Dolores Foster was walking home from work when she noticed an oddly shaped glittering something at the edge of the pavement. She stooped, fascinated, and picked up a metallic brooch or badge of unusual lightness. The metal was engraved with peculiar semi-geometrical patterns and she thought it was vibrating as she held it...
Captivated by the unusual qualities of her find she wore it at a cocktail party that evening. Either the stranger who approached her and began asking incredible questions was drunk or reality as she knew it could never be the same again...
The finding of the brooch led her to the fringe of a terrifying organisation: a group known simply as "The Engineers": men who played with the fabric of the three-dimensional world as if it were made of putty.
Dolores had to learn an entirely new set of survival data as she followed one of the Engineers into a new dimension and saw how human society was masterminded.
She had to decide whether to oppose the terrible truth she had discovered or join the strange beings who looked like men...yet ran the solar system as though it were a fairground!
Release date:
August 28, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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GARTH HAINFORD was as unlike his celebrated namesake in the popular strip cartoon as it was possible for one human being to dis-resemble another, thought Dolores Foster, as she looked across at her companion. Hainford was almost painfully slim. There was something close to the emaciated nobility of the mystic or aesthetic saint in that sparse frame. She wasn’t sure of his age, but he couldn’t have been more than thirty. His studious pre-occupation with electronic theory and his constant stooping over laboratory benches had given him a scholarly bend at the shoulders that made her think almost guiltily of an inverted, terracotta waste pipe in a builder’s yard.
Hainford was untidy. His spectacle case leaned at a precarious angle from the top pocket of his laboratory coat. His radiation safety film in its plastic container was pinned at an odd, almost incongruous angle. His hair did not appear to have been combed since the proverbial Pontius was a Pilate, or since God had created the equally proverbial little apples of the American truism.
He had a quick, shy ingenuous smile. Looking at him, Dolores wondered how a brain which could unravel the most intricate electrical circuit, make crystal clear sense of confusing diagrams, and detect the difference between a brilliant innovation and a load of hocus as quickly as an exhibitor at the Royal Academy could tell a disumbrationist hoax from a Tintoretto, could be so completely insensitive to its surroundings. How could a man like Hainford dress like the mad professor in a second feature Hollywood science fiction film? How could Garth allow that tall, slim body of his to droop like a camel with congenital thyroid abnormality? If only he hadn’t looked so … she hesitated, her train of thought ground to a halt. What was the word? Buffoon? perhaps … Pathetic buffoon … For some reason—one of those odd associations which few of us are able to explain—Dolores had always regarded buffoons as fat comedians. It was as though the world were some sort of onomatopoeia as far as she was concerned.
“I—I—think that ties it up.” Garth had a natural stammer, a part of his hesitancy. Dolores unbuttoned the faultless nylon overall, hung it in the cupboard, and took down her coat. Hainford looked at her and his lips half parted as though he was going to say something; but with a slight touch of colour—an unusual thing for him—he turned and probed furiously at an innocent looking electrode on the bench in front of him. With his eyes (shielded by their horn rimmed spectacles) focused on the electrode, as though it contained the secret of life, death and infinity, he said, “Are you going to T—Tony’s party tonight?”
“I’m thinking about it,” she answered.
“P—P—Perhaps I could see you there?” The words came out in a rush, like volatile chemicals boiling from an inadequate retort.
She smiled. “You’re definitely going then?”
He put down the soldering iron. “I think so.” He no longer looked comical now, just pathetic. Something that might have been a surge of maternal instinct came uppermost in Dolores’ mind.
“I didn’t think you liked him?”
Garth’s lower lip jutted, and his left eye blinked a little uncertainly. He rummaged in the pocket of his laboratory coat, found a handkerchief that had been used for a number of purposes of which tailors would not approve, and dabbed at the offending eye.
“I—er—don’t care for him much, no.”
“Then why go to his parties?”
He shrugged, but his eyes held the answer. He stabbed at the electrode again. It was as if deep forces, pent up within him, were finding their expression in the soldering iron. An emotional catharsis was taking place in terms of liquid-silver metal and hissing brown flux.
“Will you ring me if you change your mind and decide not to go?” There was no stammer in the voice now, no hesitation. The solder cooled into silver buttons with brown flux icing.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Thanks.”
The monosyllable was half an octave deeper than his earlier words. He looked up at her and that quick, ingenious smile came and went. She almost expected him to say something like ‘Jolly decent’ but he didn’t. He moved his hands nervously on the bench and caught the hot end of the soldering iron against his wrist. Tears sprang to his eyes spontaneously, and there was a sharp intake of breath.
“You’ve burnt yourself.” She came across the laboratory, undoing the First Aid tin as she came. It was almost instinctive procedure. Hainford seemed to need more looking after than a child. He was an incredible mixture, she thought, man and boy, infant and genius. She put acraflavine on the burn and bandaged a small dressing across it. Garth felt the light, sensitive practical touch of her hand, and a feeling not unlike an electric shock ran up his arm. Just for a fleeting fraction of a second he squeezed her fingertips. Their eyes met.
“I’ll have to burn myself more often,” he said awkwardly.
She put the First Aid tin away with a practical, almost deliberate efficiency. There was a pause as she stood with her hand on a half open door. Outside the huge neon sign ELECTRONIC INTERNATIONAL seemed to light up the early September evening. The red and green neon bathed the forecourt of the laboratory with a glare that might well have illuminated Dante’s Inferno. There was a surrealist quality about the vividness of the brilliant gases.
“Goodnight.” The word and the closing of the door seemed to have a deeper significance, as Garth watched her go. He moved around the angle of the bench, his eyes absorbing the light through the lab window, through the lenses of his spectacles. Barriers, he thought, transparent, artificial barriers. He took his glasses off, and her image became a dark, alluring blur, disappearing beyond the range of the huge red and green letters. He moved close to the mirror at the far end of the lab Hainford, you look like a coconut, he said sadly, a coconut on a stand at a shy! He fumbled along the shelf beside the mirror and found a comb. His hair was wild. He tugged hard, not once but several times, before he got through. Five minutes later there was some semblance of order among the hirsute strands. He grinned a little more happily at the newly civilised reflection. Long fingers probed a stubbly chin.
“Hainford, you look like a gorilla,” he mused softly. There was a sadness in his big, intelligent eyes.
In the cupboard under the shelf he had an electric razor of about the same age and dilapidation as the comb. He took it out now and began shaving with more determination than comfort. Finally he inspected himself, and decided that the comb and razor had made very considerable improvements on the reflection. It also occurred to him that Dolores was now some considerable distance away. “Horses and stable doors,” he muttered wryly.
With his hands thrust deep into the pockets of the laboratory coat he ambled back to the electrode and prodded it ponderously with the now cold soldering iron. …
Dolores looked up at the night sky and wondered if, beyond the glare of the London evening light, there were any stars visible. Dolores had a secret, almost subconscious romantic preoccupation with stars. She thought of the words of a poem, less than half remembered,
“As evening lets he curtain down
And pins it with a star . …”
The author, she thought, was American, one of the tragic nineteenth century American poets, the Edgar Allen Poe of prosody. By a process of association the memory of one poem started thoughts of another. She remembered an almost childish doggerel, a jingle,
“Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw mud, and the other saw stars.”
Smiling a little to herself in the early evening darkness she looked down. The man who looked at the mud, she thought, was probably the practical man, looking for a way of escape!
In the gutter something glittered … Dolores assumed at first that it was a milk bottle top, or perhaps a piece of foil from a cigarette packet. But there was something arresting about that glitter; there was almost an incandescent quality to it, a fluorescent power, as though one intrepid glow-worm had come, despite the warnings of all his elders and the mores and folkways of glow-worm society, to hazard his life in the inhospitable London gutter. Dolores stooped and lifted the glittering object, about the size of half-a-crown, from the dirt at the pavement’s edge.
It was amazingly light. She was reminded of the small denomination French and Austrian coins of her last holiday.
A few quick paces took her to the nearest street light. The mercury discharge flung down a bluey-white radiance that was almost daylight, but there was an inhuman quality about it, a sharpness, an insensitivity. The light was analytical and she was glad of it as she studied the glittering object. It was quite definitely a brooch; there was a beautifully worked pin fastener on the back, and the engraving on the front would have been a credit to a master silversmith, or an expert in golden filigree work. The chasing was so fine that strong as the mercury light was, Dolores could not trace all the lines. The brooch appeared to be cut in a number of geometrical patterns, but there were strange, almost disturbing qualities about some of the lines.
The longer she looked at it the more she saw. But perception seemed to shift constantly. First one design came into prominence and then another. The badge—the brooch—seemed a symbolic microcosm of nature itself
Here was a geometrical spiral that was a snailshell, a galaxy and the essence of both. Here were circles, squares and triangles. … Lanceolate double curves of a forest of leaves, reminding her now of eyes, now of fish, now of thin, enigmatic mouths, or even pea pods. … There were beetles, cones and clam shells. There were radiant circles contained again and again in the design, and as she continued to stare spellbound, she found symmetry after symmetry on the brooch. Here was a human figure with hands and feet outspread. Here a double inkblot like part of a Rorschach test. There was a powerful dynamic about the designs on the brooch, there was a proportion which seemed to have something in common with the Parthenon of old, a kind of golden ratio, a golden mean.
The power of that proportion reminded her of the majestic dignity of an oak tree, and there was an order about the designs. The longer she looked the more bewildering the whole thing became.
She lost all sense of time as she stared at the brooch. The designs as they replaced one another in the forefront of her consciousness inspired different thoughts and feelings. Now she was aware not only of designs, of shapes, but of points and lines, curved, vertical, oblique and horizontal. It was as though the points had suddenly begun to move. Lines formed themselves into angles, and the angles moved like waves as her perception shifted and shifted yet again, until she was seeing a whole series of planes and surfaces in the tiny brooch.
Now, as she moved a little, her hand trembling in the bluish-white light, solid forms like crystals began to form. The crystals vanished and it was just a brooch gleaming in the lamplight. Next her attention was taken by the circular outline itself, and she became aware of other lines which she had not previously seen. There were sectors, chords, tangents, radii and diameters, and there were circles within circles. The apparently simple outline of the brooch was not simple at all, it was perhaps the most frighteningly complicated thing she had yet seen.
Like a child staring into a glowing fir. . .
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