Prologue

Quivering

During the opposition of 1954 many thousand photographs were taken of Mars through various coloured filters. Astronomers were vastly intrigued by a 'W' shaped cloud 1,100 miles long which lasted from June to July and obscured the planet as though on purpose; the more romantic observers were struck by the fact that since the telescopic image is inverted the cloud was really an 'M'. 'M' for Mars? Who knows?
      - W.R. Drake, Gods or Spacemen, 1964

one

The city quivers.
      Great waves of heat roll in off the Atlantic and burst against the tall white concrete slabs of the downtown business area. And still it is only eight o'clock on a November morning: by noon the streets will be hell. It is sure as all Judas going to be one awful day.
      Officer Hotchkiss of the Hornsville Police Department leans against the corner of 43rd and 5th and scratches his armpit ruminatively. Another half hour or so and he'll be going off duty. The night hasn't been too bad, all things considered - just the usual bunch of drunks, junkies, brawls, suicides, riots and psychopaths - but still he's looking forward to knocking off and getting some shuteye. Then maybe he can play with the kids for a while - a habit his superiors ignore.
      Suddenly his slumping form tenses, and his hooded eyes are instantly alert. Down the deserted street towards him comes a bizarre figure, over six feet tall and dressed entirely in black, with a bushy black beard obscuring most of the face. The man - if man it is - is singing to himself in a soft falsetto voice, crooning as if to an unseen child; and, as he moves his hands in time to the song, little lightning flashes emanate from his fingertips. But that is not the thing that is so strange about him: there is a sort of crackling blue aura surrounding his body closely, displaying the same kind of discontinuity you see when a movie special-effects man superimposes an actor upon an artificial background.
      Officer Hotchkiss decides that he is confronted by a lunatic.
      Fully awake now, he ambles purposefully towards the macabre stranger, his right hand never straying far from the bulky revolver on his belt.
      'Hello there, stranger,' he drawls through pursed lips.
      The tall man ignores him and keeps on walking, so that Hotchkiss is forced to trot alongside like a small boy out for a stroll with his father.
      'Stranger,' he pants, 'you sure as hell better stop right there and listen to what I've gotta say to you.'
      The tall man stops and looks around him, as if suddenly becoming aware of an incongruous note in an otherwise perfect natural harmony. His eyes eventually alight on Hotchkiss, and he steps patronizingly towards the burly police officer, his hand extended in pseudo-friendship.
      'That's close enough, buddy,' says the cop.
      The stranger stops, his hand still outstretched.
      'Who are you, buddy? Where do you come from?'
      Hotchkiss knows his voice sounds nervous, but he is totally unable to control it. Close up, the man looks less like a harmless lunatic, more like one of those who should be locked up somewhere and forgotten about. Behind the black beard - which is obviously false - the face is of a strange blue hue, and in it is set a pair of the most startlingly green eyes Hotchkiss has ever seen. Another disconcerting fact is that the man's mouth appears to be designed to open sideways. And his breath smells like a linoleum factory.
      'Who am I?' repeats the dark figure. 'And where do I come from? Why, I'll answer your second question first if I may, for that is the topsy-turvy nature of this acausal Universe and all that in it lies, is it not?'
      'Yeah,' says Hotchkiss, stalling for time.
      'My,' says the stranger, ''tis truly a difficult question, my dear friend, for its most truthful answer would be that I come from nowhere.'
      Hotchkiss has his notebook ready. 'Which Nowhere would that be?' he says harshly, sarcastically.
      'Ah, you jester,' says the tall man. 'When I say "nowhere", why!, I mean - tra la - nowhere!'
      The cop breathes a deep sigh. 'OK, buster,' he says at last, 'just tell me your name and stuff the metaphysics, right?'
      'My name?' The stranger pauses for a moment, and his phosphorescent eyes rake the distant skyline thoughtfully. 'I suppose that you would call me "Death".'
      Hotchkiss finds himself writing 'D-E-A- . . .' before he realizes quite what he is doing. Then, with a resigned smile, he tucks his notebook away in his pocket and draws out his revolver.
      'All right, numbskull, you got a choice. Either I blast you here or you come quietly with me down to headquarters and I blast you there while you're trying to escape.'
      'Don't be silly, there's a good fellow,' minces the tall figure. 'There's no way in which you could possibly harm me. See, your silly gun has turned into a bar of soap already. Besides, I'm much more powerful than mortals like you could ever hope to be.
      'Look.'
      The stranger casts his lambent gaze around and spots an old lady walking her dog on the far side of City Park. He raises one of his long clawed hands and mutters a strange incantation. From the tip of his index finger springs a jet of light too bright for human eye to gaze upon, and the dog instantly disappears in a coruscating blaze.
      'Damn!' says Death. 'Missed her. I must get my fingernails cut. Anyway, I think I've proved my point.'
      He turns to face Hotchkiss, but the cop has collapsed on the sidewalk.
      'Such a pity, darling,' says Death, and he begins to walk down the street again, singing his strange high song, surveying the kingdom that will shortly be his.

two

Two hundred million kilometres above the Atlantic, at that very moment, Comrade Adrianna Dimpla's lower lip quivered.
      'You mean to say,' she blurted hoarsely, in her attractively guttural Russian accent, 'that there is no alternative?'
      'None at all,' replied Colonel Bart Malone, not looking up from the controls in front of him.
      'That the Mary Poppins is going to crash into your New York City?'
      'Sure is, honey.'
      'And that the impact is going to knock the Earth right out of its orbit?'
      'That's the general idea.'
      'And that all will be blasted to smithereens?'
      'Yup.'
      'Oh, Bart, I'm frightened!'
      It was the first time that the plucky little Russian cosmonaut had displayed any sign that she was other than a cool, calculating robot, programmed in the depths of Siberia to perform at all times with maximum efficiency. Now there were tears starting in her pale blue eyes as she pushed back from her elegantly structured face an unruly lock of corn-gold hair.
      Her companion on this Russian-American space mission, the brawny Bart Malone, had not been programmed anywhere, and so he took the opportunity to eye her appreciatively. Then he turned his gaze back to the controls, which glowed ominously. It had been only three hours since the craft had been shaken by a gigantic explosion from the port retrothruster (or possibly the starboard retrothruster: it was so difficult to tell because, of course, there's no such thing as 'up' in space). Since then, with only the one retrothruster in action, the Mary Poppins had been describing ever-diminishing circles across the broad fabric of spacetime. According to the data the computer was spewing out, it could be only a matter of a few short months before the craft impacted on the Earth at a terrifying velocity of over five light-hours per day - so fast that the atmosphere would not have time to burn it up before it reached the ground. That the resulting explosion would bathe the entire surface of the Earth in lethal radiation was the very least of the worries, for the computer had calculated that the sheer force of the impact would knock the planet into a complicated form of Hohmann transfer orbit, sending it swooping, repeatedly, close to Venus for several millennia to come. Malone recalled reading somewhere that, had the meteorite whose impact formed the Imbrium Basin on the Moon been just a little larger or a little more swiftly moving, the force of the cataclysmic collision would have been great enough to shatter that small planet into pieces. He shuddered: it was not a comforting thought.
      'But can't you do something, Bart?' Adrianna Dimpla's dulcet tones interrupted his chain of thought.
      'Not a thing,' he muttered. 'In the ordinary way I would simply have cut off the starboard retrothruster - or possibly the port retrothruster, depending upon how you think about it - but I was in such a hurry to do that I went and broke the switch right off.' He looked ruefully at the broken piece of plastic in his hand, a boyish grin puckering his features.
      'What about remote control from Houston?' The Russian cosmonaut was close to tears.
      'Nix,' said Malone. 'I knew I should never have converted the radio into a still.'
      'I thought your breath smelled funny sometimes.'
      'Yeah, well, baby, I mean, the thought of spending eighteen months drinking only recycled water was a bit too much for me.' He shrugged, and hiccupped. Then he leered.
      There was a moment's pause, and Adrianna's virgin mind suddenly began to piece together a number of incongruous events that had taken place during the mission . . .
      Their task had been to sweep out way beyond Mars to the shores of the asteroid belt, there to use spectrometry to determine, by examination of the weak sunlight reflected from those tumbling rocks, whether or not the belt was a valuable source of mineral reserves. If so, it would be the biggest boost the space program had received since its initiation, decades earlier; if not, then Man's long adventure towards the stars would be delayed indefinitely, perhaps for ever . . .
      In fact, the spectroscope had failed to survive the pressures of blast-off, but by that time it was too late to abort. So, its mission forgotten, the Mary Poppins had drifted uselessly along its pre-ordained course, its two bored crew members staring frustratedly from the viewports at the asteroid belt, whose mysteries still lay hidden from Man's ken. Maybe the next mission would be successful where they had failed . . . if ever there was a next mission.
      But the journey had not been totally uneventful. There had been a few bizarre occurrences - all of them minor - and it was these which now obtruded themselves into Adrianna's consciousness. Most mysterious of all was the time when, as she slept, all of her clothes had been swept out of the airlock by a freak gust from a nearby cosmic storm. Apparently Malone had been so engrossed in a game of go with the computer that he had noticed nothing until it was too late. Fortunately her spacesuit had been saved, but it was uncomfortable, and often she itched to take it off. Now, she began to wonder about that cosmic storm . . .
      Then there had been Malone's insistence that they both put their time to good use by wearing the indoctaphones as they slept - he to learn Russian, she to learn English. She had thought at the time that the suggestion was odd, since her English, while accented, was syntactically flawless (except in times of stress), but had gone along with the idea, assuming that he was simply too embarrassed to admit that his Russian was not nearly as good as her English. Now, she began to wonder about those extraordinary dreams . . .
      Strange, too, had been the telegram which had arrived from Mission Control while she slept - urging them to procreate. At the time she had thought little about it (and had refused to obey, since it came from the piggish, capitalistic Mission Control in Houston, not the friendly, comradely Mission Control in Gdansk), but now she began to wonder. After all, how did telegrams come to be delivered several hundred million kilometres from home? There was something very odd about the whole thing . . .
      She gasped as realization hit her.
      At once she looked up, and met Malone's slurred alcoholic gaze. It was only too obvious that he was perfectly aware of the thoughts that had been chasing each other across the uncharted wastes of her mind.
      He grinned impishly.
      Oh no! she thought. Only a few weeks to live, and I'm cooped up in here with a sex maniac!