barman going into it and putting on what appeared to be a pair of magniluct low-light spectacles. The barman, a suave young Arab, stood perfectly still for a moment, staring upwards, then put the glasses away and returned to the counter where he whispered something to the black-skinned floor waiter.- The waiter’s eyes flared whitely in his African face as he glanced apprehensively at the ceiling.

Snook took a ruminative sip from his drink. Now that he thought of it, he had noticed a group of European visitors carrying magniluct glasses at the swimming pool and had wondered briefly why they wanted low-light spectacles amid such searing brilliance. At the time it had seemed just another example of the peculiarities which afflicted over-civilised human beings, but other thoughts were beginning to stir.

This was close to the end of May, Snook recalled with effort, and some important astronomical event was almost due. He had no-interest in astronomy and, from overhearing conversations among the pilots, had gleaned only a vague notion about the approach of some large but tenuous object, less substantial than the gaseous tail of a comet. When he had

learned that the object could not even be seen, except through some tricky property of magniluct glasses, Snook had classed it as little more than an optical illusion and had dismissed it from his mind altogether. It seemed, however, that other people were intensely interested, and this was yet another proof that he was out of step with the rest of humanity.

He took a long swallow from the misted crystal of his drink, but found that his feeling of unease had not been dispelled—there was nothing new in the realisation that he marched to the sound of a different drum. The midday intoxication he had been savouring abruptly vanished, much to his annoyance. He got to his feet and stood at the long window, narrowing his eyes against the influx of light from sand, sea and sky. The European party were still grouped at the screened pool. For a moment he considered going to them and asking if there had been a recent development he should know about, but that would involve him with unnecessary human contacts and he decided against it. He was turning away from the window when he noticed the dust cloud of a vehicle approaching at speed from the north, the direction in which lay the town and airfield. In less than a minute he was able to discern that it was a jeep painted with the desert camouflage of the Sultan’s armed forces.

That’s it, he thought, oddly satisfied. That one’s for me.

He returned to his seat, lit a fresh cigarette and tried to guess what had happened. From vast experience, it could be anything from one of the jet engines having swallowed a bird, wrecking its metallic digestion in the process, to a faulty warning light on the Sultan’s private Boeing. Snook settled down further into the upholstery and made up his mind that he would refuse to respond to any so-called emergency unless it was a matter of life or death. He had just finished his cigarette when Lieutenant Charlton, a pilot in the Skywhip flight, strode into the lounge, red-faced and bristling in his wheat-coloured uniform. Charlton was an Australian of about thirty, who was on a three-year contract to fly fighter planes, and who had less feel or regard for machinery than any other man Snook had ever met. He came straight to Snook’s table

and stood with his bare gold-haired knees pressed against the white plastic. His eyes were pink-stained with rage,

“Why are you sitting here drinking, Snook?” he demanded.

Snook considered the question calmly. “I prefer it to standing drinking.”

“Don’t be…” Charlton took a deep breath, apparently deciding on a change of approach. “Didn’t the desk clerk give you my message?”

“He knows better,” Snook said. “This is my first day off in two weeks.”

Charlton stared helplessly at Snook, then lowered himself into a chair and looked cautiously around the bar before he spoke. “We need you out at the field, Gil.”

Snook noted the use of his first name and said, “What’s the trouble, Chuck?”

Charlton, who always insisted on ground crew addressing him formally, closed his eyes for a second. “There’s a riot brewing up. There’s a chance of some of the planes being wrecked and the CO has decided to move them up country until things calm down a bit.”

“A riot?” Snook was mystified. “Everything was quiet when I left the field yesterday.”

“It sprang up overnight—you should know what the Malaqi are like by this time.”

“Well, what about the Sultan’s militia? What about the firquat ? Can’t they control it?”

“It’s the bloody firquat who are stirring things up.” Charlton wiped his brow. “Gil, are you coming or are you not? If we don’t get those aircraft out of there in one hell of a hurry there aren’t going to be any aircraft.”

“If you put it like that…” Snook stood up at the same time as Charlton. “It won’t take me a minute to change.”

Charlton caught his arm and urged him towards the door. “There’s no time. This is a come-as-you-are party.”

Thirty seconds later Snook found himself in the passenger seat of the jeep and hanging on tightly as it took off in a spurting shower of gravel. Charlton brought the vehicle out on to the coast road in a barely-controlled power drift and

drove northwards at top speed, accelerating to the limit in each gear. A hot wind, so different to the air-conditioned coolness of the hotel, roared under the tilted windscreen and made Snook’s breathing difficult, while the barren ramparts ofihtjebel shimmered beyond the plain to his left. It came to Snook that he had allowed himself to be bulldozed into giving up a well-earned rest period, and into taking a ride with a dangerously reckless driver, without actually learning the reason for it all.

He tugged Charlton’s sleeve. “Is this thing worth getting killed for?”

“Not in the slightest—I always drive like this.” Charton’s spirits appeared to have picked up now that he was accomplishing his mission.

“What’s the riot all about?”

“Don’t you ever listen to the news?” Charlton took his eyes off the road to scan his passenger’s face and the jeep wandered close to the encroaching sand and boulders.

“No. I’ve got other ways of making myself miserable.”

“Perhaps you’re wise. Anyway, it’s Thornton’s Planet that’s causing all the fuss. Not just here—there’s trouble flaring up everywhere.”

“Why should there be trouble? I mean, the planet doesn’t really exist, does it?”

“Would you like to try explaining that to the average Australian bushman? Or even to the average Italian housewife? The way a lot of people figure it out is that…whoops!” Charlton broke off to swing the jeep back into the centre of the road, then resumed shouting above the rush of air. “People like that reckon that if you can see it coming, you’ll feel it when it gets here.”

“I thought you couldn’t see it without Amplite glasses.”

“Those things are everywhere now, sport. Biggest growth industry since they invented sex. In poorer areas the importers snap them in half and sell them off as monocles.”

“I still don’t get it.” Snook contemplated the jouncing horizon for a few seconds. “How can they get worked up over a kind of optical illusion?”

“Have you had a look at it yourself recently?”

“No.”

“Here.” Charlton felt in his breast pocket, took out a pair of blue-tinted glasses and handed them to Snook. “Have a look up there…about due east.”

Snook shrugged and put the glasses on. As he had expected, the sunlit sea appeared intolerably brilliant through the special lenses, but the sky was somewhat darker. He tilted his face upwards—and his heart seemed to lurch to a standstill. Thornton’s Planet glared down on him, a vast hurtling ball, somehow frozen in its deadly descent, dominating the whole sky with its baleful blue radiance. An ageless and superstitious dread gripped Snook, paralysing his reason, warning him that all the old orders were about to be swept away. He snatched the glasses off and returned to a world of reassuring normalcy.

“Well?” Charlton looked maliciously amused. “What did you think of our optical illusion?”

“I…” Snook searched the sky again, overjoyed at its emptiness, striving to cope with the idea of two separate realities. He half-raised the glasses, with the intention of putting them back on, then changed his mind and handed them to Charlton. “It looked real.”

“It’s just as real as the Earth, but at the same time it’s less real than a rainbow.” Charlton bounced in his seat like a horseman calling for more speed. “You’ve got to be a physicist to understand it. / don’t understand it, but I’m not worried because I trust anybody with letters after his name. These people don’t think the same way, though. They think it’s going to destroy the world.” He gestured towards the wooden huts at the outskirts of the township which was coming into view beyond the diagonal line of a hill. Black-hooded women and small children could be seen among the patchwork buildings.

Snook nodded, filled with a new understanding now that he had looked into an alien sky. “They’re bound to blame us, of course. We made the thing visible, therefore we made it exist.”

“All I know,” Charlton bellowed, “is that we’ve got to move some aeroplanes and we haven’t enough pilots. You could handle one of the old Skyvans, couldn’t you?”

“I haven’t got a licence.”

“Nobody’ll give a tinker’s about that. This is your chance for a medal, sport.”

“Great,” Snook said gloomily. He tightened his hold on the jeep’s handgrips as Charlton turned off the coast road on to a track which bore west of the town and ran directly to the airfield. Charlton made no concession to the poorer driving conditions and Snook found it difficult to avoid being thrown from the vehicle as it hammered its course among stones and potholes. He was glad when the airfield’s perimeter fence came into view, and relieved to see that only a handful of men in Malaqi costume had gathered at the entrance gate, although most of them were carrying modern rifles which denoted they were members of the Sultan’s militia. As the jeep approached the gate he saw there were other Malaqi in the uniform of regular soldiers positioned inside the fence with their rifles at the ready. His hopes that the situation was less urgent than Charlton had said began to fade. Charlton sounded a long blast on the horn and waved one arm furiously to clear the way ahead.

“You’d better slow down,” Snook shouted to him.

Charlton shook his head. “If we slow down too much we won’t get through.”

He kept going at high speed until they were close to the entrance and white-robed figures leapt to each side with angry cries. Charlton braked hard at the last possible moment and swung the jeep in between two scrapped aircraft tail fins which served as gateposts. It was looking as though his tactics had proved completely successful when an elderly Arab, who had been standing on top of a large oil drum, jumped down in front of the vehicle with upraised arms. There was no time for Charlton to react. A pulpy impact shook the jeep and the old man disappeared beneath its front end. Charlton skidded to a halt beyond the protective line of soldiers and looked at Snook with indignant eyes.

“Did you see that?” he breathed, his face losing its colour. “The stupid old bastard!”

“I think we killed him,” Snook said. He twisted in the seat, saw that a knot of men had gathered around the fallen body, and began to descend from the jeep. A bearded sergeant appeared from nowhere and roughly pushed him back into the vehicle.

“Don’t go back there,” the sergeant warned. “They will kill you.”

“We can’t just…” Snook’s words were lost as Charlton gunned the engine and the jeep, snaking its rear end, accelerated towards the line of hangars on the south side of the runway. “What are you doing?”

“The sergeant wasn’t joking,” Charlton told him grimly, and as if to punctuate his words there came an irregular burst of small arms fire. Sand fountained briefly in several places close to the jeep.

Snook sank down in his seat, trying to make himself into a smaller target, while reluctantly conceding that Charlton—although wrong-headed in many other things—was right in this respect. There were so few cars in Malaq that its people had never come to accept the inevitability of road fatalities. The relatives of an accident victim always treated his death as a case of wilful murder and, even in normal times, set out to gain revenge. Snook knew one aircraft fitter who had accidentally run over a child the previous year and who had been smuggled out of the country by air the same day to preserve his life.

He sat up straight again as the jeep passed into the shelter of a line of revetments and finally came to a halt outside the single-storey building which housed the operations room. Squadron Leader Gross, an ex-RAF man who was deputy commander of the Sultan’s Air Force, came running out to meet them. He paused, wordlessly, while three Skywhip jet, fighters took off in formation from the nearby strip. His clean-shaven face was streaked with dust.

“I heard some firing,” he said, as soon as the thunder of the jets had receded. “What happened?”

Charlton shifted uneasily and stared at his hands which were clenched on the steering wheel. “They were shooting at us, sir. One of the locals…ah…got in the way as I was coming in through the gate.”

“Dead?”

“He was pretty old.”

“Trust you, Charlton,” Gross said bitterly. “Christ Almighty! As if things weren’t bad enough!”

Charlton cleared his throat. “I managed to find Snook, sir. He’s agreed to fly a Skyvan out.”

“There are only two Skyvans still here—and they’re not going anywhere.” Gross pointed into the shade of the nearest hangar where two of the boxy old aircraft were sitting. The starboard propeller of one had chewed through a wingtip of the other, apparently as a consequence of inept taxi-ing at close quarters.

Snook jumped down on to the hot concrete. “I’ll have a look at the damage.”

“No, I’m moving all civilian personnel up north till this blows over. You’d better go with Charlton in his Skywhip.” Gross fixed Charlton with an unfriendly stare. “I wish you a safe journey.”

“Thank you.” Snook turned and ran behind Charlton who was already halfway to the waiting jet. He climbed into the rear seat and put on the intercom headset while Charlton spun up the engine. The aircraft surged forward almost at once, jolting solidly on its undercarriage, and wheeled on to the runway. Snook was still struggling with his safety straps when the rumbling shocks coming up through the airframe abruptly ceased, letting him know they were airborne. He examined his clothing—dark blue silk shirt, pale blue shorts and lightweight sandals—shocked at its incongruity amid the functional machinery of the cockpit. His watch showed the time to be 01.06, which meant that only nine minutes earlier he had been sitting in the hotel with his watered gin.

Even for Gil Snook, the human neutrino, the uncommitted particle of humanity, the pace of events had been bewildering. He tightened the last buckle, raised his head and saw at once that they were flying south. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, he waited until the aircraft had levelled off at 7,000 metres without changing course before he spoke to the pilot.

“What’s the idea, Chuck?” he said coldly.

Charlton’s voice was crisp and unabashed in the headphones. “Look at it this way, sport—we’re both finished in Malaq. That old scarecrow who jumped out in front of us probably had thirty or forty sons and nephews, and no matter where you go they’ll be potting at you with their Martinis and Lee-Enfields. Most of them are lousy shots, but they’ll get in close enough some day and it won’t do you any good to explain you were just a passenger. Believe me, I know about these things.”

“So where are we going?”

“I’ve finished flying for Gross anyway. We’re supposed to be a strike force and all we do is…”

“I asked you where we’re going.”

Charlton’s hand appeared above the rim of his ejector seat, the index finger pointing straight ahead in the direction of flight. “There’s the whole of Africa to choose from.”

Snook shook his head in disbelief. “My passport is back in my hotel room. Where’s yours?”

“Back in my quarters.” Charlton sounded supremely confident. “But don’t worry about a thing—we’re within range of at least six brand-new republics where they’ll be glad to give us asylum. In exchange for the aircraft, of course.”

“Of course.” Snook glanced upwards into the eastern sky, frowning. Thornton’s Planet was invisible and unreal, but -like any other spectre in the heavens—it had been an omen of ill luck.