The Serene Invasion

Chapter TWO





THE BOARDING OF the Air Europe flight from Heathrow to Entebbe was delayed for two hours due to a bomb scare in terminal six. Geoff Allen bore the hold up with customary patience. His job entailed prolonged travel, and these days delays were an inevitable part of the process. He unrolled his softscreen and spent the time editing a file of shots taken on his last assignment, a freelance trip to cover the aftermath of the bombings in Ankara.

A rainstorm was lashing the tarmac, and when the time came to board the ancient Boeing 747 the passengers were informed that, because of ‘technical difficulties’, the umbilical corridor leading from the terminal building was out of commission. As he dashed through the rain, he looked ahead to the sun of Africa and the week he was due to spend with Sally.

There was another delay, this time lasting thirty minutes, while the plane took its place in the take-off queue. He spent the time writing a short email to Sally and sending it as the plane climbed and banked over the dreary grey suburbs of south-west London.

See you in a little over ten hours. I can’t wait. Work has been hell, I’ll tell you all about it later. There I go again, complaining about my job, when yours... Anyway, things are just the same in England. Food-shortages and riots. Could be worse: look at France...

He went on in this rambling vein for another couple of pages, the epistolary logorrhoea a prelude to the oral: when he met Sally they’d talk non-stop, catching up on the mutual missed events of the past three months.

The plane flew west, out over the Atlantic and south over the Bay of Biscay, giving French airspace a wide berth. A nationalist terrorist group had brought down three planes in as many months over the south of France, in response to the number of foreigners flooding into the country. Airlines were taking no risks.

Allen lost himself in work, cropping images of bombed-out houses, the dazed victims in the streets of the Turkish capital. The country was paying the price for its acceptance of the West, its repudiation of ‘traditional’ values. Repression of dissidents, including Kurds and Islamists, had been severe and uncompromising, in the grand tradition of Turkish state heavy-handedness. The result was an anarchic free-for-all in which ideologically opposing terror groups, of every shade of political and religious persuasion, cut swathes through the country’s innocent population.

A little while later he felt a tap on his shoulder. A woman peered around the seat behind him. “Do you think that’s appropriate for children to view?”

“Excuse me?” Allen turned awkwardly to look at her.

The woman leaned to one side and indicated a small girl seated beside her. “My daughter saw what you were doing as she went to the toilet...”

His first reaction was to apologise – the typical English, deferential climb-down hardwired into every citizen of his class and age. His second, to tell the woman that her daughter should mind her own business.

He indicated the vacant window-seat beside him, “I’ll move,” he said, and did so.

In the aftermath, he wished he had said something caustic, along the lines of, “Perhaps you shouldn’t shield your precious daughter from the realities of the world...” but on reflection he was relieved he’d not had the gall to do so; that would have started him on his hobby-horse, the sanitised, advertisement-led vapidity of the British news media these days, which was happy to report atrocities with lip-smacking gusto, but was prudishly reluctant to show the effects of bombings and similar attacks. Even the internet, once the bastion of laissez faire content, had been hamstrung by recent government restrictions.

The website and sister magazine he freelanced for was based in Germany, where restrictions were a little less draconian.

He worked on the photography for another hour, by which time a hostess was processing down the aisle handing out shrink-wrapped trays of fodder the blandness of which was calculated to offend the least number of passengers. Allen chewed on a cheese roll – the cheese the latest milk-free version, cheap, rubbery and tasteless – while staring through the window at the ocean far below.

They overflew a vast hydraulic wave-farm, a series of great metal platelets connected by tubular pistons the width of the Channel Tunnel. He’d covered a story down there a few years ago. The Spanish government had flown him to Cadiz, then ferried him out by hydrofoil, to witness an amazing sight. A hundred boat-people, refugees fleeing the revolution in Morocco, had set up camp on the back of one of the farm’s great see-sawing plates, subsisting on fish and little else, until evacuated by the Spanish authorities.

The farm was free of inhabitants now, other than its skeleton crew of engineers, but he did see a tangle of wreckage and a sprawling scorch mark on one of the heaving pontoons: the result of a terrorist attack last year.

The last he’d heard, the Spanish government was thinking of closing down the farm on grounds of inefficiency, and building nuclear reactors to supply the nation’s rapacious energy needs. Opposition voices pointed out the dangers of reactors prone to terrorism...

An elderly man hobbled down the aisle towards him, smiled and inclined his head, and walked on past. Allen responded with a vague smile of his own, wondering if he’d met the man somewhere recently. His memory for faces, as well as names, was appalling, which was odd as he thought of himself as a visual person. He was endlessly fascinated by the appearance of things, of how reality presented itself visually – his degree had been in art history, and he’d been a photo-journalist for the past ten years – and yet he was forever unconsciously snubbing people because he failed to recognise their faces.

A little later the old man paused in the aisle beside Allen, cleared his throat and, when he had his attention, murmured, “I hope you don’t think this impertinent of me, but I was wondering if you’re Geoffrey Allen?”

The man had the diffident, old-school manners of a much earlier generation. Allen guessed he was in his eighties.

He smiled, wondering if the man had recognised him from one of the ID mugshots that occasionally accompanied his pieces in British colour supplements. He felt at once obscurely pleased and embarrassed.

He smiled. “That’s right.”

The man extended a frail hand. “James Cleveland. I worked with your father many, many years ago, and I once met you when you were this high. I’ve followed your career over the years.” After they had shaken hands, Cleveland indicated the aisle seat. “You don’t mind...?”

“Not at all.” Though, truth be told, the last thing he wanted was to be pinned in situ by someone reminiscing at length about the greatness of his father – a situation he’d suffered on more than one occasion over the years.

“Your father was a wonderful politician, Geoffrey – I may call you Geoffrey, by the way?”

Allen smiled his assent and groaned inwardly.

“We were on the same back-bench committee many years ago, investigating police corruption. I have never worked with a finer mind...”

Cleveland continued in this vein, and Allen responded with nods and the occasional monosyllabic agreement.

The fact was that his father had been a great man, and that rare animal: a politician loved by the people, a reformer who worked tirelessly for his constituents. That he had rarely shown himself at home was a side-issue that few knew or cared about, outside of the immediate family, Allen himself and his younger sister Catherine. Perhaps it might not have been so bad if their mother had not also been a parliamentary politician, if not of his father’s eminence, then certainly as hard-working. Allen was raised by a series of European nannies with, in the background, two distant figures called mother and father who he knew he should feel something for – as he had read about in books – but for whom he felt almost nothing other than resentment.

His parents worked hard for years, tirelessly for the people they represented... and where did it get them, he thought?

Now Cleveland said, “And I was so sorry to read about...”

“Yes,” Allen interrupted, fearing what the politician emeritus might say next, “yes, it was a... terrible shock for all of us.”

Tactfully, Cleveland changed the subject. “Well, I’m visiting my grand-daughter in Durban. She’s just given birth.”

“Congratulations.”

“And you? Work, no doubt?”

“Actually, a working holiday. I’m visiting my fiancée.”

“In South Africa?”

“Uganda. She’s a doctor working with the emergency services in Karamoja.”

Cleveland’s rheumy eyes widened. “Not the most... stable, shall we say, area in the world. Your fiancée must be a remarkable person, Geoffrey.”

Allen smiled. “She is,” he said.

The old man patted Allen’s hand like a beneficent grandfather. “Well, it has been wonderful talking to you. I hope you have a pleasant time in Uganda. Take my advice and visit Lake Edward in the south. Just the place for young lovers.” With a smile he lifted himself from the seat and limped back along the aisle.

Allen glanced through the window and stared down at the brilliant blue, beaten expanse of the ocean, feeling obscurely troubled. It was always the same when he was forced to consider his parents, and their deaths.

He tipped back his seat, closed his eyes, and tried to fill his mind with other things.





HE WAS AWOKEN a little later by the sound of activity around him. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Passengers were releasing their folding trays, preparatory for whatever culinary delights Air Europe had prepared for dinner.

He ate a bland curry, overcooked dal and undercooked rice, followed oddly by a slice of polystyrene Victoria sponge, then glanced at the time on his softscreen, which he’d fastened round his forearm. It was five o’clock British Summer Time. Estimated time of arrival in Entebbe was a little after midnight, Ugandan time. He’d booked a hire car and would drive up to Kallani overnight. Time with Sally was precious and he didn’t want to waste a second.

They were flying over the coastline of Northern Africa. The scalloped littoral of Morocco showed as a series of golden scimitars, the destination – before the revolution – of hordes of sun-starved northern Europeans and Chinese.

The plane thrummed inland, and an hour later the first of the Chinese mega-cities came into view.

It looked, he thought, like some kind of computer circuit board, a grid-pattern of prefabricated buildings and domes extending for tens of miles across the parched land. Monorails connected outlying towns which were rapidly being absorbed into the sprawling Cathay conurbation, eating up the terrain towards the Atlas mountains.

At first Allen had viewed with indifference the wholesale economic invasion of northern Africa. It struck him as the inevitable process of colonisation that the communist party of China had so vilified the West for in the past – the inevitable, rapacious rampaging of a regime turning from communism to capitalism.

Sally had set him right on that, listing a catalogue of abuses, both humanitarian and ecological, being committed by the fascist mafia, as she called them, of Beijing. She’d spent an hour telling him about specific instances of Chinese abuse, before relenting and changing the subject.

Afterwards, Allen had thought twice about suggesting ordering a Mandarin take-away.

He unrolled his softscreen and accessed the file containing the images he’d taken on his last trip to Uganda. He scrolled through shots of Sally beside Lake Kwania, looking tired and drawn after a shift at the medical centre lasting for three days with precious little sleep.

The pictures showed a thin-faced woman, not in the least photogenic, with a pinched expression and straggly hair. She was thin, pared down by a combination of a bad diet and overwork, constantly edgy and nervous and burning with the conviction of her political and humanitarian passions.

Allen loved her. For the first time in his life he had found someone he could trust, who he could talk to about his past, who listened to him and understood. As he gazed down at her thinly-smiling face, he realised that she was beautiful, and he felt a little drunk with the thought that in a few hours they’d be together again.

He noticed the first of the domes ten minutes later. He was staring out of the window, watching the rilled foothills of the Atlas mountains drift serenely by far below. They were flying over the southern slopes of the range now, and ahead was the vast stretch of the Sahara. He made out a flash of silver to the west, tucked into the foothills, and assumed it to be the glint of a river. Then he saw another, and another, and was surprised to note that they were domes, great silver hemispheres straddling towns and villages – perhaps a dozen in all, of various sizes, covering the centres of occupation along a winding road that snaked through the foothills.

Ahead to the right was a sizable town, and as the plane overflew it he had a closer view of the dome that arched over its entirety, encompassing its sprawling suburbs and two-storey central buildings like a vast snow globe.

Cleveland, making another trip to the loo, stopped in the aisle. “I suspect it’s the Chinese again,” he said, indicating the dome.

Allen frowned. “But why on Earth would they cover entire towns and villages?” he asked.

The old man shook his head. “They’ll have their reasons,” he said. “They always do, the Chinese – and you’ll find that it will make absolute sense in the long term.”

Cleveland shuffled on and Allen returned his attention to the silvery dome far below. The minute shapes of cars and trucks had halted on the road that appeared to run right into the sheer wall, and he made out what might have been tiny, ant-like crowds of people down there.

He unrolled his softscreen, accessed the net and was about to tap in Africa + Domes + Chinese, when the screen flashed a systems error and closed down. He strapped the screen round his forearm again, eased back his seat and stared out at the passing land far below.





THEY WERE FLYING over the Sahara an hour later when the plane stopped.

The first thing he noticed was the sudden, utter silence – startling after the constant thrumming of the engines. He looked out of the window. Five metres ahead of where he sat, the silver wing – which should have been vibrating ever so slightly – was absolutely still... and, more worryingly, the line of the aileron was unshifting against the arabesque of sand dunes of the distant desert. Startled, he peered directly down. They were passing over a road that cut from right to left through the sand, with a tiny truck on its tarmac’d surface. As he stared, the vehicle remained exactly where it was, unmoving in relation to the line of the wing.

Only then did he look up, across the aisle, and realise that his fellow passengers were likewise frozen. The woman across from him was lifting a sweet to her mouth, her fingers stilled an inch from her lips. Beyond her, a man was in the process of turning a page of the in-flight magazine. In the aisle, a smiling hostess was as immobile as a shop window mannequin.

Allen was about to stand up in alarm, attempt to see if everyone was similarly stricken with this paralysis, when an incredible rush of heat passed through his head and he was no longer aboard the plane.

He was flat on his back, seemingly floating in mid-air. He could feel no support beneath him. All was grey above. He tried to move his head, to look to either side, but was unable to do so. He wanted to cry out, but he could not move his mouth to articulate the words. He felt naked, though he was unable to look down the length of his body to see if this were so.

Later, he would wonder why he did not panic. It would have been a very reasonable reaction, given the circumstances. The fact was that he felt very calm, not in the least frightened. He felt a certain odd distance, a sense of remove he had once experienced when being sedated for a minor operation.

He recalled articulating the thought, What is happening to me? – and receiving a reply, as if in his head: Do not be afraid.

He wanted to laugh out loud but was unable to do so.

Seconds later he saw a bright light directly above him, dazzling. Silhouetted in the light was the outline of a human form, leaning over him. He felt only peace, as if he were in the presence of someone who, he knew, wanted only the best for him. The head-and-shoulders shape was dark, shadowy, there for a second and then gone.

He felt something ice cold on his chest, frozen pin-pricks dancing up his sternum towards his head. His instinct to cry out in alarm was stilled by the strange conviction that all was well, that he had no cause to panic.

Even when he saw what was dancing up the length of his body, climbing over his chin, then his lips and nose, and progressing to his forehead, he did not attempt to cry out. He felt no dread or horror, even though what might have been a flashing, silver-limbed mechanical spider was squatting above his forehead and lowering an ovipositor towards his skin.

Later he would describe what followed as being like the sensation of a dentist’s drill, accompanied by a high-pitched sound, felt rather than heard, a droning conducted through the bone which the ovipositor was presumably boring. Oddly he felt no pain.

A second later he experienced a blinding mental flash – which he could only describe, later, as feeling as if all his synapses had fired at once.

Then the spider, its job done, was dancing back down his face and body. He saw the human shape again, dark but benign, lean over him as if in inspection.

He was washed with a sensation of ineffable peace.

He blacked out, and an instant later was back in his seat on the plane.

He sat very still, sweating, and gripped the arm-rests. The engine was droning, the plane vibrating slightly. A glance through the window assured him they were in motion once again, the wing shaking, the desert passing by below. He glanced across the aisle: the woman was chewing the sweet that just seconds ago she had conveyed towards her mouth, and her neighbour was flipping through the magazine. The smiling air hostess approached, eyes flicking professionally over her charges.

She registered something in his expression and leaned towards him, her smile expanding in query. “Can I help?”

Before he could stop himself, he said, “Is everything okay? I mean... the plane...?”

She must have dealt with a thousand air-phobics in her time. She said reassuringly, “Everything is fine; no need to worry. We’ve lost on-line capability, but it should be up and running shortly. We will be arriving at Entebbe in a little over three hours.”

“I thought...” He shook his head. “No, I must have been dreaming.”

She smiled again. “If I can get you anything?”

“No. No, I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” she said, laid a perfectly manicured set of crimson-glossed nails on his hand, then moved off down the aisle.

The aftermath left him feeling both embarrassed and frightened. What he had experienced was as real as everything else that had happened over the course of the past few hours: the plastic meals he’d consumed, his chat with Cleveland...

The plane had stopped dead in its flight, along with everyone aboard... except him. Then he’d found himself floating naked in a grey space, with a spider drilling into...

He gave a small involuntary gasp and reached up to touch his brow, expecting to feel the messy evidence of an incision there.

All he felt was a coating of clammy sweat.

He recalled the peace he’d experienced, the reassuring words in his head, exhorting him not to fear. The odd thing was that he had felt no fear then, while undergoing whatever had been happening to him, but now, looking back at the episode, he was overcome by a wave of retrospective dread.

Could some form of dream be held accountable? He thought not. Epilepsy, then? A brain seizure resulting in a hypnagogic hallucination? But the experience had seemed so damned real. He had seen his fellow passengers freeze... and yet they had experienced nothing.

He stood and walked down the aisle, scanning the seats for the ex-MP. He found the old man reading a Kindle. Cleveland looked up and smiled.

Allen said, “This might sound strange...” He paused, licked his lips, and was aware of Cleveland, and the elderly lady beside him, looking up at him expectantly. He went on, “You didn’t happen to notice anything... odd, a few minutes ago?”

“Odd, dear boy?”

He wished he’d never asked the question. “I mean... did the plane seem to... No, I’m sorry... I must have been hallucinating. I must have dropped off... a nightmare.”

Cleveland reached out, solicitous at Allen’s agitated state. “Are you sure you’re okay, Geoffrey?”

Allen smiled. “Absolutely. A dream, that’s all. I’m sorry...”

Cleveland smiled his reassurance that it was no bother at all, and Allen returned to his seat.

He stared down at the distant desert and attempted to regain some measure of the sense of peace he had experienced during the hallucination.





ENTEBBE RUSHED HIM with its usual sensory overload of chaotic, over-populated, frenetic activity he should have been accustomed to by now – from his many visits to cities in Africa and Asia – but which always struck him anew.

The press of importuning humanity and the accompanying noise was a shocking assault. Crowds surged in the streets outside the airport, a morass of brightly coloured humanity seething even now, a little after midnight, under the glare of halogen floodlights. The constant babble of voices, blaring music, and traffic noise only confused the visual chaos – and, as if this were not enough, the stench of Africa, diesel, dung and cooking food, overlay everything. Even the humidity, he thought, was an unwelcome sensory burden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Chinese,” she said.

He pulled a face. “The Chinese?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

The thought was still fresh enough to amaze him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello there!”

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

“Kallani,” Allen said.

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

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

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

“No, of course not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen looked at him. “And you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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





TWO HOURS LATER he arrived on the outskirts of Kallani.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A schoolgirl tapped the policeman on the shoulder, then dug around in her satchel. She produced an exercise book and a pencil, which the officer took with what Allen interpreted as a sheepish expression.

Tongue-tip showing in concentration, the officer wrote a line of laborious capital letters and pressed it against the wall of the dome.

Medical centre closed – Allen read – attacked yesterday by terrorists. I will go and try to find out more.

Allen nodded, a cold feeling of numbness spreading upwards from his chest.

The policeman hurried away.

Allen slumped to the ground and leaned against the sun-warmed wall of the dome, watched in silent sympathy by the schoolgirls on the other side.