“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.”