Professor Sharp has tried all the official channels, but Mr Bliss doesn’t want the population alarmed. He has serious issues for them to think about: national security: patriotic duty; protecting freedom; pre-empting the enemy. A meteoroid would upstage him totally. The government refuses to issue any warnings. If there’s to be alarm, Mr Bliss means to cause it. And the media are surfeited with cosmic disasters; the weekend newspapers have all run ‘exclusives’ about tomorrow’s End of the World Spectacular: radio and TV news already have Davey Lucas booked for the morning. When Professor Sharp, not half so well known (though infinitely better qualified) with a boring voice and a skin problem, rings up and says there is an cometoid coming, they say they will ring him back, and laugh.
Now Sharp and his colleagues think laterally.
When the first news about the cometoid reached him from the Observatory – Professor Sharp himself, ringing urgently – Davey was cockahoop to be called by the man who so recently dismissed him as a charlatan, in the thick of the outcry at the weekend. He didn’t really listen to the content of the call. Obviously Sharp wanted to get himself on TV. Davey cut in and said he was too busy to talk, he would try to get back to the professor tomorrow.
He was, in fact, busy; he was choosing shirts; the blue was his favourite, but poor for TV; he had been warned that Bliss would be wearing red, to project a positive, optimistic image, and most colours seemed to clash with it. He was starting to think he would fall back on white: white, white, white delight: he had taken just a little of his white powder, just enough to keep dancing above the gulf that very occasionally opened beneath him, way beneath him, he was rising, rising … The performer’s adrenalin is already in him, a net of wired nerves winding slowly higher, he has left the foothills, he will soon be flying –
Then Sharp’s voice came again from far below. It was faint, pointless. Sharp understood nothing, or else he, Davey, understood nothing.
Besides, the drugs are dancing today. Davey has also taken one more valium than he usually uses before his show. (Delorice didn’t like it, but she was at the office. He wished she were here to hear his speech. He wished the Observatory would stop ringing.)
Davey took another valium, and lay on the bed, and tried to think what his life was about. Nothing at all came; just blankness. He thought, my parents. Lola. Delorice. But they had no faces, they were just a list. They seemed to come, though, with a weight of pain, as if they were slipping away into the dark, as if something very heavy might fall on them, soundlessly, slowly, from very far away. Usually the valium made him numb. He took another tablet, irritably; thought, with sudden clarity, about his step-grandmother, Sylvia, Harold’s mother, the sense of white nothingness after her heart attack, the nagging question, where could she have gone? Where do we go, he thought, mind slurring, why are we going, going, gone … The drugs were failing to keep their promise, to hold him tight in their sealed white moment; terror and loss were leaking in.
He woke at six p.m.; the phone was ringing, but he rushed to the bathroom, and vomited. His whole being was pulled out of his throat, surge after surge of wracking retching. After he was finished, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, felt suddenly sober. His head was clear. The fog was gone.
Davey goes and listens to his messages to see if he has dreamed it all, but the professor’s messages all say the same thing, and he understands that the drugs were the dream, the drugs and the shirts and the money and the palace, his weekly programmes, his teenage fans, the scripts he reads that someone else has written, the nonsense about the alignments of the planets on which he has wasted so much spacetime, the second-rate telescopes he advertises, the makeup girls who fake-tan his skin.
There is a noise at the back of the house, and he turns to look out of the basement window, hoping Delorice has changed her mind and come home, though she’s due to meet him at the Gala. He has to talk to her, to tell her everything. He loves her completely; he needs her to love him, but first she has to know the whole truth about him. He thinks he can trust her to go on loving him.
Something else is standing on the wall in the light. The fox, his fox, alert, intent, red as the earth, its breath steaming. Davey looks out, and the fox looks in.
A moment later, Davey picks up his mobile and calls Kylie Spheare to apologize.
Davey rings round the taxi firms so he can work on the journey to the Observatory; he doesn’t want Professor Sharp to think him a fool, though he’s uneasily aware that he has been a fool: the floods of letters, phone-calls, e-mails challenging last weekend’s saturation publicity for his Planets Line-Up! programme has taught him he is a bit of a fool, though the TV station was sanguine – (‘It’s a response, Davey, it’s great, it shows the whole world is going to watch us’). He calls Delorice, again and again, but her phone battery’s flat, though she doesn’t know it, the thing lies dead in the bottom of her handbag, she is walking round the Gala looking for him, and the tender electric artery between them is broken.
The cab carries Davey on the motorway through the flooded land on the way to the Observatory. The orange sky over the city gradually gives way to silvered darkness. Looking up, as he does, every now and then, from the rough calculations on his palm-top, he glimpses the constellations and shivers. They look white, distant, as they always do. Tonight’s starlight set off towards him thousands and thousands of years ago. But the planets, thinks Davey, looking at the moon, which is bright, today, on this cold clear night, the planets are a thousand times nearer. Usually the planets lie well-spaced; they are plot-able, predictable, as novels. The asteroids and cometoids are wilder, more eccentric, shooting far out in space, far beyond our own galaxy, then plunging back steeply in to the centre, nearer than the planets, crossing and re-crossing them. Each time the orbits are a little different, and each changed orbit changes other orbits, though most of the time, in a short human lifetime, they all whiz safely round the asteroid belt.
But every so often, the pattern fractures. Maybe the galaxy is bored with balance. Maybe it gets tired of a life-form’s persistence. Perhaps it wants to make room for something different, something less myopic than the city-dwellers …
Not so very rarely in a human lifetime, many times in a hundred years, a near-earth object careens towards us. The tiny ones flare into golden dust, but sometimes a large one keeps right on going.
Then senior professors call TV astronomers.
Then stories enter a phase of chaos.