Phase Space (53 page)

… I found the girl the day after the rest of the world folded away. I was disappointed; I thought it might be the spaceships.

I reached the Pole about lunch time on a Tuesday. Not that the time is important – or is it? I suppose I should record every detail …

This is how it happened.

My mother was away at her sister’s. I remember standing at my bedroom window and looking out over the quiet street. There was a girl in a scarlet coat standing at the bus stop just along the road from our house. (This was the girl I would find later.)

Then I moved to the Pole.

It was extraordinary. The houses across the street started to flatten out, smearing like wet Polaroid photos. They became reddish streaks along the ground, and then the rest of the town beyond them squashed down to a line of colour. Even the air, the sky itself, was crushed down into that line.

I walked out of the house. It was quiet as the middle of a fog. I was in a dome of air about a hundred feet across. Our house was intact but the terraces to either side were melted out of shape; they looked like plastic models with one side melted and crushed down. I walked out past the twisted bus-stop sign. The next house along was about three feet high. I could look down into its chimney pots. And the next was just a brown smear on the ground.

I tried to walk out further but it was like walking through sticky oil, and it started getting harder to breathe. The ground was smooth as glass. I ducked down into the top of the atmosphere and peered ahead. I could see a brown line topped with blue. Sometimes I could see a hint of movement along that line, perhaps an aeroplane.

It was just as I had anticipated, from my studies of Hawking.

I walked back. That was a lot easier, like walking downhill. I felt exhilarated at my affirmation. I’d done it. I was at the Pole, a lens-shaped region of Space and Time, centred on myself. This was the place where all the Lines of Longitude meet, the place where the ships were. If I could see them, no doubt they could see me, and would take me back. All I had to do was wait for the ships to come and find me.

I walked all around our house, stepping over the roofs of the ones next door. I hoped I’d find the ships waiting already, but they weren’t there. I supposed I’d have to be patient.

I made myself a supper from a snack bar. Chocolate sandwiches. There wasn’t much food in the fridge, but I didn’t suppose it mattered. I won’t be here much longer, once the ships arrive. I wrapped up the rest of the chocolate bar for the next day.

I was a bit surprised when it got dark. I can’t see the sun; there’s only a sort of pearly neon light over everything, but the light goes down in the evening. The electric lights won’t turn on, though, and the TV is dead. I’ve got a radio that works on batteries but there’s only a mush, even at the highest volume.

It got quite cold, that first evening, so I went to bed. I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I kept hearing noises, little scratching sounds.

It was light but still cold when I got out of bed, so I put my coat on over my pyjamas and went down to the kitchen. There was a trickle of water dripping out of the fridge. I opened it up. There was a stink of spoiled milk in there, but the chocolate was gone. Even the paper had vanished.

So it couldn’t be mice. What mouse would eat foil wrapping? There had to be another person with me, here at the Pole.

I tried to get washed, but there was only a brownish trickle of cold water out of the taps. And I couldn’t shave because there was no power for my razor.

I searched the house from top to bottom, walked around and around, stepping over the roofs again. Nothing.

Then I went out into the street and started to shout, making as much noise as I could.

Eventually she came running out of the front door and stood in the middle of what was left of the street. It was the girl in the red coat I’d seen at the bus-stop the day before. She held her hands to her ears and she was crying. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Tears splashed down onto her coat, of shiny plastic.

I stood in front of her. ‘Did you take my chocolate?’ My throat was scratchy after all the shouting.

She nodded, and then lowered her hands and looked up at me, dabbing her eyes with the back of her hand. She had blonde hair but it was all over the place, a real mess. And her mascara had been washed over her face. ‘I was hungry,’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t care.’ And I didn’t. Once the ships arrive, I won’t be hungry again. I started walking back to the house.

‘Wait!’ She ran after me, but stopped a few yards away, trembling. ‘Please …’ She opened and closed her mouth a few times, like a fish. She was no more than twenty, I suppose, and she had nice teeth, like a row of little pearls. ‘What’s happened? Where are we? Do you know?’ She waved her hand around vaguely, pointing to the blue-and-brown line all around us. ‘Has there been a war?’

‘A war?’ I laughed. ‘No. No war. We’ve moved, that’s all. To the Pole. I thought it was just me, to tell you the truth. I didn’t know you were here too. I don’t suppose it matters.’

She had a small face that creased up now as she tried to work it out. ‘What Pole? What do you mean?’

I tried to explain, but she looked distant, and avoided my eyes. It’s a look I’ve come to recognize: the sign of a closed mind.

I turned and walked away from her, back to the house.

‘Wait,’ she called. ‘Don’t go … Could I, uh, could I come in too?’

I left the door open.

Later on, when it got dark, I heard her come in and sneak around. She opened the fridge door with a click, but there was nothing left. I’d poured the rotten milk down the sink. Then, after I went to bed, she crept upstairs to my mother’s bedroom.

I heard her crying. I put my coat on and went into my mother’s room and sat on the edge of the single bed. She was sitting up, shivering and crying. It was nearly pitch black but I could see her big eyes looking at me.

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ I said. My voice sounded loud and clumsy. ‘We’ll be alright, as soon as the ships come.’

The girl said nothing, sitting up in bed in her red coat. I could see her trembling like a rabbit.

I went back to bed. I didn’t sleep again.

I got out of bed feeling gritty and cold. The girl had gone, leaving my mother’s bed rumpled and cold. She wasn’t anywhere in the house, not even the kitchen.

It took me a few minutes to find her. She’d walked as far away from the house as she could get, had flattened herself out against the glassy ground at the edge and reached out one hand to the blue-brown line. She had rings on three fingers on that hand. Her lips were blue and her eyes had rolled up, showing white. Her tongue was sticking out. I crawled out and grabbed her ankles, pulled her back into the air.

She breathed again in huge gasps. When she opened her eyes and saw me she started to cry. ‘Let me go. Please.’

I felt very angry. ‘You shouldn’t be scared. They’ll be here soon.’

She shut her eyes and kept crying, and said: ‘Please, please …’ Over and over.

And then she folded away. I’m not sure if I did it or if she did it herself. She just rolled flat into a sort of bright red streak and flashed away like a scarlet worm.

So that was that. Since then I’ve been alone in this fog, waiting.

I hope they’re here soon. I haven’t eaten anything for days now, and it’s getting very cold here …

The police had found no sign of any girl, red-coated or otherwise.

Sheila told the police what little she knew of Holland, and described the uncertain contact she had had with him. She tried to make the policemen share her understanding of Holland’s delusions and obsessions, of lines of space-time longitude and mental infections and golden UFOs – as far as she understood them herself – but she could see the police switching off, and labelling George Holland with brutal efficiency as ‘nutter’, or ‘anorak’.

After an hour or so they seemed to have decided they had enough. They closed their notebooks, thanked her for her time, and left. They took the letter with them; by tomorrow, she expected, it would be all over the tabloids.

After they’d gone, she found it hard to relax. She tried TV, and reading, but nothing distracted her.

She couldn’t put aside the image of Holland dying alone, trapped at the ‘Pole’ he had constructed for himself, waiting endlessly for UFOs which never came.

What was the true horror for Holland, the reason he had shut out the world? She’d always thought of UFO abduction, whatever the psychological truth of the phenomenon, as a horrific experience. But Holland seemed to have
enjoyed
his abduction. Perhaps the true terror for him was of the final abandonment, at the end of a life of abandonments: the terror of being the one they left behind …

She went to bed. But sleep, never easy for her, seemed further away than ever. Holland’s bizarre world-view stayed in her head. Perhaps it was just her teacher’s sympathy. Or perhaps Holland with his last letter had, after all, infected her with some meme. Well, if so, by tomorrow, millions more who would read what she’d read were just as much at risk.

She smiled. The loner who brought about the end of the universe. If she looked out in the street now, would she see his golden UFOs, cruising across the sky?

… In fact, the light outside was oddly bright.

She went to her window and pulled back the curtain. The window was misted up. She wiped the glass with her sleeve, and pressed her face to the window, looking for Orion.

She couldn’t see the stars. The sky was a washed-out neon blur, grey and empty.

Let me say at once that I have no regrets.

Both Gurzadian and I were men with wings on, and that means we were willing to accept risks. Naturally nobody expected the contingency we’ve come up against here, but we always knew the odds were against us in terms of getting all the way to Proxima II. In fact we would both have volunteered, even without the Draft.

I’m downlinking everything in the hope somebody will pick this up, although we’ve had no contact with the ground for a hundred days now.
Geezer
seems to be stuck fast in this barrier at the edge of the solar system, so maybe someday somebody will come out here to pick this up, and read it.

I’m not one for melodramatic gestures.

I’ll complete as much as I can before the hull implodes.

I joined
Geezer
in LEO, in low Earth orbit.

I launched in a new-series Soyuz craft from Kazakhstan. Chemical technology: obsolete in these days of the Bias Drive, of course, but you may as well shoot ’em off as break ’em up. There was a sign on the launch pad saying ‘Reliable Launch Complex Guarantees Success’. That’s the kind of little touch you just don’t get back home any more, which, in my opinion, is all part of a more general decline.

There was no foofaraw when we left. This was not Project Mercury. A lot of the coverage of America’s first interstellar mission failed even to mention the fact that two human beings were going along for the ride, and we never met a single one of the program’s head sheds. Once, when I flew Shuttle, I got to shake the hand of Ronald Reagan. Things sure have changed.

Anyhow it was a thrill to feel those bolts blowing, and that boot up the rear as the Gs cut in, and to know I was leaving Earth once more.

The truth is I’d gotten pretty tired of sitting around in the grey gulag waiting for my Demograph Draft. Anything would be better, I’d decided, even a ticket to the happy booth. And when my notice turned out to be the commission for
Geezer,
I was pleased – even relieved – but I found I wasn’t really so surprised to hear that old shipping-over music one more time.

I was already over ninety years old.

But I knew I was more than capable of returning to space, of doing this job. Jenna always said that I have spent much of my life trying to appear humble, but failing. Humility is not a favoured trait among air and space pilots, where a high premium is placed on performance.

I suppose, however, I
was
surprised to find that the Draft was leading me, not to some sky-boring LEO mission as I first thought, but to the stars themselves.

The Bias Drive’s acceleration is pretty low. We spent weeks in Earth orbit, slowly spiralling away.

All in all, the old world hasn’t changed much since I first saw it from orbit in the early 1980s, Christ, nearly sixty years ago. Can’t honestly say it looks
better
now, however.