When Zindee and he reached the perimeter of the crowd she made as if to squeeze through and claim a seat, but he held her back. She scowled up at him for a moment, but with a good-natured quirk to her lips, then took up a position where the human barricade was thin enough to let her get a good view of the speaker. Nicklin stood behind her, and it was only then that he was able to tune his senses into what the man on the platform was saying.
“…this evening’s edition of the Orangefield Recorder. The piece I am referring to was very witty. It was well written, in a sarcastic style. Perhaps its author is here with us tonight? No? It doesn’t really matter too-much if he or she is here or not, because I have no bones to pick with the anonymous scribe. That journalist was simply doing a job, stating the newspaper’s point of view on what no doubt appeared to be yet another classic case of the learned scientist revealing that he hasn’t enough sense to come in out of the rain.
“We have a saying back in Pewterspear—that being educated doesn’t stop you being stupid—so I have some sympathy with the popular vision of the scientist who splits his pants as often as he splits atoms.”
The speaker paused to allow gratified laughter from the audience to subside—then his mood changed. His stance was unaltered, even his expression remained the same, but everyone who was there knew at once that the jokes were over, that it was time to get down to the serious business of the meeting. In spite of himself, Nicklin was impressed. Assuming that the speaker was Corey Montane, Nicklin took note of the fact that he was dressed in very ordinary clothes—a plain grey coolie hat, blue short-sleeved shirt, grey slacks—not the robe or ultra-respectable business suit usually associated with hawkers of faith. Montane also spoke in normal tones, his speech completely devoid of showy mannerisms. He appeared to rely on the direct, unvarnished communication of thoughts. Nicklin liked that and, against his expectations, found himself waiting with genuine interest for the main content of Montane’s message.
“But on this occasion, my friends, I have to tell you something you have no wish to hear.” Montane’s voice, picked up by outfacing loudspeakers, could be heard rolling away into the distance through the immaculate gardens and around the redundant chimneys of Orangefield. “On this occasion, my friends, I have to tell you that not only were the astronomers in Beachhead City perfectly justified in sounding a warning—they have failed, completely, to appreciate the terrible dangers facing every man, woman and child on this huge bubble that they so naively think of as ‘the world’.
“How do I know this? I’ll tell you how I know. I know because I have been expecting an event like this for the past six years. I have been expecting it ever since I came to the realisation that Orbitsville is the Devil’s trap. It was carefully laid out by the Devil, it was oh so carefully baited by the Devil—and now it is in the process of being sprung by the Devil!”
A murmur passed through the audience, a shifting sound equally expressive of surprise, concern and derision. The glowing expanse of sun-hats, variously coloured ellipses which appeared narrower the farther they were away from Nicklin, became briefly agitated.
Montane raised his hands and waited for the disturbance to subside. “I am not omniscient. I have no direct line to God, on which He tells me what the future holds in store for His children. I do not know what the Devil’s exact plans are—all I know is that, through God’s divine mercy, we have been granted a breathing space. He could have ignored our predicament, and we would have deserved that, because it was through our own wilfulness that we left the world which He specially created for us. We turned our backs on the Eden He provided, and in our arrogance and blind stupidity we flocked to this metallic bubble. We allowed ourselves to be enticed into the trap.
“But, as I have already said, there is still a little time left. God willing, there may be enough time for some of us to escape from the Devil’s snare, and to do that we have to build starships. We have to quit Orbitsville. Earth may be denied to us for ever—a fitting punishment for our transgressions—but we can still fly to another God-given world, a new Eden, and make a new beginning for the human race.”
There was a fresh disturbance in the audience, a subdued commotion which took longer to die away, and in the midst of it could be heard voices of protest reinforced by sceptical laughter. It costs a lot of money to build starships, Nicklin thought, and you don’t need to be the Gaseous Vertebrate to work out where the money is supposed to come from. He glanced about him warily, wondering how long it would be before the collectors got to work.
“I am not asking you to accept anything on blind faith,” Montane went on, raising his voice to quell the sounds of protest. “I know only too well that faith is a very scarce commodity these days—so all I am asking you to do is to weigh up the evidence. The cold, hard, indisputable evidence. Consider, for example, the curious fact that Orbitsville’s environment is so exactly suited to…”
The realisation that—Corey Montane had to be certifiable, regardless of his rational manner, immediately caused Nicklin to lose all interest in what was being said. He shook his head, feeling oddly saddened, and was about to tap Zindee on the shoulder when she turned to him. She crooked a finger, signalling for him to bring his head down to her level.
“Jim,” she whispered, “this is another load of male ox. I think we should head over to Mr Chickley’s.”
“Good idea!” Nicklin pressed his forefinger to his lips and began to do a cartoon-style sneaking-away-in-silence walk, circling each foot in the air twice before placing it on the ground. Zindee chortled into her cupped hand and fell in at his side, doing her own version of the walk. They had taken only a few grotesque paces when Nicklin noticed they were being observed at close range by a young woman. She was holding a wicker dish, which identified her as a member of Montane’s collecting team, and her expression was one of mingled amusement and gentle reproof.
“Leaving us so soon?” she said in a low and pleasantly accented voice. “Have you not been touched by anything that Corey has said?”
Nicklin heard his mouth go into action at once. “It was all fascinating, truly fascinating, but we have some family business to attend to at the other side of town. My uncle is building himself a rock garden, you see, and he needs me to help him lift the…”
Embellishments to the basic lie—including a partial biography of the imaginary uncle—crowded into his mind, and he was selecting the most promising when, belatedly, his gaze focused on the woman.
He was totally unprepared for what happened next.
The astonishing reality of the woman flowed into him by way of his eyes, and in that instant—quite simply—he became a different person.
A major component of the starshell of emotion that burst inside him was straightforward physical lust. He wanted to go to bed with her, there and then. He craved to perform with her every act of passion that men and women had ever known and treasured as the means of giving and receiving pleasure. But there was much more to it than that. He also wanted to sleep with the woman, to experience the asexual delight of wakening beside her in the night, slipping his arm around her and nesting with her like spoons as he waited for sleep to return. He wanted to go shopping with her, to fend off doorstep salesmen together, to dab dust motes from each other’s eyes, to find out what she thought of contemporary music and of the farming of trout, to discover how far she could run, what childhood ailments she had suffered, how good she was at crosswords…