“That brat needs a lesson in manners,” Brannigan said.
Zindee studied him for a moment, decided it could be imprudent to cross swords, and moved a little closer to Nicklin. “Have you heard the news, Jim?” she whispered.
Maxy cupped a hand to his ear, intruding. “What news? Speak up a bit, kid.”
Zindee hesitated, but Nicklin—determined to develop the situation—gave her a nod of encouragement. “Go ahead, Zindee—what is it?”
“It’s just been on our television—the world has moved!”
Nicklin half-smiled as he looked down at Zindee. Her face was round and freckled, with a chin which was tiny and yet determined, and with wide-set eyes which beaconed intelligence and integrity. Her features were perfect, those of an archetypal little girl as envisaged by generations of artists, and over the years Nicklin had learned how to read that face. His smile faded as he saw the anxiety there.
“What do you mean, Zindee?” he said. “How could the world move?”
“Somebody’s been on the job,” Maxy put in with a guffaw and switched to a falsetto voice. “Did the world move for you, darling?”
“It’s just been on television,” Zindee insisted. “All the stars are different, Jim. All the ships that were docked outside the portals have disappeared. There was a woman who had just arrived from Earth… Silvia London, I think she was called… and she was crying a lot… and she said her ship had vanished…”
“The Council should never have allowed television to come into Orangefield,” Brannigan said, shaking his huge head—in spite of his violent streak and weakness for alcohol, he was quite puritanical and righteous in most other aspects of his life. “It rots people’s minds, that’s all it does, with them trashy three-dees. That kid’s a perfect example—she don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”
Nicklin did not even subscribe to the sound service which was cabled in from Weston Bridge, but within the last few days he had heard talk of an odd phenomenon which was supposed to be affecting Orbitsville’s great shell. It had been said that luminous green lines were moving across both surfaces of the sphere. There had been no way for him to verify the report in person, because the soil and rock strata were more than a thousand metres deep in the Orangefield region. In any case, he had a subconscious desire to forget that he lived in the interior of a shell of ylem which was 320 million kilometres in diameter and only eight centimetres thick.
A product of two centuries of migration, during which virtually the entire population of Earth had moved to Orbitsville, Nicklin thought of his environment simply as “the world” and lived his life exactly as he would have done on a normal planet. But the shining green lines had been something entirely new, and some of the townsfolk had mooted the idea that they were an omen, a prelude to some great event…
“Come on, Zindee!” Nicklin took the child’s hand in his and walked with her towards the door of the shop, feeling more relief over his fortuitous escape than concern about any putative threat to his pleasantly humdrum existence. “Let’s go over to your place and get ourselves a better idea of what this thing is all about.”
“I was talking to you,” Brannigan said, scowling.
Nicklin flicked Maxy’s shoulder as he passed him. “See to Mr Brannigan for me—and don’t forget to give him his bill.”
Chapter 2
Cham and Nora White—Zindee’s parents—had a veterinary practice which they operated from their home on the plot next to Nicklin’s land. The fact that they dealt solely with small animals made the couple appear almost as idiosyncratic as Nicklin in the eyes of a sizeable section of the community. The farmers of the area adjudged maintaining the health of livestock to be a worthy occupation, but devoting one’s energies to the care of sickly cats, hamsters and the like was regarded as—to say the least of it—a mildly eccentric form of behaviour.
Being classed as oddities had created something of a bond between Nicklin and the adult Whites, but that was almost as far as the relationship went. They were remarkably similar in appearance for a couple with no blood ties—medium build with a tendency to chubbiness, sharp noses, florid complexions and a general red-gold-brown coloration. Nicklin quite liked the Whites’ squirrelly appearance, but their unfailing industriousness and lack of humour had deterred him from trying to build up a close friendship.
Unexpectedly, in view of their Calvinistic outlook, they were among the few people in Orangefield who subscribed to the television service which could be piped in at some expense from Weston Bridge. Nicklin knew that Cham and Nora atoned for the self-indulgence by restricting their viewing to the evening hours, and therefore he was surprised on entering the house to find them seated near the set in the main room. It was an indication that Zindee’s obvious concern was justified, that something really serious was taking place.
“Morning, Jim!” Cham called out, gesturing for him to sit down. “What do you think of this caper?”
Nickin nodded a greeting in response to Nora White’s tense smile. “I don’t know what to think yet. Zindee gave me the bare details.”
“It was Zindee who alerted us—that’s why we’re in here at this time of the day,” Cham said, defending himself against any possible charge of sinful sloth. “Can you credit this? They’re saying that Orbitsville has moved!”
Nicklin released Zindee’s hand and lowered himself into a plumply cushioned armchair. “How do they know?”
“Apparently it’s either the universe or us. Look!”
Nicklin directed his attention to the televiewer stage which occupied one corner of the room. The scale control had been set for roughly half-size projection, with the result that the stage appeared to be populated by groups of perfectly formed midgets, male and female, some of whom were obviously distraught. The grassy surface on which they were standing was littered with discarded space suits, some of them resembling corpses. It was obvious that there had been little or no development of the area—the background, apart from a scattering of single-storey prefabs, was the featureless green of Orbitsville’s ubiquitous savannahs.
“Where is that?” Nicklin said.
“Portal 36. There’s nothing there but an agricultural research station.” Cham paused as a series of ripples swept through the scene, momentarily distorting the human figures and reminding the viewers that those seemingly real and solid human figures were only bi-laser projections, holomorphs. “We were warned the image quality could be pretty poor. Apparently all the permanent outside antennae and reflector satellites have disappeared. The TV engineers are working with lash-ups.”
“This is a kind of amateur broadcast, anyway,” Nora White added as Zindee went to sit on her knee. “The network is showing it because those people were in the middle of disembarking when their ship vanished. They actually saw it happen.”
Cham flapped one hand in an appeal for silence. “Listen to this guy—he was on before.”
“We are about to have another word with Rick Renard, the owner of the Hawkshead, the cargo ship which was attempting to dock at Portal 36 when—literally—it vanished into nothingness,” an invisible commentator said. The televiewer scene changed, flowing outwards around Renard until he occupied the centre of the stage. He was a curly-haired young man with the sort of buoyant and healthy plumpness which is underpinned by well-developed muscle.