June 23^rd Lunchtime on the mystical hill of Glastonbury. The famous festival music could just be heard.

“Oh my God I can't believe it
I've never been this far away from home
And, oh my God I can't believe it
I've never been this far away from home.” 

Her damp back tickled by the grass, Kallandra added her Texan accent to the Kaiser Chiefs’ chorus wafting across wheat fields from the Glastonbury rock festival. The blue sky, interrupted only by a few fair-weather clouds, faded away as it seemed swallows ate them. The aroma of strawberries escaped from their picnic basket adding to spilt brown ale. As her left hand scrabbled in daisies and stones, her right played with Derek’s perspiring fingers that transmitted worry. Only a week left on Earth for both of them, and then off on the first manned Mars mission. Both were as lucky as they were skilful to be selected; she as NASA’s youngest trainee astronaut, and he as aeronautical engineer for Eurospace. She knew Derek worried so she didn’t have to.

“Relax, Derek, honey, and flow with the music. Remember when we canoodled here as students, enraptured by Coldplay? Now they’re here again, reformed. So apt, eh? As are Kaiser Chiefs’ lyrics…

“…a million miles from here,” she sang to him, but he seemed disturbed. She persisted. “You know, our space mission?” She sat up to rest on her elbows, straining to listen to the umpteenth repeat of the popular song. Mega-sized amplifiers, reinforced by fifty thousand drunk, high and happy voices, blasted the sounds, but from three miles away. By the time they reached Glastonbury Tor, only the bass and occasional higher frequencies made it. Her hazelnut-brown hair would have hindered hearing, but for the mission she had it styled short so now her ears were unimpeded. She picked up the lyrics –

“It don't matter to me
'Cos all I wanted to be
Is a million miles from here
Somewhere more familiar
Oh my God I can't believe it
I've never been this far away from home…”

She lay back and saw a shape flutter on top of the ruins of St Michael’s tower. The blackbird must have given up competing, and watched them while perched in silhouette. She stopped singing and tried to whistle a friendly greeting to it. Derek laughed – finally, she thought. So that’s what it took: his woman attempting to whistle. The bird took off, probably in fright.

“This is so bliss,” she said.

“Make the most of it. It’ll take a few thousand years to terraform Mars sufficiently to lie in the open on a grassy hill and sing along to rock bands while scaring away wildlife.”

“Hey,” called Blake, Derek’s teenage nephew, “are we going down to the festival proper? Reheated Coldplay are due on.”

Kallandra evil-eyed him. She’d agreed, but didn’t really want the chubby youth with them, no matter how hilarious she found his attempts to dance, asynchronously to the rhythm. She swore she could feel the worms making a run for it as he thumped.

“We are coming back, Derek,” she said, devouring an escapee strawberry.

“What?” said Blake, taking off his glasses and rubbing them on his T-shirt for the millionth time, “to this weird hill and its oh-so-spooky-ley-lined-King-Arthur tower?”

“I know the plan is for the expedition to be a return trip, but did you read the small print?”

“Sure.”
“No, the tiny print in between the lines of the small print.”

Her green eyes looked at his, as they did three years before. Sometimes she felt he was such an idiot, not with his work, but as a man. But in romantic situations like this, she knew they were an item.

“Derek, I test space vehicles. Every day might be my last. Every day I wake up thinking whoopee, I survived another day.”

“I know, and your dad never tires of telling me how as a kid, you’d leap off the barn roof in homemade gliders so often, the ER called you bird girl.”

“That’s me. I was brought up on cornflakes and adrenalin. I continue to need both, so get used to it.”

“I have, nearly,” Derek said. “Blake, stop leaping around, you’re scaring the wildlife. Watch out, Kal – ants crawling up your arm.”

She leapt up brushing the insects off her tanned arm. “Good God, look at them!” The ants marched haphazardly across their picnic cloth, swarming over the basket. “They’re after the crumbs. Blake, tell them we’ve eaten the food.”

“Why me?”

“You’re nearer to having a meeting of minds,” she said, grinning at Derek, who winked back.

The bass throbbing from the rock festival continued, but she looked up as her blackbird squawked its distinctive warning to other birds.

“Are they after the ants?” Derek said, clipping up the basket while Kallandra waved the tablecloth in the air. “Maybe they’re telling us to go away so they can picnic on the little blighters.”

“And the worms,” said Blake, “millipedes, beetles and earwigs – they’re all coming out. Ugh, there’s a load of flying gnats. Let’s get out of here.”

A golden Labrador that, apart from when it rushed over to sniff Derek’s crotch, had been quietly collecting a Frisbee for a family a hundred yards away, added his voice. Not playful-excitedly but panic-barking, as Kal recognised from her farmyard youth.

Defeated by wildlife and Blake’s need to have his ears pounded by the world’s largest speakers, they gathered their luncheon remains and headed downhill. But she skidded to a halt, as an urge forced her to grab one last lingering look at the tower. They’d fallen in love here - with each other and, by association, the place, but with additional mystique. The pragmatist within her had tried to analyse the hair-tingling feeling she experienced last time. She laughed remembering the tarot-wielding hippies, and alternative-reality culture that ‘knew’ Glastonbury was the magical centre of the world. If the locale harboured extraordinary and sacred evanescence, it might have to do with the extraordinary people traipsing through the Field of Avalon, the Tipi Field, and the riotous craziness at The Lost Vagueness, culminating in exuberance at the Avalon stone circle. But for all that, she derived more inexplicable emotion from this tower on the extraordinary tor.

Several odd things happened at once. Either her vision blurred, or the top of the tower developed fuzziness. Maybe it had become bored with its sharp lines after eight hundred years. Her legs became blurry too, as if the footpath couldn’t wait for her and decided to slither downhill and make its own way home. Staggering, Kallandra put her hand on a large boulder to prevent herself collapsing to the ground, a temporary respite as the rock vibrated. The tiny pink flowers of a miniature thyme plant clung to the top of the boulder. The dark green petite leaves trembled, exposing a timorous millipede that scuttled across the top.

“Go for it, beastie. Escape while you can.”

In spite of a deep rumbling she heard Derek call from lower down the hill.

“Look out, Kal! The tower.”

Fighting the hill’s attempt to send her sprawling, she watched in horror as the old stone tower demolished itself from the top down. Eight hundred years after proud masons on wooden scaffolds shared broad smiles and raised mugs of celebratory cider, the tower was disintegrating in front of her. But the stones didn’t rest where they fell. Kallandra’s chest tightened with fear as the shaking hill encouraged the dismantling tower to hurtle down towards her.

“Run, Kal,” shouted Derek, but the difference between a spaceship designer and her survival skills was the use of her brain. So she scrambled laterally towards brambles that had sheltered in the lee of exposed bedrock, making a natural wall. She threw herself into the prickly Blackthorn just as a small avalanche of limestone blocks rumbled down the path she’d vacated. Sore from the scratches but intact, she crawled through the scrub and over the shaking hillside, zig-zagging until she met up with Derek and Blake sheltering behind a field wall near the base.

The ground vibrated less here but in addition to the crashing of tumbling masonry, shrieks from scared humans, and a cacophony of non-human terrified animals, a deep rumble worried their ears.

Derek shouted: “Are you all right?”

“I’ve been pricked before.”

“Is it an earthquake? You’ve been in them before in the States.”

She sniffed the air. It carried the familiar disturbed earthy odours but not the sulphurous emissions she’d experienced during some quakes in California.

“I doubt it,” she yelled. “I thought you only got tremors in Britain.”

“It’s a volcano,” shouted Blake. “Look at all the smoke.”

Kallandra shook her head but she didn’t want to shout a speech. She pointed downhill to the car park. With arms out to balance like tightrope walkers, they jogged down the lower slopes.

“Seatbelts on, where shall we go?” Derek said, starting the engine.

“Nowhere,” Kallandra said. “I only came back for my other digivideocam. The batteries are gone in the one in my bag.”

“You’re not intending to go back up there?” Derek’s eyebrows disappeared into his blond hair, making Kallandra smile.

“You can take Blake back to town if you want. Although if it’s an earthquake you should stay in the open.”

“But it’s dangerous on the tor, love. Come with us.”

“Most of the tower has fallen, so the worst of the danger is over. Derek, this is too fascinating. I gotta be here, don’t you see that? Anyway, no time for a debate.” She waved and started back up the vibrating hill.

She’d already told herself this was no ordinary earthquake. She’d experienced a few first hand in California, and they didn’t rumble on for ages like this. They come in short bursts, only seconds long. Yet the hill was shaking so much she had difficulty keeping her feet. She reached the piece of sandy-coloured limestone bedrock against which she’d first steadied herself, and aimed the digital videocam east, at the distant Glastonbury Festival. She’d expected to see emptying fields as the crowd escaped, but she could see on the distant giant screens, a rock group leaping and twisting as they belted out another musical gem. The crowd vibrated to the resonance of the beat rather than this hill. Swinging the cam around to the west the bulk of the tor hid the small town, but she could see the M5 motorway carrying traffic as normal.

She loved this kind of mystery. She looked at her feet imagining the tectonic event hidden beneath, yet it was so local that life continued blissfully ignorant four miles away. She granted that crescendos at the festival would mask the loud rumblings beneath her, and the drivers probably couldn’t hear either. Her cellphone tinkled.

“Are you OK, Kal?”

“Sure. What’s the situation in Glastonbury town?”

“Chaos. The hill slopes right into the back gardens on this side. You can feel continuous tremors. It’s as if they’re ants that have lost their queen. But no one is leaving. I’ve put Blake in a taxi to take him to the guesthouse in Weston. Cost a bomb, but I had an urge to come back to you.”

“Aw, sweet. It’s not so loud now up here, but the vibration seems to be worsening. I’m spitting out flying insects that are in swarms around here. Derek – can you hear me above this racket?”

“Just about. You’ve swapped sandwiches for live insects?”

“Close enough. Bring a shovel with you? In fact buy two.”

“Good grief, Kal. That’s lunacy— oh, all right. And you mean spades.”

The vibration seemed to calm for a moment so she ventured away from the large rock up towards the pile of stones that was Saint Michael’s Tower. Felled like the tower of Babel. Maybe the Kaiser Chiefs overdid the loudness earlier and triggered a fault beneath the tor? Not a chance.

She could just detect the bass of Reheated Coldplay’s new piece, Random Order, and although she wouldn’t make room for it on her own MP3 player, hummed to the chorus. A fragment of normality in this craziness. Randomness could have described the drumming beneath her feet, as if it had a beat controlled by stochastic monkeys.

She spotted Derek using the two spades as walking sticks to steady himself up the quivering hill. Fifty yards from her, he staggered as a thunderous roar preceded a violent shudder sending them both sprawling. She lay on her back as she was an hour before, only now the cumulus clouds angrily gathered. Kallandra felt the ground crumbling and digging into her back, forcing her to struggle to her feet. The rock she had leaned on rose from the surface by several feet before cracking and falling, accompanied by increasing roaring as rock strata ground against each other. The roaring sounds were matched by the tremors in her stomach as she thought she might not survive. This premonition was reinforced as a large crack appeared, as in classic earthquakes, between her and Derek. On her already dirty jean knees, the slope she slowly traversed seemed to rise at a steeper angle than where Derek knelt.

As she reached the crevice, she saw that so much loose earth and rocks had fallen into it she could scramble across, noting it was only a couple of feet deep. Derek grabbed her in a bear hug.

“Yes, Derek, but you’re hurting me.” She saw his face was wet, but she was uncertain whether he’d feared for her, himself, or both. Maybe she was being unkind, but for all the dangerous upheaval, she was more excited than afraid. So when Derek pulled at her to go back down to the car – the only one left in the car park – she resisted. Unable to yell coherently with the roaring around them, she pulled away from him and grabbed a spade he’d discarded. She didn’t need to hear Derek trying to shout rebukes over the growling terrain. His admonition telepathed across the disturbed air clear enough.

Reaching the shallow fissure, she plunged the spade in. Why did she have an urge to dig? Defying logic she dug more in the mix of soil, turf and limestone. Another minor upheaval, releasing earthy smells into the air, sent her onto her back. She saw Derek thrown to the floor too as he tried to reach her. Back on her feet, her ears aching from the roaring noise, she raised the shiny new spade and stabbed again at the chasm, which had opened a little more. Again it merely struck limestone rubble, jarring her arm. An urge compelled her to see if anything just beneath the thin soil was responsible for this phenomenon. Was it a result of logical analysis that this event couldn’t be related to seismic disturbance nor volcanic? No. Her logic circuits partly worked that out but a more ethereal need drove her on. A feeling, intuition; a culmination of the esprit of Avalon, her scientific and engineering training, along with bloody-minded curiosity forced her to lift the spade again.

“Come back down, Kal. For God’s sake,” yelled Derek, his voice wailing across the thundering noises.

Clang. The spade hit another rock sending sparks where quartzite and steel met. Her nostrils pinched with a smell of burnt sulphur bringing memories of when as a child she smashed a lump of white and grey quartzite laced with yellow sulphur. She dropped the spade, which slithered further into the crack out of reach. She rested her enviably flat stomach on the ground, feeling small stones through her shirt. Stretching, she grabbed the handle. A strange tingling sensation travelled up her arm to her head. Totally, unlike anything she’d experienced, and she’d been through throb hell: stinging nettles on this hill, purple-striped jellyfish at Long Beach, and the literal hair-raising moment when a shuttle simulator became a stimulator with an accidentally electrified hull. But none of these buzzed her brain. Not that her grey matter was frying, but it had tingled. She had the prescience and presence of mind to consider that her arm was slipping in and out of phase, but it could’ve been the increased vibration.

“Kallandra. Good God, woman, come back down before you turn into a firework.”

“I will. Just let me get this spade.”

Although the shaking ground made upward travel more like a fairground ride, Derek managed to reach her. “Bugger the spade. You should’ve seen yourself.”

“I nearly did. What did you see?”

“Your hair stood up like a luminous porcupine.”

“That’ll be my blue highlights. I knew they’d set off my brown hair.”

“How can you be so calm? We’re in the middle of Armageddon.”

“That’s why I’m a pilot and you’re an engineer.”

“And spaceship designer. Your life support system would soon fizzle out—”

“Without your cunning design. I don’t underrate your genius, Derek, but you do panic unnecessarily. Now can you reach the spade handle? It’s slipped further down.”

“Leave it. I’ll buy you a dozen.”

“I want that one. Something’s happened to it. There, you have it.”

They both stared at the shiny business end. At least two inches was missing as if it had been dipped into the sun.

“That’s it,” Derek said, his voice trembling with fear in addition to the physical quivering. “It must be a volcano and we’re on top of it!”

“It can’t be. Feel the cut end, it’s cool.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Kal, you could’ve burnt yourself.”

“Life is one big chance event, Derek. Anyway, you win. Let’s go before these clouds of gnats suddenly remember we’re food.”

Aided by increasing ground tremors they scramble-slithered to the Volvo estate car waiting in the car park. She gasped not only at the exhilaration but also at the sight at the base of the hill. Luckily, Derek had parked at the far end, near the gate. The rest of the tarmac was buried under detritus. Rocks and turf hid the wheels nearest the hill. Realising they’d be fortunate to move the car, they opened the door furthest from the landslide and at his insistence, Derek took the wheel. With impressive control he didn’t rev the three-litre-engine but nudged it in four-wheel-drive until out of the gate. The lane too sported a mass of fissures and debris but the sturdy vehicle successfully saw them to the main road, where they surprised a policeman erecting a barrier.

Ten miles from Glastonbury languished the sleepy seaside resort of Weston-Super-Mare, where Kallandra and Derek had booked a spacious guesthouse room for their week’s break from the Johnson Space Centre, Houston. Weston had been a popular resort for the British in Victorian times until the lure of cheap flights to the Mediterranean won the tourist battle. An extensive beach overlaid with trucked-in sand entertained few since the 1970s such that the thinning sand each season supported the unkind epitaph of Weston-Super-Mud. But its lack of crassness and heaving multitudes drew Kallandra and Derek. A perfect respite for over-stretched astronauts.

Kallandra bubble-bathed her wounds. Those wicked blackthorn barbs had drawn blood. But the sandalwood and cinnamon candles helped her to relax while the Tea Tree oil in the water worked its magic on scratches and midge bites.

Through mountainous foam her green eyes inspected her reflection in the mirror tiles. Symmetrical at worst, a beauty at best, she thought as she turned her tanned face one-way then the other. A slightly turned-up nose, large eyes and ruddy cheeks from the day’s excitement. Her hazelnut-brown hair, calmed now wet, didn’t reach her shoulders. She smiled at the blue highlights, then again at the scolding at them from her mother in El Paso. She enjoyed the electrifying look they presented to surprised friends. Maybe her raspberry nipples were a little too long but with a wave of her hand the foam hid them, so that was fine.

Exhaling a long breath she looked around the bathroom. A cobweb in a ceiling corner helped to control the fly population. They’d need a telescopic feather duster to reach that one above the twelve-feet-tall apple-white walls. Derek came in, saw her and backed out again.

“It’s OK, Derek, come and join me. This bath’s huge enough for us to have a swimming race.”

“Maybe later,” he said, as he returned with his iPaq, tuned to the BBC News.

“Oo, any news of Glastonbury. Funny that only ten miles away we can’t feel a thing. Perhaps the tremors have stopped.”

“Can I get a word in? The local news mentions it. The village has been evacuated, the hill is cordoned off, and worst of all…”

“What? It’s made the beer flat in Weston?”

“The Festival organisers have been told to send everyone home. There’ll be thousands of annoyed youngsters coming here.” He stared at a lump of earwax he’d unscrewed from his left ear with the nail on his little finger.

“Really? Do they expect the hill to explode? Maybe they think it is a volcano after all. Derek, you are not going to put that into your mouth.”

“I don’t know who your ‘theys’ are. As far as I can tell the army have been summoned but only local police are there so far.”

Kallandra stood, sending waves over the side of the bath and a foam glider gave Derek a face wash. “Sorry, love, but we gotta get back there to see what’s happening.”

“No we don’t, Kal. We’re safer here. Look, it’s seven. It’ll be dark soon.”

“You revolting man. How many times do I tell you not to eat your ear excretions? Anyway, back to the Tor. At the moment we are the experts. This is awesome stuff. Don’t you feel it?”

His long face told her he didn’t, at least not as much as she did. Although it could be the face he always presented after tasting the bitter earwax.

She rapidly towelled dry, grateful her hair had been chopped. “You stay here then. Hey, call Claude, our pet geophysicist will love this one. Why didn’t I think of him before? He’ll be at his Winnipeg home with his girlfriend.”

“You call him from the car, while I’m driving. Make sure you bring your NASA I.D. – I’ve brought mine; I believe it’ll get us past any cordon.”

“You are a genius and I love you,” she said, followed by a big hug and a slobbery kiss. “Use the country lanes. Hopefully the Festivalgoers will use the main road to the motorway.”


Three miles out, they stopped. Not for the exodus, although the lane pulsated with a mix of motorbikes and students’ barely legal vehicles heading at them, but because the sight of the tor made Derek’s foot slam on the brake.

They expected the tower to be rubble, unseen from afar, but they couldn’t have expected the new Glastonbury vision.

“I can’t see it clearly, wash the windscreen, Derek.”

“It’s not the glass.”

“Of course, the hill is quivering, but after all this time? Seven hours? The top is like a fuzz-ball.” She blathered on, but noticed he’d lapsed into silent mode. She continued the commentary for both of them. Verbalising her thoughts helped clarification for her, whereas Derek brewed his deliberations until the fermentation process reached perfection. And if it didn’t he remained broody. “Keep on driving. There’s something else different about that hill. Does it seem taller to you?”

“No.”

“That’s because you’re concentrating on collision avoidance. Wise man, but I’m telling you there is more than a crumpled tower and rising clouds from agitated dust.”

“We’ll be there in a minute, Kal. Ah, we need to turn right, but there’s a policeman single-handedly preventing miscreants going to Glastonbury Tor.”

“No problem, we have NASA I.D. cards and if all else fails I’ll whip my jeans off and wow him with my tanned legs.”

“British policemen are immune to sex.”

Kallandra nodded thinking it applied to some spaceship designers too. The policeman didn’t want to argue, he merely insisted they drove away.

“Officer,” she said in her Texan drawl. “We’re not the press, or hippy groupies, are we?”

“I suppose not. But it is dangerous back there.”

“Look again at my pass.” Not a pass, but he wouldn’t know. “On behalf of NASA, it entitles me to access the phenomenon occurring behind you. It will be too late if we have to go all the way round to the other side. Do you want us to contact your superiors, to inform them of your obstructing the course of our enquiries?”

He waved them through, muttering incomprehensibles.

Around the last corner leading to the car park, they had to stop again. The avalanche that had spilled onto their Volvo a few hours ago had grown to block the lane completely.

“The policeman was right. Let’s go back,” Derek said.

“I’d rather investigate what we can from this side. We know what the hill looked like.” She opened her door and, armed with her shoulder bag crammed with still and video cameras as well as binoculars and sample boxes, she clambered up the scree of loose rocks before Derek could stop her. Luckily, her astronaut training enabled her to make excellent progress. Nevertheless, she skidded around on the moving rocks, often slipping back a few feet.

Concentrating so much on not falling, she reached three-quarters of the height of the hill before she stumbled onto a wall. The rest of the hill in front of her was above a five-foot high vertical vibrating wall. She fell on her back, luckily on relatively level ground. The noise resembled a jet engine test, so she couldn’t call to Derek, nor appeal for his presence on her cellphone. Even so, she snapped a shot and sent it to him.

A hand patted her shoulder, making her heart neglect a beat. Derek had climbed up behind her. He drew out a handkerchief to dab at a graze on her forehead, but she waved it away, pointing at the section of hill in front. Through the roar she mouthed: ‘It’s rising.’

‘Volcano?’ he mouthed back.

‘Can’t be. No heat.’

‘Pre-eruption? Plug rising?’

She hadn’t thought of that. Many volcanoes have the magma cool after eruption resulting in a solidified vent. If, after years of dormancy, the volcano decides to have another blow, the plug of cold magma has to be blasted out. Sometimes that is preceded by the plug rising. But it wouldn’t make sense for Glastonbury Tor. Made of limestone and clays it was geologically wrong to have been a volcano. But she was at a loss for an alternative hypothesis.

‘I doubt it,’ she mouthed back. Up close to the rising mass she peered into the moving gloom. The sun was setting on the other side of the hill. In the dark, an irregular cascade of rock and turf dissuaded her from reaching in with her outstretched hand. She remembered her bag and brought out a small torch. The beam appeared to be swallowed by the blackness in the wall, which maybe wasn’t a wall, just a vertical something between the lower and upper slope. As if the top of the hill was being pushed up. She needed a brighter light, and turned her digital camera to flash. After selecting the night image and anti-shake setting, she pressed the button.

Although the camera sends a single burst, there seemed to be a double flash. In spite of being shaken by the vibrating ground, she examined the image. Inside the darkness a bright glare obscured the picture. She took more pictures though some were of the sky as the vibration appeared to be worsening. She would’ve liked to traverse the hill to see if the wall-like blackness surrounded the top, but knew Derek was keen to have them out of danger. The rain of debris precipitated around them, sometimes hitting them, but not with worrying impact speed.

Once in the car Derek used the GPS road planner to find a route to circumnavigate the tor. The roaring sound of rocks grinding and falling diminished rapidly. She photographed and took video shots, but with little hope of seeing the detail that eluded them close up. From half a mile away, the tor was a haze of vibrations. She had no doubt the top of the hill was lifting. After sending the images and mpeg files to Claude in Canada, it seemed too dangerous to stay.

By the time they reached their guesthouse room, Kallandra’s cellphone trilled her with a received message alert from Claude.

‘You are not the only ones...'

Kallandra switched from her cellphone to view her larger laptop computer screen. Claude had directed her to CNN broadcasts of mountain shaking in other countries.

“Derek, come and look at this.”

He turned from the kitchenette holding an empty mug. “You said you wanted hot chocolate so that’s what— What the hell? Is that Sugar Loaf Mountain?”

“It sure is. In Rio. Apparently Rob put him on to it.”

“Our Rob? The Aussi shrink at NASA? Don’t tell me he was having a picnic on top of Sugar Loaf?”
“No, but he’s addicted to news reports.”

“So, is Sugar Loaf lifting like Glastonbury?”

“Difficult to say. The images are too indistinct – like our problem with the shaking ground.”

“Isn’t that giant statue of Jesus on top? There’ll be panic if that’s fallen.”

“No, Christ’s on top of Corcovado Mountain. On Sugar Loaf the two cable cars have broken.”
The kettle called Derek to the kitchenette. “You do realise that Sugar Loaf could be a real volcano about to blow?”

“That’s what the authorities believe. They’re evacuating millions – my God, where are they all going to go?”

Kallandra hungered for more information and clicked from CNN to Reuters, the BBC, and Earthquake Watch in an endless cycle until something new happened.

“Ayers Rock seems to be splitting in two!”

“Ah, you mean Uluru,” he said, pleased to score a minor one-up, but then her announcement reached a consequences brain cell. “That’s all the aborigines buggered. And they’ll blame the whites. Hey, that can’t be volcanic surely?”

“Not sure, hang on, I’ve asked Claude. He said he’ll be right back. Where’s that hot chocolate?”
He pulled up a chair so they slurped and watched the screen together. Kallandra found a live webcam for Sugar Loaf Mountain but it appeared like the same foggy image as their Glastonbury. Ayers Rock would be at night so she didn’t try searching for a webcam. Claude sent her laptop a link to the geology of Ayers Rock.

“Hey, Uluru is like the tip of an iceberg. Only it has a sandstone root four miles deep.”

“There’s an interesting bit,” Derek said. “The aborigines believed there was a sacred hollow inside the rock below ground.”

“Maybe their ancient folklore knew something after all. Now what? CNN are reporting quake activity in the Yosemite Valley. But…” She switched to the Earthquake Watch site. “It’s not being picked up by live seismic centres – oh, yes it is, but not deep. No epicentre as such so not a fault movement. More a local disturbance, like when an avalanche occurs.”

“I didn’t realise you knew so much about interpreting P and S waves,” Derek said, rubbing his ear.

“I’ve always had an interest.”

“Um, especially since we met Claude.”

“You know we have to have more than one or two high level interests on the astronaut training course. Besides piloting I dabble in Artificial Intelligence and—”

“Language, especially bad language, so why geology except that the dashing Claude…”

“Linguistics, true, but that’s kinda part of the AI work I do. Anyway geology would be useful on Mars. Except it shouldn’t really be called geology there – the study of the Earth’s structure. It’s called Areography, from the Greek for the Roman God of Mars.” She glanced at Derek to see if she’d sufficiently diverted his attention from Claude. “It’s El Capitan in Yosemite. It’s cracking up. Whoa, and there’s a big landslide from Tabletop mountain in South Africa. There is a pattern here.”

“They’re all monuments, important to people?”
“Well, they are, and possibly all sacred to ancients, probably because they are individual lumps of rock that are different from their surroundings. And so susceptible in earth movements.”

“If the Earth is shaking up for some tectonic reason, maybe those more isolated features would be the first to crumble. Something you could have sweet words with Claude about.”

“You could ask him yourself,” she said, wishing he’d give his jealousy a rest. Claude, who once came second in a Denzel Washington look-alike contest, came onto women and they back to him like butterflies to a Buddleia. But at the letting-our-hair-down party last fall, a vodka too many allowed Derek to spy her and Claude in a smoochy close body-contact dance. She’d explained how it was the fault of alcohol, and that she’d no romantic intentions a thousand times to the nth power, but…

A knock at the door brought gangly Blake falling into the room. “Have you heard?”

Derek nodded. “We know about the other mountains if that’s what you mean.”

“What other mountains? No, I meant the Festival has been relocated to Bath. Will you take me tonight?”

Derek looked at him with his mouth open but nothing came out. He walked over to the window and cleaned his glasses with the curtain.

“No, is the word he’s struggling for,” Kallandra said. “We’re tired. Try again at breakfast.”

“But it’ll be a blast – bound to go on all night.” He was fondling a walnut-sized metal ball, and then threw it in the air. Derek snatched it.

“No it won’t,” Derek said. “It’ll take them all night to set everything up. What’s this, a Chinese stress ball? I didn’t know you were into Tai Chi.”

“Then I’ll help them. Oh, please uncle Derek. I’ll tell everyone what a great uncle you are—”

Blake had to stop to answer his cellphone. Derek grabbed it, giving back the ball.

“Ah, so that’s the hidden agenda. Who is Amanda?”

Kallandra smiled and stroked Blake’s arm. “Aren’t stress balls supposed to tinkle, and come in pairs? Where did you find it? So, you have some totty lusting after you in a tent. Derek, you remember those days?”

“On the tor, it was rolling down. You two in a tent? Ugh, I’m glad you aren’t my parents.” Blake grabbed his phone and stomped out.

In a rare moment of dry wit, Derek called after him: “So are we!”

The lumps in Kallandra’s half of the bed didn’t stop her weary body lapsing into grateful unconsciousness, but her active brain woke her moments before the dawn made a spectacle of itself.

While Derek snored she showered with the bathroom door open to glimpse breakfast news. Sadly for her, a prince had allegedly had an affair, so most of the airtime on British TV gave it undue importance. She switched on her iPaq while checking her cellphone messages. One from Claude referred her Ayers Rock enquiries to Rob Summers, the NASA psychiatrist who’d returned on vacation to his Australian homeland.

E-mail: to Claude Lapointe

CC: Kallandra Harvard

Hello, Claude. Having a barbeque fest here since I arrived. Ayers Rock – hey buddy, we call it Uluru these days. I’ve not been there for years. Your alert made me look at some news, and it does seem like something weird is happening – the bloody thing’s split – allegedly. My guess is that some existing cracks have opened up. The strata are vertical so it’s not so far-fetched. However, what you see isn’t what you get. LOL. There’s over three more miles of upended strata buried. I can’t see the crack going all the way.

I wonder if it’s the same kind of thing that’s happening to Huashan Mountain in China?

I’d go and investigate Uluru myself but I promised Rosie I’d spend this leave with her, and I’m due back at JSC with you guys in a few days.

Kal, sorry to hear Glastonbury Fest has been interrupted. I’ve fond memories in tents there – can’t remember the music tho. <wink>

Maybe the planet’s having a wobble, Vic?

Cya both next week.

Rob.

Useless man, Kallandra thought, but replied with thanks. The Huashan Mountain news interested her. A scrambled whiz around the web found nothing except tourist information about the mountain being a Buddhist and Taoist sacred place with shrines strategically placed to assist the faithful.

Maybe there’d been developments at El Capitan and Tabletop on CNN. Before she could click, a rap at the door startled her.

“Good grief, Blake,” she called as she tightened her dressing gown. “It’s only six in the morning. Derek, get your ass out of bed, your nephew wants his lift.”

But the door opened to two uniforms. One policewoman, late thirties, stern, a couple of shoulder silver studs meant she’d worked her way up the ranks. The other was undoubtedly male, khaki army uniform with impressive and thus high ranking moustache, which twitched as he spoke.

“Major Harvard?”

Before she could deny the fact on the grounds she didn’t reveal such intimacies to strange men, he continued. “We need you and Mr Stone on a matter of urgent National Security.”
“Really? Did you know we are on leave?” she said, then yelled: “Derek.”

“Indeed, but NASA has permitted us to request your assistance.” Bizarrely, a steward wheeled a breakfast trolley into the room from behind the Colonel.
“But how did NASA know where we were staying?”

Derek coughed as he emerged from the bathroom. “Let them in, Kal.”
“You told JSC where we were. Traitor. I’d told them we were staying in London.”

“I had to, they might have needed us in some emergency – and it seems I was right.”

Frowning at being thwarted she waved in their visitors. “What’s all this about? Have you been parking illegally, Derek… again?”

The policewoman shook her head, but remained unamused. “I’m Inspector Scrivens, and this is Colonel Dean. One of my officers reported that a couple bearing NASA credentials—”

“Glastonbury? Why, what has happened overnight? I hadn’t felt any earthquakes.”

“You need to make your own observations.”
“Oh, come on,” Derek said, offering a cup of coffee to Kallandra. “Has the tor sunk again, or split apart like Uluru?”

The Colonel looked puzzled.

“Ayers Rock,” Derek said, as if scoring a point.

“I know it’s called Uluru, but didn’t know it had anything to do with Glastonbury Tor.”

“And,” said the Inspector, “we’d rather you observe the phenomenon’s development for yourself. We have pictures but…”

“I completely understand,” Kallandra said. “We’ll be there as soon as we’ve dressed and breakfasted.”

“We’ll give you fifteen minutes and take you in my helicopter,” said the Colonel. “The roads are pretty much impassable this side of the cordon.”

“Really?” Kallandra said, “have the Festival people returned…” Her left eyebrow lifted to emphasise the question, but the visitors had left. “I bet they have guards on the fire escape in case we make a break for it.”
“I thought you wanted to investigate the damn Tor.”

“I do, but I don’t like being ordered about. Especially by foreign authorities.”

“Hey, you’re the foreigner here,” Derek said, then he unwisely head-butted a jam-loaded croissant she threw at him.

As soon as they rose above the roofs of Weston-Super-Mare they could see the traffic was ridiculously congested: mainly because the M5 motorway had become a linear car park.

“I’ve known it to be like that on Bank Holiday weekends,” Derek said.

The inspector cleared her throat, something she shouldn’t do into a headset, resulting in pained expressions from the others. “Oh, sorry. The traffic thins once past the Glastonbury turn off. It seems they’re mostly rubbernecks, and added to by New Earth neo-paganists.”

“No Festival goers returning?” Kallandra said.

“Oh my God, I’ve forgotten about Blake,” Derek said. “He must still be in bed.” His left finger rose towards his ear. Kallandra intercepted it and held his hand in hers.

“Let him stay there,” Kallandra said, “the rest will do him good. Inspector, I’ve been trying to find information and images on what’s been happening and failing. How did all these people know that the Tor is disintegrating or whatever?”

The Colonel laughed. “Not the Internet, nor television, my dear. Eddie Wear on Radio Weird. He broadcasted from Glastonbury Festival for the New Age folk, and then got wind of the strange happenings. His Campervan turned over when it was struck by a landslide. He called every hippy and music lover in the country to pay homage to the Glastonbury Devil that must have caused it.”

“Derek, make a note – we’ll have to a create a list of causation hypotheses – oh, my, there it is. What the hell’s happening to it?”

The top half of the tor appeared to be floating just above the rest. Little remained of St Michael’s Tower or of the grassland that surfaced the hill. Soil – mostly clay and turf – clung on, but Kallandra swore she could see sunlight glinting off the rock beneath.

The Colonel talked into his headset to them. “The top half was ten feet clear of the ground at six o’clock.”

Her photographs disappointed her with insufficient detail, but now there was daylight beneath, easily seen as the helicopter sought ground level to land.

All the passengers were so intent gawping at the bizarre view of a hill suspended in the air, that unlike the pilot, they hadn’t noticed a tractor pulling a muck-spreader into their landing spot. The helicopter lurched upward, tilting violently to the right.

“Sorry. But we have a suicidal farmer trying to stop me land. Where are your troops, Sir? I thought they secured this field.”

“So did I, land in the next field before that madman gets there – I’ll radio my people.”

Cattle scattered as the chopper landed.

Embarrassed soldiers with feeble excuses reached them moments before the red-faced farmer drove up in his spluttering tractor. “What right have you to land on my land? And look at what you military people have done to it.” The man was in tears, while waving his brown hairy arm at the tor.

“It’s got nothing to do with the military, Sir,” said the Colonel, bristled at the accusation of making the world’s slowest ballistic missile out of a national heritage.

“Who else could do it? This land has been in my family since William the Conqueror. Why did you have to choose my time on it to ruin it all?”

“We are here to investigate this phenomenon,” said the policewoman. “Kindly let us get on with our job. I’ll have you arrested if you obstruct us.”

“That’s a bit harsh,” Kallandra said. She walked over to console the farmer, but took a step back when his border collie growled. “Sir, I know it must be hard, but something strange is going on and we—”

“Ah, the Yanks. I might have guessed you lot would be behind it. Doing experiments you wouldn’t dare in America. Anyway, I’ve sent for my solicitor. I’ll be suing the army, the government, America. Anyone responsible.” Two men were running from the farm buildings shouting. A woman walked rapidly behind them. Clearly, his family were on their way to stop him having a heart attack.

“Derek,” Kallandra whispered, “add military experiments to the list of hypotheses.” He looked at her as if to think she was joking, and then wrote it anyway.

The Colonel waved his men to secure the helicopter landing area before leading them through a gate in the tree-lined hedge to the tor.

    From the air, she couldn’t accept what she’d seen. On foot, the obscuring trees conspired in her denial. Eager to observe once again the most stomach-curdling astonishing sight, she ran through tall grass and yanked back the five-bar gate. Five more steps and her legs rebelled. Her body trapped in a catatonic trance, her brain tried in vain to make sense of the bizarre sight. Muscles screamed: run away, but her curiosity pleaded: stay.
    After adrenaline-stretched moments that seemed like hours, with the others similarly confounded behind her, Kallandra found words. “It’s impossible.”
    “Ridiculous,” Derek said. “It must be an illusion. That hill must weigh millions of tons.”
    “Eighty million,” said the Colonel.
    Derek squinted at the hill, which continued to drip rocks and lumps of earth. “Yes, that’s a good estimate. How did you calculate it? Volume times the density of limestone I suppose.”
    “My engineer did.”
    “Listen to them,” Kallandra said to Inspector Scrivens. “My bewilderment is in complete awe, while they nerd like trainspotters.”
    The policewoman nodded, a smile, perceptible for a second. “They are sublimating their helplessness by playing with numbers. It would be just as inconceivable with one million tons.”
    After a thick silence from the four, although the sound of the cascade of rocks formed background percussion, Kallandra contributed observations of her own. “It’s still rising. The air seems to be quivering above it. See how the clouds behind are distorted, and the whole thing vibrates making it appear unclear like yesterday. Has someone measured how fast it’s rising?”
     “A foot an hour, approximately,” said the Colonel, “according to my surveyor. Hello, who’s this?”
    “He’s the policeman who let us through the cordon yesterday,” Derek said, as the overweight policeman puffed up the rock-strewn meadow to them.
    “Morning, Ma’am,” he said to his superior, and with lesser salutes to the rest. “I thought you boffins ought to know.”
    “We’re boffins now?” Kallandra said. “Is that bad?”
    “It’s ancient British for scientists,” Derek said. “What should we know, officer?”
    “Some of us local police have a theory about this floating mountain.”
    Kallandra looked at him in an effort to find evidence of awe in him. None. Anyone would think floating mountains happened all the time. Maybe he had a Japanese print of Fujiyama at home. For a moment she wondered if it wasn’t just the frequent mist that made the mountains there appear to float. Could this have happened before?
    “We think it’s them hippies. We’ve had trouble with them in the past…”
    “Constable,” said his inspector, “pilfering from local shops, setting fire to haystacks and poaching fish is one thing. Stealing an eighty-million-ton mountain is quite another.”
    “No, no. Excuse me, Ma’am. There are caves in these rocks all around here.”
    “You mean like at Cheddar,” said the Colonel.

    “Exactly, there are potholes around Glastonbury and some locals reckon there’s a sacred cave inside the Tor.”
    His superior interrupted him. “I don’t see how that could possibly have anything to do with this phenomena.”
    “It’s Wild Murray. He’s a nutter who lives in Shepton. He’s always had a crowd of followers at the Festival and each year has done some crazy gimmick. He’s made giant straw men to set afire; giant kites– and he’s a potholer.”
    “So, where’s the relevance here?” The inspector was clearly agitating herself into a rage.
    “It’s obvious to us, with respect, Ma’am, that Wild Murray has found a way into the cave. He’s taken a big balloon in there and filled it with hydrogen to create a big scene again.”
    “I don’t think a Zeppelin inside the hill would make it lift the hill,” she said. For the first time, Kallandra saw a glimmer of a smile grow into a dismissive smirk.
     “What do you think, Colonel?” Kallandra said. “Is it just possible that weak fault lines in the limestone could allow a very large hydrogen-filled balloon to do this?”
    “I would say it is very unlikely, but not completely impossible. Of course it would mean our estimate of the weight of the hill is way over that of a cave.” His moustache increased twitching as he warmed to the idea. “Just suppose there was a tall cave and the roof was made of a very thin strata, riddled with cracks. After all, limestone gorges, like Cheddar Gorge, are made from collapsed cave roofs. The additional buoyancy of a hydrogen-filled balloon might just lift it. And the weight of the surface soil and few rocks could keep it from rising too fast. Well done, Constable.” His mouth paralleled his moustache in a grin, enabling the constable to smile too.
    “Absolute poppycock,” said the Inspector.
    “Nevertheless, it is a hypothesis to be tested,” Kallandra said. “Make a note, Derek.”
    “Already done,” he said, “but it’s nonsense.”
    “I know. It’s quite feasible for the Tor to have a cave within – legendary, I believe. But unless Wild Murray has an international following, it doesn’t explain the geophysical disturbances in other continents. Have you sent pictures of this floating mountain to Claude?”
    “It’s sleep-time in Canada, Kal. Hey, where are you going? It’s dangerous too close.”
    Risking the occasional rock fall, Kallandra grabbed a hard hat from a soldier, and ventured to within fifty feet of the apparition. She gasped as she raised her camera to capture the view beneath the slowly rising hill. As soon as she aimed her camera, she was grabbed by two soldiers, who carried her, screaming obscenities, back to the others.
    The Colonel wagged a finger at her. “You’d be no use to us, Major Harvard, if you were crushed under an avalanche.”
    As her mouth re-opened to hurl abuse at him, a thunderous crash shook the ground as the remains of St Michael’s Tower fell off the Tor.
    “We have remote cameras that we don’t mind being dented,” he said, and waved to a lieutenant manning a mini-car sized tank with a turret bristling with cameras, aerials, sensors and a gun barrel.
    “Are you going to shoot it down?”
    “Not straight away, Miss.”
    “You mean you are really considering it?”
    “Miss, we have to consider the possibility that whatever is holding that rock up might let it go over the town. If the constable’s theory is correct—”
    “It can’t be. Can we have some images from your robo-tank, please?”

    A large police incident van had displaced the few cattle remaining in the angry farmer’s east field. Army field units mushroomed around it, reproducing by the hour. It was as if the Ministry of Defence training grounds on Salisbury Plain had lunged out to swallow Glastonbury. But what were they to do? The Tor continued rising at the rate of a foot per hour.
    Inside a large operations tent, Kallandra stood at the shoulder of the robot-camera operator. She pointed at the image of the base of the rock.
    “See, there is something there. Although the trailing turf and falling bits mess it up, there is a smooth dark curved surface.”
    “It might only appear dark because of the absence of light on it,” suggested Derek. “Can we illuminate it?”
    The Colonel took a deep breath. “We could, in several ways. That robot vehicle has laser, infrared and visible light projections. It also has radar and microwave emitters and receivers. Using any of these could be considered offensive to an enemy.”
    “The floating hill is an enemy?”
    “Can you assure me it isn’t, Major Harvard? No, you can’t because we remain in observational mode. I have to decide whether to illuminate the base or not after I have more firepower at my disposal.”
    “I’ve already used a flash camera on it yesterday. It didn’t blow me away.”
    “That’s positive information, even if you have a reckless disregard for your safety, and for everyone else’s. How did you know the presence of sudden bright light where it had detected none before, wouldn’t trigger an explosion? You didn’t. What sort of military training have you had, Major? No offence meant.”
    Kallandra’s face could have heated a house. She knew he was right. She had been trained to fly untested aircraft, and make gutsy on-the-spot decisions, not to pussyfoot around potential enemies. She must have bunked that course.
    The Colonel studied the faces around him. “We are going to light up the arse of the floating mountain.”
    Everyone grinned.
    If anyone expected to see alien rockets in the base they were disappointed. The light reflected off a smooth metallic curve, like the lower third of a sphere, seventy-nine yards in diameter.
    Inspector Scrivens bent forward to examine the image. “Good lord, it looks like the constable’s theory might have some validity. That could be the underneath of a balloon.”
    “No it couldn’t,” Derek said. “There must be thousands of tons of rock remaining on the top of whatever that is. And initially at least a million tons. Then there are the others.”
    “Ah, the others,” said the Colonel, with a smirk barely concealed beneath his moustache. “Yes, we’ve made contact with the military in the States, Australia, Brazil and South Africa. Maybe it’s early days, but they’ve all reported geophysical or tectonic disturbances at a local level. None of them report a complete hilltop flying off. It could be coincidence, there are hundreds of earth tremors everyday around the planet.”
    “What about China – Huashan Mountain?” Kallandra said.
    “No contact. Just how do you know about that one? Again, there are many seismic disturbances from tectonic plate movement there, so we have access to seismograph readings, but there’s been no official reporting of anything unusual. On the other hand, although entente has been more cordial lately, they remain tight-lipped about most things.”
    “So do all countries if there’s something to be embarrassed about,” she said. “Like flying mountains.”
    “Quite so. Lieutenant, do an infrared scan, followed by micro-radar, then other short wave radio scan. Report directly to me.”
    Kallandra pulled Derek outside, made him carry two camp chairs, grabbed them a coffee each, and settled to a ringside view of the hill.
    She was about to speak, but surrendered when a Chinook thundered overhead. It seemed the air was alive with helicopters, slow flying airplanes and an army drone spy plane. She focussed purloined army field glasses just above the apex of the tor, to confirm the shimmering of the air. “Either the top is very hot, or something else is distorting the air above the tor,” she yelled. The Chinook landed in the nearby developing airfield.
    Derek nodded agreement. “Now we know the base is like the lower half of a sphere, the disintegrating hill could be sitting on a giant ball.”
    Once she removed the field glasses to see the whole hill, she had to agree. “It really is shaping up to be like a spherical balloon, shaking off a mantle of soil. So, what is it?”
    “OK, I think we can rule out a natural phenomenon. I know it’s not possible for a metallic ore to have a bulbous appearance…”
    “Such as pure haematite.”

    “Exactly, but not that size.”
    “On the other hand maybe we are witnessing the first natural metallic shell with lighter-than-air interior.”
    “Kal, just say balloon. But are there natural metallic balloons?”
    “Some ejecta from volcanic eruptions have hot gases inside. And we do not possess a complete inventory of every natural phenomenon possible.”
    “True. So we add to the list of hypotheses, possible natural but unknown phenomenon. An ore, inside a limestone cave that experienced massive expansion, possibly from hydrogen.
    “Hello, a Bentley has arrived with a military police escort. Should we go and introduce ourselves?”
    “No, Derek, if they’re sufficiently important they’ll come to us.
    “If that sphere is not natural, then it must be artificial. Let’s rule out little green men for now.”
    “Which means man-made. Wild Murray might be responsible after all. It’s about time Claude woke up, let’s send him a copy of that image and ask what’s happening to El Capitan.”
    “It’s only four in the morning there, oh, go on then,” she said, partly because he’d have to go to the lieutenant to copy the file or have it transferred to their iPaq. Also, the stranger seemed to be shouting in there, and she’d like to know why. She didn’t believe in auras yet an ominous feeling accompanied that car, oozed across the field and hovered in front of her. She watched Derek enter the tent, followed shortly by shouting. He returned.
    “We have to leave,” he said, with a mix of anger and apology, although both of them knew it wasn’t his fault.
    “My guts had an ominous feeling about him. Who is he, MI6?”
    “Maybe. He said he was Commander Berringer, Ministry of Defence liaison bigwig. He said we had no business here and to clear off or be escorted to the cordon.”
    “But they brought us here. It’s that typical cock-up where the left hand doesn’t know what all the other hands are doing. We’ll see about that,” she said, putting on her stern face.
    “I agreed to go.”
    “More fool you. Go then. I’ve work to do here, and I thought you had.”
    Derek tagged along, lagging behind a couple of yards. Before she reached the tent, she turned. “Did you get the images copied to your iPaq? If not do it while I distract Berringer.”
    She marched into the tent, but was taken aback at the diminutive size of the new arrival. She took a deep breath having learnt the hard way that small people often punched an intellectual wallop, and decided to defend herself by an attack strategy.
    “Berringer, are you in the pay of the Chinese?”
    If he was surprised, or annoyed, he didn’t show it.
    “Miss Harvard?”
    “Major Harvard.”
    “No matter, I am a Commander and so senior to you. Now get out.”
    She could play status semantics but she also knew she should control her maverick tendencies, which jarred with the usual clean-cut NASA astronauts. No matter how good her flying and lateral thinking abilities were, one more embarrassment could see her off the Mars flight.
    “You must have been invited here by error, Harvard. In any case you are a foreigner.”
    “But Derek is British, we are together as a NASA investigative team. Are you prepared to push this into an incident, Commander, or agree to international cooperation that gets results and make us look good?” She embellished her conciliation with her most winning smile.
    “Very well, Harvard, you may stay, but all information gathered here is to stay with me and the British Government unless I say so. Understood? Or do I have to make you sign the Official Secrets Act?”

    She glanced over to Derek and noticed from his grin to the lieutenant that he’d already copied the images. She nodded compliance to Berringer. “You might be surprised at how useful I can be.”
    “In that case, Major, now we are friends, you can inform me what you know about the Chinese situation in Huashan? And Uluru, Sugarloaf, El Capitan and Table Top. Do you know more?”
    She winced as she realised he knew as much as she did. “I have contacts.”
    “Good, so do I. We might need them. The Chinese have already broken off a trade mission. They seem to think a bomb is responsible for the massive landslides and cracking of the mountain. Huashan is one of their most sacred mountains.”
    “I guess they haven’t seen inside it yet? Or noticed that it is rising?”
    “It was you who was going to be helpful to me, Major? All we know about the Chinese situation is that there is too much smoke from a forest fire, possibly caused when a crushed hotel oil tank spewed burning oil into its grounds. Our surveillance photographs can’t see enough and China News is silent. We have little information on your country’s El Capitan. Apparently the whole of the Yosemite Valley is cordoned off including a no-fly zone. I hope you can enlighten us?”
    “We’re trying to wake up our contact. Don’t forget that region is eight hours behind us. Even if the military are there, it’s dark so unless they feel under threat there’ll be no detailed observations. Have you been there, Commander? If, only the top hundred yards are affected, they won’t see events as clearly as we can here.”
    “Major, you mean because El Capitan is three times the height and in a gorge. South Africa is in a political turmoil again, so we’ll probably not get much sense there. Uluru’s been in daylight for hours, so why’s Australia keeping quiet?”
    “Something different seems to happening there,” Kallandra said, finding herself on the defensive. If only Rob Summers had been more informative. “It seems Uluru is splitting. If there is a sphere in there, it might take longer to become visible. But all of us are in the dark, so to speak.”
    “In which case why do you think you can be helpful, Major? You seem to know less than my department.”
    “A very big reason, Commander, I called NASA. If necessary I can have close-up satellite live satellite imagery and their onboard sensors much quicker than you could.” She could tell by his nodding, that she was on a winner. “Plus, my training allows for more lateral thinking than yours.”
    “Maybe. Speaking of imagery, I believe you noticed the shimmering in the air above the Tor. Maybe you could ask NASA to scan it for any odd emissions, and alert your contacts in the USA to fly low over theirs? I’ll ask the Australian Air Force to do the same. Major, we are singing from the same hymn sheet here?”
    “You mean it’s the airforce’s meteorological wing – so to speak - with their flying sensors? Sure I do.” They both grinned.
    Derek, secreting his iPaq in his jacket pocket, came over. “The lieutenant has another theory about the floating mountains.” He saw the Commander looking serious. “But I wouldn’t give any of the theories any credence, especially his.”
    “Spit it out, Derek,” Kallandra said.
    “He says it could be an elaborate illusion, such as when the entertainer David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear.”
    “Thank him, will you,” said the Commander, clearly unimpressed.
    “Add it to our list of hypotheses, Derek. None of them might be the answer, but the answer might be in a combination.”
    The lieutenant called over from his console. “Excuse me? I saw one of the shows. A Jumbo jet vanished in front of a large audience. I know it was only an illusion but it looked very real. I’m not saying he or another entertainer is behind this, only that a similar effect could be operating.”
    “That’s a fair point,” Kallandra said. She smiled at him, hoping it didn’t seem condescending. “I’ve noticed the air shimmering above the rising tor. I’m waiting for high-definition satellite imagery of all the sites. The infrared and gravity anomalies in particular might reveal phenomena we can’t see. It probably isn’t a master entertainer at work here, but it might be instructive to question them.”

    Inspector Scrivens jotted it into her notebook. “So we shan’t arrest Copperfield on suspicion of vandalising part of our National Heritage by floating it up and away, but to help us with our enquiries?”
    “Exactly,” Kallandra said. “Squeeze out of him how he would have done it, if he’d thought of it first. It could point us in some useful directions.”
    Kallandra heard a sharp crack from outside.
    The lieutenant cried out: “A slab of rock is sliding off the top of the tor.”
    The ground shook sending everyone hurtling to the floor as a roar, like a rocket taking off, hurt their ears. As the thundering ended, the tent walls facing the tor burst in as rocks smashed into it. More thumps and equipment-smash noises followed, but ended in seconds. In-tent chaos pursued the exterior noises with tumbled shelving, and their boxes. Kallandra gasped as an angle-iron shelf unit broke its fall on her ankle.
    She knew it could be broken, but couldn’t reach it because the limp body of the Commander lay on top of her. She could see his face, pale, but a pulse throbbed in his neck, allowing her to assume the rest of him survived too. “Commander, can you hear me? Someone get him off me?”
    Her request was met with groans from the other recumbents, as the sunlit tent exterior cast an eerie green glow on the shambles of fallen equipment and people. The main poles remained, but gashes in the canvas showed where ricocheted fragments of sharp limestone made forced entries. 
    A helmeted sergeant rushed into the tent. “Who’s hurt?”
    “Hooray. Over here,” Kallandra said. “The Commander’s unconscious and I can’t move.”
    “I’ll call for medics first, Miss, then I’ll be back.”
    A long groan came from the direction of the lieutenant. She called to him, and after some minor crashing, he responded. “I’m all right, Major, but the computer isn’t. Anyone would think the Tor didn’t want us to know too much.”
    “Now that would be too spooky. Lieutenant, if you are able can you get over to me? I can’t see my ankle, which is trapped, and I’d hate to think I’m leaking valuable red stuff while we’re idly chatting.”
    In moments he stood over her. “No bleeding, Major. Is the weight of the Commander too much? I’d rather wait for the medics to put a neck collar on him just in case.”
    “I’ve eaten burgers heavier than him. Can you lift the shelf-unit up enough to shift my ankle?”
    “I’ll help,” Derek said. He rubbed his face as if waking from a nightmare.
 

    Grateful that the bombardment hadn’t seriously injured anyone, Kallandra sat on a camp-bed outside, and nursed her bruised ankle with an icepack, while staring at the floating hill. Derek lay on a nearby camp-bed, head propped up by his right arm, and stared at the gravity-defying mass.
    “It’s no longer a Tor,” said the lieutenant, more upset at his computer’s demise than his random scratches and mild concussion.
    The Colonel shouted at them. “We’re retreating to the next field. You three, come out of the line of fire.”
    “You’re right, we can’t call it a hill, mountain or Tor,” Kallandra said. “That last rockfall has exposed the top so much, it looks like a bald head.”
    The lieutenant laughed. “And the remaining rocks and turf looks like a monk’s fringe.”
    “A silver-headed monk. But I doubt that turf will hang on for much longer. That is a sphere – no doubt any more.”
    The Colonel’s shadow crept over them. “Fascinating though it might be, people, but let’s move out.”
    “We’re as safe as we’re going to be, Colonel,” Kallandra said. “That last fall was the top, and when it went it took most of the rest.”
    “Orders, Ma’am,” said the lieutenant. “We’ll be right along, Sir.” He winked at Kallandra, so that she nodded agreement to the Colonel, allowing him to get back to the base relocation.
    They couldn’t take their eyes off the sphere.
    “It’s not as shiny as new steel would be,” Kallandra said.
    “Nor dull, more a silky lustre, like an aluminium sphere might be. But it’s still indistinct, as if there is a motor inside.”
    “Lieutenant – just a moment, what is your damn name?”
    “Lieutenant Keeler, Ma’am.”
    “First name, idiot. Mine’s Kallandra.”
    “Gifford, Ma’am. Maybe there is a motor inside, and a difficult-to-see ratchet railway pulling it upwards.”
    “Do you feel a tingling up your neck when you look at it?”
    “I know what you mean, Ma’am. It’s like looking at the Grand Canyon for the first time, or the moon through a telescope. Only this is a thousand times weirder.”
    “Totally awesome. I am looking at that sphere slowly rising, yet my brain’s logic centre screams that it can’t be happening. That tingle I am experiencing in my spine is like being plugged into an electric fence.”
    Minutes of wonder drifted by as the sphere imperceptibly rose. She glanced at the young Gifford, taking in his pale skin, high cheekbones, longer than military-approved blond hair and narrow nose. A classical handsome profile, but she wondered if he knew it. No ring – probably because of his marriage to computerised robotics and sensors. She’d take him on as a challenge, if she hadn’t that slob of a Derek. In any case she’d be accused of toy-boyism, but so what? She smiled at wicked thoughts but had to abort when he turned to her, and then nodded at the supine form of Derek, half-asleep, but with his left little finger mining his ear.
    “It gets worse,” she said.
    “You mean he eats it?”
    “Revolting isn’t he?”
    “My cat eats my earwax.”
    “Oh my God, Gifford. Don’t you feed it fish? But earwax has a sour bitter taste. I would’ve thought cats had more sense.”
    “A friend did a research paper for his biochemistry degree. He found that cats went for the triglyceride fats and cholesterol among the other muck. It’s food… but not as we know it.”
    “Hah! So Derek must be half-cat. I knew it.”
    Another round of thuds alerted them to more of the sphere losing its mantle. The base of the sphere shimmered at fifteen feet above the rest of the Tor.
    “Besides thinking this floating sphere might be an illusion, what do you think is happening?” Kallandra said.
    “I didn’t say it was an illusion, but that the tricks used in them might give us clues. It’s obvious to me what it is, especially if it’s happening to other mountains.”
    “Well? Wild Murray, natural gas inflating a metal ore deposit, or an unusual volcanic ejecta.”
    “Aliens.”
    “Maybe, but aren’t they supposed to invade not go away?”
    “They write their own rules, Ma’am.”
    “It wouldn’t make sense for them to bury themselves under millions of tons of rock. Look he’s eating it now. Hisss.”
    “It makes perfect sense, if they have the technology to easily make their way out again. Mankind hadn’t discovered them until now had we?”
    “That’s another puzzle. How come millions of tons of metal can hide from us? Why haven’t they been detected with seismographs or by potholers?”
    “I don’t know, Ma’am. We don’t know how deep they were. For all we know they started up years ago from several miles deep.”
    “How did they get down there then? It would take quite an operation to bury them. Ah. You’re going to say they might have been on the surface millions of years ago and have been covered up by sedimentary rock. Interesting. I like the way you think, Gifford.”
    “It’s only a hypothesis. It could be rubbish. On the other hand none of the ones we know about are in volcanic rock, which implies they didn’t want to risk being destroyed.”
    “Not necessarily the case. There might have been some in volcanic areas but have been destroyed. Others might be under the ocean. I wonder if the spheres can swim?”
    “Here come the Royal Engineers,” said Gifford, as an armoured humvee equipped with telescopic poles motored slowly by. “They’ll probe the sphere and see if they can get a sample, before it rises out of reach.”

    20,000 years before present.
    On the East bank of the Red Sea.

    Angry with Hanra, for allowing her mother to share their home, Oqmar had wrapped bread and goat cheese in hessian, shouldered a bladder of sour wine and slammed the door. A track led north to the hills, and within them to a favourite cave. But he had to pass through the ramshackle baked clay dwellings that made up their settlement first. He kept his head down hoping not to see, or be seen, by that witch, Kardinuta – Hanra’s mother. Living with the two women had become a conflagration. Flocks of birds rose to escape the cacophony of three shrieked and bellowed shoutings. And unless he raised his fist, he’d always lose the battles.

    Neither did Oqmar want to be seen by Sar Abdul, the village elder. He’d be browbeaten and no doubt cudgelled for not subjugating his women. But Sar Abdul hadn’t had his will broken by evil black eyes boring into his head.

    Luckily the midday sun glared down forcing most life into the shadows. He scurried through the narrow shaded gaps between rough walls, occasionally glimpsing the flashes of sun reflecting off the sea to his left. He knew every corner, palm tree, derelict and new dwelling. This was his only world. Travellers told of other settlements to the north, but neither he nor his family had been further than four days walk from Jedir. He’d had to walk for days when the goats he tried to control wandered off. He preferred his secondary role. When he fished, he’d been scarily out of sight of the township in his boat he built with his brother.

    He’d spent a few nights out there, lit by the moon and stars. He’d lie in his craft trying to sleep in the never-ending bobbing, wondering at the moving stars – some shooting through the blackness into the horizon. Some of the pinpricks were like the reds and blues of desert flowers. Perhaps they were reflections, the sky a reflection of tiny colours, each with a god to steer them and control destinies. He enjoyed rather than endured the solitude - not that he was ever completely alone. The sea-bats clicked their greetings while hunting water insects, as did the splashing flying fish laughing at his belated attempts to grab them. The netted fish would moan at him, flapping for their feeble lives, as he exchanged their spirits for the survival of his family. And, again, the gods would speak with him. At least he supposed that was the purpose of long whistles, hums and groans in the black air. Sometimes, especially when a growling storm rolled near, sending fire to illuminate both sea and sky, he’d see dreams even though he was awake-scared. He’d witnessed flying shiny pots, great fire, floating moons and sensed the silent screams of the not-yet-living.

    His brother wouldn’t share the boat in times of impending storms, but Oqmar had faith in the boat, and thus his survival. But mainly it was because his visions of the screamed dances of the gods were so vivid.

    Looking ahead he saw he was past the thorn stockade, where goats scampered away as they saw him. He’d been herded in there, as a child, with the others for lessons on milking, telling the truth, efficient slaughter, avoiding trouble, skinning and tanning, when lies were necessary, which berries and leaves helped life, and which would gripe him to death. He’d also had to learn the ancient stories. 

    The old people, who’d seen thirty wet seasons, and the young were shepherded into the stockade when it was too late to run for the reed beds in times of the Klar attacks. They’d taken anything and anybody they wanted years ago, but now the village had grown. Power in numbers.
        His shadow-self hid under his bare feet. The overhead sun hammered down, but his self-incriminating anger drove him on. He waved his goat-herding crook at the sun, but it ignored his threats.

In his cave it would be cooler in temperature and temper. No one should be travelling in this baking midday, but he withstood it. His twenty wet seasons body was sufficiently strong, and his mind determined. Sweat could be replaced. If he didn’t seek solace in the womb of his cave, he’d kill Hanra, and that would be a shame.
    A scuffled sound in the gravel behind made him turn. A brown deformed dog looked at him with tilted head. A twisted leg made it a reject by all but Oqmar. It earned its scraps by keeping small predators off the goats and herding them.
    “Here, Kur. Take the chance of being kicked. We’re both cursed, but have each other, eh?” The dog shambled up and licked Oqmar ’s hand, no doubt finding remaining smears of cheese to savour.
    “You have no women trouble, Kur. Shag the bitches and run away. No mothers come after you waving dead snakes, and hurling stones and spells.”
    The old dog threw him a sympathetic look as if the witch had tried to feed it hemlock too.
    “Kur, we’re going to the cave. I’m glad you’re here; you make a good cave-clearer of vermin.” Oqmar looked over at the glowing orange sandstone of neighbouring hills. When he stood on the summit he could see a horizon of purple mountains.
    The hour walk stretched as the scorching heat slowed both man and beast. Perspiration stung Oqmar ’s eyes and his tongue felt swollen. With a dry voice he croaked to Kur. “I wish I’d brought fruit to wet our throats, friend, instead of wine, but at least it’ll help us forget our troubles.” It might bring him insight, he thought. It had once before when baffled in the morning over how to keep his fishing net from drifting too much in the current, his inebriated evening mind told him to tie stones on the ends.
    As they staggered up the steep track, Oqmar, slipping on loose red stones, saw the narrow cave entrance. Kur saw it too and ran ahead, remembering the game where he played bite the rats.
    Oqmar sat on a shaded rock, listening to yaps and the scrabbling of paws and claws. He didn’t want to be in full view of the cave entrance or the rats might head back in. He had no urge to catch them: their flesh too stringy and bitter to enjoy. He fell off the rock when he saw the scared animal emerging wasn’t a rat, nor Kur, but a wild cat. He laughed as he brushed off the sandy dust from his long grey shirt. Now he knew there was no vermin in the cave. Nevertheless he waited for Kur to poke his nose into the sunlight.
    “Good dog. Your cheese reward is on its way.”
    The cave usually smelt musty with a combination of bat and rodent droppings, but Oqmar breathed in air that seemed fresh, with a tangy taste. Maybe the cat had been here a few weeks and driven away the smellier guests.

    A feed-me whine brought another smile to Oqmar. He squeezed into a narrow gap a few strides into the darker recesses. Kur waited for him to get through before scrabbling after. A narrow zigzag passage with an uneven floor led them to an open space sufficiently expansive for several dwellings. White rays of sunlight allowed in through overhead fissures illuminated the mysteriously level sand floor. No animal droppings ever fouled the air in this section – another mystery.
    He was in error; he’d spoiled in his cave. Not with his waste, only foxes tainted their own nest, but with gnawed bones, fish tails, and bread so green even Kur wouldn’t devour it.
    He settled on a rough blanket and straw pillow he’d brought up several new moons before. The air in the cave was not only clean but remained consistently cool – an exhilarating respite from the daytime heat and night chills outside. No one moved out of their sordid dwellings at high sun, yet here he was in paradise, a flask of wine, loaf and ripe cheese. He laughed. Kur whined.
    Oqmar laughed again, took a swig of the wine, and broke some cheese for the dog, which took it to a dark corner, wolfed it down and settled. He couldn’t have tasted it. What a waste. The air that was so sweetly clean now carried the sour taste of goat cheese, dog’s breath, and poor red wine. He broke off a lump of the gritty grey bread and let it dissolve in his mouth being careful not to let any stones break more of his teeth.
    How could this be bettered? He was away from the nags at home, a real friend snoring in a corner, and half a skin of wine to go.
    Without knowing why, he awoke mid-dream. In that otherworld state he was adrift, midnight, in his boat, his net over the side playing with the fish, while he took in the stars. The memory of the dream was fading already, moments after waking, but was it the shooting stars or Kur? For the hound was howling, and in that cave each sound amplified beyond endurance.
    “Enough, animal.” He threw a handful of sand in its direction. The howling diminuendoed to whimper, but Kur’s discomfort persisted. “Well, what is it?”
    Instead of barking an intelligible response, Kur fled some invisible spirit, keeping to the cave wall, and with tail between its legs, scrambled through the fissure.
    “You go then, back to looking out for the goats. I’ve a dream to catch. You always get spooked by nothing.” Oqmar looked around the cave knowing that if Kur was frightened there would be a real cause, even if he couldn’t see it. Satisfied that Kur was being silly, he reclaimed his place and laid back, folding his arms behind his head.
    Moments later he realised sleep wasn’t an option. The cave had lost its calm aura. Kur had detected it first, and tried to tell him, but Oqmar didn’t want to believe his sojourn was over. He raised himself to a sitting position, gathering the energy and will to walk back to Jedir. His neck tingled, and the hairs on his brown arms stood quivering as if he was cold. It couldn’t be fear. A hard life had inured him against the dread of death although the terrors of life, as embodied by Hanra’s tongue and her mother’s witchcraft, vexed him.
    A column of loose sand rose from the floor a stride from his foot, and twisted like a dust devil. He’d seen many over the desert on hot days, and much bigger, but never in his cool cave. He leaned back on his elbows to stretch his foot into the sand vortex. His foot was slowly but forcibly pushed upwards. It also tingled as if many feathers had made gentle contact. He laughed and yanked his foot back before the rest of him left the floor. Standing, he saw the vortex had reached the ceiling a man’s height above him, and the sand spiralled outwards. He kept at arm’s length, not wanting to have his eyeballs sandblasted, but he could see that the sand was dissipating as the cave floor gave up its carpet revealing a smooth circular area.
    He thought the hill had been created by Ptah from squeezing the red sands all around. Yet the cleared circle was like the round base of a shiny grey pot. So it wasn’t part of the rock. Grains of sand vibrated off the top of the upside down pot, which appeared blurred. Oqmar rubbed his eyes but it remained indistinct. The air immediately over the apparition seemed to be quivering like boiling water. Yet no heat reached him, so, squatting, he ventured his hand into the turbulence.
    Immediately, his hand lifted – gently but forcibly. He withdrew it finding his black hairs rising up his forearm inside his shirt. A shiver ran through him, up his spine, making the hair on the back of his neck rise.
    Oqmar looked at the pot. “Are you trying to scare me? Should I be worried, like Kur?” He walked around the quivering pot deciding what to do.
    “You must have a foxhole beneath, and the animal is trying to push up. That must be it. I’ll help it.” On his knees he dug his hands in the sand at the base of the pot and revealed more. The pot continued vibrating and lifted a little as if to help him.

    He snatched his hands away and sat back on the sandy floor.
    “Ah, what have we here? The gods try to burn my fingers!” To his amazement the shape was not the upside down pot he assumed. Enough was free of sand to show it had no broad lip below, and it was too shiny for the clay pots he’d seen. It glistened like the moon.
    In spite of the unpleasant sensation when he brushed too close to the ‘pot’ he dived at the sand, shovelling it away with his strong hands. Moments later he’d discovered the spherical shape of the object, and sat back in amazement. Hovering a hand’s width above the base of the shallow crater he’d dug in the sand, the sphere shimmered as it continued to slowly rise.
    “Now I am scared. This is the witch’s doing.” A mixture of fear and disbelief gripped him. He’d seen Hanra’s strange mother perform magic with fire, making objects move, and concocting potions that either made ill people well or healthy people die – usually the latter. He liked the cave because it was his sanctuary, and he relished its cool atmosphere, but perspiration poured off him.
    Gradually, he’d formed the opinion that it couldn’t have been the witch. He’d only seen her move small objects like bowls and knives, never something as big as his head. And the sphere was the size of a bigger head than his. Nor had he known her to magic anything out of her sight, except her curses and potions.
    His tentative dismissal of her involvement allowed his curiosity to gain over trepidation. He tossed some leaves at it. Of course they merely fell off. He tried offering it a few last droplets of wine, but the air turbulence over the top of the sphere prevented him holding the bladder above it. He tried to examine it more carefully by shuffling on his knees all around it, putting his face as close as he could without it repelling him with its unpleasant sensation similar to when lightning strikes near. The surface was not only smooth but showed his reflection like in a bowl of water, but distorted. The sphere appeared to be inhabited. He realised that the surface reflected his own image, but not immediately. But after dismissing the notion that it was an entity, it persisted. Disturbed at his own image, he felt and prodded his nose that seemed huge in the reflection. He remembered where he’d seen shiny rocks similar to the sphere. A traveller had small stones made of a grey-white substance that had been found in streambeds. He said it softened with fire, and we could make better beads and spear points. The matriarch was interested until the traveller wanted four of the children for two handfuls of the silver rocks. We threw stones at him as he left.
    Standing, Oqmar poked at it with a stick. He expected the sphere to knock it away or set it afire. To his astonishment the end of the stick disappeared. But when he threw a stick it bounced off. The sphere chose how to defend itself. The revelation that the sphere might be animal weakened his knees, forcing him to sit once more. It couldn’t be animal. The only eyes, mouth and limbs were his reflection. Was it using his reflection to embody itself? He’d heard of stranger things with gods and evil spirits.
    Was the spirit within evil or benign? Apprehension obliged Oqmar to edge to the wall. Leaning back he felt the coolness through his shirt, reminding him how hot he felt through anxiety. He stared in wonder and awe at the levitating ball. At a size a little larger than his head, there were few objects he’d met with a similar shape. The sun and moon looked round. Children played with baked clay balls, and he’d eaten the round eggs of turtles and fish.
    To lay a silver egg larger than his head, this hill would have to have been the largest turtle in the land. A mother goddess of a beast. He squeezed himself back into the wall as if he could melt into it. Had he disturbed a god? He stared at the levitating enigma wondering what he should do. If the sphere had special powers it could be useful to him and the village. The others would regard him as a benefactor, and so bestow privileges on him such as the choice food. There was the possibility he could undo his ties with Hanra and thus her wretched mother. He could have the pick of the young women.
    Four of his children had died of wasting illness or pox. The village Elder traded two with one of the other villages, and the last one was growing up with the matriarch. Maybe they’d let him have his son back if he brought home this sphere – as long as it held richness or good magic for them. He’d have to capture it first without it killing him.

    Or maybe he should keep it to himself. See what happens. If some of the magic rubbed off onto him, he could be the most powerful person in the village – be the Elder, and start giving orders instead of taking them.
    “Hey, sphere, have you something for me? No? Perhaps it is just as well I am not in possession of too much power. I prefer the quiet life. But it would help the village if you could rid us of the savages up in the north. The witch says we might be overwhelmed by the next wet season - our village and existence gone without trace. Is that why you’re here? Are you our salvation or a witness? You’re not going to tell me, are you? I am unworthy.”
    A faint luminescence in the sphere lit the cave. It reminded Oqmar of a ball of lightning of which he’d been scared witless, in his boat, a long time past when a fierce noisy storm blew at him. The waves fought back, but overturned him, making him swallow the brine as he righted the boat and clambered aboard. The fiery miniature conflagration swooped on him then flew across the waters into the black horizon. Maybe this one buried itself in the sand hills, and only now found its way out.
For all his posturing and pleas, Oqmar had the feeling the sphere ignored him. He was just another grain of sand in the cave.
An enquiring yelp from Kur brought Oqmar out of his brain-hurting thinking mode. "Come in, Kur, and tell me what you make of it."
    The dog offered a short bark as it scrambled through the narrow entrance, and then bristled as, with a freshly-licked nose, it sniffed the air. Kur lowered his head while fixing the sphere in his best goat-herding stare. With ears twitching like a leaf in a breeze, Kur, emitted a low growl. If the sphere heard the menacing sound, it failed to show any reaction.
    “Kur, I don’t think you should atta—” Too late, with lips curled back revealing cruel yellow teeth, the dog leapt at the sphere. Oqmar reached out in a vain attempt to grab, but all he achieved was to stroke the animal as it flew past and onto the sphere. Horrified, Oqmar expected his dog to be eaten, swallowed whole. But, yelping in shock and pain, Kur slithered over the top and down to the sandy floor on the other side. The sphere hadn’t deviated a jot. The dog lay, shaking but alive.
    Oqmar lifted it, cradling it like a baby. “There, you’ll be all right. My hand brushed against it earlier, and I too felt the demon bite, prickly, at me; like being stroked by thorns. We are not permitted to touch the moon’s daughter.” He talked comfortingly to the dog as if he knew what he was talking about. With his back to the cave wall, again, he stroked the whimpering Kur.
    Convinced the sphere was not going to attack them they both fell into exhausted sleep.
   
Oqmar awoke in fear, but it was Kur’s rough tongue salt-licking his face. The incoming sunlight had dwindled, but the sphere’s luminescence gave a blue candlelit hue to the cave. His dry mouth fell open when he noticed the sphere had risen to waist height. He had to leave before nightfall, not trusting Kur’s skills to fend off night creatures such as jackals while he picked his way home by starlight.
    “Come, Kur, we’ll return at dawn. If it won’t let us touch it, maybe we can trap the devil. I’m a fisherman, and my shirt will be my net!” He pulled off his long shirt and considered his next step. The sphere should fit nicely inside the garment, but he had to stop it escaping. While his naked body shivered in the cooling air, he knotted the sleeves at the top. Now the shirt resembled one of his nets – the gap at the neck too small for the sphere to seek its freedom.

    With a hoarse laugh, Oqmar gripped the hem in both hands and approached the sphere. It hovered in its eerie blue glow – mocking him.
    “We’ll see who’s the master now.” He held the hem with bent elbows at his chest, and then yanked it over the sphere. For a moment the glow shone dully through the shirt. Anxiously, he pulled his side of the hem towards him as if netting a large fish. For another excited moment he’d thought victory was his. Kur barked encouragement. Then he fell back clutching the shirt, but the sphere remained, implacable, imperceptibly floating upwards.  
    “What cursed magic have you worked?” Oqmar said, examining his ruined shirt. The knotted collar area had disappeared leaving a neat elliptical hole. He fingered the smooth edge. He’d never seen a cut so precise with no raggedness. Neither was it burnt, it was as if the sphere had swallowed the part of the garment with which he’d tried to net it.
    “Look at this, Kur. What will she say? I’ll be sleeping with you again for this.” He slipped the remains of the shirt over his head but only a fragment of cloth kept it on his shoulder. He held it there with the cord from the wine-bladder, and grabbed his shortened goatherd stick.
    “Let’s head for home, Kur. I’ll bring my net tomorrow. We’re not beaten yet.”

Oqmar ate his breakfast eggs faster than the time taken by the water hen to have laid them. But in vain, for Hanra had heard him creep back into the house clattering around to add bread to his breakfast. Kur too had given him away with exuberant yelps.
    “Look at your shirt. No, the one you wore yesterday. If you’d torn it, why not bring both bits home? It’s going to take a boatful of fish to replace the missing cloth. I don’t see why I should bake a week’s worth of bread to barter for it. You’re the most useless mate in the village. Well?”
    “I’ll catch fish today.”
    “Our neighbour’s warthog would be of more use than you. And a better lover.”
    Oqmar stuffed bread and cheese into his only other long shirt, but stopped short of taking the sour wine when Hanra stood in front of it.
    “I’ll take a bladder of spring water today.”
    “You can drink your piss for all I care. And Kur’s.”
    “It will taste sweet when I think of you, my dear,” he said, relishing the amazement on her face at his apparent acquiescence. Once he had the sphere with its magic, he’ll have the pick of the young women. It’d be Hanra drinking her own tears then. He fought the smile from betraying him.
    Outside, with Kur trying to make sense of the negativity emanating from the troubled home, Oqmar shouldered his strongest fishing net, and said to Hanra: “See? I am going fishing.” And then, whispered to Kur: “But we’re going to catch a richer prize. Yes?”
    Kur barked agreement, but was clearly confused whether to take the track to the hills, or to the shore, where they always walked when with a net.
    “Come, Kur.” Oqmar led the way towards the shore, knowing Hanra would know if he didn’t. A short time paddling would take him round to a bay where they could disembark for the true day’s purpose.


Laughing, Oqmar caught up with Kur after a race up a low dune. At mid-morning their shadows sought refuge in shallow depressions to their left. Although proud of his strength, Oqmar sat on the warm sand to let his lungs catch up. He smelt the tar in a blackened patch where Kur pawed at it.
    “It’s not food. Here, boy.” He threw him some cheese, which gave off a stronger odour than the tar, though not as much as the dog. No doubt he gave off stink signals to the wildlife too.
    Kur lifted his head to expedite sensory reception beyond the tar and already gobbled cheese.
    “What is it, Kur? Yes, that’s where our cave is.”
    Kur barked.
    Oqmar squinted at the red sandstone hills a short distance away, in front of the misty-lilac coloured mountains on the horizon. He looked for telltale dust rising, indicating animal or human movement. Nothing. The stupid dog was barking at flies. He brought the hog’s bladder of water to his lips. As he swallowed a glint low in the sky caught his eye.
    With his right hand shielding his vision from the sun’s glare, he realised he was looking at the area immediately above his cave. The sphere had escaped.
    He stood, and then ran with long loping strides towards his cave. Stopping, before he reached the entrance, he glared at the sphere. Four men’s height above the hill, it had the look of an extra moon.

    With Kur whimpering in trepidation behind him, he angrily climbed the low hill to its highest point immediately above the cave and below the sphere. He threw small stones that bounced harmlessly. He knew it was out of reach of his net. Walking carefully around the sandstone rock summit, he found the neat hole. The sphere had cut a chimney.
    He stomped over to a fig tree and sat in its shade, staring at the sphere. He threw a ripe fig at Kur, who nosed and licked it distastefully, and then sneaked off preferring to find a tastier rodent.
    The sphere obviously floated upwards so slowly he couldn’t detect the movement. “You beat me. Come back and allow me to snare you in my net. You are condemning me to a miserable existence with the woman from hell and her worse mother. Curses.” He gnawed a fig, including the tiny ants who’d thought it would make a fine feast.
    As the sun rose overhead, the sphere inexorably climbed too. An earlier thought surfaced, in Oqmar – the sphere had not been aware of him nor his dog in the cave. The magic sphere ignored everything except itself. It performed whatever task it needed no matter what was thrown at it. No yelling back. And yet it had two admirers, followers, who risked ridicule and humiliation to believe it was something they could have. Maybe he should follow its example. Play life like the sphere. Instead of reacting with sarcasm, screeched shouts or violence with Hanra, he’d remain aloof, follow his own path, and she’d come after him – eventually. He’d display the same patience as the sphere did. Perhaps their attitudes to each other would improve in time.
    The sphere headed for the stars, but it had left its impression, and Oqmar, with Kur, still possessed their cave, albeit with added ventilation.
    He waved goodbye to it, then had the urge to make his own impression on the adventure. He gathered some sharp stones, sticks, figs and berries. In his head lived an image of the sphere’s coming and going, but for others after him to ponder, he’d recreate it on the wall in his cave.

Five days since the spheres emerged.

    With headsets to enable the occupants to communicate above the mind-numbing reverberations of the helicopter, Kallandra urged the pilot to infringe National Park regulations and fly directly into the Yosemite Valley.
    “Claude, I told you I’d rather fly this bird myself. We’d be there now.”
    “It’s better to maintain a modicum of protocol. It’s not a NASA chopper, and we are cashing in favours more than giving them out.” He ran a moist finger over his newly grown black moustache. Kallandra spotted his preening, and smiled.
    “You’re a poser, Claude. Already dashingly handsome yet you continue to add embellishments. Show me that weird tattoo on your shoulder.”
    “Two pythons entwined in battle is not weird. And I’m not undressing for you, again. Derek will hear of it. Look, there’s the mighty El Capitan in front. It looks white with the morning sun.”
    “You’re looking at Cathedral Rocks. Another half mile please pilot. Oh, what’s your name? I’ve forgotten, and I can’t read your name badge.”
    “Lieutenant Lester Cobden, Major.”
    “Hey, that’s a great name,” Claude said.
    “What?” Kallandra said, “Do you know a Lester? But Cobden is a great name, Lieutenant. Richard Cobden was a Victorian British politician making a real effort for international peace. Are you related?”
    “I am, distantly, to one of his daughters, Major, but I know little about him.”
    “Well, Lester, his genes are guiding you through life. You won’t be disappointed if you find out more about him.”
    Claude quietly laughed. “Listen to you. I didn’t know you majored in British history.”
    “I didn’t, but we had high school history projects. I stuck a pin in a list and pricked him.”
    “Lucky Cobden. Hey, Lester where’re we going?” Claude said, as the helicopter veered sharply to the right.
    “Excuse me, Sirs, I am receiving orders to turn back. This is a no-fly zone.”
    Kallandra took a tired intake of breath, then said: “Lester, tell them these two NASA astronauts not only have fly permission here, but any roadblocks and cordons are to let us through. We have the permits. Tell them to check it out with Colonel Dwight Disraeli at the Pentagon.” She winked at Claude. They knew that Disraeli would back them, if he could be found. He’d been briefed on the spheres the previous night, and was throwing a crisis meeting together. Five days since the spheres showed themselves, and Kallandra was eager to see any changes. She knew the Chinese had been investigating theirs, but weren’t releasing their findings. The Australians had cordoned theirs, as had the others but the Aboriginals had raised objections to their Uluru being violated, so hardly any investigation had been accomplished. Locals had shot at the South African sphere to no effect.
    Claude manifested his concern by pulling at his moustache, again. “We’re going to miss the meeting at Johnson this afternoon. I know your Derek will be there, but to be frank…”
    “He’s a brilliant designer, and engineer. OK, so his backbone’s somewhere in a left luggage locker, but so far no one has been close up to two of these spheres to check similarities.
    “Lester, you see El Capitan, now, and oh my God.”
    El Capitan had a proud right-angled cliff-top appearance, which had disintegrated. Floating above it was a twin sphere to the one at Glastonbury. The sun glinted off the silvery chrome ball that had no turf or earth clinging, but then maybe the other one didn’t by now.
    Only the pilot seemed unmoved, but Kallandra knew he’d be worrying about being chased away or worse.
    “Lester, operate the cameras and range-finding computer, I have a feeling this beast is larger than the Glastonbury sphere.”
    “It could be perspective,” Claude said. “If they all surfaced simultaneously, this one is higher. If you still want to get an up close and personal, there’s a clearing at two o’clock, but too rock-strewn to land.”
    The increasingly panicky pilot hovered at jumping off height, and after his passengers leapt, flew to a safe distance out of the no-fly zone to await their pickup signal.
    Kallandra had an eerie sense of déjà vu as she stood five hundred yards from the sphere hovering thirty yards above the ground. The landscape, too, looked familiar. The grey limestone rocks had clearly been subjected to upheaval with large fissures running from the crater. Trees further down the slope had either been uprooted by ground movement or smashed down by avalanches. Any mass exodus of insects and other fauna had emptied the immediate area of wildlife. She couldn’t see any birds – once the helicopter left, the only sounds she could hear were of streams – the remnant of the Horsetail Falls that used to cascade down the face of the monumental rock. She picked her way through the rock-field, abbreviating the distance to the sphere. She knew Claude would have wanted to urge caution, but also that he’d know she’d know, so he didn’t. So much cleverer than Derek, in so many ways.
    Without admonition she approached the edge of the sphere’s exit void. The limestone looked as if the sphere had polished the vertical circular wall on its way up. Although the sky darkened with increasing cloud cover, she could see down tens of yards until the black depths absorbed her vision. The air cool and thick with silence. She knew it was illogical to have bottomless pits, and supposed a team would soon be sending a remote camera down. Knowing which strata from where the sphere originated would give them its age. She had the urge to abseil, but there might not be a rope sufficiently long.

    “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” said Claude, having picked his way through the rocks to her side.
    “You’ve been reading Nietzsche again.”
    “Nevertheless, mademoiselle, do you feel the void working on your mind to draw you in?”
    “No, Claude. I’ve seen holes before, but what’s creeping me out is being this close to that levitating sphere.”
    “I keep ducking, even though it’s higher than a five storey block. And is that static I feel?”
    “I felt tingling sensations when close to the Glastonbury sphere too.”
    She held up a hand for silence. Claude obeyed but the streams and occasional rock cascade ignored her. “I can’t hear any buzzing, or engine noise,” she said.
    “Could you at Glastonbury? I don’t recall you mentioning it in your reports.”
    “No, but…”
    “But you thought you might’ve missed it. Did you set up a wide-frequency ranging sound recording gear to pick up noises we can’t?”
    “Sure, but it picked up too much background noise. I left a Lieutenant Gifford there, requisitioning more directional mikes. It’s true to say that dogs ran off going berserk. As did Derek, but at least he came back for me.”
    “Of course he did. Kallandra. Dogs pick up higher sound frequencies than us. Maybe the sphere is emitting keep away noises, but we can’t hear them. Did the Glastonbury sphere look out of focus, like this one?”
    “It might be because it’s vibrating. I can imagine that would help it through the rock, but not through the atmosphere. I wonder what’s making it rise?”
    “That fuzziness could be from infrasound. It could be vibrating at less than twenty-five Hertz – you know, like movie frames?”
    “I’ll send Gifford a message – it’ll be midnight over there now. Oh, a reply – darn it, auto response. Claude, I think you’re on the button with the blurred affect. It’s known that infrasound can make many people feel uneasy, even nauseous.”
    “Ah, you mean the brown note? Seven Hertz? I thought that was an urban myth, but maybe no one has tested a weird giant sphere emitting it.”
    “Hey, good man Gifford is awake and busy,” Kallandra said, dabbing at her iPaq. “There you go. There are a variety of frequencies coming from the sphere including infrasound at eleven Hertz and a bunch of high ones we can’t hear.”
    “Maybe they’re communicating with whales – scrub that thought. But it’s ironic that humans might be one of the few species of animals that cannot hear the very low and very high sounds being sung by the spheres.”
    “I wouldn’t assume that the sounds are anything but noises from its internal machines or the effect of the vibrations. It would be like you trying to understand what a bicycle is saying when all it’s doing is recklessly negotiating a steep bend.”
    They laughed, took photographs, and then ventured a little closer. Kallandra would have liked to stand underneath the sphere but for the deep hole. “Because the other one was at ground level I was very close. Probes cold-melted when pressed into the surface, yet stones bounced off. I had a definite feeling it was animate, or something sentient was inside. I can’t explain it, but maybe it was the infrasound interfering with my insides. I can’t see any markings, can you?”
    “Were there some at Glastonbury?”
    “It’d only just emerged so in spite of the vibrations there was sufficient debris sticking to it to confuse possible artificial markings. This one is much cleaner. It’s remarkably smooth. I can see the landscape, including us in it, but like in a fairground hall of mirrors.”
    “Kal, why isn’t the military pointing their best artillery at this apparition? I expected to have to flash our permits at pointed bayonets every few yards.”
    “I reckon our chopper flew over roadblocks and dug-in troops in the trees. And you know that there will be missiles aimed at our sphere from over the horizon.”
    “It’s our sphere now? Has it captured your heart, Kallandra, dear?” His moustache, along with his mouth, danced with mirth.
    “Don’t be soft. Apart from re-sculpturing a few landmarks they haven’t done any harm have they?”
    “They’re not just rocky outcrops, they all seem to have been heritage sites, mostly of a spiritual significance to indigenous peoples. I did a bit of web-based archaeology and the Shoshone have been here for thousands of years. I bet they consider destroying their centrepiece a sacrilegious act.”
    “Or, they might believe their gods have reached a stage where the sphere has to be released.”
    “And do you believe that, Kal?”
    “Behave yourself – you and I know this must be an alien artefact. The interesting point is whether they chose to insert, grow or assemble them in sites of spiritual and geological interest, or…”
    “Whether their presence created emanations such as infrasound that stirred early people to believe those sites were sacred.”
    “Exactly. But, Claude, there’s more. Why are the spheres only in these areas of relatively minor beliefs, and not in the crucible of Judaism, Muslim and Christianity?”
    “Buddhism is major, and a sphere has emerged from one of their sacred mountains in China.”
    “True, Huashan Mountain, but I wonder if it was a spiritual site before Buddha?”
    “If spheres were below ground in the Middle East then they would have been damaged by the tectonic upheaval with earthquakes and all the mountain ranges there are volcanic. Kallandra, we are mere observers. Maybe whoever designed them might have thousands of spheres boring their way up through the Earth’s crust as we speak.”
    “That’s a bizarre, and scary, image. But let’s stick with what we know, and that’s not a lot. For example, the spheres seem to create tectonic disturbances on a local scales – mini-earthquakes, and avalanches, yet the holes they make are smoothly cut.”
    “Without all the seismic and geochemistry data, we are only hypothesising, but my guess is that pressure release underground can cause all sorts of reactions in the rocks.
    “Kal, that cumulus cloud is getting bigger and ominously darker.”
    “If you mean we’re going to get wet, why can’t you just say so?” She poked him in the ribs, then realized the ground was too fissured, and rocky to play catch me. So he grabbed her arms to prevent more teasing. Laughing, she caught a whiff of his Armani men’s fragrance.
    Derek would have rather died than wear men’s perfume, with the exception of manly sports deodorant. But Claude’s French half enjoyed splashing out in an extravaganza of continental aromas. She’d discounted the rumoured efficacy of pheromones and perfume, but had to admit to being stirred in the right places when in his proximity. She risked a glance at his brown eyes just as he put a warm arm around her.
    “Oops, I thought you were falling,” he said, but he didn’t let go. Her cheek brushed his chest making her knees weaken. Resistance was needed, but she’d put it on hold, wondering fleetingly how Derek would react if she’d confessed that their lacklustre but steady relationship was history. She shook her head, to clear hormonal cobwebs. What was she thinking? Maybe the awesome situation with the sphere had affected her biological judgement.
    “Hey, that cloud is leaking. We’d better call Lester for our lift.”
    Claude reached into his camera pouch and retrieved a zoom lens for the camera. Kallandra realised his intention.
    “Excellent. I wonder how the sphere will react to rain. Will the drops be absorbed or be repelled?”
    “My guess it will act like any other metallic sphere, but since it can absorb objects, anything goes until we know better. It’d be useful to see the angle raindrops bounce off the sphere.”
    “Hey, there’s a curtain of rain cascading off the sphere’s equator. And my hair’s getting wet – damn, my curls will straighten.”
    “Oh dear, you’d better tell Lester to hurry. You don’t want Derek pulling a face at your blue highlights shining through your gorgeous hazelnut tresses,” he said, and then after looking at her, “or your wet T-shirt.”
    Unused to such flamboyant flattery she reddened, willing the helicopter to fly faster than light.
    Like the seventh cavalry to her rescue the reverberating noise of the helicopter drowned the sound of the rain bouncing off the sphere. She looked but couldn’t see it.

    “Hey, Claude,” she yelled, “where the hell is it?”
    “It’s coming out of the sun in the south.”
    “I hope he goes around the sphere and not over it. No. No! He is going to fly over it.
    “Major Harvard to Lester Cobden – do NOT fly directly over the sphere! Do you copy?”
    “Too late,” Claude said, “he couldn’t have been briefed, and we were too exhilarated to tell him.”
    They watched in horror as the pilot struggled to control the helicopter a hundred yards above the sphere.
    “Can’t… ca… get lift. Unstable…”
    Kallandra had flown helicopters and although she was more used to handling out-of-control jets, tried to help. “Lester, engage your turbo and veer starboard.”
    “Control panel… dead.”
    The turbulence over the sphere, invisible in clear air except by optical distortions of the background scenery, turned the helicopter vertical, nose upwards.
    Claude pulled Kallandra’s arm to move further away. Their ears throbbed in pain at the noise of the screaming engine and the blades fighting to do their job.
    Slowly but accelerating, the helicopter fell.
    “If that was an alien spaceship,” yelled Kallandra, “then surely it would fly out of the way?”
    “Or engage a force field?” Claude said.
    Kallandra knew a ship-sized force field didn’t exist in human technology. Ideas of magnetic repulsion flashed through her brain as the tail plunged onto the top surface of the sphere, out of their direct sight.
    “Has it gone into it?” Kallandra said, though she knew he’d have no better idea than her. The shock of the accident obliging her to engage in conversation.
    “No, here comes the debris. Get down behind a boulder, double-quick!”
    The helicopter’s rear struts crumpled, followed within a second of the engine and fuel tank exploding, bringing the awful noise to a crescendo.
    Jets of yellow and red flames, black smoke and metal flew out from above the sphere. Like ejecta from a volcano, flaming incendiary bombs fell around them. Daring to look up no longer, Kallandra held her shoulder bag over her head while crouched between two large boulders. Instead of a diminuendo in the noise level it increased as further explosions – maybe the helicopter carried small munitions – and a minor apocalyptic hell plummeted onto the rocks. Sharp fragments: a painful mixture of metal and plastic shrapnel and rock shards ricocheted into her bomb shelter. She heard Claude’s yelps of pain through the percussion, chorusing her own.
    Moments later the crashing had ended, replaced by hissing as rain cooled hot fragments. Distant thunder added to the drama. The two trainee astronauts looked up from their barely secure sanctuaries and stood, surrounded by helicopter debris although the larger pieces had landed on the other side of the sphere’s circular chasm.
    With no need for speech, Kallandra exchanged anguished looks with Claude as they searched for Lester, or what was left of him. She glanced up at the sphere. Hovering above the carnage, it was impassive. Nothing seemed to faze it, but then it was probably a machine whose task was to rise repelling or melting any obstacle. If it could cold-vaporize solid limestone, what chance had a flimsy helicopter?
    Kallandra said: “Have you noticed a difference between that monster and a manmade metallic object when rain hits it?”
    “Do you mean it isn’t wet? Yes, but the underside wouldn’t be, and from this close we can’t see the top.”
    “But some water would dribble down under, wouldn’t it? Not every drop would fall off leaving it instantly bone dry. Even a Teflon ball would have a trickle around to the base.”
    “I know you are employing distraction therapy, Kal, but let’s keep looking for Lester. I can’t see where his part of the cockpit hit the ground.”
    Kallandra tripped on a loose rock. Uttering curses she fell among tangle struts from the helicopter tail boom.
    Claude rushed to her. “Kal, ah, you have quite a gash on your forehead, don’t get up.”
    “I’d already had that, and the bleeding has worsened, but I’ve twisted my ankle, damn it.” 
    He helped her up just as the sun signalled the end of rain, and illuminated the sphere. Reflected light stung her tears.
    “Damn you, sphere. You’ve gone from being a fascinating curiosity to a fucking murdering liability. Let the army do their worst.” She sat on a boulder and let loose her own rain, her shoulders shaking. Claude had a comforting arm around her, and let her work through a few minutes of shock. He rummaged for his water flask and insisted she took a sip.
    Through sobs she managed to speak. “Thanks, Claude. At least I’m still alive, unlike poor Lester. I’ve limped before. Give me your arm, you can be a crutch. Let’s find his body.”
    “At least the rain’s given up. I don’t understand it; only half the chopper seems to be here. I’ve known of aircraft being partly vaporized when its fuel detonates from a huge impact but even exploded fuel tanks shouldn’t have disappeared the cockpit.”
    “Which means…” She looked up.
    “That,” he pointed at the sphere, “has eaten it.”
    “I’m not sure I can be surprised by what it does any more. But I still feel we have to look for Lester in case he was flung clear and is lying battered, but breathing.”
    They’d circumnavigated the hole, and widened their search area. Claude sent a message to the San Diego airbase to inform them of the accident and was told it would be a couple of hours before another suicide mission was sent to them.
    While supporting her, Claude looked at aluminium fragments, shiny alternating with soot-blackened. “I’ve been on grisly post-operation fuck-ups and there’s always bloodstained aircraft fragments, and lumps of people’s innards.”
    “Me too, but there’s nothing of him here. We’ll have to extend the search. Just a minute, something’s different with that sphere.”
    They stopped to look more carefully. The blurring of the sphere persisted but near the base was a small dark bulge.
    “You don’t think the helicopter engine has fallen through the sphere?” Kallandra said.
    “Merde, it is not the engine. Look, it’s a foot!”
    Gripped with astonishment Kallandra agreed that a naked foot was emerging from the sphere. There was no opening. The foot, then leg, the other leg came out as if sliding from an instantly healing membrane. Before his torso emerged, Lester’s head appeared as if he was bent double.
    Kallandra gasped. “He’s alive. Oh my God, Lester’s alive.”
    “To think what he’s experienced; what he’s seen, but no doubt too traumatised to speak. The poor man. I cannot see him too clearly. Was he bald before?”

    “I was thinking that, but many men are these days and I didn’t see him without his helmet. Ah, Claude, he’s falling out!” With a mixture of concern and disbelief, she watched as Lester drew out his arm and shoulder. It seemed only his back was holding him in the sphere. He opened and shut his mouth, but they couldn’t hear any words. The instinct to aid overrode that of escaping the horror so they moved to the edge of the hole.
    “Lester, can you hear me?” Kallandra shouted.
    Only then did the pilot look in their direction.
    “Help me! Oh, fuck, fuck…”
    “Claude, do something. Quick, he’s about to fall.”
    “What can I do?” He looked around, desperately hoping there’d be a rope or planking, but there was nothing but limestone rocks and broken helicopter pieces.
    “For fuck’s sake, Major, help me.”
    “Don’t worry, Lester,” Kallandra said, having had optimism drive her success in life, so far.
    But to their consternation and dismay, the pilot exited completely from the sphere. The naked man appeared to hover just beneath the sphere, giving them all a modicum of cruel hope, before gravity took over. With flailing limbs, and his eyes and mouth wide open in a scream, he fell past them. He gave Claude a last accusing stare before plunging into the abyss.
    They couldn’t watch. Kallandra buried her head in Claude’s chest, but they couldn’t shut out his long wavering wail. There was no sudden end: their ears merely couldn’t or wouldn’t hear after thirty seconds.
    Kallandra had done many skydives and knew he would have dropped at least two miles into the hole. Maybe he’d fall forever. As a test pilot she’d cheated death more times than she’d want to forget, but she’d remembered each stomach griping moment, and in many ways, relished them. The adrenalin buzz was better than sex, better than the best meal, with no exceptions. She reflected that all lives were short, too damn short, and that kept her alive in dangerous situations. It sharpened her reactions, honed by an intellect that zoomed as high as her test flights. She’d argued that by working dangerously, she’d live longer because of her heightened reflexes and mental alertness, and no one dared to contradict her.
    But the death of their duty pilot bothered her, especially one she’d engaged with in friendly banter, and then in the face of catastrophe, told him not to worry.
    For long minutes they stood at the edge. She wanted to hit Claude for not whipping together an instant rescue construction, but then why hadn’t she conjured one up either? Some missions really were impossible.
    “It seems that the sphere wants to absorb some of our artefacts, and our hair,” Claude said.
    “There’s no evidence to support any such thing. The electrostatic or magnetic and other turbulence above the sphere made the chopper lose stability and crash. Just because some of the machinery appears to have been absorbed is coincidence. Otherwise you’re saying the sphere deliberately brought about the crash, when I suspect the turbulence relates to its upward motion. For instance it could be a gravity push pull engine of some kind, or an Alcubierre effect where space is being shrunk above the sphere while space is expanded below. I don’t know, that’s why I hoped scientists and engineers would be here investigating it. But I doubt it deliberately added some bits of helicopter to itself. And for all we know Lester was hairless before.”
    “Fair enough, but all this only started a couple of days or so ago, and the universities are on vacation. They, and the government investigators will take a few days to get their butts out here.
    “And, Kallandra, he might have been bald when he entered the sphere, but he definitely wore clothes and was strapped into a helicopter. Yet he emerged – forget the hair – minus the helicopter he was attached to. It seems that the sphere absorbed or accepted metals and other materials, but rejected live organic matter.”
    “I suppose so. Claude, I’m thinking…” she said, dabbing a reddened handkerchief at her head wound, “that the blow to my brainbox is making me feel faint.”
    “I only have cuts and grazes, but my head has discovered tinnitus. It’s probably all the trauma with Lester’s death-plunge, noise and minor injuries. Kal, sit down on that flat slab. We have to wait for the replacement chopper. It’s a pity we didn’t bring a flask of coffee.”
    “You’d better rest too, Claude, and we should move further from the sphere. The Glastonbury sphere had emanations from its low frequency vibrations that affected us, so it’s a good guess they all do.”
    “You’re right. Come on, let’s move away at least a hundred yards. Oh, my head – what?”
    “You blacking out, too?”


    “Hey, there’s a curtain of rain cascading off the sphere’s equator. And my hair’s getting wet – damn, my curls will straighten.”
    “Oh dear, you’d better tell Lester to hurry. You don’t want Derek pulling a face at your blue highlights shining through your gorgeous hazelnut tresses,” he said, and then after looking at her, “or your wet T-shirt.”
    She blushed, hoping the helicopter would appear.
    A roar announced the arrival of their lift, but peering around in the sky she couldn’t spot it.
    “Hey, Claude,” she yelled, “where the hell is that chopper?”
    “It’s coming out of the sun in the south.”
    “I hope he goes around the sphere and not over it. No. No! He is going to fly over it.
    “Major Harvard to Lester Cobden – do NOT fly directly over the sphere! Do you copy?” As she uttered the warning she experienced a feeling of nausea, and a stage-fright unease as if she’d rehearsed those words for a college play and about to perform on stage. Then a disturbing flash image of Lester, naked and hairless, falling through the air made her squeeze shut her eyes.
    “Copy. I’ll fly around the sphere. Major, I’ve spotted a good landing spot five hundred yards to the south if you both don’t mind a hike.”
    “No problem,” said Kallandra. She looked over at Claude, who was rubbing his forehead. Their gaze met.
    He spluttered a nervous laugh. “You too? I feel as if I’m having premonitions.”
    The helicopter flew overhead and landed in one piece, although it was difficult to see clearly as the rotors flung the rain in all directions. As they picked their way through the rocks, Kallandra slipped, but Claude had already put an arm out to support her. They halted and looked at each other with puzzled expressions.
    “How did I know you’d forgotten how to keep upright?”
    “Beats me, too, Claude. That sphere is screwing our minds. How far from it do we have to get to be… out of its sphere of influence? Hah!”
    Claude joined in the relief of hilarity with the poor pun, and they continued their hike.
    As the rotors whirred, the pilot emerged, feet first, from the cockpit. Standing, he removed his helmet, and then scratched his shining bald head.
    “Hey, he is an embodiment of the sphere,” Claude said.
    “Shush, he’ll hear. And stop laughing.”
    “Hi, Lester. How are you? Oh, my, you are shaking.”
    “Sorry, Major, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was all right until I came around this mountain and landed. I feel… I don’t know how I feel… dithery and like I’m coming down with the flu.”
    “Lester,” Claude said, with touching concern, “have you always been bald – you have no eyebrows?” He fingered his own moustache in an act of self-affirmation.
    “It’s the sphere,” Kallandra said. “Maybe you flew too close. Come on, let’s get out of here, and leave this beast for bio-hazard suits to deal with.”

Kallandra read the update note on her iPaq as she and Claude reached the pale green door leading to the Special Mission Meeting at the Johnson Space Centre, a day late.
    Mars Mission on indefinite hold.
    Imperative you attend crisis-control meeting in Rm 426 at 10:00
    Barringer

    “Good, we’re in time for this,” Kallandra said, while she made unnecessary adjustments to her hair.
    “And only a day late for yesterday’s inaugural crisis meeting,” Claude said.  “What did Derek say about our Yosemite excursion?”
    “Let’s say he wasn’t happy – I’d kinda only let him know we’d gone by text message. He was OK with it after I got home last night. What was your fiancée’s reaction when she found out you rushed off for the day with me?”
    “She doesn’t know you were with me. Mon dieu, I value my delicate parts too much. Hah.”
    Kallandra raised her hand to knock on the door, and then put her ear to it. “I can’t hear any talking. We must be the first here.”
    She opened the door and walked in. The room was full of her astronaut colleagues from the delayed Mars Mission. They were quiet because apart from Colonel Dwight Disraeli, they were ploughing through hefty files of information. She could see pictures of spheres, maps, and pages of statements. Then she caught the Colonel’s baleful eye, and his beckoning finger. Like a naughty schoolgirl dragging her feet to the front of the class, she and Claude drew up chairs to sit at the desk opposite the Colonel.
    “I have reports on you two, and they aren’t pretty.”
    Kallandra attacked in her own defence. “What’s our visit to Yosemite have to do with the Mars Mission hold? NASA got a case of cold feet again, and looking for excuses?”
    “Don’t butt in, Major. Obviously the Mars Mission go is suspended while we have these damn spheres to fuss over. We were hoping to keep a dignified, scientific and level-headed corporate front over this, but you two have brought NASA into disrepute.”
    “Excuse me?” Kallandra said. “How is being very early in the investigation of the spheres the wrong thing? Unless you’re referring to our overnight report and recommendation that bio-hazard suits should be worn by any investigators near to the spheres?”
    The Colonel glared at her, then Claude, before flicking through a file. He then started quietly but increasing in volume until the whole room stopped to listen. “Not only did you commandeer a USAF helicopter without authority, you used my name to break no-fly zones, and most tragic of all, your lack of appropriate risk-assessment led to the destruction of a machine and the death of its pilot. Not only are you two grounded, but you could be on a court martial, possibly a manslaughter by negligence charge.”
    Kallandra and Claude looked aghast and confused. Kallandra blushed with indignation.
    “You’ve been misinformed, Colonel. Lieutenant Lester Cobden was perfectly safe and alive when he brought us back to San Diego last night. His UH sixty was functioning perfectly. What’s all this about, Sir?”
    “It’s partly based on a call you made to San Diego requesting a second helicopter because, you said, the first had crashed killing the pilot.”
    The colonel, flustered, turned to his aide. “Check with USAF in San Diego. I want to get to the bottom of this.”
    “Can we have a copy of the briefing notes, Colonel,” Claude said. “Not just to see what was written about us, but to catch up on what the spheres are doing.”
    “And on the status of the Mars Mission training program,” Kallandra said, hoping she still had a place if and when it lifted off.
    “Training is proceeding as schedule – your leave, like everyone’s here, is cancelled. Pending the outcome of your statement being correct, you are still in the program along with the others. But the flight crew has not been chosen. And the go date is anyone’s guess now.”
    “Sir, I hope my involvement, nor Claude’s and Derek’s, in the sphere investigation has jeopardized our inclusion in the Mars Mission.”
    “Harvard, there are others here who did as they were instructed for this period of leave. Do you recall those instructions – the crucial element of them?”
    Kallandra reddened, but didn’t waver. “It was imperative to relax without getting involved in anything that might bring NASA into disrepute. But-”
    “No buts, Major, only your butts on the line for infringement.”
    Claude tugged at her elbow in a vain effort to quieten her. She snatched it away, piqued at being remonstrated with when she felt they’d done nothing wrong.
    “With respect, Sir, if a sphere lifted you up off your ass and threw you to the floor, and then down a hill. I bet you’d feel compelled to see what the hell was going on!”
    Apart from a groan duet from Derek, sat at a nearby desk, and Claude, the quiet room fell deeper into shocked silence. Before the Colonel could form a response, Claude spoke up for her.

    “What our mademoiselle means, Sir.” He held a hand up to Kallandra, who knew that he’d launched himself over a line by referring to her in such a sexist way, though he’d meant it to placate the Colonel. “Is that your training procedures here work so well.”
    Everyone looked quizzically at him.
    “We are taught to be scientists, not just spaceship jockeys. To investigate rationally that which puzzles, and not walk away pretending not to notice. Sir, who better to consider the astronomical aspects of the spheres phenomenon than a trainee astronaut on the spot – and one who’d actually touched a sphere?”
    A gasp waved around the room, followed by flicking papers as evidence of his statement was searched for. Kallandra leaned to Claude – catching a whiff of spearmint, and whispered: “I haven’t actually touched it except with a spade – possibly.”
    “Roll with me, Kal.”
    The Colonel grumbled to his aide, then to Kallandra. “I’ll let your impudence go for the moment, Major. You might have a point with your valuable experience. Laponte, to answer your question, the best people to investigate the spheres are properly equipped investigative engineers, and not expensive astronauts. Agreed?”
    Claude stiffened while returning a “Yes, Sir.”
    The Colonel pointed them at the Mission schedule officer for continued training duties before he changed his mind. Kallandra swore with her allocation of yet more repetitive manual landing practice, while Claude laughed at his beloved Mars geological studies. Derek had duties with the engineering design team making modifications to the Apoidea.
“Derek,” Kallandra said, “You’ll have to go on the mission because someone would have to be onboard to continue designing it en route.”
He smiled at her assumption of his automatic inclusion on the crew, but then she spoiled it.
“After all, when the stabilisers start falling off, it’ll be your fault.” She laughed at his pained face, and then felt guilty. “I’m sorry, Derek, I’m only fishing for excuses to keep you on board with me.”
“I forgive you, I forgot, Claude said to be sure to meet him at coffee break. Haven’t you two spent enough time together?”
“We are all in the same team, Derek. Honestly, there’s no cause to be jealous.”
“Me? Should I be envious of Claude? Just because he talks American with a French accent, is devilishly handsome in a weird kind of way, chases every piece of skirt – and catches them.”
“My God, you are as green-eyed as that Californian Senator whose wife tongued you at the New Year’s Party. You have nothing to worry about, honestly.”
“Her tongue, not mine. Anyway, that’s not the impression Claude gave me. But never mind, we have work to do. See you later.” He stomped off down the shiny corridor to scrum down with the other designers. Kallandra was convinced they had no serious designing work left to do, but in desperation to be on the mission, created work for themselves. She didn’t blame them. She pulled an involuntary pained face as she watched his left hand take a recreational break to his ear.
Moments later he called back to her. He approached with a cellphone clutched to his recently gouged ear. “Kal, we’re in really deep trouble. Blake didn’t arrive home. He’s three days overdue.”
“Oh, and your sister’s blaming us. Tell her he’s probably shacked up with a Goth. Oh, make it a bunch of them, she might feel happier. And I suppose it would be good to know when he arrives.”


As soon as Derek was out of sight she called Claude on her cellphone.
“What the hell have you been telling Derek about us?”
“Ah, dear Kallandra, you are gorgeous, but you know I do not harbour longings for you. Derek simply misunderstood our brief conversation. But we need to discuss the report back from the Colonel’s aide on the strange message about the helicopter crashing.”
“What did it say?”
“Later. I’m overdue for my training session, as are you, and we need privacy to talk. Coffee time is in two hours, meet in the refectory, and we’ll walk and talk.”

Relief smiled on Kallandra’s face as she and Claude took their coffee onto the sunny refectory patio. The atmosphere inside blistered with so many lines of accusing sight. It was as if the other trainees thought Kallandra was responsible for the enigmatic appearance of the spheres and the subsequent grounding of the Mars Mission. Derek, spared the condemnation because he hadn’t shared the Yosemite oddity with the crashed yet not-crashed event, sipped his coffee in the engineering designers’ clique corner.
    “Go on,” she said, “tell me the report confirms we killed Lester even though he is walking around.”
    “Kinda. It’s weird, Kal, there’s a voice recording at the San Diego USAF air base of me reporting Lester’s UH60 crashing, and us needing another chopper being sent to us. I said it crashed onto the sphere and that Lester must have died.”
    “We have no recollection of either that event nor of you making the call – right?”
    “Correct, and yet it did happen – so…”
    “It happened and yet it didn’t. But the only evidence that it did is the voice recording?”
    “Not quite. Kal, we have no memory of Lester crashing, and the USAF confirm that the helicopter is in perfect condition. But Lester isn’t well. He has nightmares – the screaming abdabs.”
    “About the alleged crash, I suppose.”
    “Do you have nightmares since then?”
    “Not as bad as Lester, apparently, but they have been weird. Up close to the sphere, and as if it’s calling me in.”
    “I’ve had some, too, Kal. One persistent has me reaching out to catch Lester falling, naked, out of the base of the sphere. I said it before, but you know what this means?”
    “It happened. So, it was undone. Now we know nothing could reassemble a helicopter and pilot smashed to smithereens. So that leaves us with it happening at time X, that day. Only somehow time was rewound to X-30 minutes, or whatever. Then rerun as if the first reel never happened. Only it worked reasonably well for us, but not for Lester. Poor kid.”
    “I agree. And that he likely outcome is Lester becoming a long-term patient in a Gulf-War syndrome wing of an armed services hospital.”
    “And so will we, Claude, if we open up about this.”
    “I can be the epitome of discretion ma petite fleur, but you have a tendency to burst your indignant righteousness on the world. Like when you attacked the Colonel this morning.”
    Her eyes widened and her cheeks reddened. “We’ve done nothing wrong.” But then she laughed. “Oh, he can take it. You know Maureen, his secretary? She told me he loves the flirty S&M banter I assail him with.”
    “Don’t we all, but I doubt he appreciates it so much in front of all the rest. Try to be discreet with the time and place of your vampire blood-letting in future.”
    “Agreed,” she said, opening her mouth and pretending to bite his upper arm, just as Derek came round the corner. “Oh, God, he’ll think we’ve been love-making again.”
    “Pardon?”
    “Derek, he thinks you and I are… you know?”
    “Hello Derek, your gorgeous fiancée has been telling me how brave you were at Glastonbury when the boulders avalanched.”
    “Ummph. Kallandra, they’re waiting for you at the prototype Apoidea hangar for another test flight.”


That night, Kallandra lay awake. Her lavender-scented pillow absorbed the overheating of her head obliging her to keep turning it. Derek softly snored beside her; a noise that comforted her with its repetitive predictability, and normally helped her active brain to settle. But the weird time-quake and the inscrutable spheres kept her synapses busy.
    She always slept with the curtains open, taking pleasure in the sight of the stars, planets and the moon. She’d flown the prototype Apoidea into space last month. At least she, and the rest of the test crew, took it above a hundred miles. The stars didn’t twinkle that far above the atmosphere, and the ochre-coloured Mars beckoned her. Supply and accommodation modules were already there, robotically assembled and in full working order, waiting for them.
    She couldn’t vodka herself to sleep because she had to fly again the next day. She lay on the rapidly warming pillow, stared at the stars and plotted a route to knit them altogether. After the tenth star she fell asleep.

Kallandra, bring me your intellect and spirited personality.
I am within many of your beloved planets.
In time take time while time lasts.
Your curiosity draws you to me.
You will be forever changed.
Blink and it’s too late.
Abyss dwellers shine.
Come here now.
Alight.

“No!”
I am yelling at the poor pilot not to fly over the top of the El Capitan sphere. There it shines in the bright Californian sunlight.
Is it rotating? And if so, in which direction and about what axis? Another helicopter flies at us. It’s horribly distorted. Hey, it’s our reflection on the sphere. But why is it projected up in the air like a holographic display? It isn’t. And look it’s blurry, like the sphere. Proximity to the sphere doesn’t distort the image, but it does my mind.
    The biggest problem remains: how am I to lower myself on top of the sphere without the turbulence over the sphere throwing the helicopter away, with me dangling on a line hurtling to the distance like a mad angler’s desperate last cast?
    The minor problem of persuading a pilot to take me perilously close to the sphere depends on him being convinced I’ll survive sufficiently intact to be jumped on. I seriously doubt my survivability of this event so I feel simultaneous relief and guilt. 
    Maybe if the helicopter flies far above the sphere, the electrostatic, magnetic or gravity waves won’t affect it. But there’s no need. I didn’t realise that the sphere’s invitation includes a free pass. Consequently, one moment I’m in the helicopter, a hundred yards from the sphere, the next I’m floating down – face up - onto its north pole.
    I should be more than stomach-wrenchingly terrified, but I might as well be in a genuine massage parlour anticipating a languorous experience. In full flight gear I sink slowly into the sphere, as if it’s made of a silver gel. My eyes shut as total immersion occurs.
    A panic nerve jangles for a moment, but my eyes continue their refusal to cooperate: they remain shut – or there’s nothing to see, just as there’s nothing to hear. What bizarre urge makes me do this? How could my famous self-will be so easily manipulated by this metal orb? Maybe I can swim out, but to where? Hell, I might as well benefit from this rare experience.
    Soundless and visionless, I can feel the soft gel-like medium surrounding me, soothing me at a comfortable body temperature. There’s a sensation of falling through the sphere, but only slowly. Surely it cannot be composed entirely of a gel? There’s a slight metallic odour somehow detected through my mouth and nose even though breathing doesn’t seem necessary.
Should I be listening – reacting – is the sphere trying to communicate? I attempt speech, but my hello blubs incoherently. Ah, now I hear something, a low-level vibration. I’m probably receiving it from whatever’s making the sphere quiver. No, this is silly. I should be on the outside looking in, not within the very problem.
But there is a different sound. In between my increasing angst moments I hear a wavering high-pitch harmonic that sometimes meets the low sounds we think comes from the vibration. If only Pythagoras was in here, then he’d know whether the musical ratios were right for perfect harmony – the music of the spheres.
I try to swim in the goo – backstroke – but without being able to see or feel movement, it’s like being in a sensory deprivation tank. But, no it isn’t. Something nudges me in the small of my back. Maybe I’ve bumped into a piece of this sphere’s inner workings, although I’m beginning to feel it has none. I try to move my hand to feel what’s there in my back but now I can’t move a muscle. It’s a kind of paralysis – it’s weird. I’m in suspended animation in a gel with my limbs moving slowly but to the internal pressures of the sphere rather than my own muscles. Ah, my back is all right now. But what’s this? Someone is touching the ends of my fingers. Who’s in here with me? Now my toes are being fingered at the same time – two others in with me?

Just a moment; how can my toes be touched? I entered the sphere wearing full flight gear; a green one-piece suit. I can’t tell if I’m wearing it now. My senses won’t tell me if my skin is touching this gel-stuff or my suit’s undergarments. This is so weird and yet I’m not as freaked out as I should be.

No! Whoever is feeling my extremities is exploring up my arms and legs. My stomach tightens with increasing worry as I try to wriggle any muscle. Come on you sinews, obey your brain. My developing panic must be causing perspiration to pour out of my forehead, but I can’t feel it. The fingers gradually creep up to my armpits, while others are on my thighs. It’s nothing like a massage, more a exploratory discovery. The fingers that have now reached around my armpits and heading for my breasts feel like they belong to someone beneath me, while the upper thighs fingers ‘person’ is above me. I’m in a sandwich yet feeling their presence without any physical pressure. Maybe it’s an illusion created by a robotic sensory device rather than humanoid creatures in this globular gel. Ah, the armpit explorer has found my breasts. That feels more like a human would: following the contours then an inward spiral gentle pressure until each nipple is simultaneously tweaked. They linger, continuing the erotic yet strange fondle. I’m both scared and aroused, but that wasn’t unusual with pre-Derek lovers. There’s nothing usual in here.

Now the fingers, and I hope it’s not another part of a male anatomy are creeping up my inner thighs and converge. Ah, something is inside me, and probing around. Luckily the gel is like being immersed in moisturizer, but I don’t like this. I’m being violated. I seriously want out. I try to scream ‘abort’ but nothing happens. Another probe has just inserted itself in my butt! Has the pilot come in here with me? Lester is that you? Of course it isn’t – it isn’t Lester in the chopper this time. It’s not human is it? Good grief, I’m being raped, buggered and groped by alien jelly.

Struggling only results in the probes penetrating deeper. Squeezing anti-rape muscles doesn’t evict them either. This is fucking awful. Somebody stop them for fuck’s sake! They are hurting me now. My breasts feel they are being wrenched off, and the pain in my butt is excruciating. I think I might be bleeding – vagina and anus. Aaarrggghhh! Stop it!

I’m using every inch of my hazard training. After all physical means to extract myself, I block the pain. Damn, it’s not working. They’re pushing into me harder still. Why can’t the bastards leave me alone? My face is as wet with tears as my ass must be from blood. At least that’s what I feel is happening. Sweat mixes with tears. I can hardly struggle now; all my energy has drained. When will I come out of this torture chamber? Stop it you fuckers!

“Kallandra, come on, wake up. You’re having a terrible nightmare. You’ve been restless all night. I’m going to sleep in the other bed tomorrow night – my pyjamas are soaked with your sweat.”
    Her eyelids cranked open to see Derek’s disgusted look. She raised herself up on her elbows and looked around. A moment ago she was inside the El Capitan sphere, so how did she become transported to their NASA apartment at Johnson? It felt too real to be a dream, but Derek said she was here all night. But why would her desire brain cells want to be inside the sphere? Did her subconscious harbour ridiculous fantasies?
    Her own pyjamas were drenched, but at least it was with perspiration. She had a quick feel under the satin, resulting in a smile that she was as healthy a condition as she ever was.

Tabitha Wish could hear the dinner bubbling and hissing in the kitchen, forcing her to abandon her tenacious viewing of the CNN channel. Her family, exasperated by her fixation on the spheres, must have conspired to be out of their Track-house to get her to vacate her chair.

“I know what you’re doing,” she shouted at no one, but possibly everyone outside the door of the newly bought home in Pearl, Mississippi. Her recent promotion didn’t pay well, but it upgraded them from an awful downtown apartment.

Before she left the living room, her nose involuntarily twitched at the aroma of roast chicken, and overdone steamed vegetables.

In the steam-filled kitchen she met three saucepans whose lids danced with uninhibited rage at being abandoned for so long. Peering into the condensation she discovered sweet potatoes gurgling at her in one pan, turnips boiling down to pot liquor in another, and a mysterious mishmash including Yellow Crookneck Squash and tomatoes plotting to escape.

“I’m turning it all off,” she yelled to her supposed conspirators. The first in the family to gain a degree, and still she was expected to be momma in everything about the home. The twins were only a week from being teens so they shouldn’t need their noses being wiped. Nor should her pop, who had taken on man-of-the-house duties since her rat-husband deserted after his Iraq duty. Not deserted from the army – that’d be understandable, but after he’d de-mobilised back in the States. Last seen in a New Orleans topless bar, she’d top him if he came near Jackson. No child support in money or any other kind. She might’ve understood if the medical report rabbited on about Gulf war syndrome or rehabilitation requirements, but she could visualize the testosterone-over-achiever making hay until money, health or suckers gave up on him.

Pulling a face at the lace-curtained window, in case any of the three playing hooky were peeping in, she sat back in her computer chair and logged onto spheresWatch.com

She clicked through the newly placed five webcams: Glastonbury, Uluru, Table Top, Huashan, and El Capitan. All floated sixty feet above their exit holes. Military presence surrounded them too. From missile launchers to tanks, fire brigades with hoses at the ready in case the spheres or the landscape turned incendiary. Scaffolding was climbing towards them at Huashan and Glastonbury. She rapid read the scrolled text where scant details informed her of the need to probe the spheres, test their structures.

The El Capitan webcam had a friend; another variable camera that zoomed to the hole, and showed heavy-duty army vehicles. A third camera showed the progress of a remote camera and grabber descending into the chasm. The two miles deep shaft swallowed the clumsy boxlike apparatus, but the floodlit image stayed constant. Occasional streaks proved it was descending but the polished rock showed the same grey scene for forty minutes before the rough base was revealed. Sample drill bits telescoped out of the robot and started their work, while more photographs were snapped and X-ray and other emissions were sought.

With bloodshot eyes from zooming too close to the screen, Tabitha hardly dared blink. Her fascination would have bordered on insanity, but she was gathering data too. Although plenty of front pages had blurted the unusual phenomenon to the populace, she, as a newly qualified journalist searched for an angle. To make her breakthrough at The Clarion Ledger, and beyond, she needed to be the first to make a connection and get it out there. She strained to catch a slipped-out piece of information seemingly insignificant at one of the sphere sites, but paralleled at the others.

“Hey, Mom,” shouted Roma, “You’ve let the dinner go cold.”

“Sorry, daughter, you know how important it is for me to show those men at the office how we women are better than them?” She swivelled the chair and grabbed her daughter for a hug.

“It’s KFC again tonight then?”

Roma laughed as Tabitha tickled her. “No, it looked just about done. I’ll heat it up again in the microwave while I butter the bread. Ah, I see Charlie’s beaten me to it.”

“Sure I have,” said Roma’s twin, with his mouth full of peanut-jellied bread.

A walking stick came in horizontally through the front doorway, signalling the entry of Tabitha’s father.

“Hey, Pop, sorry to have left you with them, but—”

“I know, I know. Matters nothing to me. You get on with your studies, maybe you’ll pass them exams this time.”

“I’ve already passed them, Pop, it’s… oh, never mind.” She stood to belatedly sort the dinner when a Reuter’s tickertape item, scrolling across the task bar caught her eye, and then her breath.

. . . Vatican spokesperson says the spheres are a warning to non-believers . . .

Amazing considering the Vatican works in centuries not in days. She hit her journalist’s link to Vatican statements, but that report wasn’t there yet. Good, that meant others wouldn’t find it either, increasing her chances of a scoop. She used her Press ID password to get into the innards of Reuters and found the source of the item. She was curious how the Vatican would’ve thought the spheres favoured Catholics or Christians.

‘Item # 3421DYS-39-Rome,Italy: 0910: 06:28: Sergio Califano, the Pope’s spokesperson, issued the following statement:

The phenomenon known as the spheres is a manifestation from God. They came from his Earth and symbolise a calling for non-believers to pay heed to the Church’s teachings. We must all pray for salvation. They are also a reminder to the faithful of his omnipotence. Earlier manifestations of the spheres occur in the bible as angels and balls of fire – this isn’t new. Nor are they aliens from outer space. We observe that all the spheres destroyed sites of heretical fringe religions, mostly from the ignorant past. No Christian site was violated giving us surety in the hand of God. They are the Light and Good.’

Tabitha saved the statement, but knew she had to find quotes from other religions before rushing off an article. This could be big, but also explosive if not handled appropriately. Her family weren’t Catholic like that Sergio Califano, but they were Baptist and wouldn’t be at all surprised if they agreed with him. On the other hand many Baptists she knew liked to believe in UFOs and aliens, but because this raises too many difficult questions with their religion, they conveniently don’t bring the two issues together.

“Whaddya think, Pop? Could aliens have the same God as us?”

“Damn Mexicans say they do.”

“No, outer space aliens.”

“Sure, though they’d have to have descended from Adam and Eve.”

“So any aliens out there, or here, according to the bible, must have originated from humans.”

Her father shuffled in his seat, looking for a forbidden cigarette. “Or they might be angels or demons, unless God made other Earths besides this one. I reckon not ‘cos it doesn’t say so in the good book.”

“It doesn’t say He didn’t either. I wonder what the Koran says about it. I’ll go and get my copy.”

“Hey, girl, you saying you got a copy of the Koran in my house?” He mocked shock – Tabitha knew he was only a Baptist by tradition.

Part of her journalism course was on multicultural and multi-religion familiarisation. She couldn’t absorb it all in, but was excellent at taking copious notes. She found a list of contacts, and sent an E-mail to a PA of the Grand Ayatollah in Saudi Arabia.

The trouble with E-mails was they took seconds to reach their destination but hours or days for people to consider them. She started the article; left it to wash pots from the partly consumed dinner; did research into aliens in other religions; badgered the kids into baths and bed; and then bit fingernails waiting for a reply. Only then did she realise Saudi Arabia would have been past midnight and asleep.

Tutting to herself she knocked off a so-so article on how the spheres were panicking people – using a riot in Alice Springs where thousands of aborigines wailed at the despoliation of Uluru. She leant towards the ‘fear of the unknown’ angle, but like many journalists presented problems rather than solutions. Another riot had erupted in China, but although it was sightseers fighting to get a good look at the Huashan sphere, she supposed they did so to convince themselves of its existence, and therefore something tangible to panic about.

She couldn’t find any evidence of rioting or panic crowds at El Capitan. The army had sealed off Yosemite, just as the British had at Glastonbury. The latter had what appeared to be hedonistic rock festivals instead of woeful mass prayers. She dug up a few worried forum threads on the web, but maybe because no one had died, general disbelief, and the holiday season on people’s minds, her article looked over the top with unnecessary gnashing of teeth. Her finger hovered over the Send button, feeling guilty for writing such nonsense, although most of it was kinda true. A light pinged on in her good-idea brain cell.

“Hello Minister? Sorry to trouble you late evening.”
“Who is it?” said the Baptist minister, sounding like this call was one too many.

“Sorry, I’m Tabitha Wish, my family has just moved to Pearl, but we did come the last two Sundays.”

“I remember, twins and your father. Do you have a problem that can’t wait, Mrs Wish?”

Tabitha had to think quickly. She was going to ask if he’d heard of people being worried about the spheres; people hoarding food and candles; more praying than usual. But he sounded like he’d fob her off crying tiredness. She needed a problem not a mere journalist’s interview question.

“I’m really worried, Minister. I can’t sleep over it, and I’m afraid God is punishing us, which means my kids will suffer.”

“What’s upsetting you, Tabitha?”

Once again, guilt gnawed at her conscience, which helped to make her voice quiver.

“It’s those spheres. I heard that they are a manifestation from God to remind us of our sins. But worse than that I’m scared to death I’m the only one that’s worried about them.”

“Nonsense, woman, many people are worried about them – well, concerned might be a better word.”

“Really? So others are panicking more than me?”

“You are not alone, Tabitha. But there’s no need to feel afraid. I’m sure the Lord is looking out for us. Come round tomorrow if you want to talk.”

“Minister, how many people have phoned you about them?”

“Why would you want to know that, Tabitha? What is this really all about?”

She’d detected a hint of suspicion in his voice. Surely he’d not know she was a journalist, although a few pieces in the Ledger had her name in the by-line.

“It’s me being silly. Thanks for your comforting words, Minister. I’ll let you go. Bye.” She amended her article to include: ‘Panic grows as congregations flock to seek salvation from the spheres.’

Once again her right index finger lightly dusted the Send button, but a musical ping announced an incoming E-mail.
To: Tabitha Wish of the Washington Post


She blushed at her audacity.

Your request for an Islamic view of the spheres prompted the Grand Ayatollah Idries Taqizi to issue the following statement to the news agencies. He will use this statement on a TV broadcast to all believers in Allah.

With no doubt whatsoever the spheres are Jinn. Allah’s Garden of Bliss is filled with Angels and Jinn. In the Qur’an the Prophet (salAllahu alayhi wasalam) has confirmed ‘The Angels were created from light and the Jinn from smokeless fire’. But although Jinn are normally not visible to mortals, there are circumstances when evil has to be driven out. We note that all the spheres have emerged from non-Muslim countries and so conclude it is the evil in them that has driven the Jinn away. Their visibility indicates Allah’s displeasure, and his demands that those countries follow the true faith.


End of statement.

Tabitha clapped her hands. She had two contradictory views, just what the tutors at university urged them to have in all good articles. In one, the Christians have the spheres as manifestations of goodness, and destroyed heretic sites. The Islam view is that they are the evil spirits in Jinn, and appeared in Christian and other non-Muslim countries. She knew this wasn’t quite an accurate representation of the two statements but that way made better copy.

This time she pressed Send.

Tabitha walked into the busy office of The Clarion Ledger the next afternoon expecting applause. Her report hit the front page of the paper, and by lunchtime had been broadcast nationwide then globally. Having started her job there only three weeks before she had yet to bond with the staff, but the hostile looks were totally unexpected. Were they envious of her coup? Never mind, she was destined to go on to greater things than their parochial existence.

An uncanny silence filled the room. Even the aircon forgot to emit its headache racket. The editor’s door opened. A sweaty middle-aged white man with extraordinary thick grey hair glared at her.

“Wish, in here, now.”

She sat on a padded chair facing his polished mahogany desk; an anachronism in that otherwise glass and aluminium office. Stale tobacco haunted the room from pre-no-smoking days. Or was he a secret cigar man? She wanted to pre-empt his attack by pointing out the success of her article spreading around the networks, but decided to let him bluster first.

“How dare you display such unprofessionalism in our name?”

“I thought you’d be pleased. What did I do wrong?”

“First, you hadn’t checked your sources. Second you distributed the article under our banner to CNN. Third, we do not engage in hysterical hype.”

Tabitha’s stomach tightened as she battled with responses. “I used the sources – well, my interpretation of them.”

“You should’ve passed your sources to me. I assumed you got it right, but the Vatican are now denying their spokesperson said anything like you wrote.”

“It’s substantially what he said – the spheres are a sign from God.”

“Yes, and the Grand Ayatollah said remarkably much the same thing, except you chose to emphasise the differences. Instead of promoting harmony, and inducing calmness, you’ve created panic where there was very little before.”

He pointed a remote control at a huge flat TV. CNN showed the waving hands of the president urging people to not panic. He said the spheres had not demonstrated any harm, his best experts were on the case, and they were most likely to be a hitherto unseen natural phenomenon. Further shots showed supermarkets whose shelves were emptying as fast as panic-buyers could wheel loaded trolleys out. He switched it off. Tabitha felt nauseous as her crime sank in.

“Mrs Wish. You have children, don’t you?”

“Sure. Twins.”

“D’you want them to grow up in a world like that?” he pointed at the now grey screen. “Where people are convinced the spheres are evil and about to kill us all. Where emptying stores is just the beginning. People will stop going to work wanting to spend their last moments with family and friends. No work means no power, no fresh water, no medics – need I go on?”
“You can’t lay all that on me. There was already some panic, my minister told me.”

“Oh, you mean your Baptist Minister, Mr Michael Davis? He tells me he no way recognises your reporting of his ‘phone conversation with you. Oh sure some people were worried about the spheres. They are one weird sack of potatoes, but only a handful saw them as evil devils ready to strike. You put it about that if you were a Christian you’d better become a Muslim and vice versa. A neat trick!”

“Aren’t you blowing this out of proportion, Sir? Somebody was going to use the Vatican statement and the Ayatollah’s sooner than later. I beat them to it. I don’t think I exaggerated by as much as you said.”

“What do I hear? D’ya think I’m making a scapegoat outta you? Well maybe you’re right and panic was on its way. But the chairman of the board found out you said you were from the Washington Post to get that Islam statement. Another time he’d give you a raise for your initiative, but in this case, he’s letting you go. In fact he said to tell you go get a job at the Washington Post.”

Tears filled her eyes. She tried to will them back but couldn’t. Sacked so soon. Her father would be mortified. Perhaps she’d gone too far, but wasn’t that what go-getting journalists were supposed to do. Her frustration boiled over. She half-remembered a rumour about the chairman having several affairs.

“You can tell the chairman he wouldn’t know a good journalist from a lap dancer, or would that be below the belt?”
“In his case you could kick him below the belt and he wouldn’t notice. Listen Tabitha, I’m supposed to sack you, but take a week off instead. If this debacle blows over, come back. If it worsens, I don’t know, I might still want you back.”

Surprised, Tabitha finally accepted a paper tissue from his outstretched hand, and mopped up tears. “Why so generous?”

“Luckily, most of the intelligentsia ignored your comments, and the extremes of the Muslim and Christian statements. Others are in dissent or denial, because they’re convinced the spheres are alien artefacts. Sadly, it leaves the masses in disarray, but many seem to like it that way.

“Your stupidity and boldness reminds me of me when I was wet. Keep an eye on the spheres for anything others haven’t spotted, but let me know first, yes?”

"Claude, I have an urge to walk on the sphere – stop me."
A break in training at Johnson gave Kallandra the opportunity to catch up with her Canadian friend. "I had a nightmare about being absorbed by the sphere and falling through it. It was weird, terrible but so fantastic I can’t get it out of my head until—"

"Until you are purged by actually doing it? Mon Dieu, no Kallandra. What does Derek say, assuming you told him?"

"I had to, he was being thrashed by my flailing arms when he shook me out of the dream. Strange, because I was paralysed while in the dream–sphere."

"Not strange at all. Your muscles are locked when in REM sleep, but as you awoke you probably lashed out. So, what did your fiancé say about your desire to enact your crazy dream?"

"I’m not sure. He just says it’s stupid, and I’d be killed either from something weird, or by falling off it. But we could string a safety net beneath, couldn’t we?"

"We? Very amusing, but this isn’t a circus act. Derek is right. I suppose if you weren’t an antivivisectionist we could throw a live rabbit at it to see if it’s injured?"

"Yeah, then interrogate it to assess its experiences if it survives. No thanks. And what mild electric or electrostatic charge might kill a rabbit mightn’t affect a protection-suited human."

"Well, I will stop you, you mad bitch." They both laughed. "Did you hear that Lester has gone deranged? He’s in a psychiatric unit rambling on about having been absorbed by the sphere."

"I’d heard. It’s also strange he’s lost all his body hair. There’s more going on here then we’ll ever find out. Oops, look at the time – we’re always late for briefings, and it’s about the hole findings."

"Two billion years? That must be an error," said Derek, when Colin Feubacher, a NASA geologist gave an assessment of the age of the spheres. Derek’s outburst in the otherwise silenced briefing room, met with nods of agreement. Kallandra, sandwiched between Claude and Derek, couldn’t get her head around the concept.

"Excuse me," she said to the worried-looking man, whose skinny appearance made him a blur when he shook with embarrassment or trepidation. "To clarify, two billion is the age of the rock strata at the base of the hole? But we have no way of measuring the age of the spheres."

"I agree. It is an assumption that if a sphere cut its way out of a hard layer, then it must have been there before that stratum was formed."

"Unless it cut its way down too," she said, although she could think of no reason why the sphere might do that.

"That doesn’t seem likely, Miss, sorry, Major. The base of the hole is rougher than we’d expect if the same polishing effect on the sides were applied above and below."

Derek stood to ask a question. "What sort of rocks have you found down there and how did you date them?"

"The oldest, at the base, are conglomerates – like a concrete mix of ancient sedimentary rocks and granites. We used radiometry and lead isotope ratio dating, which gave us two billion, plus or minus ten percent."

Claude, smiling also stood and turned to the group, who knew he specialised in geophysics. "Two billion might seem a lot, but I’m surprised it wasn’t older at that depth. There are four-billion-year-old granites in the Jack Hills of Western Australia. However, tectonic upheavals in the Sierra Nevada means that new and old rocks have played around with each other in the past, so they look like folded blankets now."

Fran Hope, a young electronic wizard, stayed in her chair when she made a statement. "These methods of dating are not foolproof. They depend, for example on statistical assumptions such as the radioactive decay continues in the distant past to the same regressive equations as laboratory short-term measurements. Contamination could interfere with the collected data, not just since sampling but in the hole as the sphere rose, if it rose."

The frail Mr Feubacher stared at Fran for a few but long seconds. "Yes, Miss. We are aware of the objections to those techniques by Young Earth Creationists, and others. We don’t say their ideas are wrong, but that we have presented our best conjecture to fit the data. Our highest probability view, given possible errors." He threw her the partial smile that said: "I don’t want to upset you, but you’re wrong and that’s it."

Before Fran could retaliate, Feubacher wisely rushed on. "Data from the Glastonbury, and Uluru hole concurs with the El Capitan findings. All three spheres seem to have originated below rocks around two billion years old." He glanced at Fran. "With the usual assumptions and caveats. We await data from Table Top and Huashan."

An awkward silence followed at Feubacher shuffled his notes. Kallandra wondered whether he was waiting for Fran to object again, or had something even more startling to say. Muttering replaced silence as the notion of the spheres being in the crust for half the Earth’s life span sunk in to the astronauts and support teams. She turned to Derek.

"What do you think of the spheres being that ancient?"

"Preposterous. They’re almost certainly alien artefacts so that implies an advanced engineering race either living on this planet or travelling across space, when the only life on Earth was bacterial."

"Amazing concept, isn’t it?" said Claude leaning across Kallandra to join in. "The moon then would’ve been so close to Earth, the tides would be nearly a thousand feet high. There would have been hurricane winds every day, and–"

The Colonel clapped his hands. "Our expert here has more to add. Buckle your seatbelts. All yours Feubacher."

"I was going to emphasise that the two billion years is give or take ten percent. If we take the oldest possibility, that is two point two billion years ago that puts the time frame to correspond with a particularly exciting event on the planet." His papers shuddered in tune with his mounting exuberance.

"The moon being broken off the Earth?" shouted an impatient exobiologist.

"No, no – the formation of abundant free oxygen on the planet."

Claude muttered: "That’s what I was going to say."

"Ummph," said Derek, as his hand on its way to his left ear was intercepted by Kallandra.

Feubacher was on a roll. "As we know, oxygen was the greatest polluter this planet has known. Anaerobic life forms died in their millions when this highly corrosive, and dangerous gas became important. Fossil records show that oxygen became sufficient to allow aerobic processes in the atmosphere just over two billion years ago. This begs the question –"

"The spheres came to bring oxygen to Earth? Never." said Derek.

"More precisely," said Claude, "to engineer conditions to create oxygen."

"It could just be a coincidence," said Kallandra.

"You still believe in coincidences?" asked Claude.

"It’s just that I have a feeling. That’s all," she said, not sure what she felt, and certainly not willing or able to broadcast her inner soul.

The colonel wound the meeting up with another thought for the group. "If this were true, it would be ironic indeed for the planet who had plans to terraform Mars, find itself terraformed." A laugh rippled through the room.

Before that ripple had completed its resonant ricochets, Kallandra’s vision blurred for a second. Her seat shuffled a few millimetres making her instinctively put her hands down to grab the sides. It was as if a micro-tremor had hit the room. She realised it wasn’t confined to her as many others had grabbed their seats. A premonition made her look at the clock over the exit, but it told her nothing. A crepuscular ray of sunlight sneaking in through Venetian blinds lit up motes, dancing more vigorously than she’d seen before.

"That had nothing to do with oxygen," she said to Claude, loud enough for anyone else to hear, if they were sufficiently calm to listen.

"I’ve experienced and studied earth tremors," said Claude. "And that wasn’t one."

"I know you’re right," she said, "but I only have a suspicion about what it was."

"spheres?"

"Of course, but what exactly, I don’t want to say at present."

Face down, yet paradoxically with the wind in her face, Kallandra knew her night was about to be disturbed by another sphere dream. Determined to deny her muscles to conspire non-functionality, she used all her willpower to lash out. More awake than asleep she raised herself on elbows to see that Derek had already sought sanctuary elsewhere.

Deciding a camomile tea would help dispel nightmares, she engaged the cooperation of her otherwise petulant leg muscles, and so made her way to the kitchen.

Instead of snoozing in the spare bedroom, Derek was at the computer desk. The screen displayed a rotating Earth, with the spheres dotted. But even with a brassy-coloured image doing its best to please, Derek ignored it as he crafted in paper, scissors, and glue. Paper polyhedra hung like a solar system from the ceiling by threads. She put up her hand to rotate an octahedron, an icosahedron, and batted a tetrahedron. Each represented approximations to the Earth with pencilled outlines of the continents. Each had six matchsticks glued at the points from where the spheres were departing.

“Is this playschool?” she said, giving the octahedron a playful tap so that it started a pendulum swing.

Derek smiled. With all the paraphernalia, he looked like a boy in a toyshop. “That’s the one.”

“Right, let me guess,” she said in response to his enigmatic statement. “The Earth is really made of eight triangles, which in time have eroded to the present-day globe.”

“You must have noticed something odd about the geographical location of the spheres?”

“If you mean there’s only one per continent, then we’ve all spotted that.”

Derek smirked and steepled his fingers. “Actually, there is a continent that is minus a sphere, but there’s more to their distribution than that. They are remarkably equidistant from each other. You’re not listening, are you?”

“Sorry, I was wondering what you’d stuck on the ends of the matchsticks. It’s not…” She thought earwax, but realised it was the amber glow reflection from the nearby screen onto the silver-painted match heads.

“Concentrate can’t you? Look, it’s too much of a coincidence for distribution to be equidistant. Especially, when we consider plate tectonics have shifted the crust such that all the present sphere locations were in vastly different places two billion years ago. Whoever planted them had to calculate predicted crust drifting—“

“Not necessarily. We’ve seen how the spheres can glide through tough rock. Suppose they’ve been stationary while the rocks flow through them since they were planted all that time ago.”

“Then, sweet Kallandra, we’d see tunnels going sideways like drift mines – oh, they would’ve melted and deformed since then, but it implies the spheres can withstand high temperatures.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me. I wonder what they are for? They’re not big enough to be gathering minerals unless there’s a very rare one.”

“Perhaps they were adding something to the planet, not removing it. After all, Feubacher mentioned the origin of atmospheric free oxygen coincides with them arriving.”

“Yeah, Claude told me it coincides with the start of plate tectonics too. Was that a good thing to bring us volcanoes and earthquakes?”

“Volcanoes added water to the planet’s surface, as well as gases. Anyway, I thought you had a completely different theory to the geology effects.” He picked up an octahedron ready as a visual aid for his next sentence.

“I do, but it’s simmering, not ready for consumption. Go on, where are the missing spheres?”

Derek looked disappointed. “What makes you think two are missing?”

“It’s an eight sided figure you have there pretending to be the Earth. You have dots where the six spheres are, therefore…”

“I could have made a six-sided polyhedron.”

“Why can’t you say ‘cube’? But you wouldn’t because you’re fiddling the geometry statistics.” She laughed. “Go on, why not?”

He picked up a couple of paper cubes with continental outlines. “I couldn’t find a configuration for a cube where the spheres are near the centres of the faces. But for an eight-sided polyhedra the six spheres are more or less central. See?” He was excited at his discovery. “And the crucial point is that it shows where two more spheres might be found.” He turned the octahedron to show her a blank triangular face.

“South Pacific, and where else? Ah, Western Atlantic – hang on, no, nearer the Caribbean. You know what that area is known as?”

He nodded. “Bermuda Triangle. So you think a sphere down there has been sucking down ships and making planes vanish?”

“Derek, there are many theories attempting to explain the Bermuda Triangle. We’ve just added one more. Interesting because the religious furore is partly because the spheres have desecrated ancient sites. We think the sites became sacred or special because of some influence of the buried spheres. That kinda fits with the Bermuda Triangle – special even if not religious. What South Pacific island has ancient religious significance?”

“Easter Island,” he said. “I haven’t checked the web for one of the moai rising up into the sky sitting on top of a sphere. That would be a sight.”

“Ha! Floating giant stone heads. But if these two are coming out why haven’t we seen them?”

“After two billion years they might have malfunctioned or couldn’t cope with particularly active earthquakes, or plate subduction zones.”

“Possibly. Derek, you have no sphere coming out of the Antarctic, ah, the sphere-less continent, or the north pole. Have you been fiddling the polyhedra to fit the facts, you naughty mathematician?”

“I’m a designer. OK, I do engineering mathematics, which means I look at the results and see how real life gives me those solutions. The only shape that fits the data well is an octahedron orientated with the known six spheres approximately in their face centres. I don’t know why they weren’t arranged so that none are flying out of the poles. Do you?”

“I think I do. They are flying machines – assuming they are machines and not living entities. Without doing the mathematics, they probably need some spin of the Earth to take off. That’s why our spaceships don’t leave at the poles.”

“But their vertical speed is only about a foot a day. Surely the latitude isn’t going to make any difference.”

“Maybe not, but we’re travelling east at seven hundred miles per hour while standing here playing with models. At the poles the speed reduces to nothing. But who knows, perhaps they don’t like the cold.”

“We should alert NASA to scan the Caribbean and Easter Island areas. Perhaps the spheres are out of sight under water.”

“You do that, Derek, I’m going back to bed before it’s time to rise again. I’m off back to Yosemite to laugh as Claude, army engineers and UCLA Geophysics people pitting their might against the sphere.”

Derek pulled a pained face. “I thought the Colonel said you were to go back to the training program?”

“Of course, though you could say off course. I am flying there.”

“Not in the prototype Apoidea? It’s not designed for prolonged Earth Atmosphere flight.”

“Cool it, Derek. The co-pilot, navigator and I are testing a modification to the flying suits. So you can knock another rivet in the Apoidea tomorrow. I’m off.”

Shouting instructions to avoid the hole, Oqmar sent the eager Kur back into the cave. No wildcat screeched out of the entrance this time. He too, felt uneasy, last night when Hanra’s mad crone of a mother muttered incomprehensible incantations over a simmering evil-smelling pot while throwing him malevolent glares.

Now he looked above the hill and could just make out the spot of light ever moving upwards. The shiny orb that should have been his, its power – transferred to him – making him leader. He wore a twisted smile while ruefully imagining wild nights with the girls he could’ve had. That Emzeena, who had no sores, and Groch with those deep dark sultry eyes…

Kur barked a come-in call, so Oqmar followed his spear inside. The uneasiness remained, but tinged with expectation. Ah, that was probably it: he was picking up tomorrow. It often happened in advance of a storm; the hairs stood up on his neck. Even the curled black hair on his head made an effort to point up at the sky. Flashes of weird images would enter his head – white monkeys playing with sticks on fire; silver bulls charged around at a terrifying speed, their legs rushing so fast they were a blur.

Sometimes it wasn’t some impossible vision. He’d see the northern savages coming down into the village, so they’d be ready for them. If only he could see the mad schemes of Hanra and her mother.

The cool of the cave welcomed him. But the inner sanctum was all wrong. The ceiling had a circular vent lined up with the bottomless pit beneath. Oqmar’s vision blurred for a second, making him stagger. He held out his arms for balance being acutely aware to keep away from the well.

Kur yelped once, preferring to lie by the wall, watching the hole then up to the ceiling, for any further spherical apparitions.

“There’ll be no more, Kur. That magic orb was our chance and it has flown away.” Rubbing his face to calm himself he sat in his favourite corner, rummaged in his robe, and threw a chunk of cheese to Kur. It was particularly ripe, and with the sour wine, consciousness soon went for a walk for both man and beast.


Oqmar awoke in a cold sweat. Before he opened his eyes he detected a presence, other than the ever-faithful Kur, whose snoring he could hear. As could the stranger no doubt. His heart doubled its drumming in spite of silent instructions to be still. Faking sleep he surreptitiously felt for his goat-crook and closed his hand around the comforting olivewood. Slowly he eased his eyelids open. No one there. He felt foolish, yet his instincts rarely disowned him.

His nervous system told him that something else shared the cave. More, he’d felt this presence before, or rather the aura disturbance that accompanied it.

Slowly he stood. “Kur, wake up you useless lump of shit.” A worried canine eye opened, followed by a nose in the air, sniffing for demons, and finding one. With a whine Kur slunk off.

“That’s it, no more treats for you today. Don’t you know anything about loyalty?”

As Oqmar watched the shamed dog’s tail dragging the floor a tremor blurred his vision. He abruptly sat in the cave’s gritty sand, and held his head while squeezing his eyes shut. This was no ordinary tremor. Outside, he’d seen the sand grains dance waist high while he hung on to the nearest tree.  His head hurt, but he heard Kur growl. Opening his eyes Oqmar knew why he’d had a premonition.

A stranger lay asleep on the floor on the other side of the sphere’s hole. He’d not seen a human with padded out flesh, and it was white. The stranger had an odd attachment on his face. His face was pale, like the belly of the snake Oqmar cooked last night. The man’s robes were strangely coloured. An elaborate green garment covered his upper body, not too dissimilar to his own rough shirt. Oqmar’s eyes widened when he noticed the stranger’s legs were wrapped in a blue cloth. His hands were white, and not just his palms. Maybe he’d been in a white clay bath like the hogs by the oasis. Oqmar was too afraid to get close in case this white monster awoke.

Oqmar should run. But by the Gods it was his cave. And hadn’t the sphere chosen his cave? It was the stranger who should leave.

His hair seemed to be made out of fine straw.

Oqmar, quivering, with his stomach yet again in a knot, moved around the hole while pointing his crook at the hair – perhaps it was a strange hat. By the Gods, the stranger had extraordinary coverings on his feet. Were they goatskin? They were whiter than his face.

Kur, behind Oqmar, growled again just as his master made the stick reach the hair on the stranger’s head. He gave it a flick with the intention of seeing if was really hair. The stranger awoke, screaming.

Oqmar fell back, and tripped over Kur, who yelped before running off. “Come back you coward.” Kur refused, but at least the stranger stopped screaming.

Struggling back onto his feet, Oqmar shouted in self-defence, “I was only checking your wrong hair!” He patted his own head and keeping the hole between them, pointed at the stranger’s hair. A thought hit Oqmar like a bolt of lightning. The stranger must be a Jinn! Out of the orb’s hole had arisen an evil spirit. Suppose it was here to stop the orb escaping, but too late, and now he’d be angry. He tore his attention from the Jinn to his only escape route. Fear tightened all his running-away muscles, although a working synapse told him escape would be futile. The fear won and he leapt for the cave’s entrance chamber, but Kur had returned and blocked the gap.

“Damn it, Kur,” he said, then turned when he heard a very human gasp. The stranger clutched at his arm. Only then did Oqmar notice a dark patch in the green cloth. The Jinn was hurt, therefore he was no Jinn. Even so, Oqmar was reluctant to seek a deep friendship.

Oqmar peered at the stranger’s face. He needed to see into his eyes, to read the person within. But the… the decoration he had wedged on his nose with what looked like round clear crystals made seeing his eyes difficult. But what he did see was a greater fear than his own. Eyes behind the contraption darted about; and he watched beads of sweat emerging out of terrified skin. Oqmar’s confidence grew in proportion to the stranger’s discomfort.

He pulled himself upright as tall as he could, even though he was much shorter than this giant. Gripping his crook tighter, he strode around the hole to the feet of the weirdly dressed man. He’d not seen anyone with surplus body, nor with such odd robes. He must be from one of the southern tribes. He’d heard the rumour of white peoples in the mountains but hadn’t believed them.

“Are you from the mountains?”

The fleshy man frowned, but looked straight at Oqmar, and opened his mouth, revealing perfect white teeth. He uttered sounds, probably words but beyond Oqmar’s recognition.

Gibberish, thought Oqmar. He knew other far away villages had strange dialects but this one must have banged his head or had chewed too much dream root. The stranger rolled up the sleeve on his left arm. A cut oozed blood, proving his reality. Oqmar dug in his own robe pockets for the healing-plant leaves he always carried. In among the green furry cheese, he unfurled a browned leaf. He sucked up spittle in his mouth, spat on the leaf, and then held it out to the stranger, who shrank back.

“Good leaf. It will stop the bleeding,” said Oqmar, persisting. It was then he noticed the stranger’s fingers were not only whiter but also extraordinarily clean, and his fingernails had been bitten so neatly. He looked at his own brown fingers – part his skin colour, part dirt. His broken yellow nails hardly compared either. Nevertheless this clean man was bleeding, and if it weren’t stopped the buzz-flies would be a nuisance.

The stranger shook his head as if in disgust. Oqmar then knew this childlike man would have to be treated like a child, for his own good.

Oqmar called out, “Kur, tell me where you are?”

In the adjoining cave Kur barked making the stranger look over his right shoulder. Oqmar leaned over and pressed the leaf on the bloody cut.

The stranger shouted, making no sense to Oqmar, who’d held the leaf firmly in place, in spite of the ensuing struggle. Oqmar smiled to himself. In spite of his disadvantage in size, his strength was superior.

After a few moments he withdrew his hand, and to the stranger’s obvious disgust, spat again on the leaf and found a home for it in his robe. The young man examined the wound with one of his very clean fingers, but he didn’t seem pleased about it. Perhaps he remained worried about being lost.

Oqmar stood and then coughed for attention. He pointed at his own chest and said, “Oqmar, Oqmar.” Then he pointed at the stranger with one hand and held his hand to his ear.”

The stranger must have played this game before, because he nodded, and said, “Blake.”

Oqmar offered him a lump of his grey bread and a piece of cheese, but it was declined even when Oqmar gnawed off the worst of the fur. He squatted and made ready to nibble some himself.

Blake rummaged in his clothes and produced what looked like a stick wrapped in a leaf, but too neat. He peeled it to reveal a shiny thinner leaf, and offered Oqmar a thin pink stick. Without hesitation Oqmar took it and after seeing Blake do the same with another one, put it in his mouth.

“Gum,” Blake said, pulling it out and back in. Oqmar realised Blake was showing how gum was to be chewed and not swallowed.

Oqmar couldn’t believe how sweet it was. He’d eaten honey and sweet berries but they were sour in comparison. With his fingers he pulled at a corner and stretched it out of his mouth. He’d eaten entrails that he could pull but not like that. He sniffed at it, but didn’t recognise the odour. He chewed again; much of his food wasn’t easy to eat. Snake was chewy; birds often bony, and some insects wouldn’t stop wriggling even after swallowing.  He again, took out the gum thinking it reminded him of the entrails of boiled white snake.

He looked at the grinning Blake who had both thumbs stuck in the air. Now the boy had shared food perhaps he’d exchange weapons. Oqmar found his old knife in his corner. The sharp flint had dulled but the boy might not notice. He passed it to him.

Blake looked puzzled, but placed it in his clothing. Then Blake’s face contorted with worry and he clutched at his right hip. His hands clutched at his garments but he snatched them away with the speed of scared bats. Through the blue cloth emerged a small shiny ball – a tiny version of the one that escaped Oqmar from this very cave.

As both Oqmar and Blake stared in shock and fear, the sphere hovered for a moment, and then shot up through the hole in the ceiling. Intuitively, Oqmar knew it was chasing the other sphere. On his back he lay on the floor with his head and shoulders overhanging the hole, and then looked up. Through the dark hole in the cave roof, he could see the sun glinting off both spheres making them look like stars. Then they were one.

It blinked.

Winked.

Gone.

Oqmar rubbed his eyes, but only blue sky remained to mock him. Two magic orbs he’d had within his grasp, and he’d lost both.  A low growl from Kur, entering the main cave at last, made Oqmar glance over at Blake. Like the first sphere the man’s edges appeared blurred as if he was moving too rapidly for eyes to see clearly.

“Blake?”

“Aaaaaaarrh!” Blake’s voice came through the air, but also shaky. Oqmar tentatively poked him with his crook proving there remained some substance there. Then after an increase in frenzied blurring, Blake vanished.

Kur barked once.

Oqmar and Kur raised their noses as they detected lingering whiffs of that metallic tang they’ve associated with thunderstorms when lightning strikes rocks.

“He must have been Jinn after all. They come and go, but usually in the Elders’ late night gatherings after a few potions. But he’s not here now, Kur, if he ever was. Come.” He held out his fingers, which Kur sniffed at and curled his lip.

“Ah, you smell Blake’s food on my fingers.” Oqmar snorted a laugh, but Kur didn’t seem pleased. He sniffed the air and then with nose to the sand, snuffled around to where Blake last existed.

Oqmar looked at the image he’d scratched and coloured, with burnt sticks and berries, of the sphere rising through the cave and out. He picked a sharp stone and added a stick figure of Blake. He added a large stomach while he laughed at the memory of the only plump person he’d seen. He added big feet and then a tiny circle for the baby sphere.

Another bark.

“What have you found? Ah, his unused sticks of gum. Look, Kur, at the patterned wrappings. I’ve never seen any leaves like this. Do you think Hanra would want it?” Kur snarled.

“Nor me. Should I hide it in Kardinuta’s supper? I suppose not. Let the wild cats find it.” He threw the gum packet onto the sand for the future.

El Capitan, USA

“No, Major, you are not passing this barrier, even if you are who you say you are,” said the army sergeant. He gripped his XM8 rifle, as did the five soldiers behind him.

“Sergeant, I was at the sphere a couple of days ago.” Kallandra sighed at yet another obstruction, but the officious guard was good at his job.

“Major, I have strict orders to allow no one, even if they could prove they were the president. In fact especially if they were the president. It could be dangerous.”

“I could go over your head, Sergeant.”

“Yes, we heard about a chopper that got into trouble. Was that you, Major?” Raised eyebrows indicated he was impressed, but his intelligent, steady eyes showed he wasn’t going to let her through. In spite of his obstinacy, or because of it, she liked him.


“OK, I understand. But soldier, two more astronauts are following me here. That’s three from the Mars mission. Don’t you think you’d better ask your superior about us? We’ll be happy to be escorted to the site.” Not a sure thing but he nodded and spoke into his radio. She’d had to shoulder her way through a large crowd to get to this barrier. Her loaned airport jeep had to be parked among hundreds of vehicles in what looked like the Glastonbury Festival a couple of weeks that seemed like years ago. Family picnics, religious groups on their knees sending missives to the Almighty for salvation, and New Age believers crowded the valley.


“Hey, Kallandra,” shouted a short black woman with vermilion hair. There was something familiar… TV journalist.

“I’m not in the mood for interviews, Miss—?“ Kallandra looked for cameras: she hated being on TV.

“Honey, don’t fret. I’m with newspapers not TV.” She held out a red-finger-nailed hand, which Kallandra briefly shook. “Tabitha Wish, The Clarion Ledger, nothing to stir you up. But I hoped to hear your view on the religious angle.”

Kallandra, looked past her for Claude, who was supposed to be following her. She turned to the reporter, whose unnatural red hair grabbed her attention.


“I’m sorry, what religious view?” As a representative of NASA, she knew how to be guarded.

“The spheres. Do they represent Good, a symbol of God’s beneficence?”

“Um, how?” Kallandra was too scientific for such loaded questions, but had an inkling how to answer them. “Maybe.”

“Or, are they Evil being driven out of the Earth by God, to save us?”

While she floundered for an answer she saw salvation shouldering his way through the throng. “Claude, over here!”

They hugged and Claude overdid the greetings embrace with kisses. Tabitha ogled and then rapid-spoke into her Dictaphone. Kallandra dug Claude in the ribs to draw the journalist to his attention, and whispered, “Press.”

He picked up her signal and held out his hand. “Hello, I’m Derek, Kallandra’s old man.”

While Kallandra’s eyes widened, Tabitha shook his hand, and looked disappointed she hadn’t a juicy affair story to break. Then she clearly noticed Claude’s name badge and pursed her lips in a knowing oh.

Before Kallandra could re-arrange the charade, the Sergeant rescued her. “Major, your party is allowed in under escort.”



Three jeeped miles later they saw the sphere above the remains of El Capitan, again.


“It’s as high as a sky scraper now, why didn’t the engineering and physics people do their tests when it was easier to reach it?” Kallandra said.

“When we were here, Kal,” Claude said, “they were preparing equipment. Whoa, there’s the heavy duty boys.”

The army driver slowed at another barrier while speaking into his headset. Tanks and missile launchers circled the exit hole, all pointed at the sphere.

“It must be scared to death,” Tabitha said, sitting in the back of the jeep.

“Hey, who said you could come?” Kallandra said, turning from her front passenger seat.

“No one said I couldn’t.” She smiled, but not at Kallandra. And Claude smiled back.

Shrugging, Kallandra scanned the faces of the dozen engineers and scientists, both army and civilian. She recognized none. She turned to Claude.
 

“Why are there no NASA people here?”

“There should be.” He walked over to an army Captain, nattered, and returned. “It’s OK, they’re over in that blue tent, preparing to launch the sensor-missile.”

“Right. What? They are not going to fire a missile at our sphere?”

“Sorry, to inform you, Kallandra, but it isn’t our sphere. It isn’t anyone’s.”

Tabitha thrust her Dictaphone closer to Claude. “Could the sphere explode?”

“I doubt it.”

“Anything is possible,” said Kallandra. “We have no idea what it is. Oh, right, we know it isn’t life as we know it, and not made by humans. They should be pointing all the other sensors at it, like at Glastonbury.”

The captain had overheard Kallandra’s overheated reaction, and came over. He saw her flying suit insignia. “Major, we’ve tried everything else. The sphere’s vibration varies between seven and eleven Hertz, just like the others, making us feel a bit queasy and accounts for the blurred look. Its surface temperature is usually three above ambient, and with negligible short wave radiation. No long wave emissions either beyond light – not a single radio transmission.”

“Maybe they use TV,” Tabitha said to the stares of the others. “What’s wrong with that?”

Claude smiled. “TV is just another set of frequencies in the same electromagnetic spectrum as radio and light.”

“So it is,” she said. “So, how do the spheres talk to each other? Semaphore?”

“Good question,” Claude said, “we’ll let you know when we find out.” He turned to the Captain. “It’s a par excellence question, bien sûr.”

The Captain agreed, and looked up at the sphere. “We can only test the range of emissions for which our science knows about. The spheres are non-magnetic, but we haven’t been able to sample one to test its composition.”

“How about the temperature differences,” Kallandra said, trying to seek ways to prevent them firing a missile. “Is it possible their variations are used to signal to an orbiting alien satellite? No, scrub that. There might be undetected satellites but the temperature variation would be too small and interfered with too much in the atmosphere.”

“Even so,” the captain said, “everything else about this phenomenon is unearthly too. How is it rising? What’s it made of? How did it get down there two billion years ago? So what’s a few degrees for it to detect? But I agree it seems too prone to error.”

“Could it be the way it’s vibrating?” Tabitha said.

“The vibrations make ultrasound so low we cannot hear but we can detect with instruments. It’s what’s making us all feel queasy. It’s called—”

“The brown note,” Kallandra said, remembering the British engineer saying the same thing.

Tabitha held up a hand, like in school. “Like whales? They can sure as candy talk over huge distances.”

“You might be right,” the Captain said, “but only on Earth – sea or air. Sound doesn’t travel through space.”

“We don’t know they need to communicate in space,” Kallandra said, “or if they did, they could switch to radio.”

Claude shook his head. “If they did, we’d be able to pick it up. They’re obviously advanced. If they want to keep their communications secret, they’d never use something simple like radio. But something has to be done by sphere A to be detected by sphere B.”

“But for all we know, they only exist here on Earth,” Tabitha said. “Lord, they might be one of God’s creatures we’d not heard about.”

Everyone laughed… except Tabitha, who slowly smiled so as not to look out of phase.


Kallandra’s cellphone chimed obliging her to walk away from the noisy discussion. She saw it was Derek, back at Johnson. “Hi, honey, is our spaceship still in one piece?”

“Hello, Kall. I’ve news about those two locations I told our bosses to search. They think they know where a sphere might be in the South Pacific near Tahiti.”

Before he could give Kallandra details, a warning klaxon sounded followed by the start up whine of a rocket motor making her put a finger in her ear. Then she realised the implication. She shouted: “No!” into her phone before closing it, and ran back to Claude, who in the collision threw himself on top of her in the grass.

“For Christ’s sake, Claude, it’s not going to explode.”

She wriggled free in time to see the flash of the rocket as it shot into the sphere. Although she didn’t expect any pyrotechnics, there remained the possibility of the unexpected. Her stomach tightened and her mouth hadn’t felt so dry since she nearly failed to pull out of a dive a month before at White Sands. Holding her breath she listened intently for any change in sound. The silvery surface continued its blurred image but the entry point of the rocket looked no different. It had healed itself. Her eyes looked at the wisps of remaining rocket exhaust drifting down before flicking to the sky on the other side of the sphere in case it had made it through.
 

Kallandra felt the ground quivering bringing back memories of Glastonbury. But it lasted only a few seconds, sending a few puffs of dust into the air and a few leaves spiralling down from worried trees. She noticed the Americans had hardly blinked through it, their quake muscles having reacted to the high frequency of tremors in California.

Elbowing Claude to allow her to stand, she heard whoops from a couple of soldiers. Thinking the sensors on the rocket had told them something new she rushed over to the command tent. The screen snowed.

“Nothing? Then why the cheers?” She looked first at the officers who stood looking foolish, and then at a corporal, who pointed in the direction of the sphere.

“We thought it would explode, or kill us. But It just took it in without so much as an oops.”

“Something did happen,” said the captain. Tabitha held up her Dictaphone, but he waved it away and wagged a finger.

Claude pointedly tapped at his watch, while lifting his eyebrows at the captain.

“Yes, Sir. Our computer went a bit haywire while I was monitoring the rocket launch. The screen blanked momentarily, but when it came back, everything seemed normal. However, when we ran the rocket sensor data through again, there’s a two-second gap, leading up to impact. Though a disappearing trick hardly counts as an impact. Consequently there is no data.”

Tabitha, annoyed at her Dictaphone having to be turned off, said, “You mean you lost two seconds’ worth of information. So what?”

“No, Ma’am,” said the captain. “We all lost two seconds. That computer, all the computers and time-related equipment show a leap forward, so to speak.” He stopped for a while to let the time factor sink in, but Claude and Kallandra already had a notion from Johnson.

Claude said, “We experienced time irregularities yesterday in Houston. Do you know if the time jump was local or general?”

“Well, that’s the odd thing isn’t it?” said the captain. “How could only us time travel forward? Surely observers at the edge of the time-field, or whatever you call it, would notice if we vanished for two seconds?”

“But we mightn’t vanish to them,” said Kallandra. “They might experience a peripheral disturbance decreasing in distance from us; a blurred vision type event. Hey, maybe that’s why the sphere is blurred. I wonder if it’s shifting time in increments but just on its fringes?”

“I don’t see how that would help the sphere move upwards,” said Claude.

“It might if it is skipping time while the Earth moves,” said Kallandra. “But I’m only floundering here, not making a reasoned hypothesis.” She noticed the captain had turned away to talk on his cellphone.

“What did Derek say?” Claude asked Kallandra.

“He said they’ve found another sphere. Or they think they have. I don’t know details. I’ll ring him back now.”

The captain beamed at them when he finished his call.

“Good news, we have a ‘go’ to use explosives.”

“Yellow Fin Tuna?” yelled the red-faced tourist, his riotous-red Hawaiian shirt bursting over his belly. “We hired this boat to catch shark.”

Charles Cakobao, the Fijian skipper and owner of the Crazy Motion stood his ground, which was literally difficult in the South Pacific swell greeting them that dawn. His frown related more to his recollection of the calm sea forecast than to the American’s tirade. He took a slow intake of air, as if it was a long cool drink. Looking past the rich man and into the fair-weather cumulus skidding over the smudged horizon shape of Fiji he watched dark dots pinpointing other game fishing boats. No doubt their skippers faced the same tirade. Ready or not, he gave his speech.

“Mr Addison, there is a moratorium on Shark fishing this season as part of the Global wildlife inventory. But we can still go after Tuna. They take just as much skill.”

“Ah, I get it,” said Addison, tapping his nose. “You want more money.”

“No.”

“Cash. Stewart, pay him another thousand.” A sea-sickly youth, wearing a blue and white striped jerkin that brought a smile to Cakobao, unzipped his money belt.

“No, Mr Addison, I’d lose my licence. These boats carry electronic tags, and so do many sharks.”

“Then I’ll buy the fucking boat. Stewart…”

“It’s not mine to sell,” Cakobao lied. “Do you want to go back ashore, or shall we go catch fish?”

A disgruntled shrug from Addison allowed Cakobao to head his boat southeast away from the island. He needed the cash from these damnable tourists, legally, or he’d go straight back.

An hour later Cakobao scratched his head in consternation. They hadn’t yet reached the spot where he could always guaranteed lively fishing, but the sonar revealed a worrying phenomenon. He gestured to his engineer-cum-waiter to come into the wheelhouse, without alerting the passengers.

“Jack, look at the screen. I’ve never seen activity like this.” They peered at blips moving to the west. Thousands of sea-creatures swam beneath them away from where the Crazy Motion was headed.

“You’re registered with Fishwatch, aren’t you?” Jack said. “Call them to see what’s happening. Or are we gonna try catching them here?”

“No point. If they’re on the run, their scared not hungry.”

Cakobao used his web connection to send his sonar data to Fishwatch. In return they fed data from other boats and satellites back to him, and added a warning. Cakobao looked at Jack with a here-we-go face and went to the aft deck, where the four large tourists inebriated themselves on the complimentary beer.

“I’m sorry, folks, we have to turn back after all. We’ve been informed that there might have been a seaquake up ahead, so there’s a strong possibility of a tsunami.”

Addison’s face turned a deeper shade of crimson. “Hang on there, buddy. I’ve paid good money to be on this bucket.”

“Mr Addison, money can’t control a tsunami.”

“It’s all balls anyway, Cakabao,” he said, looking past the Fijian at the horizon as if a dark wet wall was speeding towards them. “There’s no sign of any tidal wave. You’re pissed off with me, and your pride is getting in the way.”
Addison’s young assistant called him from where he’d been sick over the side. “There’s millions of fish, Sir.”

“So there is. Cakabao, why can’t we stop here and catch some of these?”

“Come with me, Mr Addison, and look at the data sent to us from Fishwatch. Look, there are fish and whales leaving the area. We are only a hundred miles off the centre of the area they appear to be evacuating from. What does that tell you?”

“You’re right. Something’s spooked them. And you reckon it might be a quake. But that ain’t right either is it?”

“No. We’d have seen and felt a tsunami by now – even a small one.”

“Even so, aren’t you the least curious, Cakobao, about what’s alarmed these critters? I’m the hell am. OK, let’s forget the fishing and go see. Ah, I see you find something to agree with me at last.” 


Derek called Kallandra back as she left with Claude to return to the Johnson Space Centre.

“Fish. Radar – did you know the spheres are invisible to radar? Radar has tracked aquatic life leaving the area. Extrapolating backwards has given them a point of origin. A remotely controlled sub is being airlifted there.”

“Maybe that wet sphere had further to go. How about the one in the Bermuda area?” She was impressed that Derek’s impromptu globe and sticks model produced the right result.

“Too much background noise.”

“Or it isn’t there. Destroyed? After all, two billion years is a hell of a warranty period.”

Back at Johnson, sixty people had been arguing. A quarter of them sported military uniforms, a few wore their NASA apparel with equal pride. The shouting had died after Colonel Dwight Disraeli demanded they employed cogent argument, or he’d clear the room and ask the cleaners in to make the strategic decisions. Of course they knew it was a bluff, but one that brought their bickering into perspective. Even so, the Army Chief of Staff, Gibbon, made the point that the increasing time shifts would probably end if the spheres didn’t exist.

Kallandra was losing her faith in her presumed superiority in arguments. The bullish military had made a powerful case for destroying the spheres, but all she had were gut feelings to hold back.

Derek, sitting next to her in the awkwardly hushed meeting room, leaned to whisper in her right ear. “Aren’t you going to protest?”

She stood and waved her agenda at the Colonel, who nodded at her.

“I take your point,” she said, “that these time decoherences have only occurred since the phenomenon of the spheres, but it might be like saying let’s put out a fire by destroying a box of matches – or the person holding the matches, even though they might also have a bucket of water hidden.” She saw blank faces and some leaning to each no doubt whispering ‘mad woman’.

 She continued. “I see I made no sense to some of you. OK, suppose the spheres have something to do with the time-quakes. How do we know they can’t put it right? Maybe we were going to have them anyway, and they are here to correct the situation.”

“You are in cloud cuckoo-clock land, Major,” said Gibbon.

“Fair enough, they probably aren’t,” she admitted. “But my point is nothing is known for certain about the function of the spheres. If time was running along continuously when the spheres were inside the Earth, maybe that was what they were doing – perhaps inadvertently. Now they are leaving, the Earth-Space–Time discontinuities are returning to a pre-sphere situation? We just don’t know. I cannot see how by destroying the spheres we resolve our situation. We might be making matters worse.”

“Major,” said Gibbon, “how could it be worse than say if a time-quake happens at a nuclear power plant, or a nuke missile finds itself in the air without its plane over LA?”

“OK, that would be disastrous, but it hasn’t happened to that degree, yet. The presence of the spheres so close to Earth might be preventing Time from becoming completely chaotic.”

“Absolute rot,” said Gibbon, to murmured agreement around the room.

“We do have a physicist among us,” said Disraeli, looking at a woman in a mulberry red trouser suit in a corner. She had her head down thumbing her iPaq. To Kallandra she seemed oblivious to the turned faces. Many of those faces had wider eyes, probably wondering why they hadn’t noticed the Sophia Loren – in her younger days – look alike.

“Doctor Gabriella Avana is a physicist from Milan University currently on a sabbatical working for NASA.”

Kallandra smiled at her in a vain effort to ease the poor woman’s discomfort as on hearing her name she looked up at the sea of faces.

Realising she hadn’t heard much of the debate, Colonel Disraeli said, “Doctor Avana, what is your take on the time dislocations, slippages or decoherences we’ve been experiencing? Are they caused by or minimised by the spheres?”

Smoothing down her jacket, the physicist stood. Her Italian accent embellished her impeccable English. “The wave function collapses we’ve experienced may have been caused by quantum decoherence, or it could be that leakage into the environment has occurred. Such leakage from the total superposition of the wave function obviously—“

“Excuse me, Doctor,” said Gibbon, “can you put this into English?”

“I’ll try. Basically, the decoherences you mention are theoretical occurrences that could happen, for example when the system’s wave function becomes entangled with the measuring device. Oh, sorry. In the scale of normal experiences on Earth we shouldn’t experience the kind of time distortions we are familiar with for objects near the event horizon of a black hole or the changing relative time associated with very fast space travel. The fact that some extraordinary decoherences are occurring is not inexplicable in theory. It’s just a matter of selecting which aspect of which quantum theory you want to choose.”

“So are the spheres responsible?” said Gibbon.

“I doubt anyone can be sure, unless you go and ask them,” she said.

Gibbon laughed while Kallandra shouted, “Yes.”

“Doctor,” said Disraeli, “the spheres seem to be not only ignoring us but don’t appear to recognise we exist. But is it possible that the presence of the spheres stabilised time until they started leaving Earth.”

“I suppose if in some way the spheres absorbed time decoherences while in the Earth such that time seemed linear and continuous to us until they left…” Her voice drifted off while she tapped on her iPaq. But shook her head. “I can’t say. The spheres, if artificial, are far in advance of us. Who knows what they know – and can do?”

“It is possible, then, for these time problems to get worse?” asked Disraeli.

“I’m surprised it hasn’t been already, if their leaving is creating some disruptions in time on Earth,” she said. “For example the Earth is orbiting the Sun at… um”

“Eighteen miles per second,” said Claude, to murmured agreement.

“Prego – I should have known this audience would know,” she said and smiled for the first time. “Imagine then if the time displaced affected the whole planet and instantly pushed time forward for a minute. Instead of merely shifting a few yards onto your lawn when you were attempting to put a key in your front door, you found yourself a hundred and eight miles above the ground, or into it.

“Luckily, the affected time decoherence regions seem to be very small, say the size of a person or half an airplane. But suppose the Earth’s core was displaced. We could suddenly see it as a fiery ball a thousand miles away.”

“So, we need time to be back on track as it always has been,” said Gibbon. “And I think blasting those darn spheres might well do that.”

All whispering stopped while everyone looked at Dr Avana and she looked steadily at him.

“Mi scusi. Suppose, Sir, time was chaotic on Earth before the spheres arrived, and they somehow absorbed the decoherences? Destroying would be catastrophic.”

“Hear hear,” called Kallandra, but Gibbon, as the army Chief of Staff persisted.

“Why would an alien race come to this little old planet and do us a favour by keeping time in order? What’s in it for them?”

“Sir, I am a theoretical physicist not a treaty strategist, but I assume whatever they were doing was for their benefit with no thought of any future life forms on Earth. I would further assume that merely absorbing time decoherences to make time linear and continuous here wouldn’t be their aim.”

“Are you trying to tell us those spheres were collecting our time? Why would they do that? And now they’re leaving they are taking our time bits and pieces with them?”

“I can think of another reason why they might have had an interest in keeping time normal here,” said Claude. “Who and what needs time to be orderly? Life does. So maybe the spheres have or, sadly, had a need to keep life started billions of years ago and ticking.”

“You’re not saying they are God, or Angels, are you?” said Fran Hope, the New Earth Creationist.

“I’m not, but you might,” Claude said. “It’s just a hypothesis. After all it is beginning to appear that without the spheres life would have not been sustainable on a planet with time zipping about everywhere or everywhen. Instead of thinking of the spheres as being God, we might consider what you’ve assumed was the Creator, was really the spheres all along.”

As Fran stormed out, muttering: “Heresy”, Colonel Disraeli addressed the gathering again.

“People, we need decisions not religious arguments or theories about what quantum physics might be.”

“The decision can only be to continue attempting to communicate with the spheres without trying to destroy them,” said Kallandra.

“On the contrary, the decision can only be to take them out so our planet can return to normality. And if those bastards have stolen our time decoherences, or whatever they are, we’ll have them back,” said Gibbon, whose aide whispered in his ear as soon as sufficient quiet enabled him to be heard.

“This is ridiculous,” muttered Kallandra. “There must be a protocol for dealing with communications with aliens; first contact and all that. Did you come across any in training?”

Claude shook his head. “There probably isn’t a protocol, or if there is it was thought up in the sixties and long forgotten.”

“I suggest a compromise,” said Gibbon to the Colonel. “Instead of destroying all the spheres, which, if they really were being used to stop time being fucked up, leaves the others to do that job. Destroying one will show them we mean business.”

“Or drive them away without ever looking back,” said Claude.

The Colonel held up a hand. “It’s a possible compromise. I’ll have to put it to my strategic panel and clear it with the Pentagon.”

Derek leant towards Kallandra. “Do you think the President will say no to a strike? You know people who know him.”

“He’s not my country’s President,” said Claude, “but Edsel Cabot will agree to whatever Gibbon says. A function of him being too young. I like him, clever, and our first black President, but overawed – or so I’ve been told.”

“I agree,” said Kallandra, “but at forty two he’s only a year younger than Kennedy was. Cabot was elected as a rejection of Bush, although there are clever people at the White House who’d – hello, what’s going on?”

Disraeli had rushed back into the noisy room clutching his iPaq. His normal ruddy complexion had paled.

“Quiet everyone. Apparently there’s been a pre-emptive strike on the Fiji sphere.”

A moment of shocked silence was chased by Claude shouting out, “Who by? Or need we ask?” He said looking at Gibbon – as did everyone else.

“Hey,” said the Army Chief of Staff, hardly concealing his delight. “How was I to know some maverick commander was to decide to take direct action?”

“Gibbon,” said Colonel Disraeli, “I’m in charge of the Spheres Coordinating Group. If I find you had ordered a strike there’ll be trouble.”

Kallandra stood. “Never mind the posturing, what happened exactly? Has the sphere been destroyed or is it damaged and…”

“Available for our engineers to investigate?” said Disraeli. “All I know is that three aircraft launched six missiles resulting with a mix of EMP, fragment and nuclear detonations. After which the sphere appeared to be vaporized. I have an image of the fireball.”

Kallandra whispered to Derek, “I don’t believe it’s gone. Let’s fetch up a live satellite image of the spot – they’re all being monitored. Can you send it to the big screen behind Disraeli?”

Claude leaned towards Kallandra. “I know we’ve seen spheres survive – Mon Dieu, ignore – being prodded by sticks and sensor rockets, but do you think they’d endure nukes? I dunno about you, but I’m pissing myself here.”

“No need, Claude. My waters tell me they’re above anything we do.”

While Derek left to play with the relevant buttons, Gibbon continued crowing about the strike, which was clearly at his instigation. “I hate to rub it in to those who wanted to leave those time-stealing bastards alone, but that will show them we have the balls to take them on.”

No one had the energy or words to combat him until the satellite image flickered on bringing more gasps. The date and time were current and yet the sphere was clearly shining, in place and intact.

Gibbon, in shock, stuttered: “I don’t understand…”

“Nor do I,” said Disraeli. “I apologise if I’ve misled this meeting. Can we replay the last thirty minutes?”

Awkward moments ticked by until his hand went to his earpiece. “There seems to be a technical problem. No, there it is.” The screen showed fighters approaching the sphere, but then they reversed – the time signatures showing nonsense as the picture disintegrated into pixels.

“Colonel,” said Gibbon. “I’ve had a message from… I’ll give you exact details later, but the pilots now report they never took off, but all are unwell – headaches. The jets still have their ordnance, unused. I can’t explain it.”

“It’s obvious, surely,” said Kallandra, looking at Dr Avano, who looked uncomfortable as if hoping her corner location would protect her.

“It seems as if a quantum time decoherence has occurred, especially if we have evidence of the planes being synchronously in the air and on the ground.”

Kallandra addressed her and the meeting, “Dr Avano, I know you’ll not be able to answer this comprehensively, but before our military antagonise the spheres further, would you say repeated bombardments of, say, all the spheres simultaneously, would only make things worse?”

“We’re not letting inexperienced joy-pilots like you dictate our strategy,” said Gibbon to Kallandra, and waving an arm around the meeting as if appealing for support, but getting little.

“Gabrielle?” said Kallandra, feeling a small victory, but worried nevertheless at what might happen if Gibbon went for all-out-attack on the spheres.

The physicist stood but looked uncomfortable. “If the spheres can control wave-functions to affect time – I mean if what we’ve witnessed isn’t a coincidence brought about by the nature of their existence as opposed to deliberate action – then we should be very cautious indeed.”

Kallandra, fed up with the young woman’s hesitancy. “Doctor, you mean it might be possible for them to change the scale of the time decoherence from a few seconds to take us back centuries?”

A gasp from the others in the room enabled Kallandra to note with satisfaction that more attacks on the spheres would be impossible if that thought simmered.

“I doubt it – the energy required…”

“But not impossible?” Disraeli asked her.

“Very little is impossible in theoretical physics, especially quantum mechanics. We could all slip into another universe equivalent to a million years ago – or future. And then we could—“

“Thank you, Doctor Avano,” said Disraeli. “Gibbon, you’d better attend a meeting with me in twenty minutes. I want details. Meeting postponed until further notice.”

A month later near Alice Springs, Australia.

Rob Summers accepted the cigarette from his friend, Mandu, although he’d told the NASA doctors he’d given up in plenty of time for the Mars Mission. But that was on hold, and, in any case, the urge for the intake of nicotine was secondary to the need for a social bonding with the aboriginal leader of the Anangu clan that owned Uluru.

“It’s a bloody bummer, Rob,” said Mandu, as they swung on his shack’s porch seat looking at the rubble of Uluru in the distant sunset.

Rob agreed. “I used to enjoy coming to the hotel here – always paid the extra dollars to grab a view of Uluru and watch its glory shimmer from red to blue with all the shades between.”

“That was the Tjukurpa energy of the dreamtime. Our ancestors’ spirits were looked after by Tjukurpa, until…” Tears filled his brown eyes.

“Where have the ancestral spirits gone, Mandu?” said Rob, his psychiatric skills on auto, keeping his friend talking to work through the disaster. It wasn’t as if the abos could blame the white Man this time. They could point at and blame metallic spheres for the destruction of one of their most sacred places, but they knew any retribution moment had passed.

“The spirits have gone on walkabout, Rob. I tell you what, our ancients were right about Uluru being hollow, right?”

“Too right. Do the Anangu clan leaders consider the ancient spirit – this Tjukurpa – may be related to the sphere? Hah. By that I mean—“

“Don’t worry yourself. You mean the sphere must have been down there dancing its rhythms so that we could feel it. The sphere was our hidden soul?”

“Metaphorically, perhaps. Am I going to be allowed access to the hole tomorrow? I’ve been patient, Mandu.”

“Why ask? Them buggers didn’t.” He waved a fist at the Australian Army encampment that supported the engineers and scientists who’d examined the sphere while it was near ground level. The sphere had reached a thousand feet and the human investigators had given up. The army remained pointing their weapons and a residual science team listened with their sensors, but from afar since the Fiji time event, which remained worrying.

“I’m a different kind of bugger. You coming with me?”

“As long as all we’re doing is to take a gander.”

Although Rob wasn’t a geologist he’d understood that the spheres somehow cut their way vertically through any rock strata they found themselves beneath. He’d seen photographs of smooth sides, including those at Uluru. But the ancient red rock was friable. The structure had become so unstable the hallowed tourist attraction had become a rubble heap.

It took them two hours to reach what used to be the plateau. They’d gained very little height but the scramble over the newly crumbled Uluru with large friable sandstone blocks exhausted them. Curiosity drove Rob’s perseverance, and Mandu found amusing his friend’s need to know what’s happened to the hole.

“Are you sure your leaders won’t mind me climbing this sacred heap?” said Rob, stopping below the last steep slope for a breather.

“The spirits have left. Probably gone to Kata Tjuta. So Uluru might as well be trampled over.”

“Ah, they’re the rocks bigger than Uluru. Where abouts are they?”

As he stood to conclude their hike Mandu waved his arm in a general easterly direction. Rob was a psychiatrist for NASA, not a geologist, but he was expecting a neat hole at the top, not the ragged crater they found.

“I don’t get it, Mandu, why should this rock disintegrate so much when by the images I’ve seen of the other sphere exit holes it should be relatively intact?”

“The spirit put up a damn good fight, Rob.”

“Of course, silly of me.” Rob tried not to be too flippant. He had a lot of respect for the ancient religions. In his professional capacity he’d witnessed Caribbean witchdoctory, and although the aboriginals here were more discreet, he knew of the power of autosuggestion with people getting better, or worse, merely on a spiritual leader’s say so.

While Mandu set off walking around the rim, Rob laid on a slab of ochre rock so he could look safely down the pit. He leaned over sufficiently to feel the seemingly polished wall. It felt like glass, but to his amazement he could see the bottom of the hole.  Many small and some large rocks had filled it to within thirty yards of the rim. The vibrations must have opened up all the faults and cracks in the stone. He saw a cascade of gravel slither down the opposite rim eighty yards away.

“Hey, Mandu, be careful.”

“Yeah, I noticed. It’s the bloody sphere making those noises. It’s disturbing the Earth.”

Rob looked up at the sphere directly above the hole. A perfect metallic globe over three hundred yards up. How could Mandu hear the low frequency noise that it emitted? When the spheres weren’t so high many people felt nauseous from the vibration but not from so high up. It looked like a hydrogen balloon except it didn’t drift in the wind, just slowly rose up. He aimed his camera and took both movie and stills at different settings. With the zoom he could see the warped reflection of the ochre rocks he lay on. Did the sphere know the ructions it caused? It would be ironic if it had no notion, no concept of humans or life on Earth.

One aspect of the reflected image of the rubble remains of Uluru made him gasp. The exit hole had the look of a crater. Inexpert as he was, he’d seen hundreds of images of Lunar and Martian craters. This one had a deeper and more rough base than most but the similarity sent a shiver playing xylophones on his spine. The shiver tingled again as he tripped through a series of concepts resulting in the realisation of the uniqueness of the images. Of course satellite images were available of the spheres, but not of the ground, including the holes, directly beneath. Oblique aerial photographs from airplanes lost the circular nature of the holes, and so his opportunist upward-yet-down-reflections of Uluru was special. No doubt others had photographed the spheres from beneath but maybe they needed the height to have the reflected crater view appreciated.

Of course the other exit holes on Earth were much deeper – the spirits hadn’t fought as hard, or maybe the rock was harder – but in time they would fill. All the exit holes would look like craters, even if temporary.

He sent the image with an accompanying text message to Colonel Disraeli’s data-coordinator, Matt Stevens, and to the others most interested including Kallandra and Claude. 

Tabitha Wish woke to her cellphone appealing for attention. Her budget was stretched to the limit but one of her backhanders had sent her some interesting pictures. No doubt Matt Stevens blundered in his decision that crater-like photographs along with written observations from Australia were not a problem to National Security and so worth a few bucks. But they were gold in her hands.

She lay in bed with a silly grin, composing a breakthrough story that would rock the planet more than her religious-conflict report that led to trouble last time. But this was different. She’d gone freelance to rid herself of being dominated by do-this-that editors.

Deciding to make an early start, she threw back the bedcover only  to find Roma curled up in the bed with her. A late night thunderstorm had driven the thirteen-year-old into her mother’s bed. Not that Tabitha minded. In fact it was great. Always on the go, leaving childrearing to her poppa, her guilt was assuaged only by the large but irregular checks for her exposes and audacious reports. What she lacked in accuracy she made up for in exuberance. She noted that Charlie, Roma’s twin’s street cred had obliged him to stay in his own bunk even though he was more scared of thunder than his sister was.

Successfully deserting her daughter, after stroking her sleek hair, Tabitha fired up her laptop, copied the message and image from her cellphone and started research. By the time she turned the laptop around because the morning sun made it unreadable, she’d hit the Send button.

It missed the first two editions, but by mid-morning The NY Times splashed the front page with:

‘spheres have been on Moon!’
World Exclusive by Tabitha Wish
‘NASA scientists, studying the cavities left behind by the enigmatic spheres, have determined they are the same as craters on the surface of the Moon, and probably, the other heavenly bodies in our Solar System.
Dr Rob Summers took the photographs on this page, showing the reflected image of the Uluru (Ayers Rock). Instead of the gaping deep hole he expected to find, the sides had crumbled and cascaded in to fill it so it became a crater.

Measurements checked by NASA found hundreds of similar-sized craters on the Moon. It would seem our spherical friends, who so far have only succeeded in desecrating the special religious sites on Earth, had already been to the Moon. Why? Perhaps they couldn’t find what they sought there, and came to our planet and found time. At least that’s the theory going around NASA at the moment. Can you believe it? Nor me. Maybe though, they found essential stuff in the ground that now they’ve taken it, is affecting time.

I tested my theories by interviewing Claude Lapointe, 30, a NASA geophysicist and astronaut. He confirmed that sphere craters exist not only on the Moon but on Mars and other planets in our Solar System. He should know, he was on the scratched Mars Mission. It makes me wonder if someone at Johnson knew all along about the spheres, maybe on Mars, and created a hidden agenda to go investigate them there before we were surprised by their appearance on Earth.

All attempts to communicate with these aliens have failed – they are not listening or we don’t know their wavelength. Trigger-happy chancers apparently tried to nuke the South Pacific sphere but that didn’t bother them either.

So, we civilians are subjected to minor timequakes. Mostly they are only inconvenient – even bizarrely cute, such as when we arrive at a bus stop before we set off from home. Annoying when the bus has already gone beforehand, but hey, the death rate is nothing compared to our soldiers continuing to fight ghosts in the Middle East. But when will NASA do something to stop these spheres before we are zapped so far back or forward in time that the Earth is a million miles away? No one hears you scream in space.’

Tabitha’s sigh stretched across the lunch table to her father, who gnawed an unlit cigarillo and growled at the copy of the Times thrust at him ten minutes before.

“Tabitha, this is crap.”

“Sure, Poppa, but it might be true, and it definitely evened up my bank balance.” She leaned over and eased the paper away from him, before spittle dampened any more. She reread her article, smiling at her own mischievous words, which she knew would incinerate those more sensitive minds that hung on to the notion Earth was prime, and the spheres an aberration yet to be explained. There was bound to be trouble, but investigative journalists revelled in controversy – enriching themselves in the process.

Her cellphone jangled the keys in her purse.
“Tabitha, we’re in deep shit,” said Matt Stevens, Colonel Disraeli’s data-coordinator.

“Correction, Matt, it’s you who is in trouble, I only used information you passed onto me.”

“Information you bribed me for and that makes you an accomplice. There’s a big stink about who leaked the photographs to you and then there’s all your claptrap analysis. I bet you didn’t know there’s an item about you in Astronomy Now, wondering how you know more than they do? I don’t recall sending you all that crap about the spheres having been on the Moon and Mars.”

Tabitha dropped her cellphone; partly because of her inability to grasp it while elated that she’d made the big-time. She’d become not only the writer of the headline story but the subject of the headline. What a hoot!

She gnawed at a knuckle to stem her hilarity and said, “You didn’t, Matt, but it needs a creative mind to take the dry NASA data for a run and see where it takes us.”

“Laugh at this then, Miss Wish, they want you for an investigative hearing on the leak.”

“Really? It’s a bit late for that – unless they want to give me more information.”

She heard coughing at the other end followed by Stevens, who said: “Doesn’t it occur to you that you might be prosecuted for illegally obtaining security data?”

“No, I’m totally covered – hey, I’m a professional journalist, you know. I don’t have to reveal my sources.”

“Maybe not, but I’d be careful if I were you, Tabitha. Some, let us say, difficult people have had to take very early retirement, if you know what I mean?”

“Matt, are you suggesting I shouldn’t be fixin’ to come to Johnson for this enquiry?”

“That’s up to you, but if you decide you come maybe you should be escorted at all times. Perhaps at other times too.”

“Not my style. Send me the details for this meeting, and I assume they’re making flight arrangements for me from Jackson-Pearl international?” She waited for his response but heard only crackles.

“Matt, are you there? Come on you bastard, stop fucking me about.”

“…escorted at all times. Perhaps at other times too.”

“Just a minute, Matt, you said that word for word five minutes ago.” She waited again, but only heard more crackles and possibly shouting, crashing in the background. Having experienced some micro time decoherences, or time-quakes as her journalistic phrasing leaned her to use, she guessed Johnson was experiencing such a crisis. Tabitha felt torn between concern for fellow humans, some of whom she had met, and grateful she’d switched her call to record. If something really bad had gone down at Johnson, her cellphone evidence could be another headline. The dilemma of using tragedy to advance herself lingered for a moment as she rubbed her chin. It meant food for her kids; at least that was how she justified her journalistic intrusion. Besides, the old cliché if she didn’t do it, someone else would, came partly to her lips before she chided the awful ethics it implied.

“Hi, Tabitha, you still hanging on there?”

“Hey, Matt, I thought you were all gone up there. Was that one of those time decoherences, or had you dropped your cellphone in the shredder?”

“Time messing us up again, but it’s back and forward this time. Whoa! We seem to be a having tremors too. I’ll have to go.”

Tabitha played with the computer mouse with one hand while she occupied the other by phoning other personnel she guessed were at Johnson. Her stomach tightened when the Earthquake Watch website sprung onto her screen. The last time she pointed her cursor there, the red spots of daily seismic activity followed the usual Pacific Ring of Fire, and other tectonic plate boundaries with a few hotspots here and there. Nothing unusual there, as compared with Roma’s school Earth Science textbooks. Now it was as if the screen had contracted measles. Every continent and ocean bed seemed to have a rash of earth tremors randomly distributed. She adjusted the scale so only those with Richter Magnitude five were displayed, the level at which minor damage was noticed, but no loss of life. The red spots reverted to the normal pattern with a few odd spots, including one at Houston in the last ten minutes.

The phrase Time-quakes revisited her from science fiction movies, but they were not the same. They referred to aberrations in time travel rather than the physical shuddering and displacement of parts of the Earth as a result of one bit suddenly moving forward or backwards in time. She was sure NASA and others would know about this. A mere Mississippi journalist couldn’t come up with technical explanations, surely? She found references in the logs of NASA meetings Matt had sent her. If part of the Earth had stood still for a second, the rest would’ve been eighteen miles further in its orbit around the sun. Clearly that hadn’t happened, yet. But something akin appeared to be affecting some parts.

Happy that she had sufficient pseudoscience to throw together another article under the heading: Are we in for more Time-quakes? she knocked off a few words while they lingered. While mid-‘terrifying’ her cellphone interrupted her, again.

She didn’t recognise the incoming number, but risked allowing the call. The house phone had been targeted by a few crank calls since she’d started sphere article writing. Strangers from New World Religions would regale her with their views of what was really happening with the spheres, as would High School science teachers and local politicians. Others assumed she had inside information and really knew what the spheres were. She’d had a phone call from a toy manufacturer prepared to pay her for the rights to how the spheres levitated. The call she really wanted never came – a mission statement from the spheres.

“Hello?” She never gave away her name until she knew who called.

“Mizz Wish? Ted Williamson here, a commissioning editor for the New York Times. We want you to cover the latest events at Le Capitan. My sec has e-mailed you a contract, and details where to pick up flight and travel arrangements.”

“Hey, hang on there, Ted Williamson, I’ve to be in Johnson…” She hesitated as two thoughts zipped through. What new events were happening with the sphere? And this was a paid job while appearing in front of an investigation at Johnson wasn’t, although it would keep her in the loop. She didn’t believe she was in danger or in trouble with NASA; Matt merely tried to frighten her off so she couldn’t point a ‘that’s him’ finger in his direction. But she only needed to be up to date in order to earn the bucks. Maybe she could do both.

“Sorry about that, Ted, the front door hollered at me. Any chance of you letting me arrive there the day after tomorrow?”

“No way. Something unusual is happening, as you should know, and so you need to be in Yosemite for us, immediately – no options.”

“In that case I’ll have to disappoint folk more important than you, but what the hell. Twice the usual fee, then, or you’ll have to find someone else.”

“We could easily do so, Tabitha, but your inimitable style has caught the public’s imagination. Agreed on double the fee in the contract, but I want it good and fast.”

Tabitha rocked in her chair, laughing to herself. From barely scraping one assignment a week on the local rag, to The New York Times demanding she worked for them. A warm satisfied feeling grew in her stomach; a justification of the hard evenings of studying had blossomed. Her nose wrinkled as a sickly sweet odour, like synthetic raspberry, assailed her nostrils. A tug on her blue cardigan sleeve tore her attention from the negative results as she searched for what had excited the editor over the spheres today. The webcams seemed to be stuck on yesterday’s images.

“Momma.”

“Hi Roma, sweetness, careful with that lolly on my cardigan, darling. Did grandpop get that for you? Yeah?”

“Momma, take me to the pool today?” Eyes as big and brown as her rabbit’s. Her coffee-coloured face had been recently scrubbed and shone; probably to increase her chances of a successful plea.

“I can’t, honey, Momma has to work to buy your clothes. I’ll get grandpop to take you and Charlie.”

“But you promised.” Tears leaked from practised yet genuinely pathetic eyes. At least, Tabitha assumed they were genuine; the girl had learnt to be a superior actor over the last couple of years. They hugged.

The embrace continued longer than usual as Tabitha tried to impart love through their clothes and skin. She had an urge to promise a trip at the weekend, maybe to Disney World, but her pledges had fractured so often lately she dared not set herself up for another fall.

A raucous coughing from the kitchen heralded her father bringing out their cordless phone. “There’s some God man here wanting you. Probably after rescuing the rest of your soul before you sell another portion of it to the devil.”

“Newspapers are not the devil’s work, Poppa.” She took the white phone off him, but held her hand over the speaker for a moment wondering who it was, just like she did with the mail – playing detective with the postmark and handwritten address before tearing open the envelope.

Perhaps it’d be that Denzel Washington look-alike who’d winked at her at the El Capitan site. That Kallandra Harvard bitch kept touching his arm. What was his name? Claude.

She’d given him her business card; twice. She felt heat rising in her face in anticipation of the French Canadian accent. A rasping Irish male voice dampened her passion.

“Are you there, Miss Wish?”

“Yes, who is this?” Who was her letdown? It’d better be damn good.

“Kearney, Religious Affairs editor at the Washington Post. We want you to cover a crucial multi-faith conference on the significance and response to the spheres.”

“Really? When?” She could hardly believe her luck, but surely another plane ticket didn’t bear her name at the airport?

“Tomorrow, here in Washington.”

Damn. Everybody seemed to be offering her work but simultaneously. The religious angle was very interesting especially if disparate faiths were, at last, putting aside differences in the face of a common foe. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be paying as much as the Times or as important for connections as NASA. Anyway, her Baptist upbringing hardly qualified her to weed out the angles. They only wanted her there because she’d made a name for herself with her scoops. This could be the job too many that would undo her.

“I’m sorry, I have other commitments. I could try and find someone else to be there?”

“That’s OK Miss Wish, there’ll be other journalists there, and we’d provide briefing notes. You would just have been back up. Goodbye.”

Near El Capitan

In spite of abusing friendships that should have unearthed the answer, and an Internet search, Tabitha failed to discover what had excited Ted at the New York Times. She’d sent a text to Claude who’d responded with some techie stuff about a change in the Hertz from the sphere.

A few moments more of tapping her manicured red fingernail on her cellphone, allowed her to decide that NASA’s investigation of how she obtained covert information would blow away in any drama at El Capitan. So the decision was made and she’d enjoyed her NYT-paid-for flight and helicopter to Yosemite.

Tabitha’s stomach felt the warmth of contentment as the escort led her to the military encampment at El Capitan. For the first time, she hadn’t had to blag her way to where the officials didn’t want her. She also felt the resistance crumbling with those two astronauts, Major Kallandra and that dreamboat Claude. Or did she? The Major was difficult to fathom. Those beautiful emerald eyes threw back Tabitha’s reflection rather than allowed her entry into her soul. She appeared so much stronger-minded than the nightclub scene blue-tinged brown hair implied.

To her immense delight, while queuing for a coffee. Claude had crept up behind and wrapped his arms around her. “Who’s my favourite media babe?”

“Tell me her name and I’ll claw her eyes out.”

“Mon Dieu, how I’m drawn to feisty women.”

“Is that why you are always with Kallandra?”

“Tabitha, do I sense a green-eyed monster? Kall and I are colleagues, and she is engaged to Derek, the ship’s chief designer.”

Tabitha couldn’t help smiling. She’d observed the signs in the two astronauts’ body language the last time she was in Yosemite. Either they are officially in denial for public consumption or hopeless techie-people who wouldn’t know a romantic magnetic pull when they encountered it. But hey, all the better an opportunity for her.

“Hello, what are you two getting too close about?” Kallandra’s clear Texan accent cut across the room. Tabitha coughed and spilled her coffee on Claude’s blue shirt.

Claude pinched to lift the hot cotton from his chest while Tabitha, in a fluster, reached for a paper napkin, but was beaten by a flying Kallandra who tugged at his shirt.

“Hey,” said Claude, laughing, “this isn’t the Blue Zone Club. Leave my clothes alone.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t get so close to the press,” Kallandra said, giving Tabitha the evil eye.

Tabitha, in excoriating mood, was about to rejoin with a witty comment on being pressed when a manly shout came from the entrance.

“Evacuation! Sergeant, hit the emergency claxon!”

Tabitha’s eyes widened in shock then narrowed in cunning. Emergencies were made for journalists. So, while the cafeteria emptied through a rear door, she readied her videocam and would have headed for the entrance nearest the sphere, but halted when she noticed the two astronauts wavering. She assumed all the service personnel would obey without question, as part of their rigorous military training, but of course those two had to be different; their superior intellect with egos the size of Jupiter would consider an evacuation order as a mere option.

Squabbles forgotten they rushed outside and towards the sphere. They headed against the running people stream, being knocked around as if in a pinball machine. Claude, spearheading, slowed holding out his arms to halt the two women.
 

Still a hundred yards from the sphere’s exit hole, they stared up with pained expressions at the blue sky and silver sphere. The buzzing hurt her ears. The sound waves rippled through creating a nauseating up-welling of the mouthful of coffee followed by remnants of wrapped taco beans she’d gulped down while airborne.

With one finger in her left ear, Kallandra turned to both Claude and Tabitha. She mouthed look and her right hand pointed above the sphere. Against the cerulean sky a red pencil line projected vertically up. As Tabitha watched, the colours phased through the colours of the rainbow in the mnemonic order she learnt at school: Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. It stayed for a few moments as a thin violet line, and then became paler until it whitened.

The fear that the sphere might be preparing to detonate, and dismissed by Tabitha in her need for a scoop, revisited her as the buzzing ear-pierced so much that she had to abandon her camera and squeeze both hands to her ears. As did the others. In Tabitha’s case her hands were far from puny, nevertheless the sound travelled through them with ease. With a crumpled face she gazed up at the sphere, waiting for it to burst into a million pieces putting her to death but at least the noise pain would be over.

Abruptly the noise stopped. Silence hit her like a slap in the face. Not being sure if her ears had malfunctioned in some ghastly reaction in her eardrum, Tabitha took her hands away. Nothing. But she didn’t expect to hear birds since they’d been frightened away two months ago.

She reached across and patted Claude’s arm.

“Hey, Claude, can you hear me?”

Her voice echoed around her own head as if she was dreaming. Claude turned to her and mouthed: ‘I’m deaf.’

Kallandra turned to them both while silently talking.

Equally suddenly, a high-pitched whistle penetrated Tabitha’s skull. Fingers in ears she looked up at the sphere only to see it smoothly shoot up at high speed and disappear. The whistling stopped and her hearing slowly returned to normal; although not as quick as her mouth took to close.

On the way back to the Johnson Space Centre Kallandra expressed no surprise to learn that all the spheres had left simultaneously. But her eyebrows rose when Derek, back at Johnson, told her on the radio that after they’d reached a thousand miles directly above their takeoff points, they veered to park in a geosynchronous orbit 26,000 miles above the equator.

“That’s where most of the communications and geostationary satellites live, isn’t it, honey?” She had the Learjet on auto while speaking into her headset. Claude caught up on sleep on the bed in the passenger section.

“Yes. Full marks,” Derek said. “How about getting NOAA to steer some so as to keep a camera eye on them.”

“Not easy, they are designed to grab weather images of Earth not snoop on enigmatic travellers in the same orbit. Maybe the military have—”
“Hang on, Kall, more data… I’ll get back to you.”

“Derek? Keep the line open, oh, he’s gone.” Cursing, she wondered whether to wake Claude. He required more sleep than the five hours she enjoyed most nights, but even so, he’d want to know, and she needed to share thoughts.

She double-checked the auto and then pinched Claude’s toes sticking out from under the blanket. The thought he’d wake from the leg upwards tickled her.

“Merde!”

“Oops, sorry Claude, I must have squeezed too hard. Anyway, you need to be awake. The spheres have gone into a geosynchronous orbit.”

He rubbed his eyes, and pointed at the galley while he yawned something unintelligible. Kallandra poured herself a coffee too and took them back to him, swaying as a bubble of clear air turbulence rocked the plane.

“Should we take these into the cockpit?” said Claude, glancing at the dark spots of coffee on the red carpet.

Her inclination was to let the plane look after itself but knew Claude would rather be in the driving seat when there was the slightest trouble. She needed to talk about the spheres latest gymnastics without him being distracted, so she followed him in while licking spilt coffee from her hand.

Claude played with the controls for a minute before sipping the bitter Columbian coffee. “Maybe they are merely grouping before departing for wherever they came from.”

“It must be strange for them to be saying ‘hi’ to each other after two billion years.”

“Do not make the error of assigning human attributes to these machines, Kall.”

She felt piqued that he’d believe she would be so naïve, but played along. “Many animals seem pleased enough to find each other, Of course the spheres are probably robotic.”

The plane lurched again, falling several feet. Kallandra thanked the previous CAT event or she and Claude might not have been strapped in their seats, even though the remains of their coffee found ways to decorate the cabin.

“Shit, just look at the altimeter,” said Kallandra.

“Have we lost much height?” he said, tapping his duplicate co-pilot’s instrument.

“Yes, but I meant the coffee splatters. Just as well I take it without sugar. Hey, Claude, you don’t suppose these aren’t from turbulence do you?”

“I was thinking the same. Now the spheres are further away maybe the decoherences will worsen, and—.”

Kallandra interrupted. “We have a message coming in from Elaine Stringer, relaying data from NORAD.”

“I do not know her, do I?”

“You’re joking. Blonde, an inch shorter than me but packed with sex appeal.”

“Like you?” Claude winked at her.

“Maybe – ask Derek. Elaine’s hair is shoulder-length, while mine has been savaged in readiness for our aborted Mars mission. Apparently over ten gallons of water and a hundred kilowatts of heat energy would have been saved by my having short hair. Elaine is my usual link comms person at Mission Control on my shuttle flights.”

“I am far too overwhelmed with the sea of unknown faces when I go through the Mission Control room. I can’t say I remember this mademoiselle. Anyway, Kall, I think the Mars Mission should have gone ahead.”

“It was the top brass at NASA who pulled the mission after the appearance of the spheres created so much uncertainty. I was gutted too. And we might need another home if these time fractures don’t settle down.”

“Kall, suppose there are decoherences on Mars. Mon Dieu, maybe they are the norm throughout the universe except where the spheres have evened time out.”

“Possibly, let’s consider that for all human history we’ve been used to a continuous linear timeline, so of course it was normal for us. If it is usual for time to be more jerky, perhaps we would have got used to it. Just a minute…”

Kallandra listened to Elaine’s message, and then reached for her iPaq to check the data sent through. 

“I’m copying to your iPaq, Claude. Apparently there’s an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. No images for another hour, but NORAD’s radar asteroid detection net reckons its mass is sufficient to take out a Houston-size city. There’s no impact-destination co-ordinates yet.”

Gathering painful consciousness, Blake assumed he’d fallen back into the cave. But, no. He registered, not Oqmar’s cave, but from within, a van, much like the Student Union’s Ford Transit. Nighttime, judging by the two rectangles of pale yellow light that struggled in through the rear doors. Looked like the inside handle was broken.

Had he drunkenly climbed into the van to sleep off a boozy night and dreamt about Oqmar and his crazy dog, Kur?  Again, no. The burn on his right thigh and the hole in his jeans testified to the weird experience he had in that cave. He sniffed. The scorched fabric agitated his nostrils, but another odour brought a taste of bile fighting its way up to his mouth. It was not just the smell-memory of Oqmar but evidence in that strange man’s spittle on the cut on his left arm. His Parka displayed a rip through to the blackened blood. He couldn’t remember how it’d happened. One minute he was walking home in Bristol, all limbs intact. Then a fall, but waking in that cave with a few minor abrasions as added extras. And after that the tiny ball, he’d found rolling on Glastonbury Hill during the sphere’s dramatic exit, burnt its way out of his pocket.

As he struggled to his knees, the rear door screeched open.

Good, he thought, now I can get home, shower, proper sleep.

Just one of the double doors gaped enabling the amber street-lamp light to invade the van, blinding Blake.

A male voice, mid-twenties, West-Country drawl, said, “Hey, there’s a fat fucker in our van,”

A deeper voice worried Blake with, “He must be nicking it.” But voicing a denial came out as a stutter as panic sent phlegm up into his throat.

“N-no.”

“Get him out of there.”

“I w-was not s-stealing your—“ His voice gave up as he was hauled out. He crumpled on the wet road. Immediately he doubled up as a boot rammed into his stomach. Although Blake couldn’t remember when he had his most recent meal, its acidic remains, now agitated, regurgitated into his mouth and he had no choice but to throw up onto the road. He heard raucous laughter above, but he dared not look up in case he faced accusations of ‘looking at them’ with increased painful consequences.

He remained curled up, face down, urging his muscles to do their best to squeeze his bulk into a ball.

Another kick to his right side hurt, but made him grateful for his copious buffer zone. Should he cry out his agony, or would that encourage them? He grunted.

After a minute or so of relative quiet he lifted his head sufficient to assess his status. A mistake. At the last-moment he saw a boot head for his face. The impact smashed his spectacles into his nose, which immediately filled with blood. The excruciating pain brought an involuntary scream and a deluge of stinging tears.

Curled up once more, he tasted a mix of snot, blood and salty tears. What had he done to deserve such an ignominious end? His ears malfunctioned as he could only hear their words as mumbles and guffaws. Eventually, they seemed to move away. He heard two vehicle-door slams, and then the engine started, forcing the exhaust to splutter water and diesel residue over his bloodied face. He rolled further into the gutter as the van rattled down the road. Through tears, Blake saw that he was in the grimy back streets of industrial warehousing a mile from his home.

Blake winced, and yet was grateful to his mother for dabbing the abrasion on his face with cotton wool made sodden with the clear water, which whitened with the phenol, then reddened with blood.

She’d not believed him, but once he’d uttered about the tiny sphere, she’d called his uncle Derek in Houston, and under penalty otherwise of a supper abstinence, he had to oblige.

“Yes, the ball I found on Glastonbury.”

“That could have been a miniature version of the spheres. It must have emerged from the Glastonbury one. Good God, Blake, that was a vital clue, evidence. Why didn’t you give it to us?”

“I did. You played with it and gave it back.” Typical adult to have not appreciated the importance of little things. Blake, found he could afford a wry smile at that thought even though he hurt and he hardly knew what day it was.

“Good grief. So where did it take you, exactly?”

“I dunno. Some cave.” His nerves made him shake as he recalled the strangeness of the last few hours but he needed to tell it to Derek. He’d probably believe it, unlike his mother.

“Like at Cheddar Gorge?”

“Yeah, no, it was too hot.”

“There was a fire? Or the weather was hot? A desert? Help me out here, Blake.”

“I never saw the outside – I was being attacked by a mad cave man and his pet wolf.” Was he remembering it right?

“Did he do anything to you?”

“He didn’t bugger me.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but did he touch you or give you something you still have?”

“He put some gunge on the cut on my arm. I must have fallen.” His mother, antiseptic-reeking cotton wool in hand, grabbed his left arm. “Mum, not that arm.”

“Blake, is your mother trying to clean that gunge off your arm? Stop her. I want you to take it to a lab – I’ll give you the addr—”

“Too late, it’s in the dish with the antiseptic now.”

“I was hoping to get it dated. Anything else he gave you, that hasn’t been wiped out?”

“He tried to feed me, but I refused it. Gave him some gum.” An automatic grin came with that thought.

“I thought you said he attacked you.”

“Yeah well. Do you wanna know the rest?”

“Yes. What happened to the miniature sphere?”

“It burnt a hole in my jeans and disappeared up a smooth hole in the cave roof and joined with a bigger one in the sky.”

“Then what happened? Was the caveman surprised – or did he behave as if spheres were normal for him?”

“Oqmar.”

“What’s Oqmar?”

“The caveman’s name. I remember it, and Kur, his dog.”

“Excellent memory. What happened next?”

“I passed out and woke up in a van in Bristol.”

“Blake, I’d like you to write all this down before details fade away. Please keep all your clothes – don’t let your mum wash them. Sorry to hear you were mugged when you returned. I hope you feel better soon.”

“Thanks, Uncle Derek.”

“Bye, Blake.”

“Don’t you wanna know about the knife Oqmar gave me?”

Kallandra lifted an eyebrow in disbelief. “Blake’s been back twenty thousand years?”

“Give or take a couple of thousand. We used carbon fourteen dating on the knife’s bone handle. He was in a cave in the desert. Probably Middle East. Sand grains and other debris in his clothing and trainers might narrow down the area.”

“And you believe him? Assuming you don’t find the sand was from Weston-Super-Mare, it means there were eight spheres. Messes up your math, Derek.”

“Not necessarily. There might have been dozens of spheres. Now, eight with the one in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. And the Middle-East one was small. Blake describes the hole in the cave floor and roof as fitting a yard-wide sphere not seventy nine yards, like these.”

She fought back the urge to criticize Blake’s observational abilities. “So, that fits the theory they’ve been gathering something – exotic particles, time dechorences.”

“How big would something have to be to collect time? And you could fit millions of exotic particles in a matchbox.”

She put on her hurt look. “Hey, there’s enough theory bashers knocking me down, thanks.”

They sat in the communications lab, watching the screen for a NORAD update on the incoming asteroid. The time was due for the first image to be transmitted from a close-encounter orbiting telescope.

“Derek, is that scrolling data from the incoming object or the outgoing spheres?”

“The spheres are manoeuvring, it seems, to converge in a geostationary orbit at seventy-three degrees East.”

“I presume, like all geostationary satellites, that’s over the equator. So what’s beneath them on the ground?”

“The southern tip of the Maldive Islands is the closest. There’s only the Indian Ocean directly beneath them so it’s probably insignificant.”

“Unless they need to communicate with something down there, or need rapid access, bearing in mind they can sure travel fast when they choose to.”

Derek pointed at a newspaper on the console desk. “Have you seen this garbage?”

“Sadly, yes. I’m gonna have words with that Tabitha Wish. It’s a deliberate incitement to riot.”

“She’s only doing her job, which is to sensationalise everything.”

Kallandra admired the journalist for her pulling in all directions adding to unknowns in a story. She’d explored the possibilities that the spheres were leaving not because they’d finished their mission on Earth but escaping because they knew a killer asteroid was on its way. Risking panic in the streets like that was quite reprehensible yet cunning in a way. Ms Wish must have known even when she wrote it that the incoming rock was too small to do serious damage to the planet as a whole, but she’s claimed that it was merely a forerunner of others. Of course there would always be more asteroids, but probably not just following this one.

“Just journalistic hype. Ignore her. I don’t hear any riots, do you?”

“Derek, to say that Rome is likely to be obliterated tomorrow is irresponsible. There were riots there. Where did she get her data – I mean the course projection coordinates? The leaker should be strung up.”

“It wasn’t you, then?” Derek said, his finger heading for left-ear gouge until she stopped him.

“I’m hurt that you’d think it was. Probably a man, Wish has a way of weedling information out of you weaklings.”

Derek returned his screen to a course analysis and simulator. “You know if that incoming object maintains its course vectors, and if those spheres converge where we predict…”

“I’m ahead of you. So no coincidence then. We have some checking to do. But, Derek, NORAD should know this by now so why aren’t they telling us?”

Tapping her shiny new laptop at the kitchen table in Jackson, Tabitha couldn’t believe her luck, nor how her bank account bulged.

“Mom,” Roma said, “do we have to move? I just gotten used to Five Oaks Junior.”

“You hated it last week.” Tabitha took no nonsense from her twins, even if she felt guilty for the time she left them with Poppa while she abandoned them to fly away on assignments. “And Charlie is keen to move to Ridgeland. We can now afford a bigger house. You’ll have whatever clothes you want.”

“Can I have my new friends over?” Roma snuggled up, nuzzling like a puppy on Tabitha’s right arm.

Knowing this ploy but playing along with it, Tabitha smiled and nodded. “Run along now, hon, while I make us some more dough.”

She smiled again, couldn’t stop herself if she tried. After her piece on the spheres leaving to escape the incoming asteroid catastrophe syndicated globally, along came another Godsend. So the spheres have aligned themselves to intercept said asteroid. A shield. A wonderful alien saviour to Earth’s inhabitants. Maybe they’re gonna sacrifice themselves for our unworthy souls. She hardly had to put effort into the new copy for the NYT. They’d won her auction after she’d faxed around that she’d had new news from a NASA insider.

She stopped smiling for a moment as she looked again at the e-mail from the Johnson Space Center. Her usual contact didn’t write like this one. No siggie, a scrambled sender’s data. The IP address originated from the NASA network. Unsigned but she’d stretch validation for the sake of a great story.

Whatever. The spheres had gone from wreckers, deserters to white knights within thirty six hours. Way to go. Perfect.


Kallandra sucked air in between her teeth. “Hey, we have an image. Jeez…”

The asteroid heading for planet Earth was a perfect sphere, shiny metal, and a perfect match to the others.

“Yes,” Derek said, “they’re going to meet up.”

In some ways Kallandra wasn’t too surprised. “So, no obliteration of Rome. All that woe to Catholics and terrifying the population. Followed by the spheres being a shield. Good grief, the nerve of the woman. You don’t have Miss Wish’s phone number by any chance?”

“You wouldn’t let me find it a week ago, remember? Rob Summers has been communicating with her. And Claude probably has the number of every woman on Earth in his address book.”

Kallandra put an arm around his shoulders. “Envy doesn’t suit you, Derek. Anyway, Disraeli has just released a statement about what the incoming sphere appears to be. See?” She pointed at a document window on her screen.

“Interesting. He likes to keep cards up both sleeves. He must have felt pressured to release a keep-calm notice. He says the incoming sphere seems to be meeting up with the others. Of course it could collide with them and they’d scatter like skittles.”

“Yeah, it’ll help Rome, but the rest of the world will still wonder what the hell is going on.”

Kallandra’s and Derek’s bleepers harmonised with others in the comms lab. A call to another meeting with the worriers at the top.

“You’d better reveal Blake’s trip back in time.”

“I’ve already sent a note to Disraeli about it.”

Kallandra pulled a long face. “I thought I was the first in the know. What did he say?”

“He thought it was nonsense. But I’ve been thinking since that if Blake did see the tiny sphere go up to where another larger sphere was rising, then perhaps we are seeing that same sphere up on that screen.”

“You are making a leap there. A present-day big sphere, releases a tiny one…”

“Perhaps a communication module with data.”

“Maybe. It needs to go back twenty millennia to link with a medium-sized sphere that is leaving the planet…”

“To go back to mother, perhaps a planet light years away or one of their space stations, or…”

“And then comes back twenty thousand years later. To do what? Bring news of home?”

“Possibly, and to coordinate whatever they need to do before all going back together.”

“Seems to fit – in a way – although rather convoluted.”

“All right, Kall, you tell me how you would communicate with your home planet thousands of light years away in only a few hours. If it works then why have another method? But was Blake an accidental passenger or a necessary carrier?”

“Not being funny about your family, Derek, but…”

“Say no more.”

“Are we going to this meeting? It’s only going to be a let’s-wait-and-see isn’t it?”

“Unless some brass hat wants to lob a few nukes at the spheres again now they’re out of the atmosphere. Coming?”


“I’m sorry but this meeting is cancelled,” said a worried-looking grey-suited man, Kallandra hadn’t seen before.

“A mixed blessing,” Claude muttered. He sat, as usual on Kallandra’s left, with Derek on her right.

The man turned to go.

“Hang on,” Kallandra shouted.

“Here we go,” said Claude to Derek, who raised both eyebrows in return, as Kallandra stood waving her hand.

The suit turned to face her, along with the other dozen in the hastily convened and now abandoned meeting.

“Where is Colonel Disraeli?” She glanced around the room. “And any of the military personnel? Are they in another meeting?”

The poor man trembled, and his handheld papers shook with him. “I am not at liberty to say, Major.”

Claude called out. “What are you at liberty to say, Mister…?”

“Only that this meeting is cancelled, Mister Lapointe.”

“Can you, at least, tell us if we will be informed when this meeting is reconvened?” Derek said. “There are developments in space, and—”

At last the suit asserted himself, standing straighter. “You have access to the NORAD, JPL and NASA data as much as anyone here, Mister Stone. As for if you will be informed, that is not my remit.”

“Good grief,” Claude muttered, “he’s remarkably well-informed as to our identities considering we’ve not seen him before.”

“Let’s go,” Kallandra said, “Getting information out of Mister Happy is like milking a chair.”

“I’m afraid it’s obvious what’s going on,” Derek said.

“Sure it is,” Kallandra said, walking briskly down the corridor to the comms lab. “Those brass-studded bastards want to shoot the spheres out of orbit.”

“Stop!” Derek yelled.

To her surprise, Kallandra did stop, mainly because it was so out of character for Derek to issue commands. He pulled the other two into an empty side room, and closed the door. He leaned on a conference table rather than take a chair.

“We’d be making a mistake to rush in guns blazing.”

“Do you have a better plan?” Kallandra said. She grabbed a chair and sat, her chin supported by her hands as she elbowed the table. She glanced at Claude who seemed bemused at the unusual situation.

“The military are used to this kind of situation,” Derek said. “We mustn’t treat them as clichéd military types. Remember they not only play wargames in peacetime, they use game theory in wartime.”

“So you’re saying we use game theory against them?” she said. “But I only know paperback outlines.”

“Maybe,” Claude said, fingering his moustache, “On the other hand I bet we know a man who knows a lot about game theory, don’t we, Derek?”

With a raised eyebrow, Kallandra looked at her fiancé, who’d cast his eyes downwards while shuffling his feet. “I know a bit.”

This was crazy, she told herself. Her heartbeats bounded against her ribcage, more than when she performed dangerous flying manoeuvres. How could a trivial matter like not knowing an aspect of your fiancés life and personality be so upsetting? A nervous smile betrayed her feelings.

“But, Derek, I’ve not seen you playing wargames, neither on your computer nor in clubs where…”

“Not wargames, as such. There are many ways in which game theory can be employed.”

Claude touched Kallandra’s arm. “You didn’t expect him to be moving Napoleon’s forces around at virtual-Waterloo, did you?”

“Maybe I did, but then I suppose I haven’t been in his company lately.”

“Does anyone want to know how I use game theory in my recreation?” Derek said, looking hurt presumably because the other two had been nattering during his exposition.

“Go for it, Derek,” Kallandra said.

“In London there’s a club I’ve been going to since uni days. Every third Thursday in the month we set up an ancient battle scenario – one that really happened. We then apply various game theory strategies to see if they would have changed the outcome.”

“I thought you were going to some secret Gentleman’s Club, to put it politely. But what’s the point in seeing if the outcome would’ve changed if they applied game theory?”

“Pure intellectual satisfaction, although it might come in handy now. No, not that Julius Caesar had to confront alien spheres, but he had his officers to persuade to undertake apparent daft actions but which often won the day. We also apply Games Theory to economic models and business strategies. Then we—”

“Our immediate battle,” Kallandra said, “is with the military all set to fling our most powerful nukes at the spheres.” She looked from Derek to Claude and back, wondering if they felt the spheres should be taken out. Was the nod from Claude a perfunctory solace? Had she become too involved with the spheres? Perhaps that first contact in Glastonbury and the falling into the one at El Capitan… No, that was a dream – probably.

She worried that her emotional ties with the spheres clouded her judgement, but her pilot training drove a sure wedge between passion and harsh reality. It made no sense to destroy objects that were departing, apparently. Worse, their departure appeared to be causing chaos on Earth, not experienced until they were leaving. She had to entertain the idea played around in the physics web-chat-groups that the spheres somehow absorbed time decoherences and that the linear smoothness they’d experienced with time before this year was not going to be the norm in the future.

Again she scrutinised Claude’s face. She searched for telltale half-winks, quivered eyebrows, the nearly imperceptible smile. Anything that might give away a clue that he felt as she did, or not. 

Derek’s face looked like a weasel’s. A physiognomy narrowed, it seemed, into a nose-led cone of concentration as he tapped on his iPaq before announcing the results of his game theory analysis. She worried that he might conclude with solutions she wouldn’t like. Maybe he’d find that the military would have an edge by displaying huge force. Even if they didn’t destroy the spheres they might reveal Humans as a significant entity.

Derek disrupted her ruminations. “Let’s consider one event at a time. First being stopping the military nuking the spheres. Second, if we get there, is to persuade the spheres to communicate with us or in some other way give us our normal time back. Is that right?”

Kallandra nodded, though her gut reaction worked against the spheres talking to them. If they’d had the urge to natter then why hadn’t they up till now?

Derek continued. “Game theory places scores on the consequences of various actions of, say, the military and us – or the military and the spheres. The simplest situation is called a Zero-Sum game in which no player gains except at the expense of the other player.”

“This isn’t a game with players, Derek.”

“I know that, Kallandra, but for the sake of the theory lets proceed as if it is. For years theorists couldn’t apply game theory beyond simple situations but then the Nash Equilibrium was dreamed up where sets of optimal strategies are considered in non-cooperative games such as in our situation. We apply scores in a matrix and let the computation choose the best strategy.”

“But…”

“I know what you’re going to say. OK, so the colonels and us are not machines. But drama theory has been added to game theory recently to take opinions, emotions and the theatre of both sides into account.”

Claude smiled as if a light had been switched on in his brain. “You mean the cold matrices of game theory have a touchy-feely component now?”

“Exactly. Anyway let’s consider what is in it for the military to go for a pre-emptive strike against the spheres.”

“If the nukes work, then, voila, the spheres don’t exist any more,” Claude said. “No problem for the military, and we all go home.”

“Except that time—”

Derek interrupted her, holding a hand up. “Let’s be systematic here and only consider positive aspects first.”

“Oops, sorry,” she said, looking up at the ceiling as if help was up there. “How about it demonstrates we are dangerous and so if they survive the blast they know to go away and not return.”

“A moment,” Claude said. “The Pacific sphere already took a nuke and ignored it. Ah, but it was low yield. Presumably, the colonels have duct-taped several together.”

“Don’t miss the main point,” Derek said. “It’s possible the spheres haven’t noticed us at all, let alone as an intelligent species.”

“I’ve been thinking that,” Kallandra said. “In spite of our prodding and throwing our sharpest toys at them, it could be their auto defence systems have reacted rather than any higher order intelligence. Interacting with us isn’t programmed into their systems and so they take no notice of us.”

“But they must have some threshold programmed in,” Derek said, “to prevent them being destroyed. Ah, they do… the time-quakes that apparently allow them to cut through solid granite and survive tectonic upheavals.”

“They must have a very rapid reaction to an event in order to skip out of ambient time,” Kallandra said. “So maybe no matter what the military do they’ll not be aware it was humans.”

Claude nodded. “But we suspect some spheres haven’t made it to the surface, and the Caribbean one was delayed, it seems. Perhaps they aren’t infallible although surviving two billion years is impressive.”

Derek looked up from his iPaq on which he was entering data. “My guess is that if they were placed here by an intelligence, there would be contingencies to both protect their long term investment – the spheres – and to react if another intelligence – us – threatens their existence.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t be considered intelligent compared to them,” Kallandra said. “And nothing we do can really threaten them.”

“I agree with the first part,” Claude said, “but it would be risky to assume the second. What do you think, Derek?”

“From a game point of view, the second carries a retaliation threat. Worse for us, they might be able to sense a nuke heading for them, nip back in time a second or so and disrupt time on Earth in some disastrous fashion.”

“Like one half of the planet stop in time while the other half goes forward,” Kallandra said. “Or shift the space-time of the nukes so they detonate on Earth instead of in space.”

“Interesting, but we’ve wandered away from my request for positive angles for the military to fire first.”

Claude smiled and held up a finger as if it were an antenna gathering inspiration. “Does game theory allow morale as a parameter? A strike by Earth at the nasty aliens who messed up our time, could help people feel better.”

“Only if it worked,” snapped Kallandra, who didn’t feel the spheres were enemies as much as unaware artefacts, and so technically innocent. “If the attack failed or backfired; such as contaminating parts of Earth with radiation fallout…”

“Yes, but game theory handles consequences in a separated, but linked, cell in the matrix.” Derek tapped his stylus again on his iPaq. “Now, why would it be better for the military to take no action?”

“Because there’s no way of knowing the outcome of blasting the spheres,” Kallandra said.

“Any positive reasons?” Derek sounded tired.

Claude said, “It would leave open the option of a surprise aggressive action later.”

“And it wouldn’t aggravate the spheres.”

“If that’s the best you can do, it looks like the military first strike option is optimal.” Derek’s eyebrows twitched, in a show of looking simultaneously pained yet confident of his conclusion. “You see, if we apply Zermelo’s Algorithm: where we use a backward induction from the result you want – that is, no action, then the spheres might continue to leave and the Earth continues to have time decoherences until normal life becomes impossible.”

“I smell a rat with conspiracy disease,” Kallandra said. “You must have assigned a higher negative score to the time problem than I would have, and you believe the colonels when they believe destroying the spheres ends our problems.”

“To be frank, I think it would too,” Claude said.

Kallandra’s mouth opened in silent disbelief. She’d suspected Derek would be a sycophant and side with the military. He’d always choose the path of least revolt although he could often be persuaded by logic to travel in her maverick directions. But she’d formed the impression Claude was a natural freethinker. Had she missed the point here? He seemed to be avoiding her glare, but he pre-empted her scold.

“I don’t think, Kall, you’ve taken into account the possibility that, yes, the spheres might have been absorbing our planet’s time decoherences and so we’ve assumed time naturally travels smoothly. But we’ve absolutely no idea how they’ve done that, nor what they intend to do. There’s a chance that if they were destroyed, the aspect of their existence that absorbed time decoherences will fall back to Earth and—”

“Our time continues uninterrupted as before? Are you crazy?” She felt her cheeks reaching meltdown. “Won’t whoever owns the spheres come whizzing back and investigate? Do you think the potshot technology we have will defend us against a system that had technology far beyond our comprehension two billion years ago? Ye Gods.”

Claude shrugged and fingered his moustache before he said, “OK. So many unknowns.”

“I agree,” Derek said, “which is why a methodical decision making process, such as game theory can help.”

“For all we know, the spheres have done our planet a good service. Time displacements might be the norm, resulting in chaos and possibly no evolutionary or life development as time-quaked back and forward.”

“Or,” Claude said, “evolution would have occurred quite differently to our experience. And two billion years ago, maybe some of the ingredients of proto-life, such as eukaryotic cells, were planted here by the spheres, or whoever built them.”

“So why blow up our parents,” Kallandra said, and then, arms folded in frustration, walked away.


She threw herself face down on her bed. Exhaustion had overtaken her adrenalin-fuelled energy. In pilot and astronaut training she’d felt in control of every situation. Indeed, she’d manipulated her superiors and had shamelessly exploited her intelligence and looks, knowing both put men on the defensive. The last few days had seen enormous setbacks for her, upsetting her confidence and making her distrustful. She wriggled with irritation at the knowledge, whispered to her by Claude that some of the other women considered her to be a spoilt brat. It was probably the envy monster at work. It didn’t used to get to her – she’d never felt she had to justify her natural tomboyish childhood skills. If pressed she could’ve lectured them on how her dad was as grubby-finger-nailed a rancher as any, and the sacrifices both parents and grandparents went through to help her with extra tuition, flight school, and college fees. 

She rolled onto her back and studied the faint cracks in the white ceiling paint. They formed straight lines like the once-believed Martian canals.

Back to Earth. It felt as if she was the only one on the planet who felt they shouldn’t try and blast those spheres. Maybe her gut reaction was the fabled woman’s intuition, and she’d got it wrong. Damn. It was times like this she wished she still smoked. With closed eyes, she imagined a good long pull on a King Size, ignored the inclination to cough, and exhaled slowly.

“That felt better,” she said out loud. “Come on, Kallandra, dear. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something constructive.” There was the option to go and see Colonel Dwight Disraeli. He had the President’s ear, not that he would bend it on her behalf. Damn, she needed strength. That comes from public pressure on politicians and who influences the public but the press – Tabitha Wish.

Kallandra reached for her cellphone, but was interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Go away.”

The door sneaked open and Derek crept in carrying a carton of steaming coffee. “Apologies for disturbing you, Kallandra, but I thought you’d like to know.”

“The spheres have been obliterated, and we now wait for their creators to enslave us?”

“Not yet, and possibly. But a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Lab has been investigating historical records in a cooperative project with Chinese and Brazilian historians.”

“And I should be interested, because? Oh, sorry, Derek. It’s funny we three work so well together with occasional input from Rob Summers. I forget that hundreds at NASA and the JPL along with thousands all round the planet are also working flat out on the spheres.”

“Sadly, in spite of the combined mass of global brain-power, and a range of weird international technology, no one has managed to learn more than we have about what the spheres are made of, or why.”

“At least other countries aren’t sending annihilation greetings to the spheres. Are they?”

Derek sat on the corner of the bed while studying his iPaq. “Some interesting coincidences have led to an alternative view of the time decoherences.”

“Are you telling me other countries, consortiums, whatever, also plan to attack the spheres?” She knelt on the bed shaking with anger, the more so as her rage was directed at herself for not seeing it coming.

“Actually, I’m talking about the time decoherences – they may have been with us for some years – possibly always.”

She looked at him through narrowed eyes, as if he was more alien than the spheres. How could he ramble on about theoretical niceties while she writhed in angst? But then maybe it’d lead somewhere if she played along.

“You mean like the Bermuda Triangle? Old news.”

He lowered his iPaq and looked at her with a half-smile, in what she interpreted as a pitying mode. She curled fingers around the corner of a pillow ready to hurl at him.

“They – the researchers – have catalogued hundreds of unexplained disasters. Not that smaller accidents wouldn’t count but they aren’t documented so well. Airplane crashes like that one the other day. Did you know that Tabitha had a call from the wife of her editor, Roger de Griffe? He’d sent a text message from that plane disaster.”

“Weird wasn’t it? He was on that plane that we think split when the front displaced in time from the back? Would you think to send me a goodbye love message, Derek?” She said, instantly regretting it because of course he would. But she wouldn’t have done because she’d be fighting death all the way.

“Anyway,” he continued. “There’s been many accidents that could be explained that way, from the beginning of aviation history.”

“So now we have a convenient scapegoat for human error?”

Derek gave her a short laugh. “Fair enough, but we now have an alternative explanation for some unexplained accidents. For instance…” He consulted his iPaq. “KLM Flight six-oh-seven. August fourteenth, nineteen fifty eight. Unexplained crash one hundred and thirty miles west of Ireland. No survivors, Ninety nine died.”

“I hope you’re not going to read me an uber long list of disasters that might be the result of time decoherences.”

“I won’t. But listen, there was always doubt about the North Sea Piper Alpha oil rig explosion in nineteen eighty-eight. Gas leaked into a compression chamber and led to explosion with a hundred and sixty-six deaths.”

“And you’re saying a time-quake ruptured a gas pipe?”

“Possibly…”

“Evidence, Derek. Come on, you should know better than this speculative hearsay. Have you become Tabitha Wish?”

“Recovered monitoring equipment indicates discrepancies in times recorded for the accident. And men the previous few hours reported feeling weird – headaches and nausea, which could be a feature of time decoherence – couldn’t it?”

Kallandra closed her eyes. “Maybe, dear Derek, they were breathing in leaked gas.” She lay back on the bed and stared again at the ceiling. “Is there a useful point to this list?”

Derek followed her gaze up to the ceiling. Kallandra released a smile, even though her upward gaze wasn’t meant as a trick, the play tickled her. He returned his eyes to hers.

“It seems to me, not only me, that if mankind knew about time decoherences in the past, we may not get so upset about them now. It could help your appeal to leave the spheres alone.”

She sat up, eyes now wide open. “Really? Ah, I suppose if their leaving makes time just more erratic rather than being a completely new problem, people mightn’t think they’re so bad.”

Derek stuck out his bottom lip. “Well, maybe…”

“And that would be especially so if most of those unexplained disasters were in areas far from where the known spheres were buried.”

“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Putting aside, for the moment, the notion that unexplained means a phenomenon about which we have insufficient facts…”

“Or insufficient belief in the few facts we have.”

“Agreed. Let me tell you about a particularly accident-prone region in Canada, between Nova Scotia on the East coast to Ontario. On a disaster-map of the world that region is splattered with red dots when larger areas elsewhere have none or only one.”

“And these unhappy red dots are?”

“The weirdest is a DC four that crashed heavily near Quebec in nineteen fifty seven. It hit the ground so hard one of its engines was buried eighty-four feet. The seventy-nine people were virtually unidentifiable.”

“What caused the crash – engine or human failure, a storm? What makes it weird? There must have been sufficient parts, and the black box, for the investigators to work it out?”

“Black boxes were in production by then but not in general use. There was a storm…”

“Well, there you go, Derek. I need more convincing. Next one.”

“There was a survivor. A baby was found sitting in the pilot’s seat. It was over a hundred yards from where the rest of the passenger bodies were found.”

“A baby – alive. It must have got lucky. Even so, I agree that is rather Twilight Zone.”

“Hardly anybody’s watches had the same time as each other.”

“If they’re within a minute or five that would be the case in this building. In fact, Derek, it’d be more impressive if everyone’s watches told the exact same time.”

“Fair enough. Next is a massive explosion in nineteen seventeen, in Halifax Harbour, and no, it wasn’t the Germans. A Belgian ship, the Imo, collided with the munitions ship Mont Blanc. Eight million tons of TNT detonated killing up to seven thousand sailors, dockworkers and even over five hundred local children in their schools.”

“OK, so a munitions ship explodes – it happens.”

“A survivor on the Imo says his ship seemed to suddenly be further forward and so avoiding the collision was impossible.”

“Um, and I suppose his testimony wasn’t taking seriously then whereas it would now. What’s next?”

“Right, a liner went down in a storm in eighteen seventy three. It was built to withstand worse storms and there were conflicting reports. Similarly two boats collided with over five hundred deaths in eighteen ninety-eight and another two boats with over a thousand deaths in nineteen fourteen. Remember these are all in north-eastern Canada.”

“There could be many reasons why that area is prone to accidents. The Newfoundland fogs, and North Atlantic storms and freezing winters all contribute to accidents queuing up to happen.”

“I’ve only mentioned some of the worst accidents. Comparing stats for other areas with fogs, stormy weather and shipping business, that area gets more than it should – far more. Of course  you’re right to be cautious, Kallandra, but open your mind to some of this.”

“Cautious? I sure am. You can prove anything with statistics and imagination.”

“That region had no known sphere.”

“Ah, so time decoherences weren’t being collected over the years and so more accidents happened there.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“I do, but what about the most accident-prone area on the planet?”

“I know, I know. The Bermuda Triangle does have a sphere – or did. But then it seemed something wasn’t right with it. It was delayed compared with the other six. So perhaps it was malfunctioning.”

Kallandra walked over to the open window and breathed in the heady aroma from the wallflowers below.

“Don’t forget the eighth one in the Pacific. That was slow too. But then no one lives there so time decoherences could come and go and we’d never know.”

Derek stood alongside and put an arm around her waist. “We have to accept that there are many incidents that could’ve been triggered by even a small time-quake. Or could equally be something else – unexplained. For example in nineteen-ninety-two, sewers in Guadalajara seemed to zigzag underground. Manhole covers shot into the air and streets split like earthquakes. Two hundred died.”

“Maybe it was an earthquake?”

“Not according to the Mexico Seismology Institute. If we assume the Bermuda sphere was faulty, then it’s interesting that Guadalajara is halfway between the spheres at El Capitan and Sugarloaf in Rio.”

She banged her hand on the windowsill. “Why are we pratting about discussing these accidents? If time jerked Earth around in the past, we have plenty of circumstantial evidence all around us. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, avalanches, landslides and freak weather could all be blamed on a one spot suddenly moving forward or backwards in time. It was right under our noses all along.”

“You’re not saying the spheres made no difference?”

“No, Derek. I’m saying that it seems they were absorbing time decoherences but not equally around the globe and that maybe some of the accidents and disasters over the years could have been influenced by time-quaking. We know it’s gotten worse since the spheres started leaving. We need those spheres to return or do something to stabilise our planet.”