Knots of migrants, some of them carrying suitcases, had already separated from the confusion and were hastening towards the ship. The adults’ faces were distraught, but quite a few of the children with them—secure in their innocence—merely looked excited, with eyes for nothing but the gleaming contours of the Tara.
Nicklin ran past them, belatedly remembering that Cham and Nora White had no security passes and therefore would be denied entrance. By the time he reached the gate the struggle between the two spaceport guards and their captive was ending. They had glued the burly man’s wrists together behind him with restraint patches and were bundling him into the gatehouse.
One of them, a fair-skinned heavyweight, frowned at Nicklin. “You shouldn’t be carrying that weapon, mister.”
Nicklin glanced at the sky. “Do you want to run me in?”
“Take your people away, and do it fast” the guard said. “We just gotword that a mob of two or three thousand have come out of town through Garamond Park. They’re tearing holes in our north fence right now and they’ll be on top of you real soon.”
“Thanks,” Nicklin said.
“Don’t thank me—I don’t want to be in the middle of a war, that’s all.”
“Wise man.” Nicklin ran to Danea and grabbed her arm. “I want to take Zindee and her parents. They’ll need badges.”
She gave him a thoughtful stare, took three gold disks from her pocket and handed them over. “There isn’t much time—Megan is already on the ship.”
Nicklin had to think for a moment before remembering that Megan was the pilot. “What about the paying customers?” he said, controlling a new surge of panic. “Many to come?”
Danea glanced at her watch, which was in counting mode. “Four that I know of. They should be here at any sec—” She looked out through the bars of the main gate at the surging crowd. “I see them!”
Nicklin went out through the personnel gate and saw that the hard-pressed guards were already bringing a young man and woman, each carrying a child, into the cleared space. Raising himself on his toes, he scanned the crowd and felt a pang of relief as he picked out Cham White’s coppery hair and anxious face amid the leaven of heads.
“Only three more to come,” he told the nearest guard.
“Friggin’ good job,” the sweating man grunted. “We’re goin’ to go under in a minute.”
Nicklin threw his weight against the wall of bodies. For an instant he was surprised at how readily they parted for him, then he realised that the eyes of those in the forefront were on the rifle. He managed to grasp Cham’s outstretched hand and drag him out of the throng. Nora White and Zindee followed close behind, literally ejected by the human pressure from behind, though not without some resentful pushing and clawing from the individuals they left in their wake. They were wearing identical one-piece green daysuits, and both looked pale and bewildered. Nora’s gaze never left Nicklin’s face, as though it had become a source of wonder to her, but Zindee kept her eyes averted.
“Through there,” Nicklin said, urging Cham and the two women towards the narrow gate.
“Not so fast!” The speaker was a guard with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. “Nobody goes in without a pass.”
“It’s taken care of.” Nicklin handed each of the Whites a gold badge and bundled them into the gateway. The action had a galvanic effect on the crowd. Until that moment some vestige of regard for rules had held them in check, but the sight of three of their number being so arbitrarily favoured drove them forward in resentment. The guards were slammed back against the bars and there was a flurry of vicious in-fighting while they got themselves inside to safety and bolted the personnel gate.
“What are you waiting for?” The sergeant was wiping blood from his mouth as he shouted at Nicklin and Danea. “Get out of here!”
Nicklin ran with the others in the direction of the Tara. The adults were shepherding the children who were too big to be carried. As they neared the ship Nicklin saw that Montane and Kingsley were carrying the pewter oblong of Milly Montane’s coffin up the ramp. Emigrants were clustered at the foot of the long incline while others crowded up it behind the two slow-moving men. Other men, Scott Hepworth among them, were running towards the slideway control kiosk.
Nicklin barely had time to realise that the kiosk was the centre of some kind of disturbance when, without warning, his surroundings were plunged into blackness. There followed another frenzied sequence of alternations between sunlight and darkness. The changes were occurring two or three times a second, turning the entire scene into a vast stage with characters frozen in place by lightning flashes. Cries of alarm were heard as gravity underwent sickening fluctuations, creating the impression that the ground itself was rising and falling.
The stroboscopic nightmare went on for a subjective eternity—perhaps ten seconds—and then, as before, the sanity of continuous sunlight flooded back into the world.
The late arrivers, freed from paralysis, resumed the rush towards the ship, stumbling in their renewed anxiety. One man threw away a suitcase, gathered up his son and ran ahead with him. Danea and Zindee were together, urging children forward, but Nora White kept staring at Nicklin, as though somehow he were the author of all her troubles and the only one she could look to to pin everything right. A strong wind was springing up, probably in response to the contortions of the solar cage, and dust began streaming across the dry concrete.
Nicklin looked in the direction of the kiosk and saw that a confrontation seemed to be taking place between some of the mission’s workers and a man in the grey uniform of a port official. The man was framed in the doorway of the glazed booth, angrily brandishing his arms. Deducing what the argument was about, Nicklin broke away from his group and ran to the kiosk.
Hepworth turned to him as he arrived. “This character—he calls himself the slidemaster, would you believe?—is refusing to run the ship out.”
“Drag him out of there and we’ll do it ourselves.”
“He has a gun and he says he’s prepared to use it, and I think he’s the sort of schmuck that would do just that.” Hepworth’s plump lace was purple with rage and frustration. “Besides, the controls have a coded lock.”
“What about the locks on the slideway itself?”
“We burned them off.”
“Right!” Nicklin said, urislinging his rifle.
The half-dozen mission workers hastily moved out of the way, i rcating an avenue between Nicklin and the port official. He was a lung-faced man in his fifties, with cropped grey hair and a small geometrically exact moustache. His posture was severely upright and square-shouldered, and his uniform meticulously correct in every detail—except for the gun belt, which looked as though it had come from a militaria supplier. Nicklin guessed that it had been languishing in a drawer somewhere, held in reserve in the hope that the appropriate day of crisis would eventually arrive. Just my luck, he thought. A would-be Roman centurion staving off the collapse of civilisation with a book of regulations…
“There’s no time to play games,” he said. “You’re going to start the slide rolling—and you’re going to do it right now.”