Nicklin’s body clock was telling him that something had gone terribly wrong with the natural order of things, but even more disturbing was the feeling that vast supernatural forces were at work. A mystical and superstitious element of his character—one he would have sworn did not exist—had been alerted, and it was whispering things he had no wish to hear. He had often tried to visualise the helplessness and despair experienced by someone caught in an earthquake. What must it be like, he had wondered, knowing there is no place to run to when the very ground has become your deadly enemy? Now he no longer had to imagine that sense of bleak futility. Where is there to hide when a great hand parts the curving blue canopy of the sky, displacing night and day, and its owner casts a baleful eye on all that lies below?
“How soon can we go, Corey?” a man called out. Nicklin glanced round and saw that the speaker was the electrician, Jock Craig.
“It has to be as soon as possible,” Montane replied. “I’m going to the Space Transport Department when—” He broke off, looking surprised, as his words were lost in a rebellious outcry from at least half of his audience.
“Nobody cares about certificates at a time like this,” Craig shouted, abandoning the slightly obsequious tone with which he usually addressed the preacher. “We should cut the locks and go right now!”
His words produced a widespread murmur of approval. Montane quelled the sound by the familiar trick of raising both his hands and making a damping movement. The gesture was not as effective as usual, however, and the ensuing silence was less than complete.
“Do I hear you properly, Jock?” Montane said. “Are you proposing that we should leave most of our brethren behind? Don’t forget how many of them are still waiting at home all over Pi.” He pointed at the communication panels, where columns of winking orange lights showed that dozens of callers were waiting to be answered. “What do we say to them? Do we tell them to go to the Devil?”
“It’s better for some to be saved than none at all,” Craig insisted, looking about him for support.
“I think we’re all jumping the gun a little,” Scott Hepworth cut in, booming, projecting his voice as though addressing a much larger audience. “We’ve seen one minor disturbance of the solar cage, and apart from that nothing has changed. Some kind of self-regulating mechanism could have been activated up there, something which routinely balances forces and adjusts the shadow pattern now and then. Don’t forget we’ve been on Orbitsville for only two centuries, and that’s no time at all in astronomical terms.”
Hepworth’s admonitory gaze swept around the assembly. “My advice is that we shouldn’t panic.”
There speaks the voice of cool reason, Nicklin thought. Trouble is that nobody believes a word of it—and that includes me.
“Scott is absolutely right,” Montane said loudly, doing his utmost to reassert his authority. “We will begin calling in every one of our families, starting this very minute, but in the meantime I want…”
His voice faltered—hushed by a silent burst of light—as the daytime world in all its brilliance sprang into view beyond the office windows.
It materialised instantaneously, looking normal and serene and eternal, as though nothing out of the ordinary had ever taken place. Nicklin saw birds wheeling in the sunlit air, and flags stirring gently on the masts above the main passenger terminal. The scene remained pulsing on the eye for several seconds—during which nine the people in the room exchanged stricken, speculative glances with their neighbours—then it vanished into blackness again amidst a chorus of terrified shouts and screams.
Nicklin was one of those who gave an involuntary cry because, on the instant of the new advent of night, he felt the entire floor of the office drop away beneath his feet. He knew at once that the building was collapsing, and that he was about to plunge down into its ruins. Then his eyes confirmed the curious fact that the office, and everything in it, was still firmly in place. Ashen-faced men and women were clutching at the furniture for support, but—astonishingly—the building showed itself to be perfectly intact and undamaged. A moment later the floor resumed its pressure on the soles of his feet.
The sensations normally associated with space flight were alien to Nicklin; he had never even ventured on funfair parabola rides—but his mind was quick to concoct an explanation for what had happened.
“There has been a temporary loss of gravity,” Hepworth shouted above the hubbub, confirming the worst suspicions of all those present. “That’s all it was—a temporary loss of gravity… nothing to become too alarmed about.”
Nicklin gaped at the physicist’s untidy figure, wondering if he had any idea how ridiculous he looked and sounded while trying to pass off the loss of gravity as though it had been a minor occurrence like an interruption to the local electricity supply. Nothing like this had ever happened on Orbitsville before. Even the sudden switching of day into night, terrifying though it had been, had not created the same degree of visceral fear, because light was only light after all, and everybody knew how simple it was to flick it on and off. But gravity was different! You did not fuck around with gravity. Nobody had ever succeeded in tampering with it or modifying it in any way. When gravity vanished every man, woman and child immediately became a learned professor of physics with a deep understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, knowing that where something so basic to existence could go wrong existence itself was in the balance.
As though the Gaseous Vertebrate wanted to endorse and applaud Nicklin’s thought processes, the sunlit world outside the office blazed into being once more, but only for the time it took Nicklin to snatch a breath, then there was night again. The effect was so similar to lightning, or perhaps a thermonuclear flash, that he winced in dread of the appalling detonation which had to follow. Instead there was a profound silence in which came a series of shorter appearances—day, night, day, night, day, night—a calendar month compressed into a dozen stroboscopic seconds. Once or twice during the staccato sequence gravity slackened its bonds, but not so completely as before—then it was all over. Peaceful night reigned outside. The ceiling lights reasserted themselves, shining calmly over the humdrum microcosm of the office and its cheap furniture and all the frightened people who had expected to die.
“My God,” a woman said quietly, “this is the end of the world!”
It would be more correct to say that Orbitsville has become unstable, Nicklin mused. Of course, it comes to the same thing in the end…
Hepworth pounded a table with his fist. “Does anybody know where Megan Fleischer is?”
The mention of the pilot’s name was all the catalyst that was needed to convert apprehension into action. Not much was said, there were few outward signs of mortal fear, but everybody began to move, to busy themselves, and Nicklin knew they shared the same objectives—to warn their relatives and friends, to gather up vital belongings, to get on board the ship as quickly as possible. He knew exactly what was going on inside their heads because, suddenly, he was one of them.
Orbitsville was home for countless millions of humans and for two hundred years it had been a good home. Its mountains and prairies and oceans appeared to have the permanence of old Earth, but there were few of its inhabitants who had not, at one time or another, felt a pang of uneasiness over the fact that the Big O was a bubble. It was the most insubstantial object imaginable—a film of enigmatic material with a circumference of almost a billion kilometres and a thickness of only eight centimetres.