Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

Two hours later he watched the Disk of Hyke whisper up from the desert, creating a brief dust shower, and go soaring off to disappear into the sky.

After that, anti-climax.

The first day was tense with expectation. Both Dom and Shane stayed in the pavilion and did not appear. Eventually, however, as nothing further came from the Galactic Wheel, the atmosphere relaxed. Dom set up a table outside the pavilion and took his meals there, inviting members of the team to join him. Sometimes he ventured into the Legitimacy camp, discussing the alien machine with Haskand and Wishom (who, despite his membership of the Legitimacy Armed Forces, seemed glad to discuss the problem with a scientist from a somewhat different cultural background).

With a pang of jealousy Scarne watched as Dom paid every attention to Shane, cosseting him, ordering special menus for him, showering him with calculated affection. Shane accepted his favoured status with a kind of smug pride. He was probably used to being treated as something special, Scarne thought, but with the Legitimacy it had meant extra strictness, extra rigour. Dom was offering him the lush life.

Then, at the sunset of the fourth day, everything happened at once.

Scarne was sitting in his tent when he was called into the pavilion. All ten members of the games team were present. Shane, however, was nowhere to be seen.

‘The final message has just come through,’ Dom told them quietly. ‘A galactic vessel is on its way to pick us up.’

A shiver ran through the assembled team. ‘How long…’

‘Almost immediately.’ Dom paused, for a moment looked uncertain. ‘This isn’t quite the way I wanted it. I would have preferred for us to arrive at the gaming place under our own steam, instead of having them pick us up. But that, after all, is how we often handle it when we stage a game.’

His words caused a slight stir. ‘Yeah, when there’s a security problem,’ someone pointed out. ‘Does this suggest that the game is illegal, in galactic terms?’

Dom’s eyes were withdrawn. ‘We have no information on that. The feasibility of the game, and the ability to pay up, is what is relevant.’

The sun was just vanishing below the horizon when they left the pavilion and followed Dom through the camp. The desert dusk was beginning to envelope everything. Somehow, the camp looked forsaken and forlorn without the massive presence of the Disk of Hyke , and Scarne, looking at the back of Marguerite Dom ahead of him, saw for the first time a fallible, undefended individual man. The majesty of the Grand Wheel – the whole interstellar edifice of gaming houses, clubs, personal vassalage and economic control – was absent. Here was a small group of men with only their brains, their naked ability, to rely on.

All along Scarne had supposed that Dom was too clever to have been conned by some devious, alien means. Now he was not sure that Dom himself was not a victim of his own obsessions. They seemed to be walking into something arranged in a flimsy, transparent manner, without guarantees.

Dom turned briefly to them. ‘We walk into the sunset. We will be met.’

Scarne’s doleful thoughts were suddenly interrupted by an outbreak of shouting and gunfire. The camp seemed to be erupting. Scarne swung round, trying to make sense of the chaos in the gloom. Two Wheel half-tracks were approaching fast out of the semi-darkness from different directions. As they entered the camp’s illumination he saw that in fact much of the gunfire came from them. The men and women aboard were all wearing Legitimacy garb, and they were all armed and shooting wildly.

The half-tracks ploughed into the ranked tents, coming to a stop just short of the pavilion. Scarne glimpsed the burly figure of Caerman, the archaeological team leader, picking off Wheel personnel with a gamma rifle, and he threw himself to the ground, raising his head to watch the engagement with a dazed detachment.

In the same dazed manner he saw Dom rush back into camp, face blazing. The Legitimacy team must have overpowered the guards at the archaeological camp and seized the half-tracks, he thought. They must have been biding their time, hiding weapons and waiting for an opportunity to hit back.

The real reasons for the raid soon became clear. Running between burning tents came Shane, terror on his face. Dom sprang to meet him; the youth ran almost blindly into his arms.

Running after him was Hakandra, his Legitimacy guardian. Seeing Shane and Dom together he slowed to a walk; but still he came on with a set expression, a ray pistol in his hand.

‘Hand the boy over, Dom. He’s mine, not yours!’

In his panic the youth seemed to be struggling in Dom’s grip even while he sought to escape from Hakandra. Dom held him tight, arms clasped around his chest. ‘Leave him be, you monster!’ he cried out in an uncharacteristically powerful voice. ‘Can’t you see he hates you? It’s you he’s running away from!’

Hakandra came to a stop a few yards from the pair. For a moment he seemed nonplussed. ‘No, he ran from the gunfire, not from me. Let him go, and he’ll come to me.’ He holstered his pistol. His face became pained, desperate. ‘Come, Shane,’ he pleaded. ‘Come back home!’

There was no response from either of them, except that Dom tightened his grip still further. Hakandra waited no longer. ‘Give him to me!’ he howled. He fell on the pair. Scarne was amazed to see the two men tussling and fighting for possession of the boy, who began squalling and bawling like a child.

Who would have won, and what Shane’s wishes were, could not be known, for almost immediately Caerman arrived together with another Legitimacy man, and went to Hakandra’s assistance. Dom was unable to prevent the three of them from wresting Shane from him. He ended up sprawled on the ground while Shane was taken at a run towards one of the half-tracks.

Suddenly Scarne saw something. ‘Marguerite!’ he shouted, using the Wheel Chairman’s personal name for the first time. ‘Over there! Look!’

Dom’s eyes followed his pointing finger. A faintly glowing transparent dome, or bubble, had appeared out in the desert. ‘The galactic ship!’ Scarne shouted.

Dom scrambled to his feet, glancing back and forth. Hakandra was bundling Shane into the half-track. It roared out of the camp – not back to the Legitimacy site but off into the darkness of the desert.

The Wheel master ran up to Scarne, panting. ‘They’ve taken Shane!’ he wheezed in an agony of frustration. ‘But we can’t miss the appointment. We’ll have to get him back later. Come on, we have to walk out.’

The second half-track started up and headed out of the camp, gunfire hissing after it, as the team came together again and trooped slowly out into the desert behind Marguerite Dom. Even with the Disk of Hyke gone, Scarne thought, the uprising wouldn’t last long, unless the Legitimacy people could summon help – and the space-tensor blanket was still in operation. Even so, if Scarne was right it had already achieved its object.

The transport sent by the galactics looked like a glass ball fifty feet in diameter. About a quarter of its bulk had seemingly passed into the ground. On nearing it the Wheelmen paused, staring up at its shimmering surface.

‘What happens now?’ someone asked.

A team member named Müller walked up to the sphere and touched it with his fingers.

His hand passed right through.

‘I guess this is what happens,’ he said. Boldly he stepped through the wall of the sphere and stood looking at them from inside.

As if searching for signs of the vanished Shane, Dom surveyed the gloom-darkened desert in all directions before he too stepped inside the fragile-looking globe. Silently the others followed, passing through the pervious wall which swallowed them all without the slightest distortion in its curvature.