“I still don’t get it.” Snook contemplated the jouncing horizon for a few seconds. “How can they get worked up over a kind of optical illusion?”
“Have you had a look at it yourself recently?”
“No.”
“Here.” Charlton felt in his breast pocket, took out a pair of blue-tinted glasses and handed them to Snook. “Have a look up there…about due east.”
Snook shrugged and put the glasses on. As he had expected, the sunlit sea appeared intolerably brilliant through the special lenses, but the sky was somewhat darker. He tilted his face upwards—and his heart seemed to lurch to a standstill. Thornton’s Planet glared down on him, a vast hurtling ball, somehow frozen in its deadly descent, dominating the whole sky with its baleful blue radiance. An ageless and superstitious dread gripped Snook, paralysing his reason, warning him that all the old orders were about to be swept away. He snatched the glasses off and returned to a world of reassuring normalcy.
“Well?” Charlton looked maliciously amused. “What did you think of our optical illusion?”
“I…” Snook searched the sky again, overjoyed at its emptiness, striving to cope with the idea of two separate realities. He half-raised the glasses, with the intention of putting them back on, then changed his mind and handed them to Charlton. “It looked real.”
“It’s just as real as the Earth, but at the same time it’s less real than a rainbow.” Charlton bounced in his seat like a horseman calling for more speed. “You’ve got to be a physicist to understand it. / don’t understand it, but I’m not worried because I trust anybody with letters after his name. These people don’t think the same way, though. They think it’s going to destroy the world.” He gestured towards the wooden huts at the outskirts of the township which was coming into view beyond the diagonal line of a hill. Black-hooded women and small children could be seen among the patchwork buildings.
Snook nodded, filled with a new understanding now that he had looked into an alien sky. “They’re bound to blame us, of course. We made the thing visible, therefore we made it exist.”
“All I know,” Charlton bellowed, “is that we’ve got to move some aeroplanes and we haven’t enough pilots. You could handle one of the old Skyvans, couldn’t you?”
“I haven’t got a licence.”
“Nobody’ll give a tinker’s about that. This is your chance for a medal, sport.”
“Great,” Snook said gloomily. He tightened his hold on the jeep’s handgrips as Charlton turned off the coast road on to a track which bore west of the town and ran directly to the airfield. Charlton made no concession to the poorer driving conditions and Snook found it difficult to avoid being thrown from the vehicle as it hammered its course among stones and potholes. He was glad when the airfield’s perimeter fence came into view, and relieved to see that only a handful of men in Malaqi costume had gathered at the entrance gate, although most of them were carrying modern rifles which denoted they were members of the Sultan’s militia. As the jeep approached the gate he saw there were other Malaqi in the uniform of regular soldiers positioned inside the fence with their rifles at the ready. His hopes that the situation was less urgent than Charlton had said began to fade. Charlton sounded a long blast on the horn and waved one arm furiously to clear the way ahead.
“You’d better slow down,” Snook shouted to him.
Charlton shook his head. “If we slow down too much we won’t get through.”
He kept going at high speed until they were close to the entrance and white-robed figures leapt to each side with angry cries. Charlton braked hard at the last possible moment and swung the jeep in between two scrapped aircraft tail fins which served as gateposts. It was looking as though his tactics had proved completely successful when an elderly Arab, who had been standing on top of a large oil drum, jumped down in front of the vehicle with upraised arms. There was no time for Charlton to react. A pulpy impact shook the jeep and the old man disappeared beneath its front end. Charlton skidded to a halt beyond the protective line of soldiers and looked at Snook with indignant eyes.
“Did you see that?” he breathed, his face losing its colour. “The stupid old bastard!”
“I think we killed him,” Snook said. He twisted in the seat, saw that a knot of men had gathered around the fallen body, and began to descend from the jeep. A bearded sergeant appeared from nowhere and roughly pushed him back into the vehicle.
“Don’t go back there,” the sergeant warned. “They will kill you.”
“We can’t just…” Snook’s words were lost as Charlton gunned the engine and the jeep, snaking its rear end, accelerated towards the line of hangars on the south side of the runway. “What are you doing?”
“The sergeant wasn’t joking,” Charlton told him grimly, and as if to punctuate his words there came an irregular burst of small arms fire. Sand fountained briefly in several places close to the jeep.
Snook sank down in his seat, trying to make himself into a smaller target, while reluctantly conceding that Charlton—although wrong-headed in many other things—was right in this respect. There were so few cars in Malaq that its people had never come to accept the inevitability of road fatalities. The relatives of an accident victim always treated his death as a case of wilful murder and, even in normal times, set out to gain revenge. Snook knew one aircraft fitter who had accidentally run over a child the previous year and who had been smuggled out of the country by air the same day to preserve his life.
He sat up straight again as the jeep passed into the shelter of a line of revetments and finally came to a halt outside the single-storey building which housed the operations room. Squadron Leader Gross, an ex-RAF man who was deputy commander of the Sultan’s Air Force, came running out to meet them. He paused, wordlessly, while three Skywhip jet, fighters took off in formation from the nearby strip. His clean-shaven face was streaked with dust.
“I heard some firing,” he said, as soon as the thunder of the jets had receded. “What happened?”
Charlton shifted uneasily and stared at his hands which were clenched on the steering wheel. “They were shooting at us, sir. One of the locals…ah…got in the way as I was coming in through the gate.”
“Dead?”
“He was pretty old.”
“Trust you, Charlton,” Gross said bitterly. “Christ Almighty! As if things weren’t bad enough!”
Charlton cleared his throat. “I managed to find Snook, sir. He’s agreed to fly a Skyvan out.”
“There are only two Skyvans still here—and they’re not going anywhere.” Gross pointed into the shade of the nearest hangar where two of the boxy old aircraft were sitting. The starboard propeller of one had chewed through a wingtip of the other, apparently as a consequence of inept taxi-ing at close quarters.
Snook jumped down on to the hot concrete. “I’ll have a look at the damage.”
“No, I’m moving all civilian personnel up north till this blows over. You’d better go with Charlton in his Skywhip.” Gross fixed Charlton with an unfriendly stare. “I wish you a safe journey.”
“Thank you.” Snook turned and ran behind Charlton who was already halfway to the waiting jet. He climbed into the rear seat and put on the intercom headset while Charlton spun up the engine. The aircraft surged forward almost at once, jolting solidly on its undercarriage, and wheeled on to the runway. Snook was still struggling with his safety straps when the rumbling shocks coming up through the airframe abruptly ceased, letting him know they were airborne. He examined his clothing—dark blue silk shirt, pale blue shorts and lightweight sandals—shocked at its incongruity amid the functional machinery of the cockpit. His watch showed the time to be 01.06, which meant that only nine minutes earlier he had been sitting in the hotel with his watered gin.