He had remained quiet during the early part of the drive to the planetarium, preferring to listen to the radio, and this had given Jody the chance to demonstrate her cosmic awareness.
“If only people could be made to realise how insignificant the Earth is,” she was saying, “if they would just understand that it’s only a speck of dust in the universe, there’d be less war and less petty strife. Isn’t that so?”
“I don’t know,” Ambrose replied, determined to be unhelpful. “It might work the other way round.”
“What do you mean, darling?”
“If they start thinking the Earth is insignificant, they could decide that nothing they do will make any difference to anything and start raping and pillaging even harder.”
“Oh, Boyce!” Jody laughed incredulously. “You didn’t mean that!”
“I do. Sometimes I worry in case the shows at the planetarium are encouraging the human race to snuff itself out.”
“That’s nonsense.” Jody fell silent for a moment, gauging Ambrose’s mood, and a shift took place in his hearing, bringing the words of a radio newscast to the forefront of his attention.
“…claims that the ghosts are real beings, which can only be seen with the aid of magniluct low-light glasses. The diamond mine is in Barandi, one of the small African republics which have not yet been admitted to the United Nations. Real or not, the ghosts have caused…”
“I’ve heard you say dozens of times that the only real justification for astronomy is…”
“Let me hear this,” Ambrose put in.
“…science correspondent says that Thornton’s Planet, which passed close to the Earth in the spring of 1993, is the only other known example of…”
“That’s another thing—your mother says the lectures you gave about Thornton’s Planet were the best…”
“For God’s sake, Jody, I’m trying to hear something.”
“Well, all right! There’s no need to shout.”
“…new theories about the atomic structure of the sun. South America. The dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay came one step closer to all-out war last night when…” Ambrose switched the radio off and concentrated on the mechanical tasks of driving. There had been a fall of snow during the night and the road, which had been cleared down to the tarmac, was like a swathe of India ink in a scraperboard landscape.
Jody put a hand on his thigh. “Go ahead and listen to the radio—I’ll be quiet.”
“No you go ahead and talk -1 won’t listen to the radio.” It occurred to Ambrose that he was being unfair. “I’m sorry, Jo.”
“Are you always grouchy in the morning?”
“Not every morning. But the trouble with being a trendy astronomer is that I hate being reminded that other people are doing real work.”
“I don’t understand you. Your work is important.”
Jody’s hand moved higher on Ambrose’s thigh, sending a tingle of sensation racing into his groin. He shook his head, but was grateful for the little intimacy, with its message that there were other values in life besides those of the laboratory. Forcing himself to relax, he tried to enjoy the remainder of the journey to the pleasant modern building in which he worked. The air was sharp and jewel-bright after the snowfall, and by the time they had got from his car to the office at the side of the dome Ambrose was feeling better. Jody was pink-cheeked and fresh, like a girl in a health foods advertisement, and he felt absurdly proud as he introduced her to his secretary and office manager, May Tate.
He left the two women together and went into his private suite to see what communications had filtered through the various systems to reach his desk. At the top of the heap was a fax sheet on which May had put a ring of dayglow ink around one of the main stories. Ambrose read the terse, tongue-in-cheek story of how a Canadian teacher, with the inelegant name of Gil Snook, had gone down a diamond mine in Barandi and taken a photograph of a grotesque ‘ghost’ -and, as he stood there in the warm luxury of his office, he began to feel ill.
Ambrose’s sudden lack of well-being stemmed from a number of factors.
There was the guilt he felt about the betrayal of his own academic potential. In the past this guilt had manifested itself as jealousy towards the amateur astronomer who, as the reward of years of quiet diligence, had been privileged to attach his name to a star. And here, represented by a few lines of type, was another example of the same kind of thing. How had it come about, Ambrose demanded of himself, that an obscure teacher with a ridiculous name had been at the right place at the right time? And how had this man known to do all the right things, the things which would make him world-famous? There was no mention of Snook having any kind of scientific qualifications—so why had he, of all people in the world, been chosen to make an important discovery?
There was no doubt in Ambrose’s mind that what had
happened in the backwoods African republic was important, although it was as yet too early for him to say what the significance of the event actually was. The news story contained two items which clamoured in his thoughts—and one of these was that the ghostly sightings happened just before dawn. Ambrose was good at geography, and therefore he knew that Barandi straddled the Earth’s equator.
As an astronomer, regardless of his trendiness, he also knew that the Earth was like a vast bead sliding along the unseen wire which was its orbit. The wire did not enter and leave the surface of the globe at fixed positions, as with an ordinary bead—these two points wove a lazy curve up and down the Earth’s torrid zone as the planet completed a daily revolution on its axis. And at this time of the year, late winter in the northern hemisphere, when it was dawn in Barandi—and the ghosts were walking—the ‘forward’ orbital intersection point would be passing invisibly through the tiny republic. Every instinct Ambrose possessed told him there was no element of coincidence involved.
The second news item was that the apparitions were visible only with the aid of magniluct glasses, and in Ambrose’s opinion this linked them in some way with the passage of Thornton’s Planet almost three years earlier.
He sat down at his desk, filled with a sense of imminence, feeling cold and sick and yet curiously elated. Something was happening inside his head, right behind his eyes, a strange and rare event he had only read about in connection with a few other men. He folded his arms on the deep-glazed wood of the desk, lowered his forehead to rest on them, and remained absolutely still. For the first time in his life, Doctor Boyce Ambrose was encountering the phenomenon of inspiration. And when he raised his head he knew exactly why it was that apparitions had begun to appear in the lower levels of Barandi National Mine No. 3.
Jody Ferrier entered his office a minute later and found Ambrose white-faced and chill behind his desk. “Boyce, darling!” Her voice was taut with concern. “Are you all right?”
He looked at her with bemused eyes. “I’m all right, Jo/ he said slowly. “The only thing is…I think I have to go to Africa.”
The journey to Barandi was a difficult one for Ambrose, even with his money and extensive family connections.
He had originally planned to make an SST flight from Atlanta to Nairobi, and perhaps charter a light aircraft to cover the remaining three hundred kilometres to his destination. This scheme had been scrapped, on the advice of the travel agency, because relations between Kenya and the newly-formed Confederation of East African Socialist Republics were particularly bad at the time. Ambrose had accepted the situation philosophically, remembering that Kenya and other countries had lost valuable territory to the Confederation. He then had aimed for Addis Ababa, only to be told that Ethiopia was on the point of mounting a military operation against the Confederation—to re-establish her southern border—and that all commercial flights between the two were on the point of being suspended.