Even while sitting, as he now was, sipping tea on Orangefield’s sun-dappled common, the principal element of his thoughts was bafflement over the fact that virtually nobody else was aware of having fallen into a devilish trap. What kind of mass insanity, what form of collective blindness, had suddenly afflicted humanity upon the discovery of Orbitsville?
The people of two centuries ago were products of a civilisation which had always been forced to fight tooth-and-nail simply to remain in existence. They were hard, cynical and suspicious; they knew the cosmos provided no free lunches—and yet when Orbitsville had been found they had swarmed to it like wasps to the honey pot.
Nobody had said: Wait a minute! Let’s think this thing over before we do anything hasty. What we have here is a huge sphere made of some material which defies analysis, but which has artificial gravity. It also has force lines around its sun in the form of a cage which has been beautifully engineered to provide night and day, and a progression of seasons. The thing is obviously an artefact! It seduces us by promising to meet all our needs, to fulfil all our dreams. It is too good to be true—therefore it has to be a TRAP!
Montane had no idea who had created Orbitsville, but he knew in his heart and soul that the makers—those who had schemed to pervert the course of human destiny—were no friends of God. Orbitsville had remained quiescent for what men regarded as a long time, two whole centuries, but that was a brief span in the context of the history of the universe. A carnivorous flower always remained motionless until its victim was far back in its throat, beyond any possibility of escape.
There had been reports recently of glowing green lines moving across the surface of the great sphere, and to Montane they were the equivalent of the first hungry quiverings of a Venus fly-trap’s jaws, just before the trap was sprung…
His thoughts returned to more mundane matters as he again caught sight of Nibs Affleck in the distance. A fleck of white showed that he had obtained the newspaper, and a rapid change of position indicated that he was still running. Montane half-smiled as he tried to recall the times when he too had been blessed with so much physical energy that he could afford to burn some of it off in needless exertion. At sixty, he still looked vigorous—with his glossy dark hair, unlined face and straight back—but recently his capacity for manual work had been greatly diminished. He did not suspect any furtively gnawing illness; it was just that his mental burden seemed to weigh him down more with each passing year. Mettle fatigue, he had dubbed it. The spirit could become poisoned with the toxins of weariness in the same way as an overworked body.
Affleck slid to a halt beside him, his complexion rendered even more hectic through running in the heat. “Here’s your paper, Corey. I got you one.”
“I can see you did.” Montane set his cup on the ground. “How much did it cost?”
“I wouldn’t take any money from you, Corey,” Affleck said, looking offended. “It was nothing anyhows—only a quarter.”
“Thank you, Nibs.” Montane considered pressing the money on Affleck, then realised the youngster would get the maximum value out of it in the form of the giving pleasure. He raised a hand to acknowledge Affleck’s departure in the direction of the marquee, then turned his attention to the newspaper. It was large and unwieldy, like those in historic videos, but it had been laser-printed in a modern open typeface—the publishers had not gone overboard in their devotion to the past and its ways. Montane, having no wish to strain his eyes, nodded in approval.
The front page lead-headlined MAIN STREET TO STAY IN THE DARK—was a long piece about a wrangle in the town council caused by some local businessmen applying for permission to erect illuminated signs on the facades of their stores. The other reports dealt with such issues as an unfamiliar type of tough ground-hugging weed being found on a farm, and the mayor’s wife putting on an exhibition of her own water-colours.
Montane scanned the columns with indulgent interest, and was about to go to the next page when he noticed a very brief story right at the bottom of the sheet. It was the mention of astronomers in the sub-heading which caught his eye—he had long been sensitised to anything dealing with Orbitsville’s relationship to the natural galaxy. The piece read:
EMBARRASSED ASTRONOMERS
If anybody notices a pink glow on the horizon tonight, in the general direction of Beachhead, it will not be caused by that city’s surfeit of stoplights. Instead, it will be emanating from the red faces of our overpaid stargazers who today were forced to admit that they have lost visual contact with our known universe!
Professor Carpenter of the Garamond University tried to explain away this minor act of carelessness—after all, anybody could mislay a few billion galaxies—by claiming that Orbitsville has moved to a new position in space!
Take heart anybody who noticed a peculiar lurching sensation during the night. It was not the foundations of your houses shifting—just the foundations of science!
Montane’s heart had begun a powerful thudding as he lowered the newspaper to his lap and stared blindly into the distance. He was neither deceived nor reassured by the anti-science, debunking tone of the report. He would have to verify the story, of course, but it was evident to him that some astounding cosmic event had occurred. The all-important questions now were: Had the Orbitsville trap been fully sprung, or was this some preliminary stage? Were all of Orbitsville’s inhabitants doomed, or could there yet be time for a few of them to escape by starship to a natural and God-given planet? Was he, by virtue of not having done enough during his six years of awareness, responsible for the ultimate demise of the human race?
Racked by guilt and dread, he rose to his feet and walked quickly towards the marquee, where his followers were laughing as their day’s labours came to an end.
Chapter 4
In preparation for leaving the library, Nicklin checked over his list of deliveries and found there were three that he could conveniently drop off at customers’ houses on his way into town. They were softbacks—a Western by Jack Schaefer; a slim volume on the design and making of different shapes of paper gliders; and a cheerfully illustrated treatise on the railways of Victorian England. The books were slightly bulkier than they would have been when first printed, because of the permatome coating which made the pages virtually indestructible, but otherwise it was hard to tell from their condition that they were well over two centuries old.
It occurred to Nicklin that the library trade might be adversely affected if the astronomers took any length of time to sort themselves and their equipment out and re-establish contact with Earth. Like most other library operators, he dealt mainly with the past. Orbitsville had produced practically no literature of distinction, or even works of passing interest—a consequence, the experts claimed, of all social pressures and constraints having been removed. Competition and conflict had always been the mainsprings of great art, and on Orbitsville—with free land equivalent to five billion Earths available—there was little reason for people to compete for anything, and even less for going to war. As an inevitable result, the experts went on, the few individuals who bothered to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, were unable to produce anything that was not passionless, shallow and trivial.
Nicklin doubted if his customers in low-tech Orangefield had bothered to analyse their tastes in reading matter to that extent, but he knew they showed a solid preference for books which had been published on pre-migration Earth. They seemed to be motivated by nostalgia, not for the Old World itself but for the feel of a period characterised by cosy security and comfortable certitudes. The market was too diffuse to interest publishers on Orbitsville, so the small commercial vacuum had been filled by LOG—the Library Owners’ Guild—which imported containers of miscellaneous books scavenged from the abandoned towns and cities of Earth.