The Serene Invasion

Chapter THREE





JAMES MORWELL JNR. liked to think of himself as an altruist.

As a billionaire, his opponents and detractors liked to say, he could afford to be. But the fact was that many of his rich friends and colleagues hoarded their wealth like misers, pathologically opposed to giving away the odd few hundred thousand to good causes. Not James Morwell Jnr... He had a slush fund of five million US dollars which, every year, he dispensed with the largesse of a Victorian philanthropist, bestowing tens of thousands on charities and good causes around the world – tax deductible though it might be.

His father, who had risen from working-class obscurity in inner-city Toronto to become a multi-millionaire before the age of thirty, had insisted that James’s philanthropy was nothing more than a sop to his conscience. “You’re a lily-livered milksop, boy, and you don’t like the darker side of what we do...”

Which was wrong, James had tried to argue to no avail. He had no qualms about the millions he invested in the arms industry, and certainly none about the millions he took from it in profits. War was a function of what it meant to be a human being, and always had been; if people were willing to fight, then Morwell Enterprises was more than willing to furnish them with the means to do so. And anyway, these days the arms that he supplied to various regimes around the world functioned often as a deterrent against military aggressors – so his detractors had no moral legs to stand on.

Not that the arms industry was the only arrow in Morwell Enterprises’ well-stocked quiver. He owned, at the last reckoning, over a thousand companies worldwide which traded in everything from cosmetics to couture, oil to nuclear energy. He even owned three of the top ten sub-orbital airlines.

But his abiding pride – perhaps because it had been the branch of Morwell Enterprises that his father had been least interested in – were the dozen companies which gave citizens the information they needed to make judgements about the world in which they lived and worked. He owned the world’s largest internet newsfeed, TV channels in every continent, a thousand newspapers globally, and three of the biggest publishing companies in the West.

It was said, and Morwell was proud to quote the statistic, that on average nine out of ten individuals on the face of the planet digested news put out by some organ of Morwell Enterprises every day.

Little wonder that he was a personal friend of the current US president, the Republican Lucas Blanchfield, and counted several of the British royal family as intimate acquaintances.

Even his father, a famous misanthropist who guarded his privacy with the same suspicion as he hoarded his millions, had not had anything like the degree of influence that his son, over the years, had carefully acquired.

Morwell Jnr. was young, healthy, and fabulously rich, and his greatest fear in life was losing what he had.

He was still in his early thirties – an age when the spectre of mortality was yet to appear above the mental horizon; he had rude good health maintained by well-monitored physical exercise and the country’s finest doctors; and his business ventures had never been in better shape.





HE WAS IN his penthouse office when the dome appeared miraculously over New York.

He had just stepped from the gym where he kept a rubber effigy of his father, which he cathartically beat with a baseball bat every morning. In consequence he was feeling revitalised and ready for whatever the day might bring.

In thirty minutes, at eleven, he had an informal get-together with his team of advisers, specialists who kept him abreast of world events. He enjoyed these sessions, enjoyed listening to experts expounding. He had a keen analytical mind himself, and an ability to synthesise what he learned at these meetings and then recycle it, at swish Manhattan soirées, as his own original observations.

He crossed to his desk and was about to summon Lal, his personal assistant – or facilitator, as he liked to call the young Indian – when he caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Something coruscated a matter of metres above Morwell Tower, the country’s tallest building.

It looked, for all the world, like the inner curve of a dome seen from just beneath its apex. As if all New York had been placed under a mammoth bell-jar.

He noticed his softscreen flashing on his desk, and said, “Activate.”

Lal’s thin, keen face flashed onto the screen. “Sir, I think you should take a look through the window.”

“So I’m not hallucinating, Lal. What in God’s name is going on?”

“I... I don’t know, sir. It happened around thirty minutes ago. I tried to summon you.” Lal hesitated. “There have been other... ah, developments.”

“Go on.”

“I think it would be best if I were to show you, sir.”

Morwell was in a mood to humour his facilitator. “Very well, Lal. We have a little time before the think-tank cranks in to action.”

“I think they’ll have a lot to talk about,” Lal said cryptically. “I’m on my way.”

While Lal took the elevator up from the seventy-fifth floor, Morwell turned to the window and stared out. He could see, in the distance, the great convex arc of the bell-jar sweeping out over Long Island, and in the other direction over New Jersey... So what was it? Some vast and ingenious prank? A fabulous and daring work of improvisational art? Whatever it was, he reasoned, it was not real... in the sense that it not was a solid, physical thing, but more likely a projection of some kind.

“Sir.”

Lal crossed the penthouse office and stood before the desk, his carob-brown eyes ranging over its surface as if in search of something.

Lal was in his mid-twenties and a direct beneficiary of one of Morwell Enterprises’ humanitarian projects. Morwell funded schools and academies across the world, and from them drew the finest pupils to work in his many companies. Lal had been plucked from the slums of Calcutta at the age of fifteen, educated to a high standard and processed through the Morwell business empire. Five years ago James Morwell had installed Lal as a researcher in one of his newsfeed companies. In three years he’d worked himself up to become its editor, at which point Morwell swooped again and promoted Lal to the role of his PA.

Now Lal took up Morwell’s stiletto letter opener and slapped his palm with its blade.

Morwell gestured to the bell-jar. “Any ideas?”

“I have people working on it, sir. But one thing is for certain – it’s not an illusion, as I first thought. Reports are coming in from Long Island, sir. People are reporting that the dome is solid, a wall that has cut off the entire city of New York. But not only that, sir – the domes have covered all areas of population, no matter how large or small, starting in northern Canada and sweeping the globe. There are reports from every northern continent... every village, town and city is at present under a similar dome to this one. And as I speak, they are appearing over areas to the south of here.”

Morwell sat down in his swivel chair.

Not likely, then, to be a daring work of art...

“You said there have been other developments?”

“That is right, sir. Observe.” Lal placed his left hand flat on the table top and – before Morwell could stop him – raised the paper-knife and made to bring it down on his palm.

Morwell winced, then looked up and saw Lal’s oddly comic grimace of effort. The man was shaking.

“Lal? What the hell...?”

“I... am trying... sir... to stab... my... hand!”

“Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t want blood all over my...”

Lal lowered the knife. “I cannot do it, sir. That is the thing. It is impossible. Reports from all across the northern hemisphere – acts of violence are no more. Boxing matches have ended in farce, with opponents unable to trade punches. Police report aborted bank raids and gunmen unable to pull the trigger...”

Morwell’s first impulse was to laugh and accuse Lal of playing a practical joke. He glanced at the calendar, but it was April the 30th, not the first.

He stood quickly, crossed the room to the gym and slipped inside. He snatched up the baseball bat, strode across to the rubber effigy of James Morwell Snr., and raised the bat.

He had no trouble at all in beating the figure to hell and back.

He returned to the office with the bat, and Lal was staring at the carpet and pretending he hadn’t witnessed his boss’s little weakness.

“Sir?

Morwell approached Lal. “If you’re pulling some kind of joke, Lal, you’re gonna be awful sore in the morning.”

Impulsively he raised the bat, meaning to swing it with reasonable force into the Indian’s midriff.

He stood with the bat in mid-air, and tried to swing...

He was frozen, as if the impulse to act had lodged somewhere between brain and arm.

He strained in an attempt to swing the bat, but the only result was that his arm began a palsied tremor.

Sweating, and not only with the effort of the abortive exertion, Morwell slumped into his swivel chair and told Lal to get the experts in here, on the double.