The Serene Invasion (7 page)

Clutching his holdall, he pushed his way through the crowd towards the Hertz car rental office. A military convoy raced along the road, a phalanx of black faces staring at him impassively from the back of a troop-carrier. There seemed to be increased military and police activity in the streets around the airport, an atmosphere of tension in the air. There had been an attempted coup here just six months ago, and the situation was still pretty tense.

He made it to the office, presented his softscreen to the harassed woman at reception, and waited a minute for the transaction to be processed.

The women smiled at him and said, “And where are you heading, Mr Allen?”

“North. Karamoja,” he replied, wondering at the question.

She beamed at him. “Travel north is not recommended, Mr Allen.”

He immediately assumed she was referring to terrorist activity and felt a stab of alarm when he thought about Sally. “What’s wrong?”

“The Chinese,” she said.

He pulled a face. “The Chinese?”

She passed him his softscreen and the car key. “They are dropping domes on our cities, Mr Allen. Dropping them from the air. They started in the north and they are heading south. Soon Kampala and Entebbe will be covered.” The pronouncement, imparted with the brazen confidence of the reliably informed, took him aback.

She glanced over his shoulder at the next customer in line, effectively dismissing him before he could question her further.

Bemused, he pushed through the press, exited the office and found his Volvo in the vast parking lot. He bought a bottle of chilled water from a vendor and sat in the driver’s seat, took a drink of water and tried to work out what the woman had meant.

The domes he’d seen in the northern Sahara... He’d assumed them to be the work of the Chinese, but the idea that they were actively dropping them from the air, starting in the north and heading south, was absurd.

She had obviously got hold of a rumour, some anti-Chinese scare-mongering in the area.

He activated his softscreen and attempted to access the web, but connectivity was down. He tried to phone Sally, but the line was dead.

He took another long drink of water, consulted the map he’d pre-loaded on the ’screen, then began the long drive north despite the receptionist’s alarmist warning.

H
E WAS SOON
out of Entebbe and the sprawling outskirts of Kampala, driving away from the conurbation on a motorway that for the first ten kilometres was well-lit but after that turned into a darkened road barely wide enough to contain two lanes of traffic. The only other vehicles he saw heading north through the sultry darkness was a convoy of military trucks – but the flow in the opposite direction was substantial. Trucks, cars and motorbikes jammed the road for kilometres, cacophonous with blaring horns and shouted curses. He wondered if these people too had heard rumours of the vile Chinese imprisoning towns under dropped domes...

Two hours later he was barrelling through parched grassland at a steady fifty miles an hour, and the flow of traffic heading south had dried to a trickle. There was no sign of any other military vehicles. He tried to find a news station on the car radio, but all he picked up were several music stations playing European rock classics and Baganda music.

A couple of hours later the sun came up with tropical rapidity to his right, revealing a seared landscape of stunted bushes stretching to the flat horizon. He reckoned he had another three hours to go before reaching Kallani and decided to find somewhere to stop for a rest and food.

He thought of Sally as he drove. She’d booked a five-day leave period, and said she’d take him west, to the Murchison Falls National Park. Zoologists there were working to reintroduce elephants back into the wild, and this was the reason his magazine had sent him out here. He’d spend the next few days catching up with Sally and taking a little time out to shoot the elephant story.

And in May, she had promised, she would leave Africa and come back to England, and they would set up home together somewhere in London.

The thought was still fresh enough to amaze him.

He was still thinking of Sally Walsh, half an hour later, when he saw his first dome from the ground.

It perfectly encapsulated a small town to the right of the road, perhaps two kilometres away. Its parabolic curve caught the light of the sun, its modernistic architecture striking him as bizarre out here in the African bush.

He decided to take a detour and turned along the sandy road that headed towards the town, steering around huge potholes in the approach road. Ten minutes later he braked suddenly and stared through the windscreen.

The wall of the dome cut across the road, effectively barring the way. A truck had halted before the sheer transparent wall, along with a couple of motorbikes and a battered police car. A dozen bewildered Ugandans stood before the rearing wall, staring through at the town.

On the other side, perhaps a hundred citizens, men woman and children, stared mutely out, imprisoned.

He opened his holdall, retrieved his camera, and took a dozen shots through the windscreen, then climbed out and approached the dome, stopping to take more shots.

He halted a foot from the glass – or whatever material it was – and found it to be perfectly clear, allowing him to see through without distortion. He reached out and laid a hand on the warm membrane, then knocked on it experimentally. It was not like knocking on a thin pane of glass – a window, say – but seemed much more solid, substantial. He looked down, then knelt and dug a trench in the fine sand at the foot of the dome. He reached the depth of a couple of feet, and still the membrane continued.

He’d thought the idea of the Chinese dropping them from the air ludicrous, but it seemed even more so now that he had seen a dome with his own eyes. And yet how to explain the phenomenon?

A young girl, perhaps ten years old, approached him on the other side of the glass. She stood mutely, watching him as he knelt beside the hole he’d dug. He reached out and splayed his fingers on the glass, and she laughed suddenly, silently, turned and ran away.

“Hello there!”

A portly Ugandan police sergeant was waddling across to him, smiling. “Good day to you, sir. You want to go to Morvani?” he asked, gesturing through the dome.

“Kallani,” Allen said.

The sergeant shook his head woefully. “Bad luck, sir. Kallani just the same. All towns and villages north of here the same. All covered by these...” He reached out and slapped the glass.

Allen shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible, sir. Here they are. It has happened. Radio reports say that the Chinese dropped them on all our towns, but I tell you that is not so.”

“No, of course not.”

“No, my friend here saw what happened. Akiki!” he shouted towards the gathered Ugandans. A bare-chested old man in baggy shorts trotted across to them on stick-thin legs, bobbing his head at Allen. He clutched a malnourished brown goat on a length of twine.

The police officer quizzed him in the local language, and the man replied.

The sergeant translated, “Akiki says he was out here at dawn, looking for a goat that had escaped. He came into the bush, then turned to look back at his house. And he saw between himself and his house this thick glass wall. It appeared in seconds with no noise at all. In
seconds
...” The sergeant laughed. “And Akiki is most upset, for his wife said that his breakfast is ready and she will eat it if he does not return by noon.”

Akiki gestured to a toothy, fat woman on the other side of the glass.

The sergeant said, “Akiki says that he has not eaten since midday yesterday, and he is starving. He says his wife does not need the food.”

Allen backed away from the dome and stared up at the great rearing bubble. It stood perhaps five hundred metres high at its apex, and was approximately a kilometre in diameter. It appeared to contain the town neatly, as if positioned with care to include every building within its circumference.

The policeman called, “Akiki thinks it’s a sign from god.”

Allen looked at him. “And you?”

The Ugandan shrugged. “Who am I to know, sir? Perhaps Akiki is right.”

Allen waved in farewell, climbed back into the car and U-turned. He rejoined the main road and continued north.

As he drove, he could not dismiss the fantastic notion – which had occurred to him while the policeman was speaking – that the arrival of the domes and his episode aboard the plane were in some way related.

Over the course of the next couple of hours he made out a dozen other domes, near and far, scattered across the face of the Ugandan bush. They were of differing sizes and shapes; some, like the ones he had seen from the air, were classically-shaped geodesics, perfect half-spheres, while others appeared lower and wider, more resembling watch-glasses.

Despite telling himself that there had to be some logical explanation for the sudden appearance of the domes, he could think of none. A one-off dome he might have put down to some elaborate and expensive art installation, though quite how it might have been achieved was beyond him. But this mass
endoming
of entire towns and villages, stretching from the Sahara in the north, thousands of miles south to Uganda...

Do not be afraid
... the voice – no, the
thought
– had appeared in his head, along with the visions...

T
WO HOURS LATER
he arrived on the outskirts of Kallani.

It was a sizable town of some six thousand citizens, its population swelled by the influx of Red Cross and UN aid workers. It was also one of the poorest centres of habitation in an infamously poor region of the country. A collection of two story sand-coloured buildings, a mile square, comprised the town’s centre, but a wave of slum dwellings constructed from flattened biscuit tins and hessian sacking extended south for a couple of kilometres.

A line of vehicles – Allen counted thirty before giving up – blocked the approach road. He tried getting through to Sally again on his ’screen and mobile, but the lines were still dead.

He left his car at the back of the queue, locked it and strode down the road towards the silvery wall of the dome.

Citizens were lined two deep around its southern circumference, and on the inside as many people were pressed up against the concave membrane. Husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers... all separated by a few inches of clear, impermeable membrane.

The silence was what struck Allen as strange. Normally such a gathering would have been attended by noise, chatter, laughter. But the people assembled here in their hundreds were absolutely mute, staring, some mouthing in the hope of being understood while others silently pressed palms to the glass, their gestures matched by partners and friends on the other side.

Allen left the road and walked around the curve of the dome, peering over the heads of the citizens gathered there.

Again, every building in the town had been contained. There were no outlying, individual buildings, no matter how small, not under glass. It was as if the positioning of the domes had been
planned
... he smiled at the absurdity of the idea.

He came to a section of the wall not thronged by citizens. On the other side, a gaggle of schoolgirls, in bright blue uniforms but barefoot, giggled out at him. He had an idea, unrolled his softscreen, summoned the word processing programme and tapped in twenty-four point font:
Dr Sally Walsh, Medical Centre. Can you please tell her that Geoff Allen is here.
He fished a twenty shilling note from his wallet and held it up beside the ’screen.

The girls read the message in an eager scrimmage, smiling all the time, then waved at him and ran off on the errand.

They were gone for what seemed like a long time. He chastised himself for his impatience. Sally might very well be working, pressed into service despite today being, technically, the first day of her holiday. It was an aspect of her job he found exasperating if understandable: the fact that she was on constant call, liable at any minute of the day or night to be summoned to minister to the need of her patients.

Twenty minutes later the girls returned, accompanied, Allen saw with alarm, by a khaki-uniformed police officer.

What followed was a ridiculous pantomime that might, in other circumstances, have struck him as comical.

The policeman approached the glass wall, accompanied by the schoolgirls, and peered through at him. Allen raised the screen again, probably needlessly, he thought. The officer read the words, nodded and regarded Allen with an odd expression combining unease with uncertainty.

Allen gestured, a pantomime shrug as if to say, “Where is she?”

The officer turned and spoke to a lanky schoolgirl, whose face expressed exaggerated alarm.

Allen rapped on the dome, attracting their attention. “What?” he mouthed at them.

The policeman shrugged helplessly, then said something, speaking slowly so that Allen might read the words.

He followed the man’s lips, but the movements meant nothing to him.