Orbitsville Judgement

Chapter 1

The ancient constellations—star groups which had presided over mankind’s entire history—vanished in one quiet instant, and were immediately replaced by new stars arrayed in unfamiliar patterns.

It was the most astounding event in the annals of astronomy, but it was witnessed by relatively few people. Only those who happened to be working near portals and looking outwards at the crucial moment saw the cosmos being transfigured. The news of it spread to the far interior of Orbitsville, of course, but the process took time and had little impact on the complacent market town of Orangefield. Most of Orangefield’s inhabitants had never made the journey to a portal—and therefore had never even seen a star—and happenings in the outside universe tended to be of secondary importance to them.

Distant suns might have changed their positions; remote galaxies might have done a strange shuffle—but crops still had to be gathered in the apron of cultivated land surrounding the town. The wheels of commerce and local industry still had to turn; no man or woman had been excused any chores; and infants still had to be fed, bathed and powdered before being tucked into bed for the night. During the hours of darkness the Orbitsville sky, which had never known stars, continued to exhibit its watered-silk striations, hundreds of delicate arches of blue and darker blue spanning the horizons—and life gave every indication of proceeding very much as usual…

Jim Nicklin’s home, lending library and workshop were combined in a single timber-framed building which occupied a pleasant site on the north edge of the town. It was constructed of fortwood, a local timber which, even when left unpainted, had a satisfying appearance and the durability of stone. Considered simply as a building, it was somewhat lacking in architectural merit—having been added to in a haphazard manner at various times in the previous fifty years—but it suited Nicklin’s needs and life style very well. It was easy to clean and maintain, and yet provided ample space for all his activities. It was within easy reach of the town’s amenities, and yet for the most part looked out on farmlands and distant savannahs.

There was a good fused-earth road a little more than a hundred paces from Nicklin’s front porch, but his property was separated from it by a broad stream. The clear water contained several varieties of fish which had been imported from Earth more than a century earlier, and now were as well established as if they had been there for geological eras. In addition to providing Nicklin with sport and occasional fare for the table, the stream gave him a comforting sense of being partitioned from the outside world.

To reach his premises, personal visitors and customers were obliged to make use of a small wooden bridge, at the far end of which was a gate which he could lock when he was in the mood for solitude. The fact that the stream could easily be waded, and also was well provided with stepping stones, was immaterial. When would-be callers saw that Nicklin’s gate was closed they understood they had chosen an unsuitable time, and—unless their business had a fair degree of urgency—would turn away. Respect for a person’s wish to be alone was basic to society in most regions of Orbitsville.

Although Nicklin had the reputation of being a moody and changeable individual, his unsociable spells usually manifested themselves only when nightfall was drawing near. That’s what he gets for being a bachelor, was the view of most of Orangefield county’s women and quite a few of the men. It isn’t right for a normal, healthy young man to be living on his own and going to a lonely bed at night. However, in spite of their reservations concerning Nicklin’s bachelorhood, very few of the eligible females had ever seriously thought of trying to attract him into the socially acceptable state of marriage.

He had not yet turned thirty, was tall, fair-haired, reasonably handsome and had only the faintest trace of a bulge above the belt buckle—but his boyish face, with its small nose and blue eyes, was slightly too boyish. It often bore a philosophic and mildly puzzled expression, as though he had just worked out how many angels could stand on the head of a pin and was dissatisfied with the answer. His eyes sometimes seemed amused when the folk about him were engaged in serious debate; or they could mirror a deep concern when there was nothing but laughter all around. In spite of his acknowledged genius for the repair of domestic appliances and light machinery, he gave the impression of somehow being impractical. He struck people as being soft, a dreamer who was ill-equipped to deal with the hard knocks which rural life could deal out on a plentiful basis. The women of Orangefield township and county were conditioned to respect tough, pragmatic men who had the potential to be tireless workers and good providers—so when choosing husbands they tended to overlook Jim Nicklin.

That arrangement suited Nicklin quite well. Orangefield was a low-tech community which was modelled on the ideal of a small town in the American mid-west, circa 1910, with some elements borrowed from equally idealised English villages of the same period. The quality of life was good—enhanced by the fact that high-tech resources could be called upon from outside when emergencies occurred—but Nicklin had observed that married men always had to work harder than bachelors, and led lives which on occasion were marred by domestic troubles. Not being greatly enamoured of toil, he was quite satisfied with his mode of existence, especially as there were more than enough times when he got himself into ample trouble with no assistance from a marriage partner.

He had an uneasy suspicion that one of those times was near at hand as he watched the heavy-shouldered figure of Cort Brannigan cross the bridge and come striding towards the workshop entrance. It was early on a fine spring morning, the sort of morning which might have been designed to uplift the human spirit, but there was something about Brannigan’s gait and out-thrust jaw which suggested that, if anything, his spirit was in a meaner and more joyless condition than usual.

He was a sixty-year-old farmer, who had a mixed-produce spread eight kilometres north of the town, and in spite of being obese he was renowned as a brawler. His great belly, which could absorb strong men’s best punches, surged as he walked, glowing intermittently as it moved in and out of the cylinder of shadow created by his wide-brimmed hat. Several of the cinnamon sticks he habitually chewed to obliterate the smell of alcohol projected from his shirt pocket. He had no time for Nicklin as a person, and only dealt with him because there was no other competent repair service in the county.

Some ten days earlier he had brought in his wife’s sewing-machine, which needed to have a bracket welded or brazed, and had demanded priority service. Nicklin was afraid of the big man, although he did his best to conceal the fact, and had promised the repair would be taken care of within a couple of days. He had intended to pass it over without delay to Maxy Millom, his part-time employee, but Maxy had not been around that afternoon. There had been a flurry of urgent work the following morning, and somehow the sewing-machine had been forgotten. When Brannigan had telephoned to enquire about it Nicklin had put him off with a hastily concocted excuse, and then—incredibly, it seemed in retrospect—had forgotten the machine all over again.

At that very moment it was being worked upon by Maxy in the shed he used for welding operations. The job would take only a few minutes, so Brannigan would not have to leave empty-handed, but the machine was bound to reek of hot metal when finally produced, and the big man would realise at once just how much priority his esteemed order had been given…

“Good morning, Cort,” Nicklin said, mustering a smile as Brannigan came into the shop and approached the low counter. “Great morning, isn’t it?”

“Hadn’t noticed.” Brannigan glanced over the shelves behind Nicklin. “Where is it?”

“It? Oh, the sewing-machine! Maxy will be bringing it through in a minute.”

“Isn’t it ready?”

“It’s been ready for ages, Cort… sitting right here and ready to go…” Nicklin forced his brain into higher gear. “I just noticed a rough spot on the welding—just a minute ago—so I told Maxy to take it back and smooth it out. We don’t want your good lady scratching her hand, do we?”

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 upwelling 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?”

Nickin 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.”

“…understand that when we say everything outside the shell has disappeared, we mean everything! At close range, all interstellar and interportal ships which were in dock have vanished, plus several of the latter which were en route between portals. And not only ships—docking cradles, cargo handling gear, passenger transfer tubes, even radio and TV antennae. Anything which was projecting beyond the boundary line of Optima Thule has been sheared off—with a perfect mirror finish on the metal sections, incidentally—and has vanished from our awareness.”

Professor Carpenter paused to take a sip of water. “At what we might style as intermediate range, the outer planet of our own local system—Napier—has vanished. All this is trivial, however, compared to the fact that—on the cosmic scale—every star known to us can no longer be observed, every galaxy known to us can no longer be observed.

“To my mind, there is only one possible interpretation of those facts, incredible though it may seem—and that is that Optima Thule has been repositioned.”

“I can’t believe this,” a grey-haired woman said, shaking her head with an air of sadness. “You claim to be a qualified scientist, and yet you sit there and try to make us believe that our world—Orbitsville—has been moved!”

“I am a qualified scientist,” Carpenter replied, in the measured tones of one who was determined not to be provoked. “And I did not say that Orbitsville had been moved. The word I used was ‘repositioned’. It is obvious that no movement in the conventional sense of the word was involved—the repositioning was achieved instantaneously.”

His words were followed by a babel of voices as all the holomorphs tried to make points at the same time. Nicklin gave up trying to follow the various threads of argument and lapsed into a reverie until the televiewer scene changed. The group at the table dissolved, to be replaced by an outdoors shot—a view of Portal 1 at the centre of Beachhead City. It was recognisable because of the statue of Vance Garamond, the discoverer of Orbitsville, at the edge of what appeared to the casual eye as a circular black lake.

The camera advanced until it was poised at the edge of the aperture then rotated forwards, simulating a leisurely dive into space. When it steadied the corner of the Whites’ living room was filled with an intense blackness which was stippled with hundreds of glowing specks. Professor Carpenter could be heard in voice-over, commenting on the complete absence of familiar star patterns and the presence of totally alien constellations.

As always, Nicklin found the view of the outside universe to be something of a disappointment. Orangefield was less than a thousand kilometres from Beachhead—an easy enough journey by air—but he had never taken the trouble to go there, and hence had never seen the stars in actuality. For him, those remote flecks of light had very little relevance to the problems, pressures and pleasures of everyday life. His family had been on Orbitsville for six generations, and the course of their lives had not been affected in any way by stars or patterns of stars…

“And what about Earth?” another man was heard to say.

“We no longer know where Earth is. We don’t know how to get there.” Carpenter sounded as though he was deriving a perverse satisfaction from the negatives. “Therefore all contact with Earth has been lost, probably for ever. That also goes for Terranova, of course.”

Who cares about Earth or Terranova? Nicklin thought. Museum pieces! Staring into the near-featureless blackness was beginning to make him feel drowsy. He decided to give it just another five minutes, time enough to be sure that Cort Brannigan had vacated his premises, then he would take his leave of the Whites and get back to important business. It was the task of the astronomers to find out why the universe looked different—in the meantime he had a juice extractor and a bicycle wheel to repair, jobs which had been promised for that very afternoon.

Nicklin allowed his eyelids to close, creating an exquisite feeling of relaxation in his eyes. The sensation was so pleasant that he was immediately aware of the risk of lapsing into sleep, something which would be embarrassing in front of the tireless Whites…

“Just look at old man Jim,” Cham White said loudly, his voice reaching Nicklin across murmurous summer meadows of contentment. “Working for ten minutes has worn him out.”

Nicklin roused himself with a start. “Sorry, sorry—I got very little sleep last night.” The lie came unbidden to his lips.

“What was the matter?” Nora said, showing a neighbourly concern. “Tummy troubles?”

“Yes.” Nicklin seized on the suggestion with gratitude and began to elaborate on it. “I ate a chunk of apple pie just before bed, and I made the mistake of putting a slice of cheese on it.”

“Apple pie, eh? Have you started taking cookery lessons?”

“No—it was a little gift from May McVickar.” Nicklin listened to his own words with growing dismay. Why did he get himself into this kind of situation? And what had possessed him to appoint May McVickar as his fictional benefactor? She lived only a couple of kilometres away, and was quite friendly with the Whites, and the two women could easily meet and begin chatting and comparing notes within the next day or two. In fact, with his luck, the silly old bitch could arrive on the Whites’ doorstep at any minute…

Nicklin was casting around in sudden alarm for a way to get off the subject of apple pie when he became aware of an unusual sound from outside the house, one which was beginning to conflict with the voices of the televiewer. It was growing in volume, and was so incongruous in the rural quietness of the area that several seconds went by before he was able to resolve it into separate components. There was brassy marching music overlaid with an amplified male voice which, although the words could not yet be distinguished, sounded like that of a politician or an evangelist.

“Seems like we’ve got visitors,” Nicklin said, rising to his feet and making for the door. “This I must see.”

He gave the Whites a perfunctory wave and escaped from the house into the vertical rays of the Orbitsville sun. Its warmth seeped through his hair and spread like hot oil on the crown of his head, making him wish he had brought a hat. He shaded his eyes and peered through curtains of midge-clouded brilliance. On the road beyond the stream was a slow-moving procession of about ten vehicles, a mix of campers and trucks, all of them painted powder blue. On the side of each, pulsing in photoactive orange dyes, was the message: COREY MONTANE is leading you home.

“Oh no,” Nicklin whispered, “not another bible thumper! Please, O Gaseous Vertebrate, not another holy roller!”

Denial of his prayer came in the form of a crashingly distorted announcement, the gist of which was that evangelist Corey Montane would be visiting Orangefield for three days. His intention was to bring salvation to any of the locals who had the good sense to heed his preachings. All the others would, naturally enough, be doomed.

The speaker’s words faded and became even less decipherable as the cavalcade began to pass out of sight behind a stand of whistle trees. But before intelligibility was lost altogether Nicklin picked out a fragment—“Orbitsville is a tool of the Devil.”

That’s just great, he thought bitterly as he began walking towards his own property. It looked as though for the next three days he would be under the threat of having his privacy invaded by earnest heliumheads. And worse, the therapeutic calm of the village green, where he liked to stroll in the evenings, was likely to be shattered by noisy sermons, appalling music and collectors of cash. There was one feature that all religious missions, all purveyors of spiritual peace, all renouncers of worldly gain had in common—somebody had to collect the cash.

All thought of what was going on in the outside universe had been displaced from Nicklin’s mind. Frowning and looking disconsolate, as befitted one who had found genuine cause for concern, he made his way home through the lush green grass.

Chapter 3

Helping to erect the marquee had left Corey Montane feeling tired and slightly shaky, and now he was sitting on a canvas chair outside his camper, refreshing himself with a pot of his favourite tea. As he sipped the fragrant brew he allowed his gaze to drift around the shops, inns and occasional private dwellings which ringed Orangefield’s central green. The scene—with its imported oaks and chestnut trees—was one of idyllic, nostalgic tranquillity.

Throughout history different sections of humanity had formed their own visions of the perfect setting for the jewel of life, ranging from the sentimental New York of Frank Capra to the serene Antarctic demesnes of the twenty-first-century poet, Richard Caine… But for an astonishing number of people the ideal would always closely approximate what Montane was seeing now. In the charmed age which the surroundings lovingly recreated, cigarettes did not cause cancer, it was no sin to eat butter and cream, nuclear weapons were unthought-of, and work brought fulfilment and not hypertension. Hefty, bearded cricketers might be on their way by steam train to contend with the local team; a distant mechanical murmur might be the Wright brothers tinkering with some impractical machine in their corrugated-iron workshop.

At times like this it was easy for Montane to understand why so many inhabitants of Orbitsville opted to live in low-tech communities. It pained him, therefore, to remember that his natural human response to all he saw was part of the terrible danger which Orbitsville held in store for all of God’s children. It was the bait in the Orbitsville trap…

“You all right, Corey?” The speaker was Nibs Affleck, who had approached from the direction of the marquee, where the adjustment of turnbuckles was still going on. He was a serious-eyed young man whose florid complexion was the legacy of a long spell of alcoholism. He had joined the crusade a year earlier and had found in it enough inspiration to enable him to fight free of his habit. As a result, he was fiercely loyal to Montane and showed his gratitude by being solicitous—embarrassingly so at times—about his mentor’s health.

“I’m fine, Nibs,” Montane said, glancing up from under the flat cone of his sun-hat. “Just a little tired, that’s all.”

“You should leave jobs like putting up the tent to the rest of us.”

“You may be interested to learn that being sixty years old does not qualify one for a wheelchair.” Montane smiled to show that he was not offended. “Besides, you know our rules. Nobody is so high and mighty that he is excused his share of work—and that includes me.

Affleck shuffled his feet and looked miserable. “I didn’t mean you were…”

“It’s all right, Nibs—you were just being thoughtful and I thank you for that. Now, will you do me a favour?”

“You bet, Corey!” Affleck said eagerly, his round face brightening. “Just name it!”

“This town actually has a daily newspaper—a real Mark Twain job, by all accounts—and I might consider advertising in it. I’d appreciate it if you would go and get me a copy.”

“You bet, Corey!” His eyes glowing with simple happiness, Affleck turned and bounded away across the green.

Montane watched his progress with troubled eyes. Affleck was a good-hearted, industrious man, but he was an innocent—not the kind of disciple the crusade was desperately short of. What Montane really needed was a team of smart fast-talkers with the talent for raising large sums of money, the sort of men and women who—with a mesmeric combination of business acumen and evangelistic fervour—could induce rich men to part with fortunes. It was quite difficult to find millionaires on Orbitsville, because the acquisition of great wealth involved the manipulation and control of others, and it was no easy matter to do that to individuals whose birthright it was to trek off into the interior, at any time the mood took them, and claim the equivalent of a county, or a country, or even a continent. And such wealthy people as could be lured out of their strongholds were disinclined to hand large sums of money over to what they saw as ingenuous Jesus freaks.

There had been a time when Montane had believed that he would be able to attract the sort of funding necessary for the success of the crusade, that God would speak through him and touch the hearts of men—but that had been six years ago. He almost groaned aloud when he thought of how much time had gone by since his awakening, and of how little had been achieved…

For the first fifty years of his life Corey Montane had been a conventional and unremarkable inhabitant of Pewterspear 97. The numerical suffix given to any place-name referred to the nearest portal, and that was as close as Orbitsville had come to devising a zip code system. The fact that Pewterspear had a number close to 100 meant that the city was almost as far from Beachhead as it was possible to get, but that had not troubled Montane. He had liked being well away from the great urban centres of commerce and industry. He had owned and run a small home bakery, which yielded a modest but comfortable income from the sale of a variety of spicy meat pies and elaborate Danish pastries. His wife, Milly, and grown-up daughter, Tara, had helped in the business in a relationship that was nearly always harmonious. He enjoyed a range of outdoor pursuits—principally flying light aircraft—and was well liked in the town.

The chances were that Montane would have lived out his allotted ninety years in the same pleasant and undemanding manner, but everything had changed for him in the space of a few seconds…

It was a wet morning in the early part of the year—but Montane was not in a mood to find the rain depressing. It was coming down in the form of very large, clean, tumbling drops, each of which created a spiky crystal crown in miniature as it impacted with the pavement. His vision seemed pretematurally clear—the way it could be in the prelude to a migraine—and he saw the crowns in diamond-sharp detail, just as he had done in childhood. He wondered if that could be what had inspired his present feelings of boyhood optimism, in which for him the bad weather was recreating the ambience of Christmas Eve. The section of the street he could see was crowded with shoppers, complete with umbrellas and turned-up collars, who were determined to obtain last-minute Christmas gifts in spite of the rain, and the lighted windows of the other stores were cheerily reflected on the wet ground, adding to the Yuletide atmosphere.

Montane smiled as he noted yet another similarity to the festive season—business had been exceptionally brisk that morning, so good that it was already necessary for him to replenish his window display. He decided to begin at once—while there was a break in the flow of customers—by slicing up a large veal-ham-and-egg pie, and perhaps a couple of the battenbergs, which sold well under the folksy name of marzipan windows.

“Milly,” he called out, taking a brick-shaped pie out of the refrigerator, “What did you do with the knives?”

“They’re here—in the steriliser.” His wife was in the kitchen at the rear of the shop.

“Wouldyou like to bring them out here?”

Milly gave a barely audible tut of impatience and he remembered that she was about to go over to the Canterbury to have morning coffee with a few friends. A moment later she came hurrying into the front of the shop with the knives on a tray. And somehow-it was surmised afterwards that wetness tramped in from the street had been responsible—she managed to slip and fall forwards.

Montane expected anything but tragedy on that nostalgic grey morning, but the sound that Milly emitted as she hit the floor told him at once that something terrible, something totally unreasonable and unfair had happened. It was an appalling sound-part grunt, part sigh—expressive of pain, surprise and fear.

“Milly!” Montane ran to the end of the counter, looked down and saw his wife lying face downwards on the floor. The tray was beneath her. Face contorting with shock, he dropped to his knees and rolled her over. A knife, which must have turned its point up to meet her descending body, was protruding from just below the left breast.

She died in his arms, staring up at him with a bemused expression, while the knife-handle—stirred by her heart’s last contractions-playfully wiggled and circled amid the growing stain on her tangerine blouse.

Montane tilted his head back and. howled with grief.

The hours and days that followed were almost as nightmarish as the initial cataclysmic event. After the police had made some preliminary enquiries and the ambulance had departed with the body, he turned to his daughter in the depths of his despair, needing support and consolation. To his astonishment, she reacted to him with silent, glacial fury, almost as though he had engineered her mother’s death. He was unable to penetrate the barrier she had erected between them, and as soon as the funeral was over she packed a bag and walked out, refusing to give any hint as to where she was going…

Thinking back to those traumatic days of six years ago, Montane found cause for philosophical wonderment in the fact that his awakening had been prompted, not by the loss of his wife and daughter, but by a geological peculiarity of the Pewterspear area.

The town was situated in a broad dish-shaped depression which, on the old survey maps, was designated as Mcintosh’s Bottom. Montane had always been aware of the name, but to him it had been little more than an inspiration for vulgar schoolboy jokes. He had also been aware, though with little interest, that the rocky soil on which the town was built was as little as two metres thick in many places. It was common practice in the local construction industry to support the more massive buildings on short piles which penetrated down to the Orbitsville shell, but that too had been of minimal concern to Montane—until his first visit to his wife’s grave.

He had been kneeling by the still-fresh plot, striving to wrest some degree of reconciliation from the notion that she would become one with the earth. Death was part of a natural cycle… springing from the soil, returning to the soil…

Then had come the shocking realisation that Milly’s body, her sacred body, was suspended only a hand’s breadth above the featureless grey sheet of ylem which formed Orbitsville’s vast shell. And beyond that, only centimetres away, was the harsh emptiness of interstellar space! There could never be any peace for her, for either of them, in those supremely unnatural circumstances; there could be no gentle absorption into the ancestral unity of a God-given world; there was no rightness to Milly’s shallow interment…

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 facades 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:

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 certitudes. 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!”

A murmur passed through the audience, a shifting sound equally expressive of surprise, concern and derision. The glowing expanse of sun-hats, variously coloured ellipses which appeared narrower the farther they were away from Nicklin, became briefly agitated.

Montane raised his hands and waited for the disturbance to subside. “I am not omniscient. I have no direct line to God, on which He tells me what the future holds in store for His children. I do not know what the Devil’s exact plans are—all I know is that, through God’s divine mercy, we have been granted a breathing space. He could have ignored our predicament, and we would have deserved that, because it was through our own wilfulness that we left the world which He specially created for us. We turned our backs on the Eden He provided, and in our arrogance and blind stupidity we flocked to this metallic bubble. We allowed ourselves to be enticed into the trap.

“But, as I have already said, there is still a little time left. God willing, there may be enough time for some of us to escape from the Devil’s snare, and to do that we have to build starships. We have to quit Orbitsville. Earth may be denied to us for ever—a fitting punishment for our transgressions—but we can still fly to another God-given world, a new Eden, and make a new beginning for the human race.”

There was a fresh disturbance in the audience, a subdued commotion which took longer to die away, and in the midst of it could be heard voices of protest reinforced by sceptical laughter. It costs a lot of money to build starships, Nicklin thought, and you don’t need to be the Gaseous Vertebrate to work out where the money is supposed to come from. He glanced about him warily, wondering how long it would be before the collectors got to work.

“I am not asking you to accept anything on blind faith,” Montane went on, raising his voice to quell the sounds of protest. “I know only too well that faith is a very scarce commodity these days—so all I am asking you to do is to weigh up the evidence. The cold, hard, indisputable evidence. Consider, for example, the curious fact that Orbitsville’s environment is so exactly suited to…”

The realisation that—Corey Montane had to be certifiable, regardless of his rational manner, immediately caused Nicklin to lose all interest in what was being said. He shook his head, feeling oddly saddened, and was about to tap Zindee on the shoulder when she turned to him. She crooked a finger, signalling for him to bring his head down to her level.

“Jim,” she whispered, “this is another load of male ox. I think we should head over to Mr Chickley’s.”

“Good idea!” Nicklin pressed his forefinger to his lips and began to do a cartoon-style sneaking-away-in-silence walk, circling each foot in the air twice before placing it on the ground. Zindee chortled into her cupped hand and fell in at his side, doing her own version of the walk. They had taken only a few grotesque paces when Nicklin noticed they were being observed at close range by a young woman. She was holding a wicker dish, which identified her as a member of Montane’s collecting team, and her expression was one of mingled amusement and gentle reproof.

“Leaving us so soon?” she said in a low and pleasantly accented voice. “Have you not been touched by anything that Corey has said?”

Nicklin heard his mouth go into action at once. “It was all fascinating, truly fascinating, but we have some family business to attend to at the other side of town. My uncle is building himself a rock garden, you see, and he needs me to help him lift the…”

Embellishments to the basic lie—including a partial biography of the imaginary uncle—crowded into his mind, and he was selecting the most promising when, belatedly, his gaze focused on the woman.

He was totally unprepared for what happened next.

The astonishing reality of the woman flowed into him by way of his eyes, and in that instant—quite simply—he became a different person.

A major component of the starshell of emotion that burst inside him was straightforward physical lust. He wanted to go to bed with her, there and then. He craved to perform with her every act of passion that men and women had ever known and treasured as the means of giving and receiving pleasure. But there was much more to it than that. He also wanted to sleep with the woman, to experience the asexual delight of wakening beside her in the night, slipping his arm around her and nesting with her like spoons as he waited for sleep to return. He wanted to go shopping with her, to fend off doorstep salesmen together, to dab dust motes from each other’s eyes, to find out what she thought of contemporary music and of the farming of trout, to discover how far she could run, what childhood ailments she had suffered, how good she was at crosswords…

This is serious, Nicklin thought strickenly. I’m supposed to be immune to this kind of irrationality.

He tried to decide what it was about her that had had such a devastating effect on him. She was about thirty, somewhere close to his own age, and he decided at once that she was not at all beautiful. Her face was squarish and unremarkable, with eyelids that seemed heavy and druggy; her mouth was wide, with an upper lip that was much fuller than the lower, almost as if it had been swollen by a blow. She was tall and black-haired, and her body—beneath the black sylkon blouse and taut black trousers—was slim and athletic, looking as though it had been pared down by exercise rather than dieting. She wore a flat black stetson instead of the standard coolie-style sun-hat, a flourish which indicated that the ensemble had been consciously chosen to create a certain effect. Nicklin was not sure what the effect was meant to be in terms of fashion, but he knew that for him it worked—the thought of unbuttoning the blouse actually made him feel weak at the knees.

“You must go and help your uncle, of course,” the woman said, “but perhaps you’ll come back and listen to Corey when you’re not so pressed for time. He really has something of great importance to say.”

“I’ll certainly give it serious thought.”

“That’s wonderful. By the way, my name is Danea.”

“Mine’s Jim,” Nicklin said, deeply thrilled by the realisation that there had been no need for the woman to give him her name. “Jim Nicklin, and I’ve just been thinking…”

He glanced at the people sitting and standing nearby, who were beginning to look around at him with curiosity or resentment because the conversation was an unwelcome distraction. He pointed at his ear and then at an area of trampled grass which was at a remove from the audience but still inside the ring of pole-mounted speakers which were relaying Montane’s words to the outside world. Danea nodded and moved in the indicated direction on black, spike-heeled sandals. Nicklin grabbed at Zindee’s hand and followed.

“That’s better—there were too many decibels to compete against back there,” he said when they stopped walking. “Look, I’ve been thinking things over. It’ll soon be getting dark and there probably isn’t enough time to get any useful work in on the rock garden. I think I’ll just stay on here for a while and—” He paused, becoming aware that Zindee had gripped his wrist with both hands and was trying to drag him away.

“Jim,” she whispered fiercely. “Jim!”

Danea looked down at her in a friendly manner. “Is this your daughter?”

“No!” Nicklin realised he had put too much emphasis into the denial. “No, I’m not married. This is my friend Zindee. We were going to have us a sundae—on the way to my uncle’s place, that is.”

“Hello, Zindee,” Danea said. “Don’t worry about getting that sundae. We all know how important sundaes are, and I’m sure Jim didn’t mean that terrible thing he said about staying on here.” She raised her gaze and her eyes locked with Nicklin’s. “After all, he can come back here at any time.”

“Yes.” Nicklin nodded vigorously as, annoyingly, Zindee redoubled her efforts to pull him off his feet. “I’ll do that. I’ll certainly do that.”

“Well, we’ll see you then.” Danea smiled at him, and he saw that her teeth were perfect, and that when she smiled the heaviness left her eyes, making them lively, star-centred and bold. The tremulous feeling returned to his knee joints. He raised his free hand in a farewell gesture and allowed Zindee to haul him away in the direction of Mr Chickley’s ice-cream parlour.

“Why didn’t you answer Danea when she said hello to you?” he demanded as soon as they had walked far enough to gain some privacy.

“You were doing enough talking for both of us,” Zindee replied, the set of her tiny chin showing that she was furious with him. “And what was all that bullshit about an uncle and a rock garden?” The fact that she had not used her customary euphemism—male ox droppings—confirmed to Nicklin that he was really in trouble with her.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said lamely.

“What I don’t understand is why you tell lies all the time. What makes you do it, Jim?”

That’s what I’d like to know, Nicklin thought, his cheeks beginning to grow hot with embarrassment. “You still haven’t said why you were rude to Danea.”

“She talked to me like I was a kid. Sundaes are important. Huh!”

Nicklin remained silent until they had reached the edge of the common, crossed Coach-and-Four Lane and taken up good window seats in Chickley’s. The place was quite narrow, but it extended a long way back from the street and had a glittering chrome-and-glass counter right across the inner end. Fat Mr Chickley was proud of having designed the period decor himself, even though there was some uncertainty about which period he had been aiming at. Clumps of coloured neon strips broke out here and there among the pseudo-Victorian gaslights on the walls. There were only a few customers in the twin rows of booths, presumably because of the rival attraction of Montane’s meeting.

While Zindee was up at the counter placing her complex order he took stock of himself and was not surprised to find that his hands were slightly unsteady. What had happened to him out there on the common? By inviting the woman to move to a quieter place he had, by his standards of behaviour, been making a pass at her—and he had never before behaved that way with a stranger. The unsettling thing, however, was that she had known he was making the pass and had continued to give him positive signals. No local woman would have responded to an advance from him in that way.

He was well aware that, as well as having the reputation of being ineffectual and eccentric, he was suspected of homosexuality by most people in Orangefield. He could have earned the esteem of many men, and probably of quite a few women, by being seen visiting certain homes in the town where the lady of the house had fallen back, so to speak, on an ancient means of earning a living. The main reason he had not given those houses any business was that he was an intensely private person, and did not like the idea of the town gossips knowing the exact dates on which he had found it necessary to relieve biological pressures. He therefore restricted himself to those occasions when he was over in Weston Bridge buying books or machine parts.

It was quite some coincidence, he decided, that the only woman ever to blitz him in such a way was also just about the first ever to respond encouragingly to his show of interest. As a result, there was nothing else in the world that he wanted more than to be with Danea. That was why he had lied about the rock garden in front of Zindee—she had ceased to register on his senses, she had effectively ceased to exist. And, right now, the thought that but for her intrusive presence he could still have been talking to Danea was inspiring him with resentment towards the child.

“Here we go,” Zindee said, arriving at the table with two imposing confections in tall glasses balanced on a tray. “Just look at them! Feast your eyes, Jim! How’s that for a vision of paradise?”

“Not bad.”

“Not bad!” As she sat down it was apparent from Zindee’s expression and manner that she had been restored to good humour. “Peasant! Philistine! Have you no appreciation for genuine works of art?”

“Perhaps not,” Nicklin said, taking his spoon and tentatively probing a pale green area of his sundae.

“Who’s being rude now?”

“Sorry.” He was dully surprised to find that he was not at all sorry. Why don’t you take yourself for a long walk and leave me in peace for a while?

“I know what’s the matter with you.” Zindee gave him a knowing smirk, the downy hair on her upper lip already blobbed with white. “I know what’s eating our Jim.”

“Do you?”

“He’s in love! The poor guy’s got the throbs for the Lady in Black.”

“Eat your ice cream, Zindee,” Nicklin said, eyeing her with growing dislike. “You’re talking rubbish.”

“Oh, no I’m not! I was watching you.” Zindee popped a cherry into her mouth and chewed contemplatively. “She’s got a good pair of headlights.”

Nicklin felt he ought to tell Zindee off for using language unbecoming to a well-brought-up child, but her comment had rekindled his furnace. Now that he thought about it, Danea’s breasts had been quite full in comparison to the slimness of her body, creating horizontal wrinkles in her sylkon blouse. And there was her smile! He was inclined to smile as little as possible, because when he did so his mouth curved too far up at the corners, giving him what he regarded as a goofy hayseed appearance. Danea’s smile, however, was straight, and perhaps her mouth even turned down a little at the corners—a feature which Nicklin had always envied and regarded as a hallmark of mature and worldly sophistication. What was her surname? And was the heaviness of her eyes and possible bruising of the upper lip a sign that she had spent most of the previous night in strenuous sexual activity? With Montane? Nicklin had read that it was quite commonplace for leaders of quirky religious groups to bed the most attractive of their acolytes. Perhaps this particular group went in for sex in a big way, in rituals and so forth. Perhaps Danea had been doing it with everybody! If that were the case, he wanted his share of her-even if it meant joining her nutty religion…

A mental picture of Danea coupling promiscuously with all the men with whom she travelled filled Nicklin with a pang of desire, jealousy and outrage so powerful that it caused him to squirm in his seat. He should be with her at that very moment, instead of playing nursemaid to a precocious brat who insisted on clinging to him like a leech. Looking out above the half-length net curtain which gave Mr Chickley’s window seats some privacy, Nicklin tried to see Danea, but the trees and shifting groups of townsfolk made it impossible.

“Jim, I’ve got an idea,” Zindee said. “You don’t really want your sundae, do you?”

“I guess not. I guess I’m not in the mood for an ice.”

“That’s the understatement of the century. Look, hows about you giving your sundae to me? I’ll be able to eat the two of them—no problem—but it’s bound to take me quite a while.” Zindee spoke with the grave tones of a general laying out a major campaign. “That would give you time to nip back across the street and see if you can fix yourself a date with the Lady in Black. What do you say?”

“I…” Nicklin gazed at her with an upwelling of affection so strong that it was little short of adoration. “Are you sure you would be all right? Sitting here by yourself?”

Zindee shrugged. “What could happen to a girl in an ice-cream joint?”

He stood up, drummed a message of thanks with his fingers on the crown of her sun-hat, and hurried out into the street. As he crossed to the common he realised that, without actual sight of Danea to goad him to recklessness, his cursed timidity had returned in force. He had no idea of what to say to her and, perversely, he now wished he had remained with Zindee. A glance at the sky showed that the eastern edge of the sun was being clipped by the next advancing force bar. Night would arrive quite soon, and he felt he might recapture his surprising boldness under cover of darkness, but he would have been obliged to rejoin Zindee by then.

Breasting waves of sound from the loudspeakers, he walked towards the meeting. Montane was still delivering his dire warnings, but the message was no longer penetrating to Nicklin’s brain. He circled around the listening crowd, the white marquee and all the associated vehicles three times, but was unable to see any sign of Danea.

Steeped in black, bitter disappointment—but at the same time feeling oddly relieved—he headed back towards Mr Chickley’s. From the edge of the green he saw the small and indomitable figure of Zindee outlined by the peach-coloured lights which had just been switched on in the shop. She was busily working on the sundaes.

He smiled as he thought of how pleasant it was going to be, walking home with her and savouring her safe, undemanding companionship.

Chapter 5

“By our old standards,” Corey Montane said, “we did quite well today.”

His audience—some forty strong and composed solely of his own workers—made sounds of gratification, but in a subdued and tentative manner. It was highly unusual for Montane to call a general meeting so late in the day, and each of them knew that something serious was afoot. They were sitting in a tight group in a corner of the marquee. All the door flaps had been drawn shut and tied, and the only illumination came from a single overhead globe which served to emphasise the darkness in the shadowy reaches of the huge tent. The conspiratorial atmosphere was enhanced by the fact that Montane had positioned himself in the midst of his team and was speaking in a low voice, obviously determined that any strangers who might be lurking outside would not hear what he was saying.

“We took in almost six hundred orbs today,” Montane went on. “And six hundred orbs is quite a creditable sum—by our old standards. The trouble is that our old standards no longer apply. They have lost all relevance. They are totally without meaning for us.”

Montane paused, surveying his audience with sombre eyes. They were a mixed bag of men and women, and he loved them all. Some—like the electricians Petra Davies and old Jock Craig—had joined him in the knowledge that they had useful skills to offer; others had come along with no special aptitudes, but prepared to do or learn to do anything that was asked of them. What they had in common was their belief in his message, their loyalty and their trust.

And now it was required of him, in this grim hour, that he should put all those qualities to the test.

“You already know, from today’s news, that the world has been moved to some alien part of the continuum, to a new location so remote that the astronomers cannot even find the Local Group—the twenty or more galaxies that made up our cosmic neighbourhood. The event is a vindication of all that I have told people in the last six years, but sadly, incredibly, they still do not believe. The blindness continues.

“But we are not blind. We know that the iron jaws of the Devil’s trap have quivered and have now begun to snap shut!

“I have to admit that, all along, I have been much too complacent. It is now almost two centuries since the migrations to Orbitsville began. By human standards that is a long time, but to God it is the mere blink of an eye, and to the Devil it is the mere blink of an eye.

“I was lulled by those two centuries into thinking that the time scale was much more leisurely than it has proved to be. I began my mission with grand plans to raise the funding to build a fleet of starships. The money came in much more slowly than I had expected in those days of my naivety, but I was able to adapt to that. If the worst comes to the worst, I reassured myself, it will be enough for me to set up a foundation. I will be able to die content in the knowledge that a fleet will some day set sail towards the new Eden, even if I am not there to embark with it.”

Montane gave his listeners a sad, rueful smile. “But today’s news has changed all that, and it must change us. I am now prepared to settle for just one starship, one ark which will preserve the seeds of a new branch of humanity. It must be built with all possible speed. There may not even be enough time in which to complete the ship, but we must try. It is our only hope of salvation and therefore we must make the utmost effort.

“Until this day we have been content to gather money in small amounts, but now we have to change our ways. We have to put aside our morals, to stifle the voice of our consciences. In short, we have to do everything in our power to bring in that money, even if it means descending to methods which—in other circumstances—we would find repugnant.

“I hate to use words which are associated with some of the darkest episodes in human history—but, in this unique case, the end justifies the means.”

There was a taut silence then Mace Winnick, a skeletal, shrunken-faced man who had done time in a correction clinic, cleared his throat. “Corey, are you talking about stealing?”

Montane shook his head. “No stealing. I rule it out, not on moral grounds, but because of the high probability of being caught.”

There was another silence while his audience stared at Montane with speculative eyes, trying to assess the stranger that their leader had become. Dee Smethurst, the head cook—plump, pink and matronly, looking exactly as a cook should—raised her hand.

“You almost…” There was a pained look on her face. “You almost sound as if you would condone prostitution.”

Montane carefully avoided looking anywhere near the women in the group—Danea Farthing, Christine McGivern and Audrey Lightfoot among them—who were physically equipped to earn good money by hustling. “I will condone prostitution, male or female, if it builds us that ship.”

“Corey Montane!” Dee shot an outraged glance at those seated next to her and tightened her lips in a way which indicated that she would have a lot more to say at a later time.

It came to Montane that he was likely to lose some of his team as a result of the new rules of conduct, but that simply had to be accepted. His mission had been run too much on the lines of a mobile retreat for society’s gentle drop-outs. The time had come to stop playing games, and anybody who was not prepared to commit every personal resource to the cause would have to be treated as dead wood.

“I should qualify my last remark,” he added. “I am quite prepared to condone ordinary casual prostitution, but bringing in fifty or a hundred orbs a day—I am not conversant with the going rates—would only be a tiny step in the right direction. I would, however, applaud strategic prostitution, in which the client was induced to join or support our movement to the extent of selling up his or her possessions and donating the proceeds to our fund.

“It gives me no pleasure to speak to you in these terms—but our immortal souls are at stake. Nothing less than the future of the human race is at stake!”

Montane invited his listeners to join with him in open discussion, and he stayed with them for more than an hour while the tides of emotional debate raged back and forth. Finally, when he had become too tired to continue, he took his leave of them and walked back to his camper in the darkness. When he was inside the roomy vehicle he switched on no lights except for the small reading lamp at his desk. The warm glow from its toffee-coloured glass shade enabled him to prepare the pot of tea which he always drank before going to bed. His mind was racing, trying to assimilate all that had happened during the momentous day, but a sense of deep weariness told him he would have no trouble getting to sleep.

When he had finished the tea he undressed and brushed his teeth. He switched off the reading lamp and, on the way to bed, paused by the silver coffin which occupied the centre of the vehicle’s living space.

Placing both hands on the cool metal, he closed his eyes and in a low voice said, “I’m sorry about the way things are working out, Milly—but some day we’ll both be at peace.”

Chapter 6

Nicklin stood behind the counter of his repair shop and gazed around him with a kind of sad astonishment. The morning was just like that of the previous day—sunny, clear, warm and invigorating. There had been a succession of such mornings recently, and he had luxuriated in every one of them, but today there was something dismally wrong. Not with the familiar surroundings and appurtenances of his life, but with his reaction to them.

Was it simply that he had had a poor night’s sleep? He had lain awake for long periods, reliving his meeting with the Lady in Black, inventing different outcomes for the too-brief encounter. At times he had congratulated himself, with forced sincerity, on having escaped any entanglement with her; but for the most part he had become lost in vivid scenarios which ended with the two of them in bed together. During those episodes he had found himself with a raging, rock-hard erection which kept grinding itself into the mattress, seemingly of its own volition, while he cursed the criminal waste of his youth represented by his spending all the long nights alone.

He had had restless nights in the past, but had always welcomed the morning and the return of the bright, trustworthy realities of existence. On this morning, however, life was flat and boring. Not ordinarily flat and boring, but unbearably so. The things which used to interest him, no longer interested him. The cheerful environs of his repair shop and library now had all the appeal of a morgue, and the mere idea of having to retune even one more magnetic pulse motor was almost enough to make him sit down and weep.

What am I going to do, O Gaseous Vertebrate? he thought. I can’t see how I’m going to get through a single day like this—let alone the next sixty years…

With an effort of will, he picked up the order book and checked on what work was pending. The first two items, logged in Maxy Millom’s scrupulously legible writing, were a circular saw and a lawn-mower. Beside each was the legend ‘MT’, which meant that according to Maxy’s initial diagnosis their motors needed to be retuned. It was work which Maxy could not even begin to learn because he had an almost superstitious fear of the way a faulty motor could release bursts of gyromagnetic energy, causing tools to leap off the bench like startled animals.

Nicklin had always regarded adjusting the semi-sentient para-mag blocks of a motor, persuading them to deliver their energy pulses at precisely the right instant, as the most boring job ever invented—and that was when he was in a good mood. Today the prospect seemed dire. Wishing that the diffuseness of Orbitsville’s population and the lack of universal engineering standards had not made repair-by-replacement unfeasible, he slammed the order book down.

At that moment the bleached-out stillness of the world beyond the window was disturbed by a moving flurry of dust near the bridge. It was Maxy Millom, late as usual, arriving for work on his old Bronco scooter. As he neared the shop, Maxy stood up on the machine’s footrests and gave Nicklin a military-style salute. Maintaining the pose like a rider in a parade, he passed the window, slowing down all the while, and—as he had done perhaps a dozen times in the past—went straight into the tip of a rock about the size of a football projecting from the sun-baked clay. The scooter bucked and fell sideways, bearing Maxy to the ground with it. He jumped up swearing, kicked the scooter a couple of times to punish it for having obeyed the law of gravity, and retrieved his bright green sun-hat. Leaving the Bronco where it lay, he came towards the shop, walking grotesquely as he tried with both hands to extricate the seat of his pants from the cleft of his slabby behind.

Nicklin glowered at him with purest malevolence, wondering how anybody could be dim enough to stage the identical accident so often without learning to avoid it. Just think of it, he told himself, appalled, unless I do something really drastic Maxy and I could grow old together—with him gradually wearing that rock down to a frigging pebble.

“Good morrow, Jim,” Maxy bellowed, grinning hugely, as he came into the shop. “Did you see that one? I nearly deballed myself.”

I wish you had, Nicklin thought. “You’re late again.”

“Yeah.” Maxy was totally unabashed. “Didn’t get to bed till all hours last night. A couple of the boys and me went over to the travellin’ show, just to see what sort of things was going on, then we went down to the White Spot for a few beers. Seen you at the show.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“Naw, but I seen you, all right,” Maxy said triumphantly. “You seemed to be doing okay for yourself. I was nearly going to butt in and tell snake-hips how she was wasting her time on you, and she oughta come along for a few beers with me and the boys, but my generations of good breeding stopped me.”

It has just told me it thinks I’m a homosexual—to my face!—and I go on meekly standing here. “I’m sure Danea will be deeply disappointed when she hears what she missed,” Nicklin said. “I’ll break the news to her tonight—as gently as I can, of course. We mustn’t have the poor woman bursting into tears.”

“Are you saying you’ll be seeing her tonight?”

“No, we’ve arranged to communicate by carrier pigeon! What do you think I’m saying? Of course I’m seeing her tonight.”

Maxy hopped from one foot to the other, grinning in gleeful disbelief. “Is that a fact, Jim? You’ve got yourself a hot date? Me and the boys’ll watch out for you—maybe pick up a few tips.”

Knowing that Maxy, who had remarkably little to do in his spare time, was quite capable of maintaining surveillance on him for an entire evening, Nicklin shrugged and turned away. How was he going to get out of this one? Was he going to have to plead illness and stay home? Brooding on this new annoyance, he went to the square metre of work surface which was referred to as the kitchen, and began to brew coffee. Starting the job while Maxy was present would be interpreted as an invitation for him to share. That was not what he wanted, but it was much preferable to letting Maxy prepare the drinks. He had an unfortunate habit of handling the cups by putting two fingers deep inside them, even when they were full—fingers which if examined under a microscope, Nicklin was sure, would register as a seething mass of bacteria.

“Just what I need,” Maxy said, following him. “Hey! Know who else I saw at the rent-a-freak last night?”

“No, but perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me.”

Impervious to sarcasm, Maxy nodded vigorously. “A black man! Strewth, Jim—they’ve got a black geezer working for them! He’s as black as… as…”

As your fingernails, Nicklin supplied mentally.

“…as your boot,” Maxy concluded.

Although Nicklin did not want to encourage Maxy by showing any degree of interest, he was quite intrigued. He had seen only one black person in his entire life, and that had been when he was a child. Now he found it quite difficult to visualise a human being who had black skin.

The old Orbitsville syndrome again, he thought. So much for all that ancient stuff about the universal brotherhood of man! With living space equal to five billion Earths available, like had gone off into the wild green yonder with like. Nobody was going to hang around to be persecuted, discriminated against, tolerated or even cultivated by liberals merely because of having the wrong shade of epidermis or politics, speaking the wrong language or having wrong ideas about religion, having been born to the wrong parents or in one of the vast selection of wrong places. Regardless of all teachings and preachings, the ordinary Joe had decided it was best to be with his own…

“Anyway,” Maxy said. “I’ve decided I don’t like black people.”

“That was quick.” Nicklin took two plastic cups from the dispenser. “May I ask why?”

“They’re too short-tempered, too touchy. Me and the boys was just standing there—friendly, like—looking at this guy, and all of a sudden, for no reason at all, he tells us to bog off.” An indignant expression appeared on Maxy’s tallowy face as he relived the incident in his mind. “I mean, if you can’t just stand and look at somebody!”

“What’s the world coming to? That’s what I always say.” Nicklin poured coffee into the two cups, picked up his own and moved to the front end of the shop. It was a vantage point which gave him a good view of the stream, the small bridge and the road. Beyond the building’s wide eaves the sunlight was a silent, vertical torrent of platinum-coloured rays, hammering down on the bleached-out scene with almost tangible force. The world was embedded—preserved and hermetically sealed—in the clear rigid plastic of that light. Dayton, Ohio, where it was forever 1910. Nothing was ever going to happen in Orangefield, and he was going to be right there, through all of it. The thought was enough to make him want to sit down and weep. Dismayed to feel his lower lip give a preliminary tremble, he took a sip of his coffee and winced as the near-scalding fluid coursed down his throat.

Lost in his melancholia, Nicklin had been gazing at the approaching blue Unimot convertible for several seconds before he realised it was slowing down to stop at his place. It was lost to view behind the stand of whistle trees, reappeared and turned right, coming to a halt when its driver was confronted by the footbridge. A moment later the driver got out and Nicklin’s heart gave a giddy lurch as he saw the woman. The woman.

She was no longer the Lady in Black, but was wearing a similar outfit—glistening blouse, slimfit pants, high-heel boots and flat stetson—in which the predominant colour was primrose. Glancing about her with evident interest, she came towards the shop. She was walking almost like a ballet dancer on stage, with one foot going down directly in front of the other in a way which emphasised the economical curvatures of thighs, calves and ankles.

Nicklin felt a cool prickling on his brow as he analysed the possibilities. The chances that she was coming to borrow a book or to have an eggbeater mended were just about zero—which meant that the visit was personal. Could it be—could it really be—that she wanted to take up where they had left off last night? But nothing actually happened between us last night, Nicklin reminded himself. It was all a product of my fevered imagination. This sort of thing only happens to me in the opening phases of an erotic dream.

He set his cup down, found the presence of mind to wink at Maxy, and went out of the shop without taking time to pick up his sun-hat. When the woman saw him advancing to meet her she gave him a smile which was so fleeting that it would have been possible to miss it, then her expression became severe.

“What happened to you last night?” she said abruptly.

“I…” Nicklin was lost for words. “What do you mean?”

“Jim, you know very well what I mean.”

Her use of his first name excited and encouraged him. “I assure you, Danea, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“At least you remember my name,” she said, beginning to look mollified. “I suppose that’s something, but don’t think it lets you off the hook, Jim Nicklin. Why didn’t you come back to see me last night, the way we arranged?”

Nicklin felt a gusher of pure joy shaking his intellectual landscape. It had not yet spumed up through him, but it was getting itself ready. This was the first part of an erotic dream, but it was a dream that was coming true—and all he needed to do was make the final check which would remove even the slightest possibility of his suffering a crushing humiliation or disappointment.

“Montane must have a dash of tax collector’s blood in him if he lets you go drive all the way out of town for a couple of orbs,” he said, forcing a grin. “Where’s your collecting plate?”

“That isn’t funny, Jim.” Danea gazed at him seriously from under heavy eyelids. “This sort of thing has never happened to me before, and you’re not making it any easier. You may be used to this, but I’m not.”

“I’m not used to… Danea, there was nothing actually said last night.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” she replied, her eyes holding steady on his, imploring. “Do you think I’m not quivering like a jelly over all the embarrassment I’ll have to go through if I’m wrong?”

“You’re not wrong,” he said, entranced, taking one of her hands in his. The gusher was exploding up through the ground now, blasting all that remained of the old Jim Nicklin into the high blue.

“Thank God!” She smiled and moved her hand in such a way that his knuckles were pressed into her left breast. “I didn’t sleep much last night, Jim—why didn’t you come back to me?”

“I did go back. I left Zindee with her ice cream for a few minutes and went back to look for you.”

“I was hiding in the marquee trying to calm myself down a little bit.” Her breast, beneath the sylkon blouse, felt like bare flesh against the back of his hand. “Anyway, a couple of minutes wouldn’t have been much use to us. I’m really hurting for you, Jim. I want you in me. Does that sound awful?”

“It sounds wonderful.” The former Jim Nicklin would have been reduced to incoherence by the question, but the new version remained more or less in control of himself, doing his best to act like the cool roué Danea believed him to be. “I have an apartment above the library—let’s go there.”

“No!” Danea looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the workshop. “That horrible person—the one who was hanging around the meeting last night—is watching us. I’d never be able to relax if I knew he was near us… listening… Does he work for you?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Nicklin glanced back at the window in which the open-mouthed figure of Maxy was posed like a statue. “Only the Gaseous Vertebrate knows why I keep him on. I could send him home.”

Danea shook her head. “That would be too obvious.”

“Do you want to wait till tonight?” Nicklin said, his joy beginning to cloud with anxiety. He knew with absolute certainty, because it was in the nature of such things, that if he let this opportunity slip away it would never return. Tonight was an aeon away in the future, and by the time it came Danea would have recovered her sanity, or started menstruating, or been called away to tend a sick aunt. Or he would have tripped over something and broken both his legs, or—worst of all—the Mr Hyde potion would have worn off and he would be in such a state of yellow-bellied funk that he would be unable to set foot outside the house.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Danea said, nodding in the direction of the low crest behind his premises. “What’s on the other side of that hill?”

Thank you, thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, Nicklin chanted in his mind. “There’s nothing over there,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “No people, anyway. Just little hills and lots more little hills. It’s just right for walking.”

Danea gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Do you want to go in and fetch your hat?”

“No, the sun never bothers me much,” he lied, unwilling to risk leaving her side for even a few seconds.

Conscious of still being gaped at by Maxy, he linked arms with Danea and walked with her towards the grassy crest. There was silence between them as they moved up the slope. Nicklin wondered if he should try to maintain a flow of sophisticated and tension-easing conversation, but perhaps there was no real need for words. In a lower corner of his vision he could see the buoyant cones of Danea’s bosom-you were right, Zindee, good headlamps—and the easy, languorous, alternating movement of her slim thighs. And each time he reminded himself it was all really happening, and not part of a dream, his feet seemed to lose all contact with the ground. I’m walking on air, just as the cliche says. I want this to go on for ever. Love took its time in finding me, but when it finally got here it did the job in the classic across-a-crowded-room style, and I want this to go on for ever and ever…

As soon as they were over the ridge and out of sight of Nicklin’s place and the few other buildings dotted along Cork Road, Danea turned to him and they kissed. The smell and the taste and the feel of her swamped his senses.

“Not here,” she whispered gently. “It’s too near to your place—that person might follow us.”

Belatedly aware of having tried to sink with Danea to the ground, he said, “You’re quite right—I wouldn’t put it past him. There’s a better spot over here.”

He guided her around an egg-shaped hummock to its north side, from where endless green billows stretched to the up-curved horizon. Fringing the hill were clusters of bandannas which were just coming into full flower. The trailing red-and-orange blossoms which gave the shrub its name made a colourful outpost on the edge of the ocean of grass. One of the largest clumps had grown in a U-shape which was a good size to screen a recumbent couple and even provided some degree of protection against the sun. Nicklin had noticed the leafy boudoir on previous walks, and in his imagination—inspired by constant loneliness—had peopled it with lovers, never supposing that he would be one of them.

“How’s this?” he said.

For an answer, Danea began to undress, her solemn brown eyes never leaving his. Nicklin stripped off in unison with her, throwing his clothes into the nook to form a makeshift blanket. As soon as both were naked they kissed once more—breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh.

Then they lay down together…

It might have been an hour—he had no means of judging the time—before Nicklin slowly spiralled back down into the mundane world. He was lying over Danea, but taking most of his weight on his elbows and knees, and was looking into her eyes. They were so close to his own that he was unable to focus on them. They registered as lambent brown-and-white blurs, lacking in detail, but in a little while he became aware that she was crying. He promptly rolled to the ground on his left side, disturbed by a lover’s fears, and touched the cool transparent ribbons on her cheek.

“What’s wrong, Danea?” he whispered. “You’re not sorry, are you?”

She pressed her teeth down on her lower lip to stop its trembling. “I am sorry, but not about us. Not about this.”

“What then?”

“Corey… The mission will be leaving Orangefield the day after tomorrow. I have to go with it, and that means…” She gave a sob and pressed her face into his shoulder. “I don’t want to leave you, Jim. I don’t want this to end.”

“Does it have to?” Nicklin’s consciousness, which had been totally absorbed with the present, suddenly reached out to the future and encountered—only hours ahead—a barrier of black jet, a dark wall where happiness ended and the old despairing solitude and futility began. “Do you have to leave? Couldn’t you stay here with me?”

Danea shook her head and he felt her tears smearing on his skin. “I’m committed to the mission,” she said in a muffled voice. “It’s what I believe in, Jim. I can’t forget all the vows I… Besides, I don’t think I could stand living in a place like Orangefield.”

“I’ve got news for you, Danea.” Bolts of white lightning cleaved the landscape of Nicklin’s mind. “I can’t stand living in Orangefield either.”

He felt her body go rigid. She raised her head and gave him several light kisses, dabbing his face with her tears.

“That’s very sweet of you,” she murmured. “I feel so very honoured that you would even consider leaving your home and everything you know and going out on the road with me. Is that what you meant, or am I… ?”

“That’s what I meant, and you know it.”

She gave him a tremulous smile and gently nuzzled her pubis against his hip. “You’re a lovely man, Jim, but there are things you don’t know about.”

“What sort of things?”

“Corey doesn’t permit people to come along for the ride. We’d be swamped with fellow-travellers—in both senses—if he allowed that. Everyone who joins us has to be totally committed, and that means…” She tried to lower her head again, but he placed his hand on her brow, forcing her to continue looking at him.

“Go on,” he said.

“It means selling everything you own… your home, your business, your insurance… everything… and donating all the proceeds to the mission.”

“Is that all you’re worried about?” Nicklin laughed with genuine relief. “Consider it done, little girl! Consider it done\”

All the heaviness disappeared from Danea’s eyes. “Do you mean it, Jim? Do you really mean it? We could have a little camper all to ourselves—and you don’t even have to marry me if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.”

“We’ve got all the time in the world to talk about that,” she said, raising herself to a sitting position, looking radiantly excited. She remained that way for a few seconds, then her expression became pensive.

Nicklin was more confident now, and no alarm bells rang for him. “What is it this time?”

“I’ve just thought of something.” Her eyes were speculative and oddly watchful as they searched his face. “I don’t know what the others, especially Corey, will think of me if I go back as bold as brass and tell them I’m moving in with a man I met only last night. That probably sounds silly to you, Jim. You’re probably used to a procession of women going in and out of your bed—and you don’t have to care one hoot what people say about it—but things are a bit different for me at the mission. It’s all a bit straight-laced. It’s all very old-fashioned, but I really value the respect of the people I work with there…”

Danea paused, looking self-conscious. “What a big speech! And I don’t even know if what I said makes any kind of sense to you.”

“I understand.” Nicklin felt some disappointment, but he was already possessive towards Danea and the disappointment was more than offset by his learning that Montane’s followers were not proponents of communal or even casual sex. “You’re saying we can’t start living together right off. I can handle that.”

“Thank you, Jim, thank you!” She hugged him, pressing in hard with her breasts. “We’ll only have to wait a little while after Corey accepts you. And we won’t be apart all the time, my lovely horny darling—every now and then we’ll be able to take ourselves for a little walk.”

The inflection Danea put on the last word, the assignment to it of a special secret meaning, made Nicklin’s throat close up painfully with sheer happiness. In future, when they were in the company of others, he or she would only have to suggest going for a “walk”, and nobody else present would know what was meant, but he and Danea would know, and it would be more of the kind of ecstatic love-making they had just experienced. The world was a wonderful place in which to live—and how could he ever have thought that Danea was not beautiful?

While they were dressing he found a damp patch near the bottom edge of his shirt which made him wince as he crammed it under his belt. Danea laughed and told him he had only himself to blame for being so virile. After they were clothed again they remained in the lee of the bandanna for a minute while he tried to explain, with some guesswork here and there, how he would go about disposing of all his assets in a very short time. Danea looked embarrassed and asked him not to talk about such things until he was with Corey Montane. Nicklin loved her all the more because she so obviously wanted to keep their personal relationship uncontaminated by financial matters.

As they were walking back to his place, his arm around her shoulder and hers around his waist, a new thought occurred to him “If we’re going to be married,” he said lightly, “I suppose it would be only proper if I got to know your second name.”

“You mean you took me into your love nest and you didn’t even know my…!” She pushed him away from her with a scandalised laugh. “Farthing! My name is Farthing—I told you that last night.”

“You didn’t! I swear to you by the Gaseous Vertebrate that you didn’t.” He tilted his head thoughtfully. “At least, I don’t think you did.”

“You see! You’re not even sure!” Danea came back to him and put her arms around his neck. “Tell me the truth, Jim—just how many women have you taken for a walk up here?”

“You’re the only one,” Nicklin protested, but was unable to resist allowing the claim to sound unconvincing. He was more flattered than he cared to admit by her repeated suggestions that he was a sexual conquistador. And if she happened to be impressed by men of wide experience there was no point in his going all out to change her opinion of him. Life was suddenly opening up in a big way. Now that he had been with Danea he could admit that the women of Orangefield, with their dismissive and condescending manner, had always given him a sense of sexual inadequacy. But the fault had been with them all along! They were small-towners, hidebound and limited by their Hicksville upbringing, whereas he was a natural cosmopolitan who could only be appreciated by other cosmopolitans.

As he walked in the sunlight with Danea’s hip gently nudging his, he thought for a moment about the fact that he was on the point of selling up everything he owned, for no other reason than his desire to be with her. But he felt no doubts, no qualms, no apprehensions. He was going to rid himself of his shackles and become free to begin his real life.

“Tell me something,” Danea said. “What is this Gaseous Vertebrate you keep mentioning? What do you mean?”

Nicklin was surprised. “I didn’t realise that I… It’s a name that somebody—one of the old German philosophers, I think—invented for God.”

“God? It sounds strange. Not very respectful.”

“It’s meant to be the opposite of respectful. It’s meant to express disbelief. The Bible claims that God made man in His own image. So, if we look like Him, He must look like us, and that means He has a backbone. But if He’s a spirit—by definition a creature who has no weight—why does He need a backbone to support His weight?”

“Please do me a favour,” Danea said, a barely noticeable wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. “Don’t refer to God in that way when you’re with Corey—I’m sure it would hurt his feelings.”

Nicklin gave her a compliant nod, and—for no reason which could be isolated from the clamorous background of his thoughts-it came to him that there was something important, something very important, which he should have discussed with the woman he loved.

Chapter 7

An hour spent with the manager of the Orangefield branch of the Portal One Bank had left Nicklin emotionally exhausted. He was not sure why an interview with Dixon Figg should have that kind of an effect on him, but it always had, and he was glad to leave the hushed dove-grey offices of the bank and go for a restorative walk in Mumford Park.

Except in large cities, the profession of realtor had all but ceased to exist in the two centuries that man had been on Orbitsville. It was ironic, Nicklin often thought, that it was a surfeit of the very commodity they traded in which had practically forced real estate dealers out of existence. With entire continents available for nothing, clients willing to pay more than peanuts per hectare had become elusive.

The banks, ever ready to fill a commercial vacuum, had absorbed land management into their activities, and as a consequence Figg had a comprehensive knowledge of Nicklin’s affairs. The thing which annoyed Nicklin was that Figg always treated him with barely hidden disapproval, even contempt, in spite of his sensible business practices, avoidance of debt, and an accumulation of some 40,000 orbs in his personal savings account. Figg was only reflecting the town’s prejudices, Nicklin surmised, but surely it was incumbent upon the manager of a bank to be more civilised than the local stubblejaws.

On being told that Nicklin wanted to liquidate every one of his assets in preparation for leaving town in a couple of days, Dixon Figg’s expression had gone from shock to outrage to deep suspicion in as many seconds. The display had cowed Nicklin so thoroughly that he had not dared to give the real reason for his drastic proposal. Instead he had launched into a series of lies about a cousin in Beachhead City who had presented him with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy into the family’s ventilation engineering business. Under Figg’s astute probing the structure of lies had become more complicated and increasingly shaky, until in the end—his intelligence roundly insulted—the banker had withdrawn into the hostile iciness with which he concluded the interview.

Now, walking amidst the greenery of the park, Nicklin was reproaching himself for not having been tough and cold with Figg. Tough, cold and—if necessary—brutal. When the questioning started he should have silenced Figg with the verbal equivalent of a broadsword. Perhaps he would do just that in the morning when he went to collect his underwritten draft for 82,000 orbs, but it was much more likely that he would be as ineffectual as ever. It was only when he was with Danea that the bold and positive side of his personality seemed to emerge, enhanced by the power of her feelings for him.

The realisation that he would soon be quitting oppressive Orangefield for ever, and going off into the unknown with her, gave his spirits a powerful boost, enabling him to drive the crabbed Mr Figg out of his thoughts. He strolled around the little park twice, breathing deeply and consciously relaxing, until it was almost time for his 11.00 a.m. appointment with Corey Montane. Leaving by the east gate, he walked the length of Telegraph Row, making good progress because there were few shoppers around at that drowsy time of day, the tail-end of the mid-morning lull. He emerged on Buckboard Lane, one of the boundaries of the common, which was comparatively free of vehicles and easy to get across.

The mission’s marquee glowed like a snowdrift beyond the screen of trees. As he approached it he saw that the site, with its rectangular group of cars, campers and trailers, was almost deserted. Several men and women were sitting on the steps of the platform, talking earnestly among themselves, but he knew not to look for Danea among them. For reasons he had not fully understood, she had thought it best to remain out of sight until after his talk with Montane. The most convenient person to ask guidance from was a man who was leaning against a nearby tree, his head concealed beneath an enormous droop-rimmed straw sun-hat. His back was to Nicklin and he appeared to be eating a banapple.

“Hi, there!” Nicklin said. “Can you tell me where I might find Corey Montane?”

The man turned, smiling, and Nicklin saw that he was the black of whom Maxy had spoken. “No might about it! I can tell you where you will definitely find Corey.”

“That’s even better,” Nicklin replied, smiling in return, and doing his best not to stare at the deeply pigmented skin of the man’s face and hands.

“Over there. The silver job with no writing on the side.”

“Thank you.” Nicklin nodded and went in the indicated direction. He was pleased because the black man had treated him with amiable courtesy, as few locals would have done, and it reinforced his feeling that he was throwing his lot in with soulmates—travellers, cosmopolitans, people who had seen a thing or two.

As he neared the silver trailer, Corey Montane appeared in the open doorway and came on to the step to meet him. The first thing Nicklin noticed was that the impression of ordinariness he had projected from the stage was no longer present. It was his face that made the difference when Montane was seen at close range. The features were conventionally handsome and as clearly defined as those of a cartoon character. Nicklin, in spite of having no art training, felt he could have produced a recognisable lightning sketch of Montane. The regular features—ruler-straight nose and square chin, glossy dark hair coming to a widow’s peak—would have taken just a few strokes of the charcoal. Only the eyes would have been difficult, impossible, even for a master portraitist. They were grey, deep-set and full of lively interest, but at the same time they seemed to be focused on some point very far beyond Nicklin. It was as if the mind behind them had weighed him up and found him to be of only transient interest. While Nicklin was there in the flesh that interest would be as complete and sympathetic as Montane could make it, but his true concern was with matters infinite and eternal.

Nicklin liked him immediately, and—against his expectations—felt considerable respect for him. “I’m Jim Nicklin,” he said, extending his hand.

“Hello, Jim.” Montane’s handshake was firm and dry. “Danea has been telling me all about you. Would you like to come inside and have a cup of tea? We can talk better in the old bus and it’s a lot cooler inside—at least it would be if the air conditioning was working properly.”

“I can put it right for you,” Nicklin said as he followed Montane into the vehicle. “It’s probably just a matter of—” He broke off on seeing the long silvery box occupying the centre of the floor space.

Montane gave him an appraising, slightly amused glance. “Yes, it’s just what it appears to be- a coffin. Temporary resting place for my wife. Didn’t Danea tell you about my unusual domestic arrangement?”

“Ah… no.”

“She probably didn’t want you to think I was crazy.” Montane nodded towards a cushioned bench, inviting Nicklin to be seated. “We run the mission on strictly democratic lines, you know. One of our principal rules is that accommodation has to be shared out equally, but although there’s enough room in my vehicle for a few more people nobody ever suggests moving in. They pretend it’s out of respect for me, but who would want to share with a casket? Especially one that was occupied…”

Nicklin tried to smile. “Not too many, I suppose.”

“It’s understandable, but my circumstances are far from being normal.”

That has to be the understatement of the decade, Nicklin thought, an ambivalence creeping into his opinion of Montane. The initial instinctive respect was still there, but what man in his right mind toted his wife’s dead body around everywhere he went? Or even anywhere he went? It was bound to be against some statute or other, and had it ever been possible to introduce effective law enforcement on the Big O—in place of the prevalent system of restrained anarchy—Montane would have been in trouble. Something else the man had said was causing tremors of unease far back in Nicklin’s consciousness, but he had no time to identify it.

“This is a very big step you’re contemplating,” Montane commented as he began to prepare the tea. “You fully understand, I take it, that the money you transfer to the mission will be in the form of a donation?”

“What else could it be?”

“My point is that you won’t be buying a holding in some kind of commercial enterprise—a starship construction company, let’s say—a holding which you could dispose of at some future date should you wish to do so.”

“You’re saying I won’t be able to get my money back.”

“I’m saying precisely that.” Montane set out two antique-looking china cups and saucers. “And the amount involved is bound to be quite large.”

“Oh, well—in for an orb, in for a crescent,” Nicklin said, immediately regretting his attempt at flippancy as he noted the seriousness of Montane’s expression.

“There’s a lot more than mere orbs and cents at stake here,” Montane replied. “I’m very happy for Danea and you, of course, and I wish you every happiness together, but—”

“My feelings about her aren’t going to change, and even if they did—which they aren’t—I don’t see that it would have any bearing on any financial agreement between you and me.” Nicklin was surprised to hear himself speaking with a degree of forcefulness which he had rarely achieved before—especially with a stranger—and he tentatively identified the Danea effect again.

Montane halted in the act of opening a jar of milk capsules. “I apologise, Jim. I intended no slur on Danea or you. I accept that you love each other, although it was all rather sudden by my personal timetable, but will you give me a direct answer to a direct question?”

“Of course.”

Montane set the jar down and turned to face Nicklin. “Are you a believer, Jim? Do you truly believe in God and in the message I bring to mankind on His behalf?”

“I…” Nicklin looked into the calmness of the grey eyes and for once in his life understood the futility of lying. He turned his head from side to side, slowly, once.

Unexpectedly, Montane gave him a broad smile. “If you had tried to fool me on that one, I’d have booted you out of here, Jim—regardless of how much money it cost the mission. I can only work with people I respect, and who respect me. Milk?”

“One,” Nicklin said as Montane picked up the small jar. “I’m glad we cleared the air, but I’m a bit surprised.”

“At my taking on a non-believer? These are very special times, Jim. Naturally, I would prefer it if everybody I came in contact with was a disciple of the Lord, but this is an imperfect world and I have to use any instrument that He sends in my direction. The mission will benefit in two ways from your joining us—firstly, from your generous donation to our funds; secondly, from your practical skills. Danea tells me you are an excellent engineer.”

“Technician might be a better word, and only in a small way.” Nicklin accepted a cup of tea, and as he sipped it the feeling that something was amiss returned to him. Was it that Danea had warned him about speaking of his atheism to Montane? She had indicated that Montane would be deeply displeased, but in the event the man had proved to be quite indifferent. She had also said that no “paying guests” were permitted to come along for the ride, and that too was incorrect. It appeared she was not as familiar with her leader’s views as one might have expected…

“Well, I’m pleased to accept you into my team, and I’m sure you’ll be a useful member regardless of whether we style you engineer or technician,” Montane said. “And now we ought to sort out some necessary details—does it embarrass you to talk about money?”

“It’s one of my favourite subjects.”

“Good! Money is very important to us.” Montane came to sit on an old adjustable chair opposite Nicklin, a move which brought him close to the metal coffin. He placed his cup and saucer on it while he angled the seat to a more comfortable position. As an avowed materialist, Nicklin tried not to show any reaction, but using a loved one’s coffin as an occasional table struck him as being vaguely distasteful. Unfortunately for him, he also saw the little domestic absurdity as being very funny—especially for a religious leader—and he was not at all certain of being able to control his amusement.

“Milly would have liked being helpful around the place,” Montane explained, apparently prompted by some kind of near-telepathy as he retrieved his tea. “This way we’re still man and wife—if you see what I mean—until she is properly laid to rest.”

“I quite understand,” Nicklin muttered, staring fixedly into his cup and fighting the urge to laugh. Why, O Gaseous Vertebrate, does life never serve anything up to us absolutely straight? Why does every drama have to contain its element of the ludicrous? Why does every leader have to have a squeaky voice or a boil on his bum? Is it your way of hinting to us that everything might be part of a big joke?

“You’re looking a bit pensive, son,” Montane said. “Is there anything on your mind?”

“Nothing too weighty,” Nicklin assured the older man. “Just odd thoughts about this and that. It isn’t every day that a man begins a brand-new life, you know.”

Although he had put just about everything he owned into the hands of the Portal One Bank, it took Nicklin longer than he had expected to vacate his premises. He kept finding last-minute jobs to do, personal minutiae to preserve or destroy, all kinds of trivial items which somehow could not be abandoned without leaving notes for future users. When he had arranged for Danea to pick him up at midday it had seemed that he was allowing ample time in which to pull out, but now a distinct undertone of panic was creeping into everything.

The weather had changed during the night. Opaque grey clouds had come sifting in from the west, and the breeze which had sprung up was strong enough to activate the whistle trees on the far bank of the stream. They had curled their leaves and were emitting a mournful, ruminative keening which reminded Nicklin of the sound effects in a bad melodrama. There had been no rain as yet, but the air felt cool, moist and heavy.

Luckily, this was one of the days on which Maxy Millom was not due to put in an appearance, so Nicklin was spared the interrogation which would have been inevitable. He had the pleasure of penning Maxy a note which informed him that he was no longer in employment, then he concentrated on the series of less rewarding chores.

Everywhere he went he was conscious of being observed by Zindee. She had been in bed and asleep the previous night when he had paid the Whites a courtesy call to let them know he was pulling out. He had told Cham and Nora practically nothing about his true motivations, but on the instant of hearing the news from her parents Zindee would have understood that it was all to do with Danea Farthing. She was out there somewhere as he worked, near by, covertly watching him while she weighed up the changes that were going to be wrought in her life. He very much wanted them to part as good friends, but there was little point in his going to the Whites’ house and trying to speak to her—if everything was going to be all right Zindee would come to him.

Fifteen minutes before midday, magically, all the necessary chores had been completed. He made one last lour of his apartment, the library and the workshop, then locked the place up. He put the keys and all documents required by Mr Figg into a pocket, carried his single suitcase across the footbridge and set it on the ground to await Danea’s arrival. Zindee was bound to realise that he was on the point of leaving, but she remained out of sight. The first of the rain began to fall, huge tumbling drops which popped audibly into the dust, and he took shelter under a tree.

A moment later a blue car appeared in the distance. Nicklin picked up his case, but dropped it immediately as he saw Zindee running towards him from the direction of a clump of tangle-weed. He knelt and took the impact of her body full on the chest as she threw her arms around his neck.

“Thanks, Zindee,” he whispered. “Thanks for coming.”

“You’re going to miss my birthday party.” Her voice was reproachful. “It’s the day after tomorrow.”

“I have to miss this one—and I’m sorry about that—but there’ll be lots of other birthday parties.”

“They’re too far off.”

“I promise I’ll come back and see you.” Hearing the car approaching, Nicklin reached into his pocket and brought out a memento he had found in a drawer a little earlier—a bronze Roman coin—and pressed it into Zindee’s hand. “Don’t spend it all in one shop.”

She gave a reluctant little snort of amusement, rubbed a moist cheek against his own and backed out of his embrace.

Nicklin stood up, brushing dust from his knees. “Wait and say goodbye to Danea,” he urged.

Zindee set her tiny chin and gave the blue car a venomous glance, then turned and ran towards home. Rain was dappling the back of her light orange T-shirt with tangerine. Nicklin stared thoughtfully at the swiftly departing figure until the car had rolled to a halt beside him. When he looked around Danea had slid the Unimot’s roof into place and was smiling at him from the vehicle’s shaded interior.

“Don’t stand there in the rain,” she called out. “Otherwise you’ll take root.”

Nicklin’s new home was a camper whose interior was almost completely filled by eight bunk beds. His initial glimpse of the layout, which he found rather reminiscent of a submarine, had produced a pang of depression which he had fought off by thinking hard about Danea. He had told himself he could put up with any kind of discomfort for the sake of what lay ahead, but had known that his prospects of sleep on that first night were not good. He was too keyed up and had too many thoughts clamouring inside his skull. It had come as a pleasant surprise, therefore, when he had been asked to drive the camper and to take what was referred to as the dead dog shift—four hours starting at midnight. For some ill-defined reason he had expected to be left to his own devices for the first day or two, and he welcomed the opportunity to do something which was guaranteed to tire him out.

Now, sitting on his own at the camper’s wheel, he was in the kind of bemused philosophical mood in which ideas can be examined without being analysed. Processions of them rolled through his uncritical mind, reflecting the events of the last three days, to mental commentaries no more penetrating than Isn’t life weird? or You never know what to expect, do you? or I wish I was back in old Orangefield right now—just to see their faces or Here’s one for the books!

Physically, he was surrounded by the Orbitsville nightland—hundreds of indigo and sapphire ribbons arching across the heavens, narrowing and merging into a prismatic glow above the polar horizon, while the world beneath was an ocean of purest blackness. The vehicles ahead of Nicklin were the only things visible in the darkness. Their lights gave them the semblance of ships, and their wakes were the random whorls and feathers which patterned the fused-earth road.

The spectacle soothed and uplifted Nicklin, but at the same time it reminded him that his happiness was only complete when Danea was at his side. The night would have been perfect had she been with him right there in the driving cabin, but he had seen surprisingly little of her during the day and now she was asleep in the camper she shared with six other women. She was reluctant to make too great a display of her feelings for him, he guessed. He could understand that kind of reticence, which had always been part of his own make-up, especially as it rendered all the more precious the secret things that had passed between them.

When he had got into the car beside Danea that morning she had leaned across to kiss him, and in doing so had placed her hand squarely on his crotch. The little act of familiarity, unseen by the rest of the universe, had spoken volumes to Nicklin, and he was totally secure in their mutual love. Ahead of him lay a future which was mysterious and unpredictable in many respects, but he was sure of the fulfilment that Danea and he would bring to each other. All that was required of him was some patience until they had their own private mobile home, and then…

He frowned as a quirk of memory brought into sharp focus something which had cropped up during the conversation with Montane that morning, and which had been a burr in Nicklin’s subconscious ever since. One of the mission’s principal rules, Montane had said, was that accommodation had to be shared out equally. There had been no mention of special exceptions, and—now that Nicklin thought of it—he had not noticed any vehicles which appeared to be given over to couples, or even groups of couples. Did that mean that he and Danea were to be the first to live as man and wife?

“Why not?” He spoke the question aloud as he reminded himself that this was a time of upheaval for Corey Montane and his followers. Big changes were supposed to have taken place in the cosmos and they were being mirrored by radical new policies within the itinerant community. He had those selfsame changes to thank for his being allowed to join the caravan and take up the life of a… vagabond. Having dredged up the old word, he savoured its archaic and romantic flavour.

Now that he thought of it, a large proportion of Orbitsville’s population consisted of vagabonds. The people he was accustomed to meeting in everyday life had stopped travelling, but nobody knew how many others had kept on moving, spreading from the triple ring of portals into the green immensities of the Big O. They could have travelled a long way in two centuries—splitting up into more and more divergent tribes, each claiming its autonomy and moving onwards for reasons that seemed less and less important to outsiders.

Nicklin had seen the powerful divisive force at work even within his own limited compass. It was, for example, practically impossible to find in the Orangefield area families which did not have Anglo-Saxon surnames. Given a telescope of limitless light-gathering power and resolution, it would have been possible to aim the instrument at any of the dark bands of the night sky and pick out the city lights, the village lights—or even the campfires—of those who had found new reasons to draw apart from their neighbours. He had little doubt that somewhere up there were communities which had chosen to separate from the rest of mankind over disagreements about how to prepare food, or the number of letters in their alphabet, or whether their deities should be portrayed with or without navels.

And the distant glimmers would betoken not only the presence of humans. Alien races had discovered Orbitsville long before Vance Garamond’s fugitive ship had come probing through the interstellar void. One of those vanished races had actually mustered the resources and sheer arrogance to try taking control of Orbitsville by sealing all but one of the 548 portals with diaphragms of steel. It had been an awesome attempt to monopolise the vastness of the Big O, and those who made it had flourished perhaps for millennia. But others had challenged their supremacy, unimaginable battles had been fought both inside and outside the great shell, and in the end there had been nobody left to claim victory.

What had happened, Nicklin wondered, to the descendants of those ancient, alien warriors? A few dozen extraterrestrial species—none related to any of the others—had been found in regions close to portals. The only traits they had in common were passivity and lack of curiosity, a willingness to go on for ever reinventing the steam engine, and Nicklin sometimes suspected that the same destiny was in store for humanity. The Orbitsville syndrome! The big question was: should he laugh or cry? Was it a matter for despair or rejoicing that the future promised to be an eternal Sunday afternoon?

The mood of gentle melancholia which had crept over him was suddenly dispersed by an unexpected event.

There were six vehicles ahead of the camper, and all the time he had been at the wheel they had maintained a fairly steady formation, the configuration of their lights changing only where the road dipped or turned. Now, however, brake warnings were staining the night with crimson and the line was compacting into an irregular group. Nicklin used his heel on the camper’s single control pedal and brought the vehicle to a halt. Less than three hours of his shift had passed, so it was too soon for changeover, and as he descended from the cabin he surmised that somebody up front was having mechanical trouble.

The guess was proved wrong even before he had joined the knot of drivers who were standing by the lead vehicle. They were looking down at what seemed to be a luminous green tape which lay across the road and stretched off into the darkly mysterious grasslands on either side. As Nicklin approached the group he realised that the glowing strip was insubstantial. The surface of the road was giving off the green light, in a band about eight centimetres wide, but there was no evidence of any special pigment having been applied. It was as if the molecules of the rock-hard material had been agitated.

“That can’t be a traffic marking.” The speaker was a man whose name Nicklin had not yet memorised. “Not away out here, at the ass-end of nowhere.”

“Specially as it goes all that way off the road,” a tall woman said. The others in the group turned their heads from side to side, their eyes following the glowing strip until it faded into the distance.

“Perhaps it’s a boundary… some kind of county line,” put in Nibs Affleck. He had not been on a driving stint, but was among several people who had been resting and were now joining the company, holding coats around themselves to ward off the cold. Nicklin found himself scanning the dimly seen figures in search of Danea.

“That’s not too likely, Nibs,” the first speaker said. “Boundaries went out with the ark.”

“Whatever it is, it has killed off the grass.” The tall woman had switched on a flashlamp and was aiming it at the ground where the green strip angled away from the road. All vegetation rooted within the edges of the strip had turned white or pale gold, and was very obviously dead.

Nicklin conjured up an absurd picture of a little man pushing a sports field marker—one that was filled with powerful weedkiller instead of white paint—all the way around the interior of Orbitsville. A kind of Johnny Appleseed in reverse. Interested in having a closer look at the phenomenon, he stepped across the line and was startled to feel himself passing through a plane of spongy resistance. The effect was mild, rather like a momentary conflict of small magnets, but it produced an odd and slightly queasy sensation as it slid through his body. He moved back and forth several times, confirming that the intimate disturbance was real, and that it was limited to a plane which rose vertically from the glowing strip. Others noticed what he was doing and began similar experiments, some of them murmuring with surprise.

“Hey, Jim!” The tall woman with the flashlight—he had seen her with Danea and now remembered her name as Christine McGivern—was standing near him. She was beckoning for him to draw even closer, and as he did so he was aware that she was straddling the green line and slowly moving her hips from side to side.

“This is fun,” she whispered. “You can feel it touching you up.”

“It’s an ill wind,” Nicklin muttered, trying to match Christine’s disconcerting smile. He looked away from her and was relieved to see Corey Montane approaching the group. Montane had wrapped himself in a striped raincloak and his black hair was tousled, but neatly so, like that of an actor portraying a man freshly roused from his bed. Several men moved rowards him to explain what had been found, and Nicklin hastily joined them.

“Would someone kindly fetch a spade?” Montane said, after examining the green strip. A short-handled emergency spade was handed to him almost immediately. He took it and made to lift some earth which was crossed by the luminosity, but red-nosed Nibs Affleck took the implement from him, with gentle insistence, and began to dig at a furious rate. Spectators shuffled back as their feet were bombarded with flying dirt, and within seconds Affleck had created a sizable hole.

“Thank you, Nibs,” Montane said. “I think that’s enough.”

Affleck, who apparently had been prepared to dig until he collapsed, reluctantly moved away from the excavation. Nicklin, still trying to recover his equilibrium after the little encounter with Christine, was able to see into the hole and at once understood why Montane had wanted it dug.

The lime-green strip had not been broken by the digging. It now followed the precise contours of the excavation, glowing on the surface of the raw earth as though projected by a powerful optical device. It’s a cross-section through that weird rubbery field, Nicklin thought. An effect that shows at the ground-air interface. I wonder if the field goes right down to the Orbitsville shell.

“This thing… this manifestation… must extend all the way down to the shell,” Montane proclaimed without hesitation or signs of doubt, raising his voice for the benefit of individuals who were belatedly emerging from their campers to join the group. “My friends, this is a portent! We have been given yet another sign that Orbitsville is entering its final hour. The Devil’s trap is closing!”

“Lord save us!” somebody cried out among the exclamations of alarm which arose from the assembly.

Montane seized on the emotional flux of the moment. “It is still within His power to do exactly that. Although the hour is perilously late, although we stand on the very brink of the abyss, God’s mercy is infinite—and we may yet be saved. Let us bow our heads and pray to Him.” Montane raised his hands, palms facing downwards, and those around him lowered their heads.

Nimble footwork, Corey, Nicklin thought, marvelling at the speed with which the preacher had reacted to and made use of the situation. Any old portent in a storm! While Montane was leading his followers in the improvised prayers, Nicklin renewed his search for Danea and was disappointed not to see her. The thought of Danea reminded him of her friend Christine, who was now standing chastely with the rest of the group. Suddenly he understood why he had been so taken aback by her conversational gambit, which had been somewhat indelicate to say the least of it. The conspiratorial whisper and the use of his first name had linked them together as a pair of freewheelers surrounded by prudes—but what had led her to that presumption about him, a man she had hardly even seen before?

The only explanation he could come up with was that Danea had been talking freely to Christine about matters which he regarded as private. Indeed, the word private came nowhere near to expressing his feelings—sacred would have been more appropriate. The notion of Danea and her friend giggling over confidences, especially if graphic sexual details were involved, brought a warm tingling to Nicklin’s face.

Was it possible? Was it possible?

Standing there—in the complex patterns of light and darkness created by the enigmatic green-glowing strip, the ribbed Orbitsville sky, and the splashes of brilliance from vehicle headlamps—Nicklin felt totally alone, isolated from the group of strangers he had planned to espouse.

He turned away, walked slowly to his camper and climbed into the driving cabin. Sitting hunched over the wheel, he told himself he was thinking like a hypersensitive adolescent. It was all too easy for an introspective dreamer such as he to build fantasies based on nothing more than a misinterpreted word. All he needed was a little time alone with Danea. One smile from her, one sympathetic glance from those heavy-lidded eyes was all it would take to put everything in his universe to rights. But why had he seen so little of her since joining the mission? Why had she become so damned elusive?

A short time later the caravan was on the move again, and as Nicklin’s vehicle crossed the lime-green strip he felt its magnetic pulse motor falter for just an instant. The power loss was so slight and so fleeting that only one attuned to such things by many years of experience would have noticed it.

Nicklin flicked his gaze over the dashboard instruments, frowning, then allowed his thoughts to drift back to problems which seemed infinitely more serious.

Chapter 8

Corey Montane was shivering with the cold by the time he got back to his own vehicle. When going out into the night he had put a raincape on over his pyjamas, expecting to be away from his bed for only a few minutes while the details of some mechanical problem were explained to him. He had not anticipated being shown new proof that the Devil was actively going about his evil work. The subsequent prayers for salvation had taken a considerable time, and during them the chill of the clear night air had seeped a long way into Montane’s body. He felt as if his internal organs had grown cold and had slowed down in their various activities.

“Good night,” he said to Gerl Kingsley, the hulking ex-farmer who was driving dead dog for him. “I’ll see you when four o’clock comes round.”

“Corey, why not let me handle the next shift as well?” Kingsley said, opening the camper’s mid-section door for Montane. “You look real done out.”

“Nice of you to say so!”

“I didn’t mean to—” Kingsley slapped himself lightly on the forehead for lacking diplomacy. “What I meant to say was you’re bound to be tired, and I’m as chirpy as a barrel of budgies. I could easy go on till eight or even tomorrow noon.”

Montane smiled. “We all take our due turn.”

“Yeah, but I won’t sleep anyway. I got more energy than I know what to do with.”

Looking up at the hugely indomitable man, Montane could easily accept the statement. It was one of his precepts that he did his share of all tasks, including the most menial, and it brought an ample reward in the form of devotion—such as Kingsley was showing at that moment—but he was tired and he had much to think about.

“Perhaps I could stand in for you sometime,” he conceded reluctantly and in seconds Kingsley had bundled him, with a kind of respectful roughness, into the camper’s warm interior. He locked the door, slipped out of his cape and steadied himself against the silver coffin as the vehicle began to move.

“I’m sorry about all this, Milly,” he said, addressing his wife. “Satan never sleeps—so he’s bound to disturb us during the night every now and then.”

He tilted his head, waiting to see if Milly would reply, but there was no response from within the coffin and he went to his bed. Switching off the light, he made himself comfortable beneath the covers and turned his thoughts to the phenomenon of the glowing green line. His instinctive awareness of the Devil and all his moves told him the line was an evil manifestation, but it was hard to guess its exact purpose. It had to be an indication that the Orbitsville trap was closing, but what could be the function of a weak, spongy force field which produced green luminosity where earth and air met?

Montane craved to know how far the line extended around the shell. Were there others? Were they straight or curved, and did they form patterns? He could get some of the answers when the caravan reached the next town, now that new antennae were being run out into space to permit the re-establishment of radio and television communication between the portals. But having to wait a day was an annoyance, especially as the Evil One had chosen to increase the tempo of events.

Not for the first time, Montane found himself wishing he could understand why the transmission of signals on radio frequencies had always been impossible within the vast hollow sphere that was Orbitsville. The early explorers had noticed the effect within minutes of their arrival, but two centuries of subsequent research had failed to explain why the lower part of the electromagnetic spectrum was completely blanked out. Montane knew in his heart that it was more of the Evil One’s scheming—perhaps intended to prevent Orbitsville’s diverse inhabitants from forming a global society—but why? How, precisely, did the Devil benefit?

The question had troubled Montane for years, and it was the lack of any plausible answer which had discouraged him from bringing the subject into his preaching. It was not the only hidden card in the Devil’s hand, and no doubt it would be played when the time was exactly right.

Besides, there were more immediate problems to be dealt with—including that of Jim Nicklin. Montane shifted uneasily in the bed, goaded by his conscience. Nicklin was a decent young man—intelligent yet naive, complicated yet unworldly—and what was being done to him was an undoubted sin. Danea Farthing had hooked and landed him like a skilled angler bringing in a salmon, but the sin was not really hers. She was only Montane’s agent, and he in turn was acting on behalf of God. These were dire times, and no individual sacrifice was too great if it helped bring about the salvation of the human race.

Montane’s problem was that, after all the philosophical arguments had been advanced and all the profound words spoken, an innocent man had—pursuing the angling metaphor—to be gutted like a fish.

And he, Corey Montane, was the one who would ultimately have to face up to those puzzled blue eyes. What would he say to Nicklin? What justification could he give? The Lord has made me a fisher of men? I was only obeying orders?

Montane twisted again beneath the covers, searching for the elusive position of comfort which might enable him to slip away into impartial sleep. He could only hope that the essential softness he had identified in Nicklin would lead to the forthcoming ordeal being a brief one. Nicklin was not the type of man to become violent, even on realising that he had just been fleeced of everything he owned. In all probability he would, after a short confrontation, wander off back to Orangefield as a sadder and wiser man, and endeavour to pick up the threads of his old life. Montane punched his pillow, trying to beat it into submission.

“Why are you torturing yourself over this thing?” Milly’s voice, reaching him from the interior of the coffin, was compassionate, brimming with sympathy. “You know very well that you had no choice in the matter.”

Montane gazed in the direction of the oblong casket, the dull sheen of which was discernible even in the near-darkness. “Yes, but will Jim Nicklin see it like that?”

“Darling, you did what you had to do.”

“It’s just that I feel so guilty,” Montane replied, taking a deep, quavering breath. “And what makes it far worse is knowing in advance that young Nicklin will be so easy to deal with and get rid of. I’d feel better if I had to face some hard case who’d raise hell and start throwing things around.”

“If Jim Nicklin was a hard case his money would still be in his own bank—not yours.”

“I know that, I know that!” Montane realised he was beginning to sound irritable. “I’m sorry, Milly—it’s just that things are… We’re going to have to move to Beachhead and stay there, you know. Life’s been too much of a holiday for us—cruising around the countryside—and there just isn’t enough money in that. Neither of us likes living in a big city. In fact, we hate it. Things won’t be easy for us.”

“God didn’t say things would be easy.” His wife’s voice now contained a hint of admonition, of the corrective forcefulness he so badly needed. “You’ve never had the future of mankind riding on your shoulders before.”

“I… I suppose you’re right, Milly—as always. Thank you.” Montane closed his eyes, and within a very short time had drifted away into peaceful estuaries of sleep.

Chapter 9

When Nicklin squeezed into his bunk, shortly after the changeover at four, he did so with no expectations of sleep. Even had he been in the right frame of mind the conditions in the camper would not have been conducive to proper rest. All his life he had been accustomed to a spacious and comfortable bed in a room all to himself. He had surrendered those prerequisites of civilised existence for the privilege of lying down with Danea, the two of them nested like spoons, and holding her in his arms the whole night through. The contrast between that deferred bliss and what he had to put up with in the meantime was almost too great to contemplate.

Henty, the man due to take over the driving, had done a lot of resentful mumbling while getting ready, as though Nicklin had been in charge of the rota and had marked him down for the worst shift out of personal spite. The six other men had been disturbed to varying degrees by Henty’s griping, and were making restless sounds and movements as the vehicle got back on the road. Seen in the patchy dimness, the twinned rows of double-decker bunks more than ever resembled the interior of a submarine, and Nicklin began to feel claustrophobic. To make matters worse, Henty—isolated in the separate driving cabin up front—seemed to be working off his bad temper by steering with unnecessary roughness.

All things considered, Nicklin’s prospects of sleep were very poor, but in a remarkably short time he had entered the world of the dream.

The setting was in sunlit open air, and featured a small rounded hill whose slopes had been fashioned into a beautiful alpine garden. It was obvious that a great deal of loving and painstaking work had been poured into the construction of the garden. The rocky banks, underpinning for shoals of blossoms, contrived to look natural while at the same time their symmetry betrayed the handiwork of a master architect. Paths of meticulously fitted stone wound their way around the hill, beneath small archways and past numerous sculpted benches.

Apart from Nicklin himself, there were two characters in the dream. One was his mother, who in reality had died when he was seven; the other was the terrifying figure of a fox who walked upright on his hind legs and was as tall as a man. The fox wore antique clothing—a shabby frocked coat, a winged collar and a greasy cravat secured by a horseshoe pin—and for some reason Mrs Nicklin was blind to the fact that he was not another human being.

She was laughing with him, treating him like a close member of the family. Nicklin was a small boy cowering behind his mother’s skirts, appalled by her inability to notice the fox’s pointed yellow teeth, his Disney-animal nose—like a shiny black olive standing upright on the end of his snout, and his red-brown coloration, the essence of all that was fox.

For his part, the fox was playing up to Mrs Nicklin. He was grinning, nudging, telling little jokes, and every now and again his red-veined eyes glanced appreciatively and knowingly at little Jim. Isn’t this the best laugh ever? the eyes seemed to gloat. Your mother doesn’t know I’m a fox. And—best of all—she doesn’t know I’m going to eat you up!

Little Jim’s fear increased as he heard the fox proposing that it should take him for a walk through the alpine garden. There were many secluded corners in the garden, places where a fox could kill and devour a small boy without being disturbed in its work. And his fear became pure terror when he heard his mother welcoming the suggestion because she needed time to go shopping.

“It’s not a man—it’s a fox,” he screamed, clinging to her thighs. “Can’t you see it’s a fox?”

His mother and the fox laughed together at the childish absurdity. Saliva dripped from the beast’s yellow teeth.

“Don’t be such a silly boy,” his mother said, thrusting him forward with an adult’s irresistible force. “Go along with your nice uncle and have a lovely time.”

Betrayed, weeping, doomed—Jim was propelled into the fox’s grasp. Its hand was hard and strong, covered with hairs which looked and felt like strands from a brown doormat. Jim’s mother was already turning away, uncaring, as the fox dragged him towards the hill. In just a few seconds the fox and he were alone in one of the quiet places, where stone walls hid them from the rest of the world.

The fox wasted no time. It turned on him, its mouth yawning widely enough to engulf his head, so widely that he could see the pink uvula doing a funny little dance at the entrance to its throat.

That was what gave the game away—one Disney touch too many!

Jim had seen the fox before, or creatures rather like it, in dozens of half-remembered cartoons, and he knew it was only a drawing on a sheet of transparent plastic. He knew it had no ability to hurt him—and with that abrupt realisation the dream became a lucid one, giving him control over the course of events. Suddenly he was safe, and had power, enormous power which he could enjoy—just like Alice in the last chapter of the Wonderland book.

Taking a deep breath he bellowed, “Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a cartoon!”

The force of the shout sent the fox reeling backwards, his face comically aghast and his hair blown into receding red-brown points. Giggling with glee, little Jim turned and sprinted away along the stone path. He had taken only a few bounding steps when the solid-seeming pavement opened up in front of him, forming a gaping black pit. As Jim went helplessly over the edge and began the downward plunge he realised that the beautiful little hill, so plentifully encrusted with stone, was hollow.

And the things waiting for him inside it had no place in children’s cartoons…

Nicklin opened his eyes wide and stared at the underside of the bunk above. His first thought was: What the hell was all that about? The dream had not exactly been a nightmare—it had been too preposterous to ram the icy dagger of terror all the way through his guts—but it had been a disturbing one nevertheless. He had little or no time for historic Freudian theory, yet he had an uncomfortable feeling that the odd dream had been laden with symbolism. And it was quite remarkable how, after more than three centuries, the Disney style—his particular brand of anthropomorphism, which hinted at an underlying fear of all wild creatures—could still exercise such a powerful influence over the unconscious minds of children and adults alike.

It suddenly came to Nicklin that he was seeing the base of the bunk above in the meagre daylight which seeped through a tiny circular window. Furthermore, the camper had stopped moving and there were sounds of activity from outside. He put an eye to the window and saw that the caravan had come to a halt in what appeared to be a sports field. There was little in the way of facilities—just some forsaken goalposts, a scoreboard and a small pavilion. The roofs of a few dwellings could be seen above the somewhat scrawny hedge which marked the field’s perimeter. In the distance the tops of several tall buildings projected up from layers of morning mist, slim pastel streaks against the sky. A star-like point of light glowed on one of them, trembling in the moist air, evidence that a photocast station was in operation.

Millennium City, Nicklin thought, sinking back on to his pillow as he identified the location. Where he came from the town was the butt of many jokes because of the discrepancy between its grand name and the red-grimed wasteland of open-cast bauxite mines, purification plants and railroad sidings. He was in no hurry to leave his bed for the privilege of seeing more of Millennium City or its inhabitants. Gentle snores from other bunks suggested to Nicklin that his new companions were of a like frame of mind.

He expected that they would all soon be rousted out to begin erecting the big marquee, but for the present he had the symbolism of the strange dream to think about. Why had a fox been part of the cast? Was it merely because of the menacing fox character in the half-remembered Disney version of Pinocchio? And what was the significance of that most implausible geographical feature—the hollow hill? Could it have represented the womb? Had it had something to do with his mother’s presence? Nicklin had not dreamed of her in a long time, and it was strange that his unconscious mind had chosen to portray her as one who was prepared to hand him over to a monster. Monster… mons… mons veneris… Montanel Had Nicklin, in the dream, been handed over to and swallowed up by a small mountain—Montane? Had his mother, his betraying mother, represented Danea Farthing, whom he had only last night begun to suspect of… ?

The whirlwind of confusing questions and simplistic, amateurish associations abruptly collapsed in Nicklin’s mind, deprived of its motive power by the aridity of the real world. It was an objective fact that Danea had been avoiding him ever since he had joined the mission; and there was no doubt at all that she had been talking too freely to the tall one with the flashlight—what was her name?—Christine. Why had he not sought Danea out yesterday and forced the issue? Why, in the name of the Gaseous Vertebrate, had he delayed so long before deciding to confront Danea and get everything straight between them?

Feeling cold and sick, impelled by an urge to learn and verify the worst, Nicklin got out of his bunk. Ignoring the sonic shower cubicle, he pulled on the clothes he had worn the previous day and went out into the morning sunlight. The first thing he noticed was the marquee spread out over a large area of grass, but no work was actually being done to erect it. A number of people were gathered near the expanse of lazily rippling material, some of them arguing with each other.

As Nicklin was stepping down from the camper, two men and two women detached themselves from the larger group and strode towards the sports field’s entrance. They were carrying suitcases and had some extra items of clothing slung over shoulders or arms. The leader was Dee Smethurst, the plump archetypal cook, whose face bore an expression of outrage.

“It’s you I feel sorry for, mister,” she said to Nicklin as she passed by. “I don’t hold anything against you.”

Her companions nodded, their sun-hats bobbing, and they went on their determined way before Nicklin could ask what the cook had meant. The driver of a taxi which was waiting beyond the field’s single gate got out of his vehicle to greet them. Nicklin heard one of the four say something about a railroad station, confirming that he had just witnessed a small desertion among Montane’s followers.

Puzzled, he took his own sun-hat out of his pocket, spread it into a circle and jammed it on to his head before walking towards the larger group. He now felt keyed up, yet cool and balanced, ready for anything—the epitome of the new urbane Jim Nicklin who had been too big for Orangefield to hold. The state of mind lasted until he saw Danea Farthing, and not one second longer.

She was dressed in black again, but with a circular skirt instead of pants, and the sight of the lean-hipped figure in among all the ordinary faceless people did peculiar things to Nicklin’s pulse. The sensation of all resolve draining out of him was almost a physical one, evocative of childhood dismay on finding hot urine running down his legs. The Danea effect in reverse, he thought. What am I going to say to her?

He began to force a cold smile as he drew close to Danea, but felt his mouth curve up at the corners—giving him his old happy hayseed expression—and he settled for a look of calm seriousness. For one craven instant he hoped she would evade him, but her eyes met his without hesitation.

“There you are, Jim,” she said smiling warmly. “Where have you been hiding yourself?”

He responded with a nod, less confident than ever, wondering if he was about to make a fool of himself because of an attack of lover’s paranoia. “Can we talk?”

The men and women standing within earshot did not actually nudge each other, but an unmistakable frisson went through them, and their reaction saddened Nicklin. It was all the confirmation he needed.

“What do you want to talk about?” Danea enquired, with more brightness than was strictly necessary.

“Not here.” He glanced around the others, taking in their frozen grins and casually averted eyes.

“I’m supposed to be helping here, but…” Danea shrugged and fell in beside him as he began walking towards the goalposts in an empty quarter of the field. “Well, how did you sleep last night? I heard we stopped for something out in the middle of nowhere, but I slept right through it, myself. Did you get up?”

“Didn’t Christine tell you I was there?”

“What do you… ? Why should she?”

The blue ribs of the Orbitsville sky pulsed at the edges of Nicklin’s vision. “You and Christine tell each other everything, don’t you?”

Danea wheeled on him immediately, all trace of heaviness gone from her eyes. “What the fuck is this all about?”

“Nothing,” he said quietly. “I guess it’s about nothing.”

“Look, I’m sorry.” Danea pressed the back of a hand to her forehead, slightly altering the tilt of her black stetson. “I don’t usually talk like that—it’s just that I’ve been so worried. I feel guilty about you, Jim. What happened between us… it was all a mistake.”

Nicklin’s throat closed up painfully, preventing him from speaking.

“I’ve no idea what could have happened to me,” Danea went on. “I don’t know what kind of impression I gave you.”

Nicklin’s memory stirred into action, restoring his power of speech. “You gave me the impression that we could live together in our own camper—but Montane told me that was never on the cards.”

“Do you wear a recorder everywhere you go? Do you record every casual remark then pick it apart afterwards?”

“What?”

“Well let me tell you something for nothing, Mata Hari—I don’t like being spied on by anybody, especially you!”

The sheer irrationality of the attack confounded Nicklin. “I think Mata Hari was a woman,” he said automatically, and on the instant of speaking saw the verbal cudgel he had put into Danea’s hands. Will she use it? Please, O Gaseous Vertebrate, don’t let her sink that low. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and he watched in fascination as surprise, gratification and triumph flitted across her features.

“Do you think,” she said, savouring every word, “I didn’t know that?”

And there we have it, he thought. Danea, of all people, has no reason to doubt my sexuality—and yet something told her what to say. Something about me tells all of them what to say. When they want to put me down, or when the opposite is the case and they want to… Nicklin blinked as his thoughts led him unerringly to the solution of another little mystery, one which had been quietly but persistently tugging at an obscure corner of his mind.

On the morning Danea had driven out to his place, the morning he had ceased being an ugly duckling and had become a swan, she had referred time and time again to his prowess with women. It had been a keynote of her conversation. Tell me the truth, Jim—just how many women have you taken for a walk up here? Words spoken in tones of rueful admiration. Words spoken by a woman acknowledging her helplessness while under the spell of a charming roue. Words that throughout his adult life he had craved to hear!

Danea had known exactly what to say, because something about him always gave the game away. On the evening of that first meeting on Orangefield common she had looked at him, and had done a perfect cold reading on him, and known at once how to go about robbing him of everything he owned. Not only that—she had known how to make him enjoy being plucked and trussed and handed over to Montane. In the space of only a few hours he had gone from duckling to swan to oven-ready turkey, and had loved every moment of it!

“You’re good, Danea,” he said simply. “You’re very good at what you do.”

As he was turning away he thought he saw, perhaps for one fraction of a second, a stricken look in Danea’s eyes, but if he had learned one lesson it was not to trust his judgement in such matters. That look had probably been manufactured just for his benefit—showing a master’s painstaking attention to the very last and finest detail. Danea had made it clear what she really thought of him—and it had turned out to be much the same as what all other women thought of him—and the only important thing now was deciding what to do with the rest of his life.

He could never again face up to all the good burghers of Orangefield, even though it would have been so nice to be in Zindee’s wise-beyond-her-years company once more; and he had no intention of staying on in Millennium City. The best plan might be to head for the anonymity of Beachhead, but he had no more than ten orbs in his pocket, not even enough for the rail fare. A murmur of voices reached Nicklin from the group by the marquee and his face began to burn as he guessed Danea had rejoined her friends, possibly to regale them with new details of how she had handled the simpleton from Orangefield.

He had to get away from the scene of his mortification as quickly as he possibly could. For that he needed some money, and the only source he could think of was Corey Montane. It was hard to think of a greater humiliation than going cap in hand to the sanctimonious Fagin who had cleaned him out, but if Montane wanted to go on with his man-of-God impersonation he might be willing to part with a hundred or two. Especially if he were threatened with trouble!

Nicklin tried to imagine himself bursting into Montane’s camper with an iron bar in his hand, and his misery intensified as he realised how preposterous the notion was. Violence simply was not in his nature, no matter how much he might be provoked, and he could not even envisage going to the police or the local news media. Montane had been very careful to establish that there was no connection between Nicklin’s personal relationship with Danea Farthing and his donation to the mission’s funds. The most Nicklin could hope to achieve by kicking up a public rumpus would be to multiply the number of people who saw him as a prize ass.

As he was walking towards Montane’s vehicle it occurred to him that, considering all that had happened to him, he was reacting more like an automaton than a human being. He was being a bit too civilised and passive, even for Jim Nicklin, but there was a strangeness somewhere deep inside him—an ineffable psychic tremor which hinted at emotional earthquakes to come. It was advisable for him to make what practical arrangements he could while the blessed numbness persisted.

Finding the middle door of Montane’s camper open, he went up the steps and into the vehicle without preamble. Montane was sitting on the side bench, cup of tea in hand, watching a small television set which he had placed on his wife’s coffin. Even though it could not have been more than five or six kilometres to the local photocast station, the image of a newsman was poor, thanks to mist in the intervening air. The sound quality was reasonable, however, and Montane seemed totally absorbed by what was being said.

He raised his free hand in a mute hello to Nicklin, then pointed at a chair, inviting him to sit down. Feeling that he had already been placed at a tactical disadvantage, Nicklin reluctantly lowered himself into the seat. His knees were almost touching the coffin, and as he gazed at the silvery surface he found himself speculating about its contents. Had the body of Milly Montane been specially treated to prevent decomposition? Or was he sitting right up against a box full of… ? He aborted the thought with all possible speed and turned his attention to the newscast in which Montane was so engrossed.

“…stressed that they could only make an educated guess at this stage, because radio links between all portals have not yet been fully re-established,” the announcer was saying. “It does appear, however, that the mysterious green lines are a global phenomenon. They have been reported in the vicinity of more than twenty portal cities, and experts who have been extrapolating the figures think that the lines are roughly 950 kilometres apart, all the way around the Orbitsville equator.

“The mind boggles, doesn’t it? Mine certainly does, but a good boggle has never done anybody any harm—that’s what I always say.

“We’ll bring you more on that story later, but now we are returning to our panel discussion on the economic effects of what some scientists are already referring to as the Big Jump. With the portal communities now effectively cut off from each other, many manufacturing centres are denied access to their markets. If the present situation continues, the greatest growth industry of all time is likely to be the construction of interportal spaceships.

“With us to talk about the problem is Rick Renard, who has scarcely been off the air in the last few days, because—as you are no doubt aware—he is the owner of the Hawkshead, the starship which vanished while disembarking at Portal 36. Mr Renard is already forming a consortium for the design and building of…” Image and voice faded together as Montane reached out and switched off the television.

“Good morning, Jim,” he said. “Tea?”

Nicklin continued staring into the lifeless grey screen, hardly aware that the other man had spoken. Something uncanny had happened to him while he was listening to the photocast, something outside all his previous experience. At the mention of Renard’s name there had been a heaving—that was the only word he could apply to the sensation—in the deepest levels of his consciousness… a leviathan had stirred briefly in some black prehistoric swamp of his mind…

Renard! The name threw off expanding circular echoes of itself. Reynard! That means fox. But this fox doesn’t want to eat small boys-he wants to build spaceships. The fox and the spaceship! It sounds like one of those cute pubs, and what has that got to do with… ?

“Are you with me, Jim?” Montane said, giving him a quizzical look. “I’m offering you a cup of my best tea.”

Nicklin made his eyes focus on Montane’s face. “No tea for me, thanks—I need to talk to you.”

“I’m always ready to listen.” Montane went on very quickly, not giving Nicklin the chance to continue. “I was right about that green line we found last night. Remember I said it probably went all the way down to the shell? Well, according to the local news there are hundreds of the damned things—and they do go right down to the shell. I don’t like it, Jim. This is the Devil’s work. What did you want to talk about?”

Nicklin, still recovering his mental equilibrium, was not quite ready for the question. “I… I suppose I ought to congratulate you.”

“Congratulate me?” Montane looked puzzled but very much at his ease. “On what?”

“On the neat and highly professional way you and one of your prostitutes stripped me of everything I owned.” Nicklin was surprised to see the preacher’s bright, penetrating eyes become cloudy and vague. He had not expected that much of a reaction from a professional.

“You’re talking in riddles, son.”

“I’m talking about the excellent job done on me by you and your prostitute.”

Montane glanced uneasily at his wife’s coffin. “We don’t like that kind of talk in here.”

“Oh, I’m sorryl” Nicklin said, unable to resist the kind of sarcasm he normally disdained. “Pardon me for not measuring up to your high standards of behaviour.”

“I gather,” Montane said stonily, “that something has gone wrong between you and Danea.”

“You gather correctly.”

Montane sighed and shook his head, the picture of a man saddened by news he had expected but had hoped against the odds not to hear. “I’m really sorry about that, Jim—and, naturally, I’ll give you what counsel I can—but you must understand that my workers’ interpersonal relationships have nothing to do with me. And I made it clear to you, right at the outset, that any donation you chose to—”

“There’s no need for you to worry yourself about that side of things,” Nicklin cut in. “I fully accept the consequences of my own stupidity, and all I want to do now is get far away from here as fast as I can. I presume you won’t mind letting me have a couple of hundred, just to get me started.”

Montane frowned. “I can’t do that, Jim.”

Nicklin’s jaw tried to sag. “All I’m asking is the rail fare to Beachhead City, and a bit more for a room!”

“I’m sorry,” Montane replied, “I just don’t have that kind of money.”

“I know you don’t have that kind of money.” Nicklin was hardly able to believe what was happening. “My 82,000 orbs—that’s the kind of money you have.”

Montane gave him a patient little smile. “You don’t seem to understand, Jim. It is God who owns that money now. You gave it to Him—and I could no more think of taking some of it back than I could of taking a life.”

“Beautiful,” Nicklin said bitterly. “That’s really beautiful, Corey. You and Danea make a great team.”

Montane appeared not to notice the insult. “What I could do—in fact, I’d be neglecting my Christian duty if I didn’t do it—is let you have something out of my own pocket. Out of the housekeeping. I only have about thirty orbs, but you’re welcome to all of it.”

Too fucking kind, Nicklin thought, watching in disbelief as Montane stood up, set his cup aside and took a reproduction lacquered tea caddy down from the shelf over his cooking area. He opened the box, brought out three ten-orb bills and—with the air of a monarch conferring a knighthood—handed them to Nicklin.

“I’ll always remember you for this,” Nicklin said as he stood up and shoved the photo-pulsing rectangles into his hip pocket. Abruptly turning his back on Montane, he ducked out through the camper’s door and stepped down on to the trampled grass. The group by the marquee had grown quite a bit larger, and it seemed to him that every face in it was turned in his direction. They were all set to gawp at him while he went to retrieve his few belongings from his locker, and no doubt when he reappeared with them everybody in the mission would be assembled to watch his departure.

He hesitated, his face throbbing hotly in tune with his heartbeat, and for a moment he actually considered walking straight on out of the field and away from the whole sorry mess. It might be worth abandoning his meagre possessions if doing so spared him any extra embarrassment. The pounding in his chest intensified, causing him to feel a little nauseated and light in the head, and there came a real fear that for the first time in his life he could be about to faint. He fought to regulate his breathing, to use the yoga technique for inducing serenity, and it was while he was standing there in the intrusive light of the morning sun that he became aware of something strange.

Behind him—in the shaded solitude of the camper—Corey Montane was speaking to someone.

“I’m sorry, my dear,” Montane was saying. “As you heard, that young man had got himself worked up into quite an emotional state. The only way I could get rid of him was to give him some of your housekeeping money, but I’ll see to it that you don’t go short. I promise you he won’t disturb us again, so let’s finish our tea in peace, and then perhaps we’ll pray together for a few minutes. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Nicklin inhaled deeply, blinked at his surroundings as though seeing them for the first time, and began to smile.

A wearisome psychogenic burden was being lifted from his shoulders. He could feel mental fetters dissolving, chains falling away, prison doors opening… Metaphors abounded. The air he had drawn into his lungs retained all the pastel colours of dawn, and those colours were diffusing through his system, creating a nacreous glow, sparkling in his mind.

It’s all a joke, he told himself. Thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, for reminding me that everything is just one big joke. Conceits such as embarrassment and humiliation are no longer valid as far as I am concerned. I repudiate them! Montane has my money, and there’s nothing much I can do about it, but he can no longer simply face me down. Nobody can do that any more—especially not some silly old cool who lugs his belter half around in a tin box and chats to her over his corn flakes; especially not a bunch of heliumheads who believe the world is going to end next Tuesday…

Remembering he had an attentive audience in the group who were supposed to be erecting the marquee, Nicklin raised one hand and gave them a cheerful wave. His smile grew wider as he noted the uncertainty with which several of them returned the salute. He spun on the ball of his foot and went back into the camper. Montane, who had resumed his seat, looked up in some surprise—teacup in hand—and a look of priestly displeasure appeared on his face.

“Jim, I’ve been as generous to you as I possibly could,” he said. “Is there any point in spinning this thing out?”

“I’ve been thinking the whole business over,” Nicklin replied. “I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday. You know—about how the mission could make good use of all my technical skills and that kind of stuff. What I’ve been thinking is that it’s my Christian duty to stay on here with you… and Danea… and the rest of the gang.”

Nicklin took the three ten-orb notes out of his pocket and, with a meaningful wink, placed them on top of the silver coffin.

“After all,” he added, maintaining his cheerful smile, “I still have so much to give…”

Chapter 10

As soon as possible after the transit entered Beachhead City’s central area Nicklin got out on to the crowded footpath. He knew by the route diagram that he was still three stages short of his actual destination—which was Garamond Park—but this was his first visit to Beachhead and he wanted to get the feel of the place, something which could best be done on foot. He fanned his sun-hat into a circle, placed it squarely on his head and began to walk.

The first thing he noticed, apart from the seemingly endless throng, was that the environment was much cleaner than he had expected. The shops and small offices on each side of the street looked fresh and well maintained, and the pavement was remarkably free of litter considering the number of people at large. Nicklin allowed himself a wry smile. As a dweller in a small town he had shared the common belief that all big cities were filthy, garbage-strewn places. Another Orangefield illusion which did not travel well!

After walking for only a few minutes he was also struck by the degree of specialisation that was possible for various retail outiets. There were stores which sold nothing but garden tools, or picture frames, or equipment for a single sport such as archery or subaquatics. That fact alone gave Nicklin the sense of being in a metropolis where the consumer population ran into millions. Another exotic note, to him, was the way in which prices were prefixed by the letter M, standing for monits or monetary units. Metagov had long ago decreed that a global economy—one which embraced every one of the cities strung out along Orbitsville’s billion-kilometre equatorial band—could only operate on the basis of a universal currency which had a fixed value at all portals. The monit was therefore the city dwellers’ exchange medium, while rural communities used the more homely orb, whose value fluctuated in accordance with local conditions. Notices displayed in the windows of some of the shops he passed informed Nicklin that Portal One hinterland orbs were worth 83.23 per cent of a monit, but as he had only a few bills in his pocket the pecuniary disadvantage meant little to him.

Attracted by the aromatic coolness wafting out of a bar, he went inside to quench his growing thirst with a glass of beer. The dim interior was devoid of clientele at that time of the morning. He went to the counter, behind which a young man and a woman were engrossed in a game of stacks, a simplified form of 3D chess. The man’s gaze flicked towards Nicklin for an instant, but otherwise the pair did not acknowledge his presence.

It was a situation in which the old Jim Nicklin would have waited timidly for many minutes, scarcely daring to clear his throat in a bid for attention, but the new liberated Jim Nicklin was not so easily put off.

“Take a good look at me,” he said in a loud voice. “I am what’s known as a customer. You two are what’s known as barkeeps, and—this may come as a great surprise to you—your function in this establishment is to serve customers with any drink they ask for, which in my case happens to be a beer.”

The young man looked up from the game, dull-eyed, still digesting what Nicklin had said. “A beer?”

Nicklin nodded. “Yes, you must have heard of beer—it’s that yellow frothy stuff that comes out of those pumps. Or perhaps you missed the relevant lecture at Barkeep Academy.”

The man’s brow wrinkled and he turned for enlightenment to his companion, who appeared to be the older and brighter of the pair. Lips compressed with resentment, she drew a beer and clumped it down in front of Nicklin. The head rocked and some of it slopped over the rim of the glass.

“Eighty cents,” she said in a cold voice.

As Nicklin was setting a one-orb note on the counter he remembered with malicious satisfaction that it was worth only three cents above the price of the drink. “Keep the change,” he said grandly. “Buy yourself something extra nice.”

Feeling well pleased with himself, he carried his glass to the most distant corner of the room and sat at a table. It had taken the mission ten days to reach Beachhead, with stops at two intervening towns, and he had been pleasantly surprised when Montane had announced a short break. The arrival of the caravan at a small town usually generated enough interest to guarantee an audience, but it had scarcely been noticed by the incurious citizens of Beachhead, and Montane needed some time in which to advertise his presence.

Grateful for the chance to be his own master for a while, Nicklin had grabbed his twenty-orb allowance—quaintly described by Montane as a stipend—and had bolted into the city. Visiting the famous Portal One to view the stars for the first time was at the top of his list of priorities, but he also had to have a period of quiet contemplation. The cool, deserted bar was ideal for that purpose, and as he sipped his beer—freed of the continuous pressure of other personalities—he could feel himself beginning to relax. So much had happened in such a short time that he felt rather like a curio collector who had acquired many pieces on a single buying trip and now desperately wanted a lull in which to study and catalogue them.

There was Danea Farthing, for instance—one of the most curious curios of the lot…

Nicklin’s mouth quirked into its U-shaped smile as in his mind he went over the first encounter with her after his road-to-Damascus brainstorm outside Montane’s camper.

He strolled towards the group by the marquee, enjoying being the focus of their attention, and Danea—as though sensing some vital change in him—drew closer to her tall friend, Christine McGivern. He gave Christine an amiable and salacious wink, then addressed himself to Danea.

“I’m sorry about getting a bit prickly a while ago,” he said. “You see, I never paid so much to get laid before, and I was sort of expecting—for that kind of money—to get a few repeat peformances.”

Christine gave a delighted gasp, but the colour drained from Danea’s face.

“I see now that it wouldn’t be good business for you to issue season tickets—not when you’re humping for the Lord,” Nicklin went on. “But I would like some more. Nothing too fancy, you understand—just straight stuff. How much would you charge a regular customer?”

Danea’s mouth opened silently several times, then she pushed her way through the circle of listeners and ran off in the direction of her camper.

“Would a hundred orbs a shot be all right?” Nicklin called after her. “I don’t mind saving up my stipend.” Putting on a look of honest puzzlement, he faced his audience, most of whom were gazing at him with shock or growing resentment. “Is Danea upset about something? I wonder what could have upset her. I hope it wasn’t something I said.”

“You shouldn’t ought’ve talked to Danea like that,” Nibs Affleck muttered. His blue-red dipso’s nose was gleaming with sweat, and he appeared to be full of righteous anger, the most dangerous kind.

“Really?” Nicklin enquired mildly. “What’s so awful about having a little business discussion?”

Affleck moved towards him, his breastbone thrusting forward like the prow of a boat, but those next to him grabbed his arms and pulled him back. With a reproachful glance at Nicklin, he shrugged off his restraints, walked to the flat expanse of the marquee and began tugging on the guy ropes. The rest of the erection crew eagerly joined in the work, and in a few seconds Nicklin found himself alone with Christine.

“Well, hello,” she said warmly, with a look that was both amused and speculative.

He met her gaze directly. “Are you doing anything special tonight?”

“I don’t know—how special can you make it?”

“We’ll get away from here for an hour or two and have a few drinks,” he said. “Then I’ll show you my prospectus.”

The incident had been a definite high point in his brand-new life, Nicklin decided, marred only by the odd way in which Danea had caved in so easily. Corey Montane had spoken to him about it afterwards, trying to make the point that the mission observed certain standards of propriety, but in spite of much frowning and piercing with the eyes he had appeared ineffectual. That was because his position was basically untenable—like that of someone who was trying to-run a genteel brothel and had no contingency plans for dealing with the unpleasant customers who were bound to show up now and again. What he should have done was to employ a couple of his largest disciples to work Nicklin over with iron bars and dump him in a convenient alley. But Montane, having branched out into a line of business for which he had no vocation, was caught in a trap of his own making.

Now that Nicklin was considering the matter, he could see that Montane had not even been much shakes in his former role as a simple roving evangelist. Lacking the personal flair for attracting large sums of money, he had compounded his problem by surrounding himself with a bunch of society’s drop-outs, most of whom were liabilities rather than assets. About the only thing they had in common was the belief that Orbitsville was the Devil’s lobster pot, and that Montane was going to get them out of it and lead them to a new Eden.

Nicklin smiled again as he toyed with the notion. It was his ingrained scepticism which had created a barrier between him and the other members of the mission in the first place. Quite a few of them, Christine being a good example, were only vaguely religious in their outlook, but their unshakable faith in Montane’s word tended to distance them from unbelievers. The barrier had rapidly solidified itself into a rampart after Nicklin had adopted his new persona—or had it adopted him?—but he had no complaints on that score. He had never been accepted by society in general; now the non-acceptance was under his own terms, and that was a much better arrangement.

Suddenly impatient to get on with the business of the day, he finished his beer and walked towards the door. “I’m leaving you now,” he called out to the couple behind the bar, giving them a genial wave. The venomous look it drew from the woman gladdened his heart as he went out to join the crowds in the street.

Although he was seeing Garamond Park in person for the first time, the place had an air of familiarity to Nicklin. The wandering groups of sightseers, the vivid botanical displays, the trees which partially screened the lustrous city buildings—television had turned all of these into visual cliches. Nevertheless, Nicklin felt a pang of excitement as he came in view of the portal itself.

It registered on the eye as a circular black lake, about a kilometre in diameter, which was surrounded by sloping lime-green lawns. Clustered on its nearer edge were low mounds of masonry which were all that remained of fortifications built by the enigmatic Primers, who had dominated Orbitsville many thousands of years before mankind’s arrival. At the far side of the aperture were the passenger buildings and warehouses of the space terminal. In the distance they still looked fully functional, even though the great starship docking cradles—which should have projected into the void beneath them—had been conjured out of existence.

The single new element in the scene was a group of mobile laboratories at the eastern side of the portal, close to the old Metagov observation post. They had been cordoned off from the public and the immediate area was a profusion of cables, crates, trolleys and gantries. Metal frameworks were clamped on the rim of the aperture, their lower halves extending down into the black, making it easy for spacesuited technicians to force their way in and out through the diaphragm field which retained Orbitsville’s air.

Something really has happened on the Outside, Nicklin thought, otherwise there wouldn’t be all this fuss.

The realisation was accompanied by the special feeling of wonderment which comes when a concept which has been held in intellectual probation is finally accepted. Now totally beguiled by the prospect of actually seeing the stars, the alien stars which were the subject of so much controversy, he walked towards the night-black portal. Picking his way among family groups who were having picnic snacks on the grass, he reached the place where the path skirting the portal broadened into a small semicircular plaza.

At its focus, standing on the very rim of space, was the famous Garamond statue. Although it was the most over-publicised object in the globe, he paused before the heroic bronze which depicted a man clad in a vacuum suit of a design which had been in service two centuries earlier. The spaceman, helmet in one hand, was shading his eyes from the sun’s vertical rays with his free hand while he scanned the horizon. On the statue’s granite base was a plaque inscribed with three words:

Nicklin flinched as a wash of coloured light flooded into his eyes. It was accompanied by the sound of a gentle sexless voice, and he realised that a multi-lingual information beam projected from the statue’s plinth had centred itself on his face. Scarcely without delay, a computer had—by interpreting his optical response to subliminal signals—deduced that English was his first language.

Images of a triple-hulled starship, as seen from space, had begun to fill Nicklin’s vision, but he moved away from the statue and broke the beam contact. He had no need of a potted refresher course in Orbitsville’s early history, especially at this particular moment, when he had only to take a few paces to see the universe spread out at his feet. Aware of feeling like a child about to unwrap a long-awaited gift, he moved away from the plaza and the immobilised tourists with their rapt expressions and blindly gazing eyes. Others in brightly coloured holiday clothing were leaning on the low balustrade which rimmed the portal, strung out like birds on a line. He walked past them to reach an uncrowded section, then placed his elbows on the rail and looked down at the stars.

His initial impression was that something had gone wrong. The blackness below him seemed quite unrelieved at first, and it was only when his eyes began to adjust that he was able to discern a sprinkling of faint-glowing specks. Disappointed, feeling that he had somehow been cheated, he glanced at the other spectators. They were staring into the portal with every appearance of being fascinated. Some were pointing out items of special interest to companions or children. Perhaps it’s all in the way you focus your eyes, he thought. After all, some people can’t adjust to the old stereo viewers, and others can never see fine rain.

He looked down again, blinking, trying to perform unwonted tricks with his optical muscles, but no luminous splendours emerged from the blackness. The universe continued to register on his vision as nothing more than a meagre scattering of dim points of light. He raised his eyes a little and tried looking further afield, but towards the centre of the portal the timid stars were completely invisible, hidden by the mirages which shimmered on the surface of the diaphragm field.

He turned away from the rail and walked slowly along the perimeter path, feeling slightly depressed and lost for something to do. At intervals along the path there were observation booths with hoods which curved down into the portal. He guessed that inside one of them, shielded from the brilliance of the sun, it would be possible to get a much better view of the cosmic environment, but there were long lines of would-be spectators waiting at all the booths. In any case, all he could expect to see was brighter specks of light and more of them. It hardly seemed worth the trouble.

I must admit that you really had me going for a while, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he thought ruefully. But now that I’ve peeped at the universe I do believe that it, too, is all part of the Big Joke. And what next? Why, I think the most sensible thing to do right now would be to bugger off somewhere and have another beer…

By late afternoon Nicklin was beginning to tire of exploring Beachhead City on foot. The beneficial effect of the eight or so glasses of beer he had consumed during his wanderings was wearing off, giving way to a drowsy apathy. He had never expected to develop any attachment for his cramped new sleeping quarters, but now he yearned to squeeze himself into the bunk bed and simply lose consciousness.

Drawing on his sketchy knowledge of the city centre, he headed in a direction he believed would let him intercept the transit to Cinnamon Brow, where the mission was stationed. He was walking past a window display of 3D television sets when the row of solid images abruptly changed. In place of graphs showing some kind of production figures there appeared the head and shoulders of a pink-faced, well-padded man who was giving the world a confident smile. A slight prominence of his teeth seemed to add aggressiveness to his expression.

I know that face, Nicklin thought, his memory stirring. The spaceship man… Rick Renard… Renard… Reynard!

Nicklin’s stride faltered as into his mind there flashed the likeness of the Fox from Disney’s Pinocchio—toothy, slavering, menacing, nose like a shiny black olive perched on the end of his snout. The dream! That damned dream with the fox in man’s clothing and the garden which covered a hollow hill. What had it to do with spaceships? Nicklin experienced a coolness along his spine as the leviathan heaved once more in the black swamps of his subconscious. For one pounding instant he seemed on the verge of understanding the whole bizarre scenario, then there came the maddening sensation which accompanies the escape of elusive memories, the sense of a door slamming in the mind just as the grinning quarry slips through to the other side.

Irritated by the incident and hoping he was not going to become obsessive about it, Nicklin went on his way, growing more tired with every step.

Darkness had slid across the world by the time he got back to tin mission, and although he was still weary he now wanted something to eat before bed. He had gone all day without food, mainly because his miserly allowance would not have covered the cost of a decent meal.

The site was a vacant section in the kind of area where low-cost housing struggled for territorial control against light engineering units and anonymous storage buildings. How Montane selected such places and got authorisation to use them was something Nicklin had yet to learn, and he cursed the general lack of amenities as he stumbled across the rutted ground with little more than the luminosity from the ribbed sky to guide him. Why had Montane never learned that it paid to think big? Or that money attracts money? The mission should have taken over the biggest and most prestigious stadium in the city, and made a show of installing its workers in the best hotels. That way—quite apart from matters of high finance—Nicklin could have had a first-class meal before retiring to bed, instead of the uninspiring stodge served up by Carlos Kempson, the so-called cook who had replaced Dee Smethurst.

When he reached the marquee and its retinue of vehicles he discovered that Kempson’s trailer—which had been dubbed the chuck-up wagon—was locked. Mildly annoyed, he glanced about him and became aware that someone was speaking inside the marquee, although its interior lighting was not switched on. He walked to the entrance, looked inside and discovered that Montane was quietly addressing a group of his followers. They were sitting in the front two rows of one section, illuminated only by a single portable lamp. Montane had not gone up on the stage, but was standing on the flattened grass just in front of his audience. To Nicklin the scene looked oddly furtive, reminiscent of a meeting of early Christians in pagan Rome.

“…much more serious than I thought it was,” Montane was saying. He paused as Nicklin entered the marquee, and some of his listeners looked around to see what had caused the interruption. A few made noises which indicated that they regarded Nicklin’s presence as an intrusion, but Montane silenced them with a damping movement of his hands.

“Come and join us, Jim,” he said. “This is a ways-and-means session, and God knows we need all the fresh ideas we can get, regardless of the source.”

Choosing not to be offended by the last words of the sentence, Nicklin—his curiosity aroused—advanced along the left aisle. As he neared the group he saw that Danea Farthing was sitting in the second row. He sidled into the third row, sat down directly behind her and blew gendy on the back of her neck.

“Hello, darling,” he whispered. “I got back from town as soon as I could—I hope you didn’t miss me too much.”

Her only response was to hunch her shoulders and lean forward to distance herself from him. Smiling with malicious satisfaction, Nicklin made himself at ease and directed his gaze towards Montane.

“For the benefit of anyone who has come in late,” Montane went on, a certain dryness in his voice showing that he wanted Nicklin’s full attention, “we are discussing an extremely serious new setback in our plans for the future.

“As you all know, eleven or twelve days ago—when this globe we inhabit made what people have begun to refer to as the Big Jump—Orbitsville lost contact with everything that had previously existed outside the shell. That included all the interstellar ships which were either approaching Orbitsville or were already docked outside all the portals.

“At the time, I saw no reason to be concerned over the disappearance, because it had never been my intention to buy a fully operative vessel. Even a ship nearing the end of its certification would have cost something in the region of two million monits—a price which was far outside our limited resources. I should say at this point that none of you is to blame for our not having built up the necessary funds. You have all worked hard, and the fault lies entirely in the way I directed your efforts.”

Corey, old son, them is the truest words you ever spoke, Nicklin thought, but a murmur of disagreement arose from the audience. Montane—a homely figure in his short-sleeved tan shirt and off-the-peg slacks—swallowed visibly and nodded in gratification. Nicklin, realising the man was under a considerable degree of stress, began to sense that what he was hearing was no ordinary pep talk.

“Some time ago I chose what seemed a reasonable alternative, under the circumstances,” Montane continued. “I contacted a leading repair yard, right here in Beachhead, and took an option on an obsolescent Type 93 passenger ship. Apparently its owners had put it into land-dock for a major overhaul, but had gone out of business before the work was completed.

“It was not the ideal ship for our needs, but the asking price was only three-quarters of a million, plus approximately another 200,000 for completing the refurbishment. We haven’t got all the money yet, but I had hopes of reaching the target before next winter.”

All you needed was a few more heliumheads like me. Nicklin shifted impatiently in his chair. So what happened next?

“But I have to report to you that today when I contacted the brokers concerned—Mather and Czubek—I was informed that my contract had been cancelled. It seems that I was a few days late with one of my interim payments, and that was all the excuse they needed. In normal circumstances a slight delay with an instalment would have been neither here nor there, but ever since the Big Jump circumstances have been very far from normal.

“It turns out that a huge consortium has been formed with the object of re-establishing interportal trade in the shortest possible time. The members of this consortium are buying up all available spacecraft—interstellar ships included—and, as far as I can determine, money is no object with them. We are in a sellers’ market, I was told today, and the laws of supply and demand have pushed the price of our ship up to more than three million monits.

“There you have it, my friends.” Montane’s voice, which up to that point had been well under his control, hoarsened into something like a sob. “I… I don’t know what to do next. The Devil is laughing at us tonight… and I simply don’t know what to do next.”

A man in the front row spoke up. “You can’t blame yourself, Corey—for three million they’d have found some way to break the contract.”

“Yes, but on top of everything else I’ve lost the deposit I put down.”

“How much was it?”

Montane gave a wan smile. “The deposit was a hundred big ones.”

Nicklin noticed the atypical use of slang, albeit ancient slang, and knew that Montane was trying to be casual, as a way of dealing with a desperate sense of guilt. There was a general gasp of dismay at the news of the loss, but Nicklin had turned his thoughts to the central issue—was Montane about to abandon his pathetic attempt to become a new Saviour?

Unexpectedly, he found little to savour in the idea. He expected to quit the mission some time in the nearish future and find a job with decent pay and prospects, but he still despised Montane and Danea, and craved a chance to revenge himself on them. What had just happened to Montane was clearly a major disaster, but it had not been personally and visibly inflicted by Nicklin. Therefore it did not count for much in the revenge stakes.

As for Danea—he had devised a special super-duper all-singing, all-dancing scheme of vengeance for her, one which would bring him complete satisfaction in every sense of the word. The plan was to amass a good sum of money—the how of it was not clear to him yet—but he wanted so much cash that neither she nor her bumbling Svengali would in all conscience (great word!) be able to refuse it on behalf of the Lord. She would be obliged to prostitute herself for him again, and when that happened he would make use of that splendid body as it had never been made use of before. If she was going to play the role of temple prostitute, priestess-whore, he was going to be the most ardent worshipper in the land. It was a consummation devoutly to be wished, and when the happy day came he was going to fuck her and humiliate her and fuck her again and make her sorry she had ever…

Hold on! he told himself in near-panic as fury geysered through him. You’ve got to play it cool. Icy cold, in fact. They won’t hate you properly unless you are seen to be chilly and emotionless, inhuman and implacable…

In the front row the electrician Petra Davies raised her hand to ask a question. “Corey, could we not appeal directly to the boss men in this consortium? When they hear that we are a religious organisation—”

“That’s right,” a man cut in. “Or maybe we could just rent the ship from them for a while. After all, we only want to make one trip in it—then they could have it back.”

Montane shook his head. “It’s a good idea, but I very much doubt that these people would be in sympathy with our objectives. In fact, I’m sure they wouldn’t. The head of the consortium is a man called Rick Renard…”

The remainder of the sentence was lost to Nicklin. He was already in a mental turmoil when the mention of Renard caused a veritable explosion in the depths of his subconscious, a psychic detonation which hurled a shrapnel of tumbling memory fragments up into the forefront of his mind. Renard… Reynard! He had had an uncle by the name of Reynard. Not an uncle—Reynard had been his mother’s uncle. A great-uncle. As a small child he had been deeply afraid of his great-uncle Reynard, because his mother had a habit of referring to him as a wily old fox, and little Jimmy Nicklin had been convinced that Reynard really had the ability to turn himself into a fox when nobody else was around. Jimmy knew in his heart that if he were ever left on his own with great-uncle Reynard the dreadful transformation would take place, and that Reynard the Fox would eat him all up. Luckily, great-uncle Reynard was a rare visitor to the Nicklin home, because his job as a land surveyor took him to distant places. And it was from one of those remote locations that he had sent little Jimmy a certain picture postcard…

“Corey, I’ve got some interesting news for you,” Nicklin called out, his heart pounding as he rose to his feet. “I know where there’s a spaceship—a spaceship you can have for next to nothing!”

Chapter 11

“All right, Jim—why all the secrecy?” Montane said. “I don’t like the idea of keeping all the others in the dark, not at this sad stage of our enterprise.”

The door of his camper was closed, the toffee-shaded lamp was creating a mellow glow, and the tea requisites were laid out on the ready-made table formed by Milly Montane’s coffin. The two men were sitting on the side bench, their knees almost touching, and Nicklin—his tiredness having completely vanished—was luxuriating in the atmosphere of seclusion and comparative comfort.

“We have to talk about my fee,” he said, “and I felt it would be better if we did that in private.”

“Fee? You expect a fee?”

Nicklin smiled. “Of course! Nothing in this life comes free, Corey—you should have learned that by this time.”

Montane studied his face. “Do you want your money back?”

“Possibly. I’m not sure yet. I might be prepared to go on treating it as an investment in Montane Enterprises Inc.”

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Montane said, pouring out two cups of tea.

“I’m having the time of my life,” Nicklin assured him.

“I’m glad somebody’s having a good time. Very well, Jim—tell me what you want. Let’s hear it.”

Nicklin sipped from his cup before speaking, deliberately prolonging the moment. “Leaving the question of my money to one side for the present, I want a new job. No more driving in the middle of the night, no more clearing of thistles. I think the title of Executive Vice-President might suit me.”

“A grand title wouldn’t have any meaning around here,” Montane said with a thin smile.

“It would for me. And in keeping with my new status I would expect my stipend to be increased. In fact, I expect unlimited drawing facilities—although naturally I wouldn’t abuse the privilege. My needs are modest.”

“Go on,” Montane said, still with his bitter smile.

“And I want a camper all to myself.” Nicklin made a show of delicately inhaling the aromatic vapour from his tea. “When I say I want it all to myself, I’m referring to the living space. There would, of course, be drivers provided for my exclusive use. And when we get to our permanent headquarters I want really good hotel accommodation.”

“I’m beginning to enjoy myself too—just taking in your performance,” Montane said. “You still haven’t told me where this mythical spaceship is.”

“I’m coming to that,” Nicklin replied, his pulse increasing in speed and power. “There’s just one more thing.”

“And that is… ?

“Danea Farthing,” Nicklin said casually. “I want Danea Farthing.”

Montane’s smile vanished and he abruptly set his cup down, slopping tea into the saucer. “Get out of here, Jim—and never come back. Go on! Get out right now!”

Nicklin settled himself more comfortably on the bench. “A spaceship, Corey. A guaranteed way of getting out of Orbitsville before the trap closes. An open ticket to New Eden. God has entrusted you with the task of leading His children to safety, and He has given you licence to employ any means within your power. You explained all that stuff to me not so long ago, sitting right here on this bench, the day you were telling me how I had been well and truly shafted. Surely you can’t have forgotten so soon?”

“You are the filthiest…” Montane closed his eyes, his face the colour of tallow. “Danea Farthing is a human being.”

“I should hope so,” Nicklin said with a grin. “There’s nothing kinky about me.”

“Spare me your diseased humour. I repeat, Danea is a human being.”

“She was for sale then,” Nicklin said in a voice from which all traces of humour had fled. “So she ought to be for sale now. Have a quiet word with her, there’s a good chap.”

Still with his eyes shut, Montane clenched his hands and sat without speaking for ten or more seconds, then—unexpectedly—he relaxed and raised his eyelids. His gaze was mild and unperturbed once more.

“I was praying,” he explained. “I was communing with the Lord.”

“Did He commune back at you?”

“He reminded me that I have only your word for it about this ship. It may no longer exist, for all I know, or it may never have existed. He counselled me to stay my anger.”

Nicklin nodded thoughtfully. “Verily, He hath counselled you well. Hey, that sort of lingo must be catching!”

“So how about it, Jim?” Montane replied, no longer allowing himself to be baited.

“How about my fee?”

“I think I have ceased to believe that you can deliver a ship, but I confess to being curious about whatever kind of story you have dreamed up.” Montane was now speaking in his customary rectorial manner, apparently satisfied that he had gained the advantage in what had become a verbal duel. “Therefore, I have few misgivings in agreeing to your terms.”

“Wise man,” Nicklin said.

“I’m expecting this to be good, Jim.” Montane’s expression was calm as he retrieved his cup and removed some drips from the bottom of it with his fingers. “So go ahead and astonish me—where is this spaceship that can be obtained for next to nothing?”

Nettled by Montane’s change of attitude, Nicklin ignored an inner voice which warned him that he might be rushing ahead too fast. “It’s buried near a small town within a few thousand kilometres of Beachhead.”

“Buried!” Montane guffawed in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me that somebody hauled an interstellar ship thousands of kilometres into the hinterland… and then buried it?”

“Well, he didn’t dig a hole in the ground and drop it in there. He covered it with tonnes of earth and rocks.”

“Why?”

“It was intended to be a memorial,” Nicklin said, wondering how he had got into a defensive posture. “Something like a mausoleum. As I remember it, there was a rich man with a young wife who wanted to be a space flier. He bought her a ship of her very own and she promptly got herself killed in it in some kind of freak accident. So he paid to have the ship transported to his home estate and he made it into a tomb for her. He decided that it didn’t look right, however, and I can’t say I blame him—a space-going ship would look a bit odd sitting in anybody’s back yard. Luckily, his hobby was gardening, so he had the ship landscaped—I suppose that’s the best way to put it—and, as far as I know, he pottered around it quite happily for the rest of his natural.

“A touching little story, don’t you think?”

“Obviously you think it’s very funny.”

Montane’s gaze flickered towards his wife’s coffin as he spoke, and Nicklin experienced a pang of happiness as the significance of the involuntary glance dawned on him. He had been slightly worried about how Montane might react to the bizarre tale of a millionaire’s folly, but he had completely overlooked the parallel in the two men’s lives. Blind chance, otherwise known as the Gaseous Vertebrate, had rendered Montane soft, receptive and vulnerable. Bless you, Corey, he thought, I had forgotten that anybody who lugs his old lady around in a tin box would be inclined to sympathise with the notion of a metal Taj Mahal.

“I don’t think it’s the slightest bit funny,” he said in overly solemn tones. “It’s just that I tend to hide my emotions under a veneer of flippancy.” He was rewarded by a momentary flash of loathing in Montane’s eyes, a signal that the preacher’s defences had again been penetrated.

“What is this man’s name?” Montane said.

“I can’t remember.”

“Where is the spaceship?”

“I can’t quite remember that, either,” Nicklin replied. “All I can say right now is that it’s near a town in the Pi region.”

Montane sniffed. “You can’t remember much, can you? How did you get this story into your head in the first place?”

“When I was a kid I had a great-uncle, name of Reynard Nicklin, who travelled a lot because he was a surveyor or a cartographer or something like that. He sent me a holocard of the tomb once, and promised to take me there some day. Very pretty and colourful it was—an ornamental garden completely covering this little hill—but I guess I would have forgotten all about it if it hadn’t been for the weird background note. That must have made quite an impression on me, because I’ve had spooky subterranean rumblings about it all day. And tonight at the meeting… suddenly… there it was!”

“Just a minute,” Montane said, frowning, “you got the holocard when you were a child? This story about creating a mausoleum… How long ago did it all happen?”

Nicklin shrugged. “Fifty, sixty years ago… perhaps even a hundred… Who knows?”

“You’ve been wasting my time!” Montane exhaled forcibly, showing exasperation, and his voice hardened. “I sat here and endured your blasphemies and obscenities, and your sheer—”

“Take it easy,” Nicklin cut in. “What’s the matter?”

“Rust! That’s what’s the matter—there’ll be nothing left of your damned ship by this time.”

Nicklin smiled his happy hayseed smile, keeping his mouth in its cheerful U-shape until Montane took heed of his expression and gave him a questioning look.

“They were still constructing spaceships out of the old electronsated alloys in those days,” Nicklin said soothingly. “That was before the Earth-Orbitsville trade petered out and the shipyards had to cut back on costs. No, Corey, there won’t be much rust or any other kind of corrosion for you to worry your head about. At least, not in the pressure hull, the internal structure and the major components. There might be some problems with all the minor bits and pieces, but even there…

“I mean, ifyou decided to use a spaceship as a ready-made casket you’d make certain the whole thing was properly sealed up, wouldn’t you? You’d hardly want your nearest and dearest to get mildew. And you definitely wouldn’t want bugs crawling up her.”

Montane set his cup back in the saucer again, this time with exaggerated care, and when he spoke each word was the splintering of a human bone. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this to any man, but if you speak like that about my wife—ever again—I’ll kill you, Jim. I swear I’ll kill you.”

“I’m shocked at you,” Nicklin said comfortably. “That was a terrible thing to say to a fellow human being.”

“I wouldn’t have said it to a human being.”

“I’m immune to insults now, Corey. I’m immune to everything.”

“Then you must be very unhappy.”

“On the contrary,” Nicklin said, maintaining his smile. “I’ve found the secret of complete happiness. Do you want to know what it is? I’ll tell you anyway. At all times you keep just one thought uppermost in your mind—that everybody is a piece of shit.”

“Does that include yourself?”

“Especially yourself, old son—that’s the whole point! It would ruin the Big Joke if you didn’t include yourself.”

Montane shook his head, the movements slow, tired, barely perceptible. “Let’s get back to the buried spaceship—where is it?”

“That’s something else I can’t remember, but I’ve an idea the letter A crops up two or three times in the name of the town,” Nicklin said, wondering if he should compel the preacher to put details of their new arrangement on to tape or paper. “I might be able to find it by going through a Pi gazetteer, but even without the name we have enough information.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Montane said, giving him a sly glance. “I could find it by myself now.”

“Yes, but Renard’s people could get there faster—if I tipped them off.”

“The ship may not even be available,” Montane countered. “There may be descendants who treat it like a shrine.”

“The facts we have suggest that the lady died, as they used to say, without issue.”

“There could be other relatives. Perhaps they unearthed the ship years ago and sold it for scrap.”

“I’ve already thought of that.” Nicklin concealed the lie as expertly as he could. Christ, he thought, the old boy has a point there—I should have kept my mouth shut until I’d done some detective work on my own. “But the scrap value would hardly cover the excavation and haulage costs.”

“And there’s always the possibility that your memory has tricked you over the location,” Montane said, now apparently enjoying himself. “It’s going to be ages before interportal flights are commercially available again—so if it turns out that the town isn’t in the Pi region I don’t see how we can get to it.”

“This conversation is starting to lose all its sparkle—and I’m starving.” In spite of himself, Nicklin was impressed by the other man’s mental resilience, and he was fast becoming angry with himself for having played all his trump cards so early on in the game. The really smart thing to do would have been to take his time, to consolidate his ground step by step. He should have verified the existence and availability of the ship, then he should have found a way to acquire ownership, by bringing in a third party if necessary. Then, and only then—when he was in a safe position to dictate all the terms—would it have been safe to talk business with Montane.

So what had gone wrong with his sense of judgement? Nicklin writhed inwardly as he answered his own question. It had been the Danea effect again. The fevered visions of inflicting revenge on her, the lurid and penis-stirring images of debauching the Bitch in Black, had robbed him of all caution and common sense. In short, he had behaved like a mindless creature with a whiff of pheromones in its nostrils, and the full price of his stupidity remained to be discovered.

“If you’re really hungry I could have Carlos bring a tray in here,” Montane said.

A pleasingly tasteless line sprang into Nicklin’s mind at the idea of eating off Milly Montane’s coffin… My wife says the dinner’s on her… but Montane was touchy about dead wife jokes and had sounded genuinely dangerous over the last one. The objective was to earn his undying hatred, not to be killed by him.

“No need to put old Carlos to all that trouble,” Nicklin said. “I daresay I can wait a while longer.”

“Very well, but if all this works out—and you do take up your ‘executive’ position—you may have to get used to grabbing food while you have the chance.” “So you’re not going to renege on our deal.” “I’m a man of my word, Jim, and the truth is that you’re likely to be of more value to the cause now than you were when you joined us. That’s what I call irony,” Montane stood up and went forward to the shelf which supported his video set. “I’m going to see if I can call up a good Pi gazetteer on this thing and then we’ll find out if it jogs your memory. There’s no point in wasting any more time.”

“I agree,” Nicklin said, then became concerned about giving the impression of turning soft and compliant again. “But the job was only part of my professional fee. Remember?”

Montane spoke abstractedly, concentrating his attention on the video’s command panel. “If you’re talking about Danea,you have to remember something. I told you the first day we met that Danea Farthing is a private individual—any personal relationship she may have had with you has nothing to do with me or this mission.”

He’s sticking it to me, Nicklin thought in dismay. He is really sticking it to me! This is what I get for letting my dick rule my head. A crazy old coot, who thinks he’s Moses Mkll and has conversations with his wife’s corpse, is running rings around me!

“Correct me if I misheard you,” he said bitterly, “but I thought you said something about being a man of your word.”

“My vows to God take precedence over everything else.”

“How convenient!”

“You must try to be consistent, Jim.” Montane was still stooped over the video set, apparently finding complexity in its simplified controls, but his words were very much to the point. “A few minutes ago you were happy with the idea that God had given me licence to procure women. If that were the case, He would positively encourage me to commit a minor sin like lying now and again—as long as it served His cause.”

Thing’s can’t go on like this, Nicklin told himself, his fingernails biting deeply into the heels of his hands. There are going to be big changes around here.

He had no idea of how accurate his prediction would prove to be…