Twenty minutes into the play, the red Courier was trapped between two mirrored screens (with the horned head of Zamtyl, and the many-tongued Arkrol, reflected back and forth to infinity); the scarlet Hero offered some help but was, basically, blocked with a transparent screen. On the dice a diamond two glittered amidst black ones and fives, and Lawrence was a point away from his bid; which meant an astral battle.
As they turned their attention to the three-dimensional board which dominated higher decisions (and each of the seven markers which they played there bore the frowning face of a goddess). Bron decided it was silly to sit there fuming at Sam’s standing behind him. He turned, to make some comment—
Sam was not at his shoulder.
Bron looked around.
Sam sat at one of the readers, in the niche with Freddie and Flossie, sorting through some microfiche cards. Bron sucked his teeth in disgust and turned back to Lawrence with a, “Really—”
—when the common room lamps dropped to quarter-brightness. (Lawrence’s wrinkled chin, the tips of his fingers, and the base of the green Magician he was about to place, glowed above the vlet board’s light.) A roaring grew overhead.
The lamps flickered once, then went out completely.
Everyone looked up. Bron heard several men stand. Across the domed skylight, dark as the room, a light streaked.
Sam was standing too, now. The room lights were still out and the lights on all the room’s readers were flickering in unison.
“What in the world—” someone who had the room next to Bron (and whose name, after six months, Bron still did not know) said.
“We’re not in the world—” Lawrence said, sharply even for Lawrence.
As the room lights went on again, Bron realized with horror, excitement, or anticipation (he wasn’t sure which), the skylight was still black. Outside, the sensory shield was off!
“You know,” Sam said jovially—and loud enough for the others in the room to hear—“while you guys sit around playing war games, there is a war going on out there, that Triton is pretty close to getting involved in.” The joviality fell away; he turned from his reader and spoke out across the commons: “There’s nothing to worry about. But we’ve had to employ major, nonbelligerent defensive action. The blackout was a powercut while energy was diverted to our major force. Those streaks across the sky were ionized vapor trails from low-flying scouting equipment—”
“Ours or theirs?” someone asked.
A few people laughed. But not many.
“Could be either,” Sam said. “The flickering here was our domestic emergency power coming in; and not quite making it—the generators need a couple of seconds to warm up. I would guess ...” Sam glanced up—“that the sensory shield will be off over the city for another three or four minutes. If anyone wants to go out and see what the sky really looks like from Tethys, now’s your chance. Probably not too many people will be out—”
Everyone (except three people in the corner), including Bron, rose and herded toward the double doors. Bron looked back among the voices growing around them. The three in the corner had changed their minds and were coming.
Coming out onto the dark roof, Bron saw that the roof beside theirs was already crowded. So was the roof across the way. As he glanced back, the service door on the roof behind them opened; dozens of women hurried out, heads back, eyes up.
Someone beside Bron said, “Lord, I’d forgotten there were stars!”
Around him, people craned at the night.
Neptune, visibly spherical, mottled, milky, and much duller than the striated turquoise extravaganza on the sensory shield, was fairly high. The sun, low and perhaps half a dozen times brighter than Sirius, looked about the size of the bottom of the vlet’s dice cup. (On the sensory shield it would be a pinkish glow which, though its vermilion center was tiny, sent out pulsing waves across the entire sky.) The atmosphere above Tethys was only twenty-five hundred feet thick; a highly ionized, cold-plasma field cut it off sharply, just below the shield; with the shield extinguished, the stars were as ice-bright as from some naturally airless moon.
The dusty splatter of the Milky Way misted across the black. (On the shield, it was a band of green-shot silver.)
The sky looks smaller, Bron thought. It looks safe and close—like the roofed-over section of the u-1—yes, punctured by a star here and the sun there. But, though he knew those lights were millions of kilometers—millions of light-years away, they seemed no more than a kilometer distant. The shield’s interpenetrating pastel mists, though they were less than a kilometer up, gave a true feel of infinity.
Another light-line shot overhead: It pulsed and diffused color across the dark like a molten rainbow.
“They’re flying so low—” That was Sam, calling from near the roof’s edge—“that their ion output is exciting a portion of the shield into random discharge: that’s not really their trail you’re seeing, just an image, below it, on the—”
Someone screamed.
And Bron felt suddenly light-headed; his next heartbeat reverberated in his skull, painful as a hammer. Then, at a sudden blow to the soles of his feet, his stomach turned over—no, he didn’t vomit. But he stag-geied. And his knee hit someone who had fallen. Somewhere something crashed. Then there was a growing light. His ears ceased pounding. The wash of red dissolved from his eyes. And he was on his feet (Had he slipped to one knee? He wasn’t even sure), gasping for breath.
He looked up. The shield’s evening pastels, circled with a brilliant blue Neptune, were on again. People on his roof (and the roofs around) had fallen. People were helping each other up. His own hand, as he turned, was grasped; he pulled someone erect.
“... back inside! Everybody get back inside!” (Still Sam; but the surety had left his voice. Its authority tingled with a slight, electric fear.) “Everything’s under control now. But just get back mside—”
They herded into the slant corridor, spiraling down into the building; anxious converse broiled:
“... cut the gravity ...”
“No, they can’t do ...”
“... if the power failed! Even for a few seconds. The whole atmosphere would bulge up like a balloon and we’d lose all our pressure for ...”
“That’s impossible. They can’t cut the gravity ...”
Back in the commons, the strain (if, indeed, the city’s gravity had faltered for a second or so) had shattered one of the skylight’s panes. No pieces had fallen (it was, apparently, “shatter-proof”) but the glass, smithereened, sagged in its tesselations.
Chairs were overturned.
A reader had fallen, file drawers spilled; fiche cards scattered the orange carpet.
The astral cube had come loose from its holder and leaned askew, its god-faced markers fallen out onto the gaming board among scuttled ships and toppled soldiers.
Sam was saying to those who stood around them: “—no, this doesn’t mean that Triton will have to enter the war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Worlds. But the possibility’s been a clear one for over a year. I doubt if the odds on it have changed one way or the other—at least I assume they haven’t. Maybe this incident has just made the possibility a little more clear in your minds. Look, pull up some chairs—”
“Now you explain the gravity thing again,” Freddie said, a little nervously. He sat cross-legged on the floor, one bright-ringed hand on his father’s knee (Flossie sat in the chair behind him, both hands a-glitter in his naked lap): “You explain it very slowly, see? And very clearly. And very simply.” Freddie glanced up, then around at the others. “You understand now how you have to do it?”
Someone else said: “Sam, that’s terrifying. I mean, if it had been cut for even fifteen or twenty seconds, everyone in the city might be dead!”