The dark side of the sun - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,17

this was his last day in the world. The last of the wine. And, they would kill him before he discovered Jokers World. Dom should be luckier.

His personal flyer bobbed in the swell, down by the long jetty.

The door slid to. With a light tread, he set off, quelling the wild elation that ran through him, because death was a serious matter.

His father’s voice stopped and the cube projection stopped. Dom shot a glance upwards.

Something small glittered in the air, like a mote of metallic dust. He heard Joan’s voice, every word as crisp as frosty air.

‘Samhedi, there’s another one in here. Be ready.’

‘What is it?’ asked Dom. The fleck appeared to have grown.

‘A collapsed proton. Does that help you?’

‘Sure. Like in a matrix engine.’

‘Something like that. By the look of it it’s already ingested its own atom. What you can see is angular light effect. It’s being controlled.’

The first thing that Dom realized was that both of them were standing like statues. The second was …

‘I have seen that before.’

‘It was the gravity whirlpool that got you before, though. Take one step now and it’ll be a bullet with teeth. Ever been sucked through a hole one micron across?’

‘Uhuh.’

‘I’m sorry, that was tactless. If Samhedi doesn’t get here soon you won’t have to bother about that, though.’

‘Asphyxiation? It’ll suck the air out of the room.’ She nodded.

Samhedi’s voice came from the wall grille.

‘When I say so, please to lie flat on the floor, keeping away from the approximate centre of the room … now!’

Dom caught a glimpse of a flying silver ball the size of a grape before he hit the floor.

When he rolled over it was floating a metre above his head. There was an odd sensation of heat along his spine. They had caught it in a matrix field. It was still sucking up air like a miniature tornado. Presently it drifted out through the wall, leaving a hole with its edges twisted into high-stress shapes. He could hear shouts outside, and the whine of the matrix generator.

He helped Joan to her feet.

‘You seem to have it all figured out,’ he said.

‘It was a sensible precaution. After your – your party, it was days before we figured out how to get rid of the damn thing. It was your robot who came up with the answer.’

‘You couldn’t put it on a ship because it would eat its way through the floor … Isaac? What did he suggest?’

They watched through the hole. On the lawn outside, Samhedi’s equipment was clustered around the baby black hole. The silvery sheen had disappeared now. It appeared as a point in space that wrenched at the optic nerves, and the men working around it had to hang on against the wind that was driving into nowhere.

Three of them manhandled a tall cylinder until it was standing upright under the thing. The cylinder was thick with matrix coils.

‘This should be quite impressive,’ said Joan.

‘I’m getting the idea, I think,’ said Dom. ‘The bottom of the tube is sealed, the matrix field stops it touching the edges, the air rushes in at the top ...’

Samhedi bellowed an order against the gale. The thing – it looked like an eye now, a malevolent one staring straight at Dom – dipped into the cylinder.

There was an explosion.

It was the cylinder, reaching Mach One a mile overhead. It sucked itself on towards the stars.

‘Neat,’ said Dom. ‘Suppose it hits the sun? No, you’d have a ship up there. Then what?’

‘Seal it up and dump it in deep space. Isaac suggested finding a genuine black hole and dumping it there. That sounds like an invitation to blow up the universe, though, so Hrsh-Hgn suggested accelerating it to about half as light as it was. It’d accelerate, he believes, on interstellar hydrogen.’

‘And end up drilling a hole in someone’s planet on the other side of creation,’ said Dom. He was trying to smile.

His grandmother reached out and took his shoulder.

‘You’re not doing badly at all, Dom.’

‘You neither, Grandmother.’

‘Just because I am reasonably adept at disassociation. You won’t see me when I choose to turn off.’

Dom shuddered despite himself. He had been with friends when they turned off after DA trips. It was a discipline only taught within the Sadhimist klatches. A man could go for days, weeks, without being affected by his emotions. One or two had told him it was a great sensation – there was a feeling of icy intellectual power, an ability to face problems shorn