The Tugging

Ramsey Campbell

I

When Ingels awoke he knew at once he’d been dreaming again. There was an image, a memory clamouring faintly but urgently at the edge of his mind; he snatched at it, but it was gone. He swung himself off the crumpled bed. Hilary must have gone to do her research in the library hours ago, leaving him a cold breakfast. Outside hung a chill glazed blue sky, and frost was fading from the windowpane.

The dream continued to nag at his mind. He let it pluck at him, hoping that the nagging would turn by itself into memory. He slowed himself down, dressing slowly, eating slowly, to allow the memory to catch up. But there was only the insistence, like a distant recollection of a plucked tooth. Through the wall he could hear a radio announcer’s voice in the next flat, a blurred cadence rising as if to leap a barrier that obscured its words completely. It buzzed at his mind, bumbling. He washed up quickly, irritably, and hurried out.

And found that he couldn’t look up at the sky.

The feeling seized his neck like a violent cramp, forcing his head down. Around him women were wheeling prams in which babies and groceries fought for space, dogs were playing together in the alleys, buses quaked at bus stops, farting. But on Ingels, pressing down from a clear rather watery blue expanse to which he couldn’t even raise his eyes, weighed a sense of intolerable stress, as if the calm sky were stretched to splitting: as if it were about to split and to let his unformed fear through at him.

A bus braked, a long tortured scraping squeal. When Ingels recovered from his heart-clutching start he’d jolted off the fear. He ran for the bus as the last of the queue shuffled on. Scared of the sky indeed, he thought. I’ve got to get more sleep. Pill myself to sleep if I have to. His eyes felt as if floating in quicklime.

He sat among the coughing shoppers. Across the aisle a man shook his head at the tobacco-smoke, snorting like a horse. A woman threw herself and three carrier bags on to a seat, patting them reassuringly, and slammed her predecessor’s open window. Ingels rummaged in his briefcase. He’d left one notebook at his own flat, he discovered, muttering. He flicked through the notes for his column, holding them flat on his briefcase. Wonder if the fellow whose knee I’m fighting recognises my style. World’s champion egotist, he rebuked himself, hiding the notes with his forearm. Don’t worry, he won’t steal the copyright, he scoffed, pulling his arm back. He put the notes away. They looked as bleary as he felt.

He gazed around the bus, at the flat stagnant smoke, at the ranks of heads like wig-blocks, and settled on headlines over the shoulder in front of him:

IS THE SOLAR SYSTEM ON TOW?

Six months ago an amateur astronomer wrote to us,
warning that a planet might pass dangerously close to Earth.

THE ASTRONOMER ROYAL’S COMMENT:
“UTTER TWADDLE”.

Now the world’s leading astronomers have agreed
to let us have the facts.

TODAY WE TELL ALL.

In an exclusive interview

But he’d turned over, to the smaller print of the story. Ingels sat back again, remembering how the Herald had received a copy of that letter six months ago. They hadn’t published it, and the letters editor had gazed at Ingels pityingly when he’d suggested they might at least follow it up. “I suppose you arts people need imagination,” he’d said. Ingels grimaced wryly, wondering how they would handle the story in tonight’s edition. He leaned forward, but the man had reached the editorial comment: “Even if his aim was to prevent panic, are we paying the Astronomer Royal to tell us what too many people are now suggesting was a lie?”

Ingels glanced out of the window. Offices flashed past, glazed displays of figures at desks, the abrupt flight of perspective down alleys with a shock like a fall in a dream, more displays. The offices thinned out and aged as the bus gathered speed towards the edge of Brichester. Nearly there, Ingels thought, then realised with a leap from his seat that he’d passed the Herald building three stops back. For a second he knew where he’d been heading. So what? he thought savagely, the rims of his eyes rusty and burning, as he clattered downstairs. But once he was on the street he wished that he’d thought to remember: now he couldn’t imagine where he could have been going in that direction.

BRICHESTER HERALD: BRICHESTER’S EVENING VOICE. The iron poem (two-thirds of a haiku, he’d thought until he grew used to it) clung to the bricks above him. The foyer was quiet. He wondered how long it would be before the presses began to thump heartily, disproving the soundproofing. Not long, and he had to write his column.

His mind felt flat and empty as the elevator. He drifted numbly through the hundred-yard open-plan office, past the glancing heads behind glass personalised in plastic. Some looked away quickly, some stared, some smiled. My God, I don’t even know his name, Ingels thought of several. “Hello, Moira,” he said. “How’s it going, Bert.” Telephones shrilled, were answered, their calls leapt prankishly across the floor. Reporters sidestepped through the aisles. Smells of deodorant and sweat, tang of ink, brandished paper, scurrying typewriters, hasty agitated conferences.

Bert had been following him to his desk. “Don’t wait for your personal bulletin,” Bert said, throwing a telex sheet on the desk. “The latest on your wandering planet.”

“Don’t tell me I’ve convinced you at last.”

“No chance,” Bert said, retreating. “Just so you don’t start turning the place upside down for it.”

Ingels read the sheet, thinking: I could have told them this six months ago. The Americans had admitted that an unmanned probe was well on its way to photograph the wanderer. He rested his elbow on the desk and covered his eyes. Against the restless patches of light he almost glimpsed what he’d dreamed. He started, bewildered; the noise of the newspaper poured into him. Enough, he thought, sorting out his notes.

He typed the television review—a good play from Birmingham, when are we going to see a studio in Brichester—and passed it to Bert. Then he pawed desultorily at the day’s accumulation on his desk. Must go and see my folks this week. Might drain my tension a little. He turned over a brown envelope. A press ticket, elaborately pretty lettering: exhibition of associational painting—the new primitivism and surrealism. Ug, he thought, and whatever you say to surrealists. Private view this afternoon. Which means now. “You can have a local arts review tomorrow,” he said, showing the ticket to Bert, and went out.

Once out of the building his mind teetered like a dislocated compass. Again the sky seemed brittle glass, ready to crack, and when he moved to shake off the obsession he found himself urged towards the edge of Brichester. A woman flinched from him as he snarled himself to a halt. “Sorry,” he called after her. Whatever’s in that direction, it isn’t the show I’ve been invited to. But there must be something there. Maybe I went there when I was young. Have a look when I can. Before I sleepwalk there.

Although he could have taken a bus into Lower Brichester, where the exhibition was, he walked. Clear my head, perhaps, if I don’t get high on petrol first. The sky was thin and blue; nothing more, now. He swung his briefcase. Haven’t heard of these artists before. Who knows, they could be good.

He hadn’t been through Lower Brichester for months, and was taken aback by its dereliction. Dogs scrabbled clattering in gouged shop-fronts, an uprooted streetlamp lay across a road, humped earth was scattered with disembowelled mattresses, their entrails fluttering feebly. He passed houses where one window was blinded with brick, the next still open and filmy with a drooping curtain. He examined his ticket. Believe it or not, I’m on the right track.

Soon whole streets were derelict. There was nothing but Ingels, the gaping houses and uneven pavements, the discreet sky, his footsteps alone; the rush of the city was subdued, quiescent. The houses went by, shoulder to shoulder, ribs open to the sky, red-brick fronts revealing their jumble of shattered walls and staircases. Ingels felt a lurking sympathy for the area in its abandonment, its indifference to time. He slowed down, strolling. Let myself go a bit. The private view’s open for hours yet. Relax. He did, and felt an irrational impulse pleading with him.

And why not, he thought. He glanced about: nobody. Then he began to lope through the deserted streets, arms hanging, fingers almost touching the road. Unga bunga, he thought. One way to prepare myself for the primitives, I suppose.

He found his behaviour touched a memory; perhaps the memory was its source. A figure running crouched through ruins, somewhere nearby. A kind of proof of virility. But they hadn’t been deserted city streets, he thought, loping. Just flat blocks of black rock in which square windows gaped. Abandoned long before but hardly affected by time. A figure running along a narrow path through the stone, not looking at the windows.

Clouds were creeping into the sky; darkness was suffusing the streets around him. Ingels ran, not looking at the houses, allowing them to merge with the memory they touched. It was coming clearer. You had to run all the way along one of the stone paths. Any path at all, for there were no intersections, just a straight unbroken run. You had to run fast, before something within the windows became aware of you, rather as a carnivorous plant becomes aware of a fly. The last part of the run was the worst, because you knew that at any moment something would appear in all the windows at once: things that, although they had mouths, were not faces—

Ingels stumbled wildly as he halted, glaring up at the empty windows of the houses. What on earth was that? he thought distractedly. Like one of those dreams I used to have, the ones that were so vivid. Of course, that’s what it must have been. These streets reminded me of one of them. Though the memory felt much older, somehow. From the womb, no doubt, he shouted angrily at his pounding heart.

When he reached the exhibition he walked straight past it. Returning, he peered at the address on the ticket. My God, this is it. Two of a street of dingy but tenanted terraced houses had been run together; on the front door of one, in lettering he’d taken for graffiti, were the words LOWER BRICHESTER ARTS LAB. He recalled how, when it had opened last year, the invitations to the opening had arrived two days later. The project he’d described after a hurried telephone interview hadn’t looked at all like this. Oh well, he thought, and went in.

In the hall, by the reception desk, two clowns were crawling about with children on their backs. One of the children ran behind the desk and gazed up at Ingels. “Do you know where the exhibition is?” he said. “Up your arse,” she said, giggling. “First floor up,” said one of the clowns, who Ingels now realised was a made-up local poet, and chased the children into a playroom full of inflatables.

The first floor was a maze of plywood partitions in metal frames. On the partitions hung paintings and sketches. As Ingels entered, half a dozen people converged on him, all the artists save one, who was trying to relight a refractory cone of incense. Feeling outnumbered, Ingels wished he’d made it to the maze. “You’ve just missed the guy from Radio Brichester,” one said. “Are you going to talk to all of us, like him?” another asked. “Do you like modern art?” “Do you want coffee?”

“Now leave him be,” said Annabel Pringle, as Ingels recognised her from her picture on the cover of the catalogue. ”They’re new to exhibiting, you see, you can’t blame them. I mean, this whole show is my idea but their enthusiasm. Now I can explain the principles as you go round if you like, or you can read them in the catalogue.”

“The latter, thanks.” Ingels hurried into the maze, opening the typed catalogue. A baby with an ear-trumpet, which was 2: Untitled. 3 was a man throwing his nose into a wastebasket, and Untitled. 4: Untitled. 5, 6, 7—Well, their paintings are certainly better than their prose, Ingels thought. The incense unravelled ahead of him. A child playing half-submerged in a lake. A blackened green-tinged city shouldering up from the sea. A winged top hat gliding over a jungle. Suddenly Ingels stopped short and turned back to the previous painting. He was sure he had seen it before.

22: Atlantis. But it wasn’t like any Atlantis he’d seen pictured. The technique was crude and rather banal, obviously one of the primitives, yet Ingels found that it touched images buried somewhere in him. Its leaning slabs of rock felt vast, the sea poured from its surfaces as if it had just exploded triumphantly into sight. Drawn closer, Ingels peered into the darkness within a slab of rock, beyond what might be an open doorway. If there were the outline of a pale face staring featurelessly up from within the rock, its owner must be immense. If there were, Ingels thought, withdrawing: but why should he feel there ought to be?

When he’d hurried around the rest of the exhibition he tried to ask about the painting, but Annabel Pringle headed him off. “You understand what we mean by associational painting?” she demanded. “Let me tell you. We select an initial idea by aleatory means.”

“Eh?” Ingels said, scribbling.

“Based on chance. We use the I Ching, like John Cage. The American composer, he originated it. Once we have the idea we silently associate from it until each of us has an idea they feel they must communicate. This exhibition is based on six initial ideas. You can see the diversity.”

“Indeed,” Ingels said. “When I said eh I was being an average reader of our paper, you understand. Listen, the one that particularly interested me was number 22. I’d like to know how that came about.”

“That’s mine,” one young man said, leaping up as if it were House.

“The point of our method,” Annabel Pringle said, gazing at the painter, “is to erase all the associational steps from your mind, leaving only the image you paint. Of course Clive here wouldn’t remember what led up to that painting.”

“No, of course,” Ingels said numbly. “It doesn’t matter. Thank you. Thanks all very much.” He hurried downstairs, past a sodden clown, and into the street. In fact it didn’t matter. A memory had torn its way through his insomnia. For the second time that day he realised why something had looked familiar, but this time more disturbingly. Decades ago he had himself dreamed the city in the painting.

II

Ingels switched off the television. As the point of light dwindled into darkness it touched off the image in him of a gleam shooting away into space. Then he saw that the light hadn’t sunk into darkness but into Hilary’s reflection, leaning forward from the cane rocking-chair next to him, about to speak. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he said, scribbling notes for his review.

The programme had shown the perturbations which the wandering planet had caused in the orbits of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, and had begun and ended by pointing out that the planet was now swinging away from the Solar System; its effect on Earth’s orbit would be negligible. Photographs from the space-probe were promised within days. Despite its cold scientific clarity (Ingels wrote) and perhaps without meaning to, the programme managed to communicate a sense of foreboding, of the intrusion into and interference with our familiar skies. “Not to me it didn’t,” Hilary said, reading over his shoulder.

“That’s sad,” he said. “I was going to tell you about my dreams.”

“Don’t if I wouldn’t understand them either. Aren’t I allowed to criticise now?”

“Sorry. Let’s start again. Just let me tell you a few of the things that have happened to me. I was thinking of them all today. Some of them even you’ll have to admit are strange. Make some coffee and I’ll tell you about them.”

When she’d brought the coffee he waited until she sat forward, ready to be engrossed, long soft black hooks of hair angling for her jawbone. “I used to dream a lot when I was young,” he said. “Not your average childhood dream, if there is such a thing. There was one I remember, about these enormous clouds of matter floating in outer space, forming very slowly into something. I mean very slowly … I woke up long before they got there, yet while I was dreaming I knew whatever it was would have a face, and that made me very anxious to wake up. Then there was another where I was being carried through a kind of network of light, on and on across intersections for what felt like days, until I ended up on the edge of this gigantic web of paths of light. And I was fighting to stop myself going in, because I knew that hiding behind the light there was something old and dark and shapeless, something dried-up and evil that I couldn’t make out. I could hear it rustling like an old dry spider. You know what I suddenly realised that web was? My brain, I’d been chasing along my nervous system to my brain. Well, leave that one to the psychologists. But there were odd things about these dreams—I mean, apart from all that. They always used to begin the same way, and always about the same time of the month.”

“The night of the full moon?” Hilary said, slurping coffee.

“Funnily enough, yes. Don’t worry, I didn’t sprout midnight shadow or anything. But some people are sensitive to the full moon, that’s well enough documented. And I always used to begin by dreaming I could see the full moon over the sea, way out in the middle of the ocean. I could see the reflection resting on the water, and after a while I’d always find myself thinking it wasn’t the moon at all but a great pale face peering up out of the ocean, and I’d panic. Then I wouldn’t be able to move and I’d know that the full moon was pulling at something deep in the ocean, waking it up. I’d feel my panic swelling up in me, and all of a sudden it would burst and I’d be in the next dream. That’s how it happened, every time.”

“Didn’t your parents know? Didn’t they try to find out what was wrong?”

“I don’t know what you mean by wrong. But yes, they knew eventually, when I told them. That was after I had the idea my father might be able to explain. I was eleven then and I’d had strange feelings sometimes, intuitions and premonitions and so forth, and sometimes I’d discovered they’d been my father’s feelings too.”

“I know all about your father’s feelings,” Hilary said. “More than he knows about mine.”

Soon after they’d met, Ingels had taken her to see his parents. She’d felt his father had been too stiffly polite to her, and when she’d cross-examined Ingels he’d eventually admitted that his father had felt she was wrong for him, unsympathetic to him. “You were going to let me tell you about my dreams,” he said. “I told my father about the sea dream and I could see there was something he wasn’t saying. My mother had to make him tell me. Her attitude to the whole thing was rather what yours would have been, but she told him to get it over with, he’d have to tell me sometime. So he told me he’d sometimes shared his father’s dreams without either of them ever knowing why. And he’d had several of my dreams when he’d been young, until one night in the mid-twenties—early 1925, I think he said. Then he’d dreamed a city had risen out of the sea. After that he’d never dreamed again. Well, maybe hearing that was some kind of release for me, because the next time I dreamed of the city too.”

“You dreamed of a city,” Hilary said.

“The same one. I told him about it next morning, details of it he hadn’t told me, that were the same in both our dreams. I was watching the sea, the same place as always. Don’t ask me how I knew it was always the same. I knew. One moment I was watching the moon on the water, then I saw it was trembling. The next moment an island rose out of the ocean with a roaring like a waterfall, louder than that, louder than anything I’ve ever heard while awake; I could actually feel my ears bursting. There was a city on the island, all huge greenish blocks with sea and seaweed pouring off them. And the mud was boiling with stranded creatures, panting and bursting. Right in front of me and above me and below me there was a door. Mud was trickling down from it, and I knew that the great pale face I was terrified of was behind the door, getting ready to come out, opening its eyes in the dark. I woke up then, and that was the end of the dreams. Say they were only dreams if you like. You might find it easiest to believe my father and I were sharing them by telepathy.”

“You know perfectly well,” Hilary said, “that I’d find nothing of the sort.”

“No? Then try this,” he said sharply. “At the exhibition I visited today there was a painting of our dream. And not by either of us.”

“So what does that mean?” she cried. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

‘Well, a dream I can recall so vividly after all this time is worth a thought. And that painting suggests it’s a good deal more objectively real.”

“So your father read about the island in a story,” she said. “So did you, so did the painter. What else can you possibly be suggesting?”

“Nothing,” he said at last.

“So what were the other strange things you were going to tell me?”

“That’s all,” he said. “Just the painting. Nothing else. Really.” She was looking miserable, a little ashamed. “Don’t you believe me?” he said. “Come here.”

As the sheepskin rug joined their caresses she said “I don’t really need to be psychic for you, do I?”

“No,” he said, probing her ear with his tongue, triggering her ready. Switching off the goose-necked steel lamps as she went, she led him through the flat as if wheeling a basket behind her; they began laughing as a car’s beam shone up from Mercy Hill and seized for a moment on her hand, his handle. They reached the crisp bed and suddenly, urgently, couldn’t prolong their play. She was all around him, working to draw him deeper and out, he was lapped softly, thrusting roughly at her grip on him to urge it to return redoubled. They were rising above everything but each other, gasping. He felt himself rushing to a height, and closed his eyes.

And was falling into a maelstrom of flesh, in a vast almost lightless cave whose roof seemed as far above him as the sky. He had a long way still to fall, and beneath him he could make out the movements of huge bubbles and ropes of flesh, of eyes swelling and splitting the flesh, of gigantic dark green masses climbing sluggishly over one another. “No, Christ no,” he cried, gripped helpless.

He slumped on Hilary. “Oh God,” she said. “What is it now?”

He lay beside her. Above them the ceiling shivered with reflected light. It looked as he felt. He closed his eyes and found dark calm, but couldn’t bear to keep them closed for long. “All right,” he said. “There’s more I haven’t told you. I know you’ve been worried about how I’ve looked lately. I told you it was lack of sleep, and so it is, but it’s because I’ve begun dreaming again. It started about nine months ago, just before I met you, and it’s becoming more frequent, once or twice a week now. Only this time I can never remember what it is, perhaps because I haven’t dreamed for so long. I think it has something to do with the sky, maybe this planet we’ve been hearing about. The last time was this morning, after you went to the library. For some reason I don’t have them when I’m with you.”

“Of course if you want to go back to your place, go ahead,” Hilary said, gazing at the ceiling.

“In one way I don’t,” he said. “That’s just the trouble. Whenever I try to dream I find I don’t want to sleep, as if I’m fighting the dream. But today I’m tired enough just to drift off and have it anyway. I’ve been getting hallucinations all day that I think are coming from the dream. And it feels more urgent, somehow. I’ve got to have it. I knew it was important before, but that painting’s made me sure it’s more than a dream. I wish you could understand this. It’s not easy for me.”

“Suppose I did believe you?” she said. “What on earth would you do then? Stand on the street warning people? Or would you try to sell it to your paper? I don’t want to believe you, how can you think they would?”

“That’s exactly the sort of thing I don’t need to hear,” Ingels said. “I want to talk to my father about it. I think he may be able to help. Maybe you wouldn’t mind not coming with me.”

“I wouldn’t want to,” she said. “You go and have your dream and your chat with your father if you want. But as far as I’m concerned that means you don’t want me.”

Ingels walked to his flat, further up Mercy Hill. Newspapers clung to bushes, flapping; cars hissed through nearby streets, luminous waves. Only the houses stood between him and the sky, their walls seeming low and thin. Even in the pools of lamplight he felt the night gaping overhead.

The building where he lived was silent. The stereo that usually thumped like an electronic heart was quiet. Ingels climbed to the third floor, his footsteps dropping wooden blocks into the silence, nudging him awake. He fumbled in his entrance hall for the coat hook on the back of the door, which wasn’t where Hilary kept hers. Beneath the window in the main room he saw her desk spread with her syndicated cartoon strip—except that when he switched on the light it was his own desk, scattered with television schedules. He peered blearily at the rumpled bed. Around him the room felt and moved like muddy water. He sagged on the bed and was asleep at once.

The darkness drew him out, coaxing him forward, swimming softly through his eyes. A great silent darkness surrounded him. He sailed through it, sleeping yet aware. He sensed energy flowering far out in the darkness, vast soundless explosions that cooled and congealed. He sensed immense weights slowly rolling at the edge of his blindness.

Then he could see, though the darkness persisted almost unchanged. Across its furthest distances a few points of light shone like tiny flaws. He began to sail towards them, faster. They parted and fled to the edge of his vision as he approached. He was rushing between them, towards others that now swooped minutely out of the boundless night, carrying cooler grains of congealed dust around them. They were multiplying, his vision was filling with sprinkled light and its attendant parasites. He was turning, imprinting each silently blazing vista on his mind. His mind felt enormous. He felt it take each pattern of light and store it easily as it returned alert for the next.

It was so long before he came to rest he had no conscious memory of starting out. Somehow the path he’d followed had brought him back to his point of origin. Now he sailed in equilibrium with the entire system of light and dust that surrounded him, boundless. His mind locked on everything he’d seen.

He found that part of his mind had fastened telescopically on details of the worlds he’d passed: cities of globes acrawl with black winged insects; mountains carved or otherwise formed into heads within whose hollow sockets worshippers squirmed; a sea from whose depths rose a jointed arm, reaching miles inland with a filmy web of skin to net itself food. One tiny world in particular seemed to teem with life that was aware of him.

Deep in one of its seas a city slept, and he shared the dreams of its sleepers: of an infancy spent in a vast almost lightless cave, tended by a thin rustling shape so tall its head was lost to sight; of flight to this minute but fecund planet; of dancing hugely and clumsily beneath the light of a fragment they’d torn free of this world and flung into space; of dormancy in the submarine basalt tombs. Dormant, they waited and shared the lives of other similar beings active on the surface; for a moment he was the inhabitant of a black city deserted by its builders, coming alert and groping lazily forth as a pale grub fled along a path between the buildings.

Later, as the active ones on the surface had to hide from the multiplying grubs, those in the submarine city stilled, waiting. Ingels felt their thoughts searching sleepily, ranging the surface, touching and sampling the minds of the grubs, vastly patient and purposeful. He felt the womb of the sea lapping his cell. His huge flesh quivered, anticipating rebirth.

Without warning he was in a room, gazing through a telescope at the sky. He seemed to have been gazing for hours; his eyes burned. He was referring to a chart, adjusting the mounting of the telescope. A pool of light from an oil lamp roved, snatching at books in cases against the walls, spilling over the charts at his feet. Then he was outside the room, hurrying through a darkened theatre; cowls of darkness peered down from the boxes. Outside the theatre he glanced up towards the speckled sky, towards the roof, where he knew one slate hid the upturned telescope. He hurried away through the gas-lit streets, out of Ingels’ dream.

He awoke and knew at once where the theatre was: at the edge of Brichester, where his mind had been tugging him all day.

III

He rose at dawn, feeling purged and refreshed. He washed, shaved, dressed, made himself breakfast. In his lightened state the preamble of his dream seemed not to matter: he’d had his inclination towards the edge of Brichester explained; the rest seemed external to him, perhaps elaborately symbolic. He knew Hilary regarded his dreams as symptoms of disturbance, and perhaps she was right. Maybe, he thought, they all meant the theatre was trying to get up through my mind. A lot of fuss, but that’s what dreams are like. Especially when they’re having to fight their way, no doubt. Can’t wait to see what the theatre means to me.

When he went out the dawn clutched him as if he hadn’t shaken off his dreams. The dull laden light settled about him, ambiguous shapes hurried by. The air felt suffocated by imminence, not keen as the cold should make it. That’ll teach me to get up at cock-crow, he thought. Feels like insomnia. Can’t imagine what they find to crow about. The queues of commuters moved forward like the tickings of doom.

Someone had left a sheet from the telex on his desk. Photographs from the space probe were expected any hour. He wrote his reviews hurriedly, glancing up to dispel a sense that the floor was alive with pale grubs, teeming through the aisles. Must have needed more sleep than I thought. Maybe catch a nap later.

Although his dream had reverted the streets, replacing the electric lamps with gas, he knew exactly where the theatre should be. He hurried along the edge of Lower Brichester, past champing steam-shovels, roaring skeletons of burning houses. He strode straight to the street of his dream.

One side was razed, a jagged strip of brown earth extending cracks into the pavement and into the fields beyond. But the theatre was on the other side. Ingels hurried past the red-brick houses, past the wind-whipped gardens and broken flowers, towards the patched gouge in the road where he knew a gas lamp used to guard the theatre. He stood arrested on it, cars sweeping past, and stared at the houses before him, safe from his glare in their sameness. The theatre was not there.

Only the shout of an overtaking car roused him. He wandered along, feeling sheepish and absurd. He remembered vaguely having walked this way with his parents once, on the way to a picnic. The gas lamp had been standing then; he’d gazed at it and at the theatre, which by then was possessed by a cinema, until they’d coaxed him away. Which explained the dream, the insomnia, everything. And I never used to be convinced by Citizen Kane. Rosebud to me too, with knobs on. In fact he’d even mistaken the location of the lamp; there it was, a hundred yards ahead of him. Suddenly he began to run. Already he could see the theatre, now renamed as a furniture warehouse.

He was almost through the double doors and into the first aisle of suites when he realised that he didn’t know what he was going to say. Excuse me, I’d like to look under your rafters. Sorry to bother you, but I believe you have a secret room here. For God’s sake, he said, blushing, hurrying down the steps as a salesman came forward to open the doors for him. I know what the dream was now. I’ve made sure I won’t have it again. Forget the rest.

He threw himself down at his desk. Now sit there and behave. What a piddling reason for falling out with Hilary. At least I can admit that to her. Call her now. He was reaching for the telephone when Bert tramped up, waving Ingels’ review of the astronomical television programme. “I know you’d like to rewrite this,” he said.

“Sorry about that.”

“We’ll call off the men in white this time. Thought you’d gone the same way as this fellow,” Bert said, throwing a cutting on the desk.

“Just lack of sleep,” Ingels said, not looking. “As our Methuselah, tell me something. When the warehouse on Fieldview was a theatre, what was it called?”

“The Variety, you mean?” Bert said, dashing for his phone. “Remind me to tell you about the time I saw Beaumont and Fletcher performing there. Great double act.”

Ingels turned the cutting over, smiling half at Bert, half at himself for the way he had still not let go of his dream. Go on, look through the files in your lunch-hour, he told himself satirically. Bet the Variety never made a headline in its life.

LSD CAUSES ATTEMPTED SUICIDE, said the cutting. American student claims that in LSD “vision” he was told that the planet now passing through our solar system heralded the rising of Atlantis. Threw himself from second-storey window. Insists that the rising of Atlantis means the end of humanity. Says the Atlanteans are ready to awaken. Ingels gazed at the cutting; the sounds of the newspaper surged against his ears like blood. Suddenly he thrust back his chair and ran upstairs, to the morgue of the Herald.

Beneath the ceiling pressed low by the roof, a fluorescent tube fluttered and buzzed. Ingels hugged the bound newspapers to his chest, each volume an armful, and hefted them to a table, where they puffed out dust. 1900 was the first that came to hand. The streets would have been gas-lit then. Dust trickled into his nostrils and frowned over him, the phone next to Hilary was mute, his television review plucked at his mind, anxious to be rewritten. Scanning and blinking, he tried to shake them off with his doubts.

But it didn’t take him long, though his gaze was tired of ranging up and down, up and down, by the time he saw the headline:

ATTEMPTED THEFT AT “THE VARIETY.”

TRADESMEN IN THE DOCK.

Francis Wareing, a draper pursuing his trade in Brichester, Donald Norden, a butcher [and so on, Ingels snarled, sweeping past impatiently] were charged before the Brichester stipendiary magistrates with forcibly entering “The Variety” theatre, on Fieldview, in attempted commission of robbery. Mr. Radcliffe, the owner and manager of this establishment

It looked good, Ingels thought wearily, abandoning the report, tearing onward. But two issues later the sequel’s headline stopped him short:

ACCUSATION AND COUNTER-ACCUSATION IN COURT.

A BLASPHEMOUS CULT REVEALED.

And there it was, halfway down the column:

Examined by Mr. Kirby for the prosecution, Mr. Radcliffe affirmed that he had been busily engaged in preparing his accounts when, overhearing sounds of stealth outside his office, he summoned his courage and ventured forth. In the auditorium he beheld several men

Get on with it, Ingels urged, and saw that there had been impatience in the court too:

Mr. Radcliffe’s narrative was rudely interrupted by Wareing, who accused him of having let a room in his theatre to the accused four. This privilege having been summarily withdrawn, Wareing alleged, the four had entered the building in a bid to reclaim such possessions as were rightfully theirs. He pursued:

“Mr. Radcliffe is aware of this. He has been one of our number for years, and still would be, if he had the courage.”

Mr. Radcliffe replied: “That is a wicked untruth. However, I am not surprised by the depths of your iniquity. I have evidence of it here.”

So saying, he produced for the Court’s inspection a notebook containing, as he said, matter of a blasphemous and sacrilegious nature. This which he had found beneath a seat in his theatre, he indicated to be the prize sought by the unsuccessful robbers. The book, which Mr. Radcliffe described as “the journal of a cult dedicated to preparing themselves for a blasphemous travesty of the Second Coming,” was handed to Mr. Poole, the magistrate, who swiftly pronounced it to conform to this description.

Mr. Kirby adduced as evidence of the corruption which this cult wrought, its bringing of four respectable tradesmen to the state of common robbers. Had they not felt the shame of the beliefs they professed, he continued, they had but to petition Mr. Radcliffe for the return of their mislaid property.

But what beliefs? Ingels demanded. He riffled onward, crumbling yellow fragments from the pages. The tube buzzed like a bright trapped insect. He almost missed the page.

FOILED ROBBERS AT “THE VARIETY”.

FIFTH MAN YIELDS HIMSELF TO JUSTICE.

What fifth man? Ingels searched:

Mr. Poole condemned the cult of which the accused were adherents as conclusive proof of the iniquity of those religions which presume to rival Christianity. He described the cult as “unworthy of the lowest breed of mulatto.”

At this juncture a commotion ensued, as a man entered precipitately and begged leave to address the Court. Some few minutes later Mr. Radcliffe also entered, wearing a resolute expression. When he saw the latecomer, however, he appeared to relinquish his purpose, and took a place in the gallery. The man, meanwhile, sought to throw himself on the Court’s mercy, declaring himself to be the fifth of the robbers. He had been prompted to confess, he affirmed, by a sense of his injustice in allowing his friends to take full blame. His name, he said, was Joseph Ingels

Who had received a lighter sentence in acknowledgement of his gesture, Ingels saw in a blur at the foot of the column. He hardly noticed. He was still staring at his grandfather’s name.

“Nice of you to come,” his father said ambiguously. They’d finished decorating, Ingels saw; the flowers on the hall wallpaper had grown and turned bright orange. But the light was still dim, and the walls settled about his eyes like night around a feeble lamp. Next to the coat rack he saw the mirror in which he’d made sure of himself before teenage dates, the crack in one corner where he’d driven his fist, caged by fury and by their incomprehension of his adolescent restlessness. An ugly socket of plaster gaped through the wallpaper next to the supporting nail’s less treacherous home. “I could have hung the mirror for you,” Ingels said, not meaning to disparage his father, who frowned and said “No need.”

They went into the dining-room, where his mother was setting out the best tablecloth and cutlery. “Wash hands,” she said. “Tea’s nearly ready.”

They ate and talked. Ingels watched the conversation as if it were a pocket maze into which he had to slip a ball when the opening tilted towards him. “How’s your girlfriend?” his mother said.

Don’t you know her name? Ingels didn’t say. “Fine,” he said. They didn’t mention Hilary again. His mother produced infant photographs of him they’d discovered in the sideboard drawer. “You were a lovely little boy,” she said. “Speaking of memories,” Ingels said, “do you remember the old Variety theatre?”

His father was moving his shirt along the fireguard to give himself a glimpse of the fire, his back to Ingels. “The old Variety,” his mother said. “We wanted to take you to a pantomime there once. But,” she glanced at her husband’s back, “when your father got there all the tickets were sold. Then there was the Gaiety,” and she produced a list of theatres and anecdotes.

Ingels sat opposite his father, whose pipe smoke was pouring up the chimney. “I was looking through our old newspapers,” he said. “I came across a case that involved the Variety.”

“Don’t you ever work at that paper?” his father said.

“This was research. It seems there was a robbery at the theatre. Before you were born, it was, but I wonder if you remember hearing about it.”

“Now, we aren’t all as clever as you,” his mother said. “We don’t remember what we heard in our cradle.”

Ingels laughed, tightening inside; the opening was turning away from him. “You might have heard about it when you were older,” he told his father. “Your father was involved.”

“No,” his father said. “He was not.”

“He was in the paper.”

“His name was,” his father said, facing Ingels with a blank stare in his eyes. “It was another man. Your grandfather took years to live that down. The newspapers wouldn’t publish an apology or say it wasn’t him. And you wonder why we didn’t want you to work for a paper. You wouldn’t be a decent shopkeeper, you let our shop go out of the family, and now here you are, raking up old dirt and lies. That’s what you chose for yourself.”

“I didn’t mean to be offensive,” Ingels said, holding himself down. “But it was an interesting case, that’s all. I’m going to follow it up tomorrow, at the theatre.”

“If you go there you’ll be rubbing our name in the dirt. Don’t bother coming here again.”

“Now hold on,” Ingels said. “If your father wasn’t involved you can’t very well mean that. My God,” he cried, flooded with a memory, “you do know something! You told me about it once, when I was a child! I’d just started dreaming and you told it to me so I wouldn’t be frightened, to show me you had these dreams too. You were in a room with a telescope, waiting to see something. You told me because I’d dreamed it too! That’s the second time I’ve had that dream! It’s the room at the Variety, it has to be!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” his father said. “I never dreamed that.”

“You told me you had.”

“I must have told you that to calm you down. Go on, say I shouldn’t have lied to you. It must have been for your own good.”

He’d blanked out his eyes with an unblinking stare. Ingels gazed at him and knew at once there was more behind the blank than the lie about his childhood. “You’ve been dreaming again,” he said. “You’ve been having the dream I had last night, I know you have. And I think you know what it means.”

The stare shifted almost imperceptibly, then returned strengthened. “What do you know?” his father said. “You live in the same town as us and visit us once a week, if that. Yet you know I’ve been dreaming? Sometimes we wonder if you even know we’re here!”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Ingels said. “But these dreams—you used to have them. The ones we used to share, remember?”

“We shared everything when you were a little boy. But that’s over,” his father said. “Dreams and all.”

“That’s nothing to do with it!” Ingels shouted. “You still have the ability! I know you must have been having these dreams! It’s been in your eyes for months!” He trailed off, trying to remember whether that was true. He turned to his mother, pleading. “Hasn’t he been dreaming?”

“What do I know about it?” she said. “It’s nothing to do with me.” She was clearing the table in the dim rationed light beyond the fire, not looking at either of them. Suddenly Ingels saw her as he never had before: bewildered by her husband’s dreams and intuitions, further excluded from the disturbingly incomprehensible bond between him and her son. All at once Ingels knew why he’d always felt she had been happy to see him leave home: it was only then that she’d been able to start reclaiming her husband. He took his coat from the hall and looked into the dining-room. They hadn’t moved: his father was staring at the fire, his mother at the table. “I’ll see you,” he said, but the only sound was the crinkling of the fire as it crumbled, breaking open pinkish embers.

IV

He watched television. Movement of light and colours, forming shapes. Outside the window the sky drew his gaze, stretched taut, heavily imminent as thunder. He wrote words.

Later, he was sailing through enormous darkness; glinting globes turned slowly around him, one wearing an attenuated band of light; ahead, the darkness was scattered with dust and chunks of rock. A piece of metal was circling him like a timid needle, poking towards him, now spitting flame and swinging away. He felt contempt so profound it was simply vast indifference. He closed his eyes as he might have blinked away a speck of dust.

In the morning he wrote his review at the flat. He knew he wouldn’t be able to bear the teeming aisles for long. Blindly shouldering his way across the floor, he found Bert. He had to gaze at him for a minute or so; he couldn’t immediately remember what he should look like. “That rewrite you did on the TV review wasn’t your best,” Bert said. “Ah well,” Ingels said, snatching his copy of last night’s Herald automatically from his desk, and hurried for the door.

He’d nearly reached it when he heard the news editor shouting into the telephone. “But it can’t affect Saturn and Jupiter! I mean, it can’t change its mass, can it? … I’m sorry, sir. Obviously I didn’t mean to imply I knew more about your field than you. But is it possible for its mass to change? … What, trajectory as well?” Ingels grinned at the crowd around the editor’s desk, at their rapt expressions. They’d be more rapt when he returned. He strode out.

Through the writhing crowds, up the steps, into a vista of beds and dressing-tables like a street of cramped bedrooms whose walls had been tricked away. “Can I speak to the manager, please,” he said to the man who stepped forward. “Brichester Herald.”

The manager was a young man in a pale streamlined suit, longish clipped hair, a smile which he held forward as if for inspection. “I’m following a story,” Ingels said, displaying his press card. “It seems that when your warehouse was a theatre a room was leased to an astronomical group. We think their records are still here, and if they can be found they’re of enormous historical interest.”

“That’s interesting,” the manager said. “Where are they supposed to be?”

“In a room at the top of the building somewhere.”

“I’d like to help, of course.” Four men passed, carrying pieces of a dismembered bed to a van. “There were some offices at the top of the building once, I believe. But we don’t use them now, they’re boarded up. It would be a good deal of trouble to open them now. If you’d phoned I might have been able to free some men.”

“I’ve been out of town,” Ingels said, improvising hastily now his plans were going awry. “Found this story on my desk when I got back. I tried to phone earlier but couldn’t get through. Must be a tribute to the business you’re doing.” An old man, one of the loaders, was sitting on a chair nearby, listening; Ingels wished he would move, he couldn’t bear an audience as well. “These records really would be important,” he said wildly. “Great historical value.”

“In any case I can’t think they’d still be here. If they were in one of the top rooms they would have been cleared out long ago.”

“I think you’re a bit wrong there,” the old man said from his chair.

“Have you nothing to do?” the manager demanded.

“We’ve done loading,” the man said. “Driver’s not here yet. Mother’s sick. It’s not for me to say you’re wrong, but I remember when they were mending the roof after the war. Men who were doing it said they could see a room full of books, they looked like, all covered up. But we couldn’t find it from down here and nobody wanted to break their necks trying to get in from the roof. Must be there still, though.”

“That has to be the one,” Ingels said. “Whereabouts was it?”

“Round about there,” the old man said, pointing above a Scandinavian four-poster. “Behind one of the offices, we used to reckon.”

“Could you help find it?” Ingels said. “Maybe your workmates could give you a hand while they’re waiting. That’s of course if this gentleman doesn’t mind. We’d make a point of your cooperation,” he told the manager. “Might even be able to give you a special advertising rate, if you wanted to run an ad on that day.”

The five of them climbed a rusty spiral staircase, tastefully screened by a partition, to the first floor. The manager, still frowning, had left one loader watching for the driver. “Call us as soon as he comes,” he said. “Whatever the reason, time lost loses money.” Across the first floor, which was a maze of crated and cartoned furniture, Ingels glimpsed reminiscences of his dream: the outline of theatre boxes in the walls, almost erased by bricks; a hook that had supported a chandelier. They seemed to protrude from the mundane, beckoning him on.

The staircase continued upward, more rustily. “I’ll go first,” the manager said, taking the flashlight one of the loaders had brought. “We don’t want accidents,” and his legs drew up like a tail through a trapdoor. They heard him stamping about, challenging the floor. “All right,” he called, and Ingels thrust his face through drifting dust into a bare plank corridor.

“Here, you said?” the manager asked the old man, pointing to some of the boards that formed a wall. “That’s it,” the old man said, already ripping out nails with his hammer, aided by his workmates. A door peeked dully through. Ingels felt a smile wrenching at his face. He controlled himself. Wait until they’ve gone.

As soon as they prised open the office door he ran forward. A glum green room, a ruined desk in whose splintered innards squatted a dust-furred typewriter. “I’m afraid it’s as I thought,” the manager said. “There’s no way through. You can’t expect us to knock down a wall, obviously. Not without a good deal of consultation.”

“But there must have been an entrance,” Ingels said. “Beyond this other wall. It must have been sealed up before you got the building. Surely we can look for it.”

“You won’t have to,” the old man said. He was kicking at the wall nearest the supposed location of the room. Plaster crumbled along a crack, then they heard the shifting of brick. “Thought as much,” he said. “The war did this, shook the building. The boards are all right but the mortar’s done for.” He kicked again and whipped back his foot. He’d dislodged two bricks, and at once part of the wall collapsed, leaving an opening four feet high.

“That’ll be enough!” the manager said. Ingels was stooping, peering through the dust-curtained gap. Bare boards, rafters and slates above, what must be bookcases draped with cloth around the walls, something in the centre of the room wholly covered by a frame hung with heavy material, perhaps velvet. Dust crawled on his hot face, prickling like fever. “If the wall would have collapsed anyway it’s a good job you were here when it did,” he told the manager. “Now it’s done I’m sure you won’t object if I have a look around. If I’m injured I promise not to claim. I’ll sign a waiver if you like.”

“I think you’d better,” the manager said, and waited while Ingels struggled with his briefcase, last night’s Herald, a pen and sheet from his notebook, brushing at his eyebrows where dust and sweat had become a trickle of mud, rubbing his trembling fingers together to clean them. The men had clambered over the heap of bricks and were lifting the velvety frame. Beneath it was a reflector telescope almost a foot long, mounted on a high sturdy stand. One of the men bent to the eyepiece, touching the focus. “Don’t!” Ingels screamed. “The setting may be extremely important,” he explained, trying to laugh.

The manager was peering at him. “What did you say you do at the Herald?” he said.

“Astronomy correspondent,” Ingels said, immediately dreading that the man might read the paper regularly. “I don’t get too much work,” he blundered on. “This is a scoop. If I could I’d like to spend a few hours looking at the books.”

He heard them descending the spiral staircase. Squirm away, he thought. He lifted the covers from the bookcases gingerly, anxious to keep dust away from the telescope, as the velvety cover had for decades. Suddenly he hurried back to the corridor. Its walls bobbed about him as the flashlight swung. He selected a plank and, hefting it over the bricks, poked it at the rafters above the telescope, shielding the latter with his arm. After a minute the slate above slid away, and a moment later he heard a distant crash.

He squatted down to look through the eyepiece. No doubt a chair had been provided once. All he could see was a blurred twilit sky. Soon be night, he thought, and turned the flashlight on the books. He remembered the light from the oil lamp lapping at his feet in the dream.

Much of the material was devoted to astronomy. As many of the books and charts were astrological, he found, some in Oriental script. But there were others, on shelves in the corner furthest from the sealed-off door: The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, Image du Monde, Liber Investigationis, Revelations of Glaaki. There were nine volumes of the last. He pulled them out, curious, and dust rose about his face like clouds of sleep.

Voices trickled tinily up the staircase, selling beds. In the close room dimmed by the dust that crowded at the hole in the roof, towards which the telescope patiently gazed, Ingels felt as if he were sinking back into his dream. Cracked fragments of the pages clung beneath his nails. He read; the words flowed on like an incantation, like voices muttering in sleep, melting into another style, jerking clumsily into another. Sketches and paintings were tipped into the books, some childishly crude, some startlingly detailed: M’Nagalah, a tentacled mass of what looked like bloated raw entrails and eyes; Glaaki, a half-submerged spongy face peering stalk-eyed from a lake; R’lyeh, an island city towering triumphant above the sea, a vast door ajar. This he recognised, calmly accepting the information. He felt now as if he could never have had reason to doubt his dream.

The early winter night had blocked up the hole in the roof. Ingels stooped to the eyepiece again. Now there was only darkness through the telescope. It felt blurred by distance; he felt the distance drawing him vertiginously down the tube of darkness, out into a boundless emptiness no amount of matter could fill. Not yet, he thought, withdrawing swiftly. Soon.

Someone was staring at him. A girl. She was frowning up at the hole in the roof. A saleswoman. “We’re closing soon,” she said.

“All right,” Ingels said, returning to the book, lying face upwards in the splayed light. It had settled into a more comfortable position, revealing a new page to him, and an underlined phrase: “when the stars are right.” He stared at it, trying to connect. It should mean something. The dim books hemmed him in. He shook his head and turned the pages swiftly, searching for underlining. Here it was repeated in the next volume, no, augmented: “when the stars are right again.” He glanced sharply at the insistent gap of night above him. In a minute, he snarled. Here was a whole passage underlined:

“Though the universe may feign the semblance of fickleness, its soul has always known its masters. The sleep of its masters is but the largest cycle of all life, for as the defiance and forgetfulness of winter is rendered vain by summer, so the defiance and forgetfulness of man, and of those others who have assumed stewardship, shall be cast aside by the reawakened masters. When these hibernal times are over, and the time for reawakening is near, the universe itself shall send forth the Harbinger and Maker, Ghroth. Who shall urge the stars and worlds to rightness. Who shall raise the sleeping masters from their burrows and drowned tombs; who shall raise the tombs themselves. Who shall be attentive to those worlds where worshippers presume themselves stewards. Who shall bring those worlds under sway, until all acknowledge their presumption, and bow down.”

Ghroth, Ingels thought, gazing up at the gap in the roof. They even had a name for it then, despite the superstitious language. Not that that was so surprising, he thought. Man used to look upon comets that way; this is the same sort of thing. An omen that becomes almost a god.

But an omen of what? he thought suddenly. What exactly was supposed to happen when the stars were right again? He knelt in the dust and flurried through the books. No more underlining. He rushed back to the telescope. His thighs twinged as he squatted. Something had entered the field of view.

It was the outer edge of the wandering planet, creeping into the telescope’s field. As it came it blurred, occasionally sharpening almost into focus for a moment. Ingels felt as if the void were making sudden feeble snatches at him. Now the planet was only a spreading reddish smudge. He reached for the focus, altering it minutely. “We’re closing now,” said the manager behind him.

“I won’t be long,” Ingels said, feeling the focus sharpen, sharpen—

“We’re waiting to close the doors,” the manager said. “And I’m afraid I’m in a hurry.”

“Not long!” Ingels screamed, tearing his gaze from the eyepiece to glare.

When the man had gone Ingels switched off the flashlight. Now he could see nothing but the tiny dim gap in the roof. He let the room settle on his eyes. At last he made out the immobile uplifted telescope. He groped towards it and squatted down.

As soon as he touched the eyepiece the night rushed through the telescope and clutched him. He was sailing through the void, yet he was motionless; everything moved with him. Through the vast silence he heard the ring of a lifted telephone, a voice saying “Give me the chief editor of the Herald, please,” back there across the void. He could hear the pale grubs squeaking tinnily, back all that way. He remembered the way they moved, soft, uncarapaced. Before him, suspended in the dark and facing him, was Ghroth.

It was red as rust, featureless except for bulbous protrusions like hills. Except that of course they weren’t hills if he could see them at that distance; they must be immense. A rusty globe covered with lumps, then. That was all, but that couldn’t explain why he felt as if the whole of him were magnetised to it through his eyes. It seemed to hang ponderously, communicating a thunderous sense of imminence, of power. But that was just its unfamiliarity, Ingels thought, struggling against the suction of boundless space; just the sense of its intrusion. It’s only a planet, after all. Pain was blazing along his thighs. Just a red warty globe.

Then it moved.

Ingels was trying to remember how to move his body to get his face away from the eyepiece; he was throwing his weight against the telescope mounting to sweep away what he could see. It was blurring, that was it, although it was a cold windless day air movements must be causing the image to blur, the surface of a planet doesn’t move, it’s only a planet, the surface of a planet doesn’t crack, it doesn’t roll back like that, it doesn’t peel back for thousands of miles so you can see what’s underneath, pale and glistening. When he tried to scream air whooped into his lungs as if space had exploded a vacuum within him.

He’d tripped over the bricks, fallen agonisingly down the stairs, smashed the manager out of the way with his shoulder and was at the Herald building before he knew that was where he intended to go. He couldn’t speak, only make the whooping sound as he sucked in air; he threw his briefcase and last night’s paper on his desk and sat there clutching himself, shaking. The floor seemed to have been in turmoil before he arrived, but they were crowding around him, asking him impatiently what was wrong.

But he was staring at the headline in his last night’s newspaper: SURFACE ACTIVITY ON WANDERER “MORE APPARENT THAN REAL” SAY SCIENTISTS. Photographs of the planet from the space-probe: one showing an area like a great round pale glistening sea, the next circuit recording only mountains and rock plains. “Don’t you see?” Ingels shouted at Bert among the packed faces. “It closed its eye when it saw us coming!”

Hilary came at once when they telephoned her, and took Ingels back to her flat. But he wouldn’t sleep, laughed at the doctor and the tranquillisers, though he swallowed the tablets indifferently enough. Hilary unplugged the television, went out as little as possible, bought no newspapers, threw away her contributor’s copies unopened, talked to him while she worked, stroked him soothingly, slept with him. Neither of them felt the earth begin to shift.

∇