He nodded. “I hit Freeborn Junior. And the man who killed George. I hit them square on.”
“I don’t like the sound of this, old boy. Do you mind?” Helig retrieved his bottle, poured some brandy into a cup and gave the bottle back to Snook. “This place will be swarming with troops in half an hour.”
“That’s it then,” Ambrose said in a dull voice. “It’s all over.”
“Especially for George.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Gil—but George Murphy wanted this project to go on.”
Snook thought about Murphy, the man with whom he had become friendly only a few days earlier, and was surprised by how little he knew about him. He had no idea where Murphy lived or even if he had any family. All he knew for certain was that Murphy had got himself killed because he was brave and honest, and because he cared about his friends and the miners who worked for him. George Murphy would have liked the transfer project to go on, and the more startling the end result the better, because the greater the world interest that was aroused the less opportunity there would be for force to be used on his miners.
“There might still be time,” Snook said. “I don’t think young Freeborn and his gang were acting under orders. If it was some kind of a private raid, they mightn’t be missed until some time tomorrow.”
Helig frowned his doubt. “I wouldn’t count on it, old boy. The guards at the gate are bound to have heard the shooting. Anything could happen.”
“Anybody who wants to leave should go now,” Ambrose commented, “but I’m staying as long as possible. We could be lucky.”
Lucky! Snook thought, wondering just how relative the meaning of a word could become. The brandy bottle was still one-third full and, laying tacit claim to it, he retreated to the same corner where he had stood with Ambrose only ten minutes earlier. Ten minutes was only a short span of time, and yet, because it separated him from a personal epoch in which Murphy had been alive, it could have been years or centuries. His own luck, he now realised, had begun to desert him that day in Malaq three years earlier when he had answered the emergency call to go to the airfield. Looking even more closely at the chain of circumstance, the emergency which had been sparked off by the passing of Thornton’s Planet had not been an isolated event. He had quickly forgotten his single look at the livid globe in the sky, but the ancients and today’s primitives were wise enough to regard such things as portents of calamities to come. Avernus had suffered at that time, been dragged out of her orbit, and he -without being aware of it—had been caught in the same gravitational maelstrom. Boyce Ambrose, Prudence, George Murphy, Felleth, Curt Freeborn, Helig, Culver, Quig—these were merely the names of asteroids which had been drawn into a deadly spiral, the motive forces of which emanated from another universe.
Looking out into the darkness, taking small regular sips from the bottle, Snook found it hard to credit that astronomy—that most remote and inhuman of the sciences—should have had such a devastating effect on his life. But he was, of course, wrong in thinking of the subject as being remote, especially now that—at points along the equator—the era of close-range astronomy was being ushered in. People could now look at another world from a distance of only a few metres. And in several years’ time, when a large crescent of Avernus had emerged through the Earth, astronomy could even become a mass entertainment. It would be possible to stand on a hilltop on a dark night, wearing Amplites, and see the vast, luminous dome of the alien planet spanning the horizons and looming high into the sky. The rotation of the Earth would carry watchers closer and closer to the translucent enormity of the planet—revealing details of its land masses, the houses, the people—and finally plunge them under its surface, to emerge some time later on the daylight side, where Avernus would be rendered invisible.
Marshalling unfamiliar thoughts, Snook found, gave him some respite from the anguish he felt over Murphy’s death. He tried to visualise the position some thirty-five years ahead when the two worlds were overlapping by only half a planetary diameter. Near the equatorial regions the two great spheres would be intersecting at right angles, in which case the spectators would see a vertical wall sweeping towards them at supersonic speed. On the face of that wall, fountaining upwards into the sky—also at supersonic speed—would be a steady procession of Avernian landmarks seen from directly above. It would require nerve not to close one’s eyes at the moment of silent intersection; but a greater spectacle would come thirty-five years beyond that again when the two worlds fully separated from each other. The directions of rotational movement would be opposed to each other at the point of final contact. By that time magniluct glasses might have been improved to the point at which they made Avernus appear completely solid. If so, there would come dizzy, mind-exploding minutes when it would be possible to see the surface of an upside-down world streaming past, just above one’s head, at a combined speed of over three thousand kilometres an hour, bombarding the eyesight with inverted buildings and trees which—although insubstantial—would rip through a man’s awareness like the teeth on a cosmic circular saw.
And following that, in the year of 2091, would come the ultimate spectacle, with the return of Thornton’s Planet.
The separating gap would have increased to less than four thousand kilometres by that time, which meant that—for wearers of Amplites—Avernus would fill the entire sky. Earth would have a ringside seat for the destruction of a world…
Snook abruptly pulled back into the present, where he had enough problems of his own. He wondered if the rest of the group. Prudence in particular, understood that he was to die soon. If they did, if she did, no signs were being given to him. He could have done without a show of sympathy from the others, but it would have been good, very good, if Prudence had come to him with words of regret and love, and allowed him to cradle her neat golden head in the crook of his left arm. Thy. navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor, the ancient words ran in his mind, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
Thinking back on it, Snook found himself beginning to doubt that the moment of closeness in Prudence’s car had actually occurred. Another possibility was that she had responded to him as momentarily and casually as if she had been patting a stray puppy on the head, and with no more meaning. The irony was that he was supposed to have a rare telepathic gift—yet he was less able to divine the workings of a girl’s mind than any clumsy adolescent on his first date. Unless one was surrounded by like beings, he decided, telepathy would be an intensifier of loneliness. No apartment is as lonely as the one in which can be heard faint sounds of a party next door.
It occurred to Snook that he was rapidly becoming drunk, but he continued to sip the brandy. A certain degree of intoxication made it easier to accept the fact that there was no way he could get out of Barandi alive. It also made it easier to reach a relevant decision. When Colonel Freeborn came he would be looking for Gilbert Snook—not the other members of the group—and, once he had Snook, he was likely to devote all his attention to him for quite a long time, during which Ambrose might be able to complete the big experiment.
It was a perfectly logical decision, therefore, that—when the Leopards arrived at the mine—he should go forward and give himself up to them.
Chapter Thirteen
The soldier was so drunk that he would have been unable to stand but for the support of the two military policemen who gripped his arms. From the state of his uniform it was obvious that he had fallen more than once, and had been helplessly sick. In spite of his physical misery, he was terrified in the presence of Colonel Tommy Freeborn, and he told his story in disconnected groups of words—with frequent lapses into Swahili—which made sense only to someone who already had the general picture. When he had finished speaking, the Colonel stared at him with leaden-eyed contempt.