He looked at her, recalling when she’d told him, last November, that she’d had enough of work in Africa and was coming home to London in May. His joy had been overwhelming.
Had she decided to stay, he wondered? Had the events of yesterday made her feel beholden to the medical centre, its staff and patients?
She turned to him. “But why wait until May, Geoff? I want out now. When we get back, I’ll tell Krasnic I’ll work till the end of the month, so he can find a replacement.”
He reached out and took her hand. “I’m delighted, but you’re absolutely sure?”
“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life, Geoff,” she said. “I want to be with you in London.”
He fetched two more beers from the cooler, and they toasted each other as the sun went down.
Beside them, ten minutes later, the tone of the announcer’s voice made Sally sit up and pull the softscreen across the table.
“And there have been developments on the starship front. First, Bob Hudson in southern Spain…”
“Thank you, Sue. Yes. Just minutes ago as I speak the ship I’ve been tracking south across Europe suddenly disappeared, along with the seven other ships converging on the Saharan desert. We have footage here of the second it happened…” The softscreen showed the European starship moving slowly over Gibraltar when, in a flash, it was gone. “It just… winked out of existence…” the reporter concluded breathlessly.
“We must interrupt you there, Bob. We cross now, live, to Amelia Thirkell who has just arrived in the press encampment a hundred kilometres north-west of Timbuktu. Amelia, there have been developments…”
“There certainly have, Sue. If I can just set the scene here. We are — that is, the world’s media — are encamped in a vast arc around what some of my colleagues have termed ‘ground zero’ — the locus where the starships will meet. The first people to arrive here reported that they could get no nearer than ten kilometres to ground zero, and seemed to be prevented by a… a force-field or barrier…” She pointed across the desert. “It’s just a hundred metres in that direction, and surrounds ground zero in a vast circle.”
Thirkell looked into the sky, an expression of wonder on her face.
“And then, literally minutes ago, just after the starships vanished, they appeared again over the darkening sands of the Sahara.”
The image panned away from the reporter and lifted into the sky, where a strange and beautiful choreography of interstellar vessels was playing itself out.
Allen found himself gripping Sally’s hand as they stared at the screen. Against the darkening skies, the eight identical starships approached a central locus, slowing as they came together. They hovered, silently, nose to nose, for all the world like the silver-blue petals of some vast intergalactic flower.
“Their nose-cones seem to be actually touching,” Thirkell reported. “It’s as if they’re fitting together to form a vast pattern. Because of each ship’s identical delta shape… they can join to form what looks like a great… snowflake.”
The BBC camera looked up at the configuration at an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees, and from this viewpoint the eight starships no longer resembled so many individual vessels but one vast, interlocked shape, a great interstellar cartwheel lambent in the light of the setting sun.
Seconds later, a bright flash emanated from the hub of the configuration, a pulse of white light that spread in a concentric circle from the conjoined nose-cones to the outer edge of the ships. It did not stop there but fell, like a vast halo, towards the desert far below.
“It’s coming down slowly, silently,” Thirkell said in a wavering voice. “I… it looks as if it will land, or hit the ground… in the exact place where the invisible barrier or force-field prevented our forward progress…”
Beside him, Sally murmured something in wonder.
The halo of white light, perhaps a hundred metres high, reached the ground and settled. Three or four reporters — and then more and more — began to walk towards the effulgent light, their shapes silhouetted against the glow.
One or two reached out, touched the wall of light; the camera zoomed in, catching their expressions of wonder as they looked back and smiled.
Suddenly, the light began to lift. The cameraman followed its ascent to the circumference of the interlocked starships.
A chorus of cries greeted the ascent. Thirkell was saying, “I… I’ve never seen anything like it. This is miraculous! I don’t know how to describe what has happened here in the middle of the Sahara, one of the driest, most inhospitable areas on the face of the Earth…”
The image on the screen showed the light settling around the rear of the ships and moving inwards, retracing its path towards the conjoined nose-cones.
The image, blurred, danced, as the cameraman panned down to show what was revealed on the ground.
Sally gasped, fingers to her lips, and Allen just stared in silent wonder.
The sands of the Sahara had been transformed. What before had been an undulating landscape of limitless sand was now a vast expanse of rolling green meadows, occasional oases, or lakes, with clusters of what appeared to be low-level domes occupying the glades and meadows.
The more audacious reporters, the same ones who had approached the white light earlier, now stepped forward and walked towards the margin of the paradise that had appeared as if by magic. Hesitantly, Thirkell followed them, tracked by her cameraman.
She approached the edge of the greening, rimmed by a circular silver collar that came to the height of her knees, and stepped over it. She climbed the gradient of a grassy knoll, staring about her in wonder, and when she came to the crest she turned and beamed at the camera.
“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry… This is the most amazing… Excuse me, I’m overcome by the most… I can only describe it as… as a feeling of optimism. I know that must sound crazy, even in the context of what has happened here, but…” She shook her head, words at last failing her.
The cameraman joined her on the summit of the knoll and panned, then zoomed in on the nearest dome. It was surrounded by what appeared to be a ring of cultivated land, where plants and shrubs grew in profusion.
And all around, hardened reporters were coming together and hugging. The image wobbled, showed a blur of Thirkell’s blouse as she embraced her cameraman. She pulled away and looked into the sky, at the underside of the starships. “And as I stand here in this… this wonderland… I can’t help but wonder when they might communicate with us…”
“And on that note,” Sue said back in the London studio, “we’ll leave it there. Let’s stay with the images from the Sahara, the momentous images I might say, while we discuss recent events with my studio guests. Ladies, gentlemen, what is to be made of these developments…?”
Allen sat back in his seat, staring into the northern darkness where the incredible events were being played out.
Sally found his hand. “What’s happening, Geoff?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But I do know that we’ll find out, in time.”
They sat side by side long into the evening, sipping their beers and watching events unfold on the softscreen.
It was after midnight when a wave of lassitude swept over him, a sudden incredible tiredness, and he tried to think back to the last time he’d slept. He’d snatched a couple of hours on the flight, and before that a few hours back in London.
He switched off the ’screen and they moved back into the hut.
They lay face to face on the bed, holding each other, and within minutes Allen was asleep.