Starsound Part One

         And it sang like a second sun, and it was perfect.  High it rose, above the hill that itself was above the town where twenty thousand, so caged in their own problems they never dared look outside, walked, fought, drank and cursed. The night seemed stripped of stars, as though bared to herald  Its coming. 
         Steve Diamond took a deep breath, ran beyond the cliff's edge and flew.  Expertly controlling the vanes of his hang-glider, he caught every whisper of upcurrent generated by the carpet of rooftops below him. Body near-emaciated, head thrown back, he urged his fragile, spun-carbon wings up as though they could take him to join the globe that lay, in all probability, beyond the Earth.
         Blanking his mind, he listened to its Song. 
         He'd first heard the Song eleven years earlier when, as a drug-stoned loner, he'd lived on the empty backstreets of his city by the sea. A golden thread of sound, it hooked his mind and lifted him 
free from a world of permanent frustration, joblessness and non-acceptance.  For months he'd seek it in vain, and be left cold and empty. Then its notes would fill his brain with crushed-ice diamonds,  cold and pure.
         He remembered the first night he'd gone to the hill. The sound was pure and commanding as the lusts of those who dwelled in drug-delirium around him. It drew him to the hilltop, his eyes to the triangle of lights that outlined the secret space-station poised, by geostationary coincidence, above the seatown's Pier. When it rose, he knew it was neither star nor comet for the sounds were novas within him. He'd reached out to hold the sphere, and cried when he knew he could not. 
         The next day, he'd bought himself his Wings.
         The shop-keeper had laughed when he'd chosen the spun-carbon hang-glider. “You're too heavy. You'll need the bigger ones...”
         “I can diet!”
         The man looked at Steve's figure and laughed.  But the sight of Steve's wallet quenched his laughter, the sight of its fullness made him look at Steve with respect.  The till had rung and Steve, unassembled glider tucked under his arm, had left. 
         The next day, Steve had visited the junkyard.  Here was a realm of dead things, robots punished by exhaustion and murdered by obsolescence. Sometimes, Steve would find something that would, if cared for, live. These he saved, utilizing 'organs' donated by other machines, their bodies cremated by rust. Fridges, fans, televisions, anything he could mend he'd donate to local charities.  The owner saw and recognised him, waving him in with the briefest of glances from his newspaper. Steve filled the back of his old, patched van with a pair of video-camera monitors, a carefully selected sack of cogs  and the lenses and reflectors from a pair of great searchlights, triumphantly unearthed in a corner of the enclosure.  Finally, panting, he'd put a pair of great, tractor engines into the back.  Roping the doors together - the van was too full to close - he glanced up at the owner, Sid, who was standing next to him, scratching his head.  “Steve, if you can make them engines work I want a cut of what you get for them.”
         “Oh, they'll never run again.”
         “Then why the hell d'you want them?”
         “Because they're heavy!” He pulled out his wallet. “How much?”
         “For that junk?” The man laughed.  “Just a promise.”
         “And that is?”
         “You let me see what it is you make with it all.” 
         “That's a deal.” Steve reached out his hand and the yard's owner shook it, marveling and wondering. 
         
         Birds passed him. A gull soared below him, shocked to silence by seeing a human so far from its normal habitat. Another hovered on the windcurrents, gazing with him up at the sphere that refracted starlight like moonsets seen through summer waves.  He felt a kinship with this bird and wondered if it heard the same sounds that crashed in cymbal torrents through his brain. Gusts held him and he flung himself upwards through them, body stretched like a spear. 
         Sometimes, he thought the sphere or those within must surely sense his urgency and take him inside. Often, he realized they probably simply didn't care. Thoughts like those could leave him empty and down for days until, once more, the music's silver torment torched his mind.
         Abruptly, the sphere vanished and the music snapped to silence.  The gull who had been his companion dived seaward, a gust of wind span him sideways and Steve realised, reluctantly, that for tonight the show was over.  Spilling air sideways, he landed lightly as a sycamore seed on the hillside. 
         “That was beautiful.”
         Steve froze, hang-glider removed and half-folded. The voice was a woman's but he couldn't make her out in the shadows.  Peering nervously around, he decided to parry her words. “What was?”
         “You. Up there.” Lamplight reflected from an amber, spiral cane, pointing skywards. “You handled that glider like it was part of you.”
         He wondered if she'd seen the sphere, then decided that, if she had, she surely would have mentioned it. And if she hadn't, if by some chance only certain people could see it, then he simply didn't want to tell her. It was his secret, telling others would be a betrayal, somehow.  Finishing folding the glider, he snapped the catches shut that made it no more than a bulky package which he slung around his shoulder as he walked towards her voice. “I like to fly. Sometimes, when your head's too full of people and daytime, it's the only place you can be free.”
         “Ugghhh.  Tell me about it!” A shape detached itself from the shadows around the bus shelter. The street-lamp reflected from two spiral sticks. An old lady, Steve thought. Unable to sleep, out for a walk. But the voice wasn't old.  And, when she stood in the lamplight, neither was the face. 
         Beauty danced there, elfin and magical as moonlight on water.  A breeze tousled the mass of electric curls surrounding it, and Steve found himself wondering what it would be like to cradle their weight in his hands.  Her figure was slight, the sleeves of her emerald blouse creased around slender arms. A long skirt, the colour of midnight leaves, covered her legs. A wheelchair was parked by the kerb and he realised it must be hers, for there was nobody else around.  So naturally did she use her sticks that he hadn't realised she needed one at all.  “They prod you, pry into you, want to know what you're doing every moment of the day. You have no privacy. And you know what the worst of it is?”
         Steve smiled.  “Tell me.”
         “They smile down at you. As if everything they do is a Great Favour to be bestowed upon you. As though you're So Lucky to have them there.” She reached her wheelchair and Steve was about to offer to help her in when, with an expert twist, she seated herself and slid her sticks into scabbards fixed to either side of the chair. “I'd be doing fine by myself, if they wern't there.”
         The moonlight caught her face again and Steve felt his breath catch briefly in his throat. She settled herself, reached for the brakes and Steve gave a courtly half-bow. “May I offer my services as a chauffeur?”
         “You any good with these things? Handled them before?” She gave him a shrewd glance and rolled her eyes up. “That's a no, I can see that. Well, two things to remember. It's not a pram, I'm not a sack of potatoes and kerbs is always backwards.”
         Which made it three things, but Steve decided against telling her that.  Her directions led him to a steep cul-de-sac, ending in a driveway that led him to a large, red brick house. He gingerly turned the wheelchair backwards and slid it off the kerb.  “Uff! What did I tell you I wasn't?”
         “A sack of potatoes.” repeated Steve, deadpan.
         “And if I had been, they'd've been returning the bruised ones round about now!”
         “I'm not a nurse!”
         “No, you're a Man. Men mean well but they're hamfisted and have to be Told. Still, you did your best. And it's nice to have someone offer to help.”
         “Do they know you're out?”
         The silence that followed that question was so filled with scorn that Steve wished heartily one of the shadows was a hole he could jump into.
         “And who, may I ask, are they?”
         “Well...” He gestured towards the house. 
         She span the chair and raked him with a gaze that had claws and teeth. “That's my house. I come and go as and when I please. I have no servants, other than the do-gooders Social Services send around. You thought it was a Home, didn't you.”
         Steve opened his mouth, but she gave him no time to speak. 
         “And why, pray tell, do you think I'd need one of those places? Because my legs don't work? My  brain is fine. My arms are strong.  I've been taking care of myself all my life, and...”
         “I'm sorry. I didn't think.”
         “No, you're a Man.  Men are doers, not thinkers. Agh.” She broke off abruptly, turned and rolled herself up the drive.
         “Well done.” Steve said to himself, “you sure blew that one!” He looked at the house. “That's a big place for one little lady to be rattling around in, all by herself.” Two floors high, but wide.  Large windows, meaning large rooms within.  As he walked back towards the main road, he thought of and discarded many ideas of how she'd come to be in such a house, on her own.  “Ah, well.” He shrugged. “Probably never see her again, anyway.”  He yawned and stretched.  Flying always took it out of him. 
         The three-mile walk from the hill to his house, added to the extra effort of pushing the wheelchair, had his muscles tying themselves into knots that filled his mind with thoughts of a long, luxurious soak followed by sleep. Supper could wait till breakfast.  For now, sleep was all he needed. 

         He found he was thinking about her when he awoke. It was full daylight outside and, startled, he looked at his watch.  Sunday. He laughed and shook his head, relaxing.  “Breakfast, I think.  Then, a little Paid Employment.”  The week was filled with running his shop. Sundays and evenings were the times he actually worked! 
         Filling a plate with bacon, eggs and sausages, he snapped a Vacu-Seal (patent pending) sphere of his own design around it and carried it to the observatory-cum-workshop that filled most of the bottom of his garden.  Onehandedly unlocking the padlock, he toed the door open and looked at the stack of ticketed wrecks covering the workbench nearest the door.  The benches surrounding the other walls were filled with neatly labelled crates of spares. Removing the plate from the plastic sphere, he looked at the stacks of moribund machinery and shook his head. “Who said you had to be called Jesus to restore the dead to life?” Unable to resist the briefest of glances skywards, just incase Someone decided to reply with a lightning bolt, he filled his mouth with sausage-and-egg and picked up the first. “Hokay. Mrs. Simons' fan. Not that she couldn't have bought a new one with everything she's spent on keeping this one going, but anyway.”
         Most of the people who brought him obsolete machinery to fix, or strange ideas to make work, cared for their machines/ideas like pets. And Steve loved the challenge of keeping them going, even if it meant just keeping the casing and replacing almost all of the insides. Thanks to the scrapyard, spares were plentiful and cheap.
         Spinning a screwdriver like a gunslinger's gun, he began to work.
         Time became meaningless, the traffic's sound blending into the drone of the bees that filled his carefully collected wild-flower garden.  He liked looking out and seeing scamperings and scuttlings the Perfect Gardens, manicured to sterility, on either side never had. Satisfaction became elation.  Elation became euphoria which bubbled into laughter and he whisked spares from boxes into housings with a certainty and deftness that surprised him, in some depth of his subconscious.  Then,  automatically, a nest of screens embedded in the wall behind him crackled on. A hard-drive whirled to life and an apologetic alarm bleeped like a robot chick.
         “In daylight, by christ. And twice...”  Dropping his tools, he almost ran to the screens. 
         The computer tower, and its stack of firewire-connected hard drives, had no keyboard; it didn't need one. All it had was a mouse and a plastic cross of direction-finders. At night, when the dome was open, the cross steered the telescope around the sky. During the day, it panned the starfields being broadcast by telescopes and satellites worldwide, over the Internet. It had taken him six months of careful searching with frustratingly inadequate equipment to find the wavelength on which the Sounds were broadcasted. Once he'd found it, he'd programmed the system to wake up whenever it was being used, and to find the starfield where the signal was strongest. 
         It didn't broadcast the sounds themselves. It didn't need to. They seared through him, each a shock of exultation as brilliant as the light from the stars themselves. Each straining tendon was a conduit for their beauty and, as he searched frantically for a sign of the Sphere, his head seemed to contain the power of a sun.
         The infobar along the bottom of the multiscreen told him the sound's co-ordinates, but picking out one moving image from the mass of fuzzy points that filled the screens wasn't easy.  Wishing furiously he could afford the hyperclear plasma screens true observatories used, he peered amongst the comets and space-debris, dismissing most for the randomness of its motion. 
         Then, briefly, he found the sphere.  Mouse-drawing a banding-box around the tiny sphere, he brought the image up full-screen. Then he just stood, looking at its glowing, platinum-gold beauty, every flicker bringing a change in the harmonies surging through him, hands held unconsciously in an attitude of prayer. 
         Abruptly as always, the Sphere vanished, and with it the sounds. He gasped and fell forwards, as though he'd been leaning against a wall that had suddenly collapsed. Mind still groping for the Sounds that were no longer there, he looked at the co-ordinates of the point in space where the craft - he could think of it as nothing else - had disappeared.
         When he saw them, his eyes widened.  Just to be certain, he triangulated the space-coordinates to get the map reference of where he'd have had to be standing to have seen the sphere at that moment, for himself.  And when he got his reply, he didn't have to click on the map. 
         They were the co-ordinates of the hill no more than three miles away, the hill from which he'd flown two nights previously. 
         “Again.” Opening a battered exercise book, he made a note of the co-ordinates.  “Again.” He read the columns of co-ordinates, shaking his head at the tale they told.  The first time he'd heard/felt the Sounds had been eleven years ago.  Then he'd thought they were just a result of being high.  A too-near brush with the police had made him ditch the drugs and everything he'd used to manufacture and take them, but the sounds had remained.  Had strengthened until, unwillingly, he'd grown to need them as a surrogate for the drugs he'd once used. Over the months, he'd become so attuned to them he could use his body as an aerial, turning until he found the point where their music was clearest.  After they'd gone, when he'd finished crying for their passing and sanity had returned, he made a rough note of their co-ordinates. 
         The observatory had been a natural extension of this. Had been the reason he'd started his shop. Everything he'd earned had gone into it, all the time the Music spurring him on.  The Dome, and the telescope, rotated on a central mains-driven spindle, backed by a stack of great storage batteries to provide against outages. The computers that ceaselessly searched the starfields, he'd built from scraps and spares, and donated computers from big offices that were being upgraded.
         The story it told him was strange, though irrefutable.  Until last year, the Sphere could turn up anywhere, in either hemisphere.  Why it affected him, how it affected him from so far away, he didn't understand. Wherever it was in the Earth's sky, it broadcasted its music and his body received it. But slowly, the co-ordinates had become more localised. Until, for the last couple of years, they'd been so firmly rooted in his area that he'd been able to see it by naked eye and binoculars from the great hill at the far edge of town, astounded that the hill wasn't filled with people with telescopes, wondering at the sky's new denizen.
         So he'd built himself a treadmill, got objects of varying weight from the scrapyard and began rebuilding his body, using the great, rusting engines he'd taken as training weights so he could soar closer to it on spun-carbon wings. And the sightings had become more frequent.  “First, every three months or so. Now...” He checked the dates. Twice. In two months. “They've speeded up to one a month, maybe more.  Why?” Closing the book, he frowned. There was a local astronomy society  but one mention of this to them would fill his garden and observatory permanently with myopic anoraks gawping over his screens and asking ridiculous questions. No. That was something he could do without. And besides...
         Telling anyone felt like a betrayal. It was as though the sphere was singing just for him, a secret song that only he could hear. And something inside him said it was best like this. That she was trusting him with knowledge of its presence. “But why me?” Steve asked the ladybird crawling through his keyhole. “Why would She want me to know?”
         The ladybird didn't care. She flew up into the shadows and Steve puzzled as he returned to work on the repairs. 

         Monday morning came, and with it a trail of customers to his shop, leaving with boxes that juddered and hummed with electric life. New repairs were opened on the spot, fixed straightaway if the fixing was easy, reverently placed in the back room and labelled if they had to be taken home to fix. He looked a little ruefully at the room's growing fullness.  His reputation was increasing rapidly, and with it the complexity of the work he was being given. No longer just old televisions and radios, there was an astrolabe and an orrery in there to re-calibrate, doing those accurately would take a day in themselves.
         Lunchtime came, and with it thoughts of a long, cold glass filled with liquid nourishment. He looked carefully along the road, saw no obvious customers hurrying towards him and was just about to turn the sign to CLOSED when a little yellow minibus pulled up outside the entrance to the shopping centre, at the far end of the street.  The comically stout driver slid from his seat to the ground and began unloading wheelchairs as their owners were lowered on the tail-lift. 
         One of the passengers was using a pair of spiral sticks that glistened like amber-trapped sunbeams. Throwing his coat on, he turned the sign, locked the door behind him and was across the road before even thinking why he was hurrying.  He reached the minibus just as the last of the passengers was being helped into their coats and only then realised he didn't understand why he was there. Uncertain what to say, he smiled at his acquaintance from the hillside, hoping the smile didn't look as fatuous as he feared it might be.
         “Ooh... Pamela, I didn't realise you had a friend coming.” The helper who'd been holding the wheelchair handles looked up at Steve and gave a surprised smile. 
         “Didn't realise it m'self!” Pamela, curls barely restrained by the knitted hat pulled over her ears, glanced up at Steve. “See you've had your wings clipped!”
         “Looks like you've got your own private chauffeur!” joshed a man in the wheelchair beside hers. “Told you it wouldn't take you long!”
         “Looks like Pammy's got a...”
         “Sarah, shut up!” The chubby girl in the 'chair next to Sarah's elbowed her.  “It's nice to have a friend to take you round the shops. Isn't it, Pam?”
         Pamela groaned. “Get me out of here, if you must. Gently up the kerb. And BACKWARDS!”
         Obediently, Steve swung the wheelchair around and the others laughed.  “She'll soon have you trained, don't worry about that!” said a man from the middle of the group.
         “And I bet he enjoys it, too!” added Sarah, unperturbed by the nudging from the wheelchair beside hers. “Nice and muscular, that one. I like them like that m'self...”
         Hastily, Steve wheeled her into the shopping centre. Once inside, Pamela buried her head in her hands and groaned.  “Now you've done it. Where did you spring from?”
         “Got a shop across the road.” He drew himself up. “You name it, if it's electrical I can probably fix it. Saw the minibus...”
         “And why did you think I'd want to renew our acquaintanceship? Not to mention the fact I'm going to be the talk of the day centre for the next week, now.” She groaned again, melodramatically.
         “Buy you a drink?”
         “You can. People with my condition have to have regular intakes of liquid. And food!”
         Steve laughed and steered her towards the bar. 
         The bar was called the Penguin and, at first glance, looked full of them. Second glance revealed the occupants to be office-workers, mostly from the glass-and-steel towerblock at the shopping centre's edge, electronically linked to other offices nationwide.  Ordering meals and drinks, Steve took Pamela to a secluded alcove and sat opposite her. “Been thinking about our meeting.”
         “Should I be flattered?”
         He let that one slide. “Just wondering why you'd picked that particular evening to come out to look at the stars.”
         “Couldn't sleep. Looked out through the window and saw a man going hang-gliding, decided to come out to watch the fun.”
         “Perhaps I'm the one who should be flattered!” So she'd got dressed, come downstairs in... he supposed she had a stair-lift, got into her wheelchair and gone all the way down her long drive to the hillside, just to see him hang-glide.  Now he knew he had as much pride as the next man but that was a little too much to swallow, even for him. “You've seen me there before?”
         “Hey, Steve! Didn't know you came here. And... Pamela, isn't it?”
         Pamela tried to pull her head into her jacket like a tortoise, but didn't quite make it. “Omigod. Steve, how many more of your friends are in here?”
         “Pamela, I didn't even know Albert was!” He smiled at the eager-faced youngster, no more than 20, who was striding towards them, cocktail in hand. “Didn't know you two knew eachother!”
         “I'm Pamela's chauffeur, part-time, retained on a contingency basis!” said Steve deadpan, ignoring the look of fury in Pamela's eyes. 
         “Pamela, this man has to be the area's best engineer. And one of the leading astronomers! He'd be the head of the Astronomy Club, if only he bothered joining it.”
         “Really?”
         Was that alarm in Pamela's face? Steve did a double-take, still wasn't certain. She'd sat up at the mention of astronomy, now her face was carefully ironed free of emotion.
         “And Pamela is my best recent client.  She's rented that big old house just off the Hill, that one I couldn't give away to anyone else because it needed too much doing to it.”
         “Ah, has she?” Steve tapped his chin, thoughtfully.  “She had it long?”
         “About two years, I think.” A waitress appeared and placed steaming plates before Steve and Pamela. “Ah, you got him to buy you lunch, have you? Good on you, Pamela! Though you can afford better places than this now, you know, Steve.”
         Steve found he was getting great pleasure from the thought of Albert's next three clients being gazumped from right under his nose. “What makes you think I've that kind of dough?”
         “He's holding out on you, Pamela. Right little goldmine, that shop of his.  People bring him in gadgets they've had for years and he gets them going again.”
         “Can you make things from scratch?”
         “Ideas, you mean, Pamela?”
         “Well... if I told you something I needed making, could you do it?”
         “I'd give it a darned good go!” Was it his imagination, or was there a sudden flash of hope in her eyes?
         If so, it was quickly quenched by her look of ironed indifference. “That's good to know.” She took a forkful. “Ow! Ho-oh-t!”
         Behind the counter, the waitress smiled as she watched two men vying over patting a girl's back and plying her with water to soothe her scorched throat. 

         That evening, in his observatory, Steve mused over the meeting.  Albert's arrival had thrown him, stopped him from asking more about why she'd been on the hillside.  That it had been just to see him fly, he doubted. And besides...
         She was disabled. Getting herself dressed, getting her wheelchair open once she'd gone downstairs, going down the drive to the road leading to the hillside, then to the hill itself; all those would have taken time. If she'd been in her nightclothes when she'd seen him, he couldn't imagine her doing all that in time to be there before he'd finished his flight.  He knew enough about the world of disabilty to know that her home-help would have been there to undress her and get her ready for sleep fairly early in the evening. Home-helps worked to their own timetables, rarely to those their... He hated the word 'patients', but could think of no other, would rather they used. So, she'd cancelled the home-help. Which meant she'd intended to remain dressed. 
         Which meant she'd intended to go to the hillside? But why?
         Could she have heard the Song, too? He thought back about her, about how carefully she'd tried to guard her emotions. About the feelings, unspoken, he'd seen flicker in her eyes. “Could she, by Jove?” he mused, aloud. 
         From the computer, a warning chuckle.  Putting down the antique blender he was fixing, he crossed to the screen. An E-mail, from one of the many online astronomers' societies he belonged to, all far enough away so he wouldn't get pestered by their members. Reading it, his eyes widened.  Leaping into his 'starseat', he threw the switch that opened the dome's slit and elevated the telescope. Using the joystick, he jockeyed the 'scope to face the co-ordinates given in the E-mail. Then he put it on full-focus and began, minutely, examining the starfields. He knew they would be shaky, because of the Earth's atmosphere.  He knew he'd get a far better picture on his screens, once his computer had compensated for the shakiness to give an enhanced image.  But the computer would record all that was about to happen. He could see the filmshow any time he wanted.  The night was as crisp and clear, as free from light pollution as any night on this part of the Earth ever was, and an event like this was rare enough to be worth watching in realtime. 
         The light was faint at first, and distant.  Slowly, painfully, it brightened and spread.  Briefly, it outshone most of the other stars in its quadrant and Steve slid from the telescope's seat and ran to the computer, enlarging the image, knowing with an awful certainty what he'd find.
         As his computer downloaded the picture, the Sounds began.  They filled him with a searing finality that threatened to rip his mind from him. He turned the telescope to where he knew, with absolute certainty, he'd find their source - and saw, not one, but a cluster of globes.  Each pulsed with its own unique light, their song a choral requiem for distant, dying systems.  Unknown to him, he sang and his voice, wordless, echoed their rhythms and sounds.  His brain felt crowded, he pressed his hands against his head incase the hemispheres burst. 
         One by one, the globes faded. One by one, their songs blackened to silence. On the computer screen, a generated image of a sun with a long, burning finger.  And Steve knew with acid certainty that that 'finger' of light had just erased the life on distant worlds. 
         Staring at the screens, he wept. 

         He slept fitfully that night, his dreams filled with rivers of lava and outlines of strange animals, burned into rock. Atmospheres boiled from planets, x-ray flares briefly showing their insides, crumbling and collapsing.  And golden globes everywhere, darting, landing, rising and heading back out to space. 
         Steve awoke early and stared outside, unable to comprehend the everyday things he saw, so full was his mind of his own crazed dreams. 
         Filling a sink with cold water, he bathed his face.  The chill broke reality over him, sending the pictures into his subconscious and he gasped like a man who'd been underwater too long.  Not wanting breakfast, he drove to his shop and opened up.  Taking a holdall of tools and one of spare parts from his van, he began working on the repairs that filled the back of his shop.  Gradually, the routine of work began to bring normality back to him. 
         At about 12.30, when the idea of lunch was just beginning to seem very appealing to him, a car pulled up outside.  The driver was a lady who looked vaguely familiar to him and he frowned, trying to place her.  When he did, his eyes rolled up in mock resignation.  She was the lady who would have been Pamela's wheelchair pusher, had Steve not appeared by the minibus. Which meant the passenger was...
         Two spiral sticks emerged, hoisting their holder from the seat and into a wheelchair placed by the passenger door in the nick of time. Sheathing them, Pamela looked up at the shop and smiled at Steve. Feeling suddenly elated, Steve smiled back.  The helper wheeled her in and parked her in front of the counter with a great look of 'Here she is!' on her face. 
         “Be good now, won't you?”
         Pamela rolled her eyes up and nodded at the helper. “We will.”
         “Don't do anything I wouldn't.”
         “We won't have long enough!” 
         Steve coughed, the helper gave a slightly shocked look as she left and Pamela threw back her head and laughed. “Welll... she asks for it, sometimes!”
         “So what can I do for you?”
         “Last time, I seem to remember, you bought me lunch.”
         “Same place?”
         “No, too many people. How about... Gilfrey's. Yes. That place always looked nice to me...”
         Steve felt his wallet trying to bury itself in his pocket at the thought of going in there. “You sure? We've got to get there...”
         “That your van?”
         Steve nodded.  “It is.”
         “Then that's answered your question, hasn't it.”
         So it was they arrived outside one of the town's most exclusive restaurants in a battered, white Transit van.  Having been rolled down a makeshift ramp of two battered planks, Pamela opened the restaurant door with a regal flourish, giving a brief bow to all the aging businessmen and their wives filling the tables before dismissing them with a toss of her head.  A waiter removed a chair from a table and she wheeled herself into place, wiping its surface with a finger and inspecting it for dust. “Hmm. Passable. Now let me see...” She took up the menu and began, thoughtfully, to read. 
         Dinner and wine ordered, Steve leaned back.  “Right. Now that's sorted, what can I do for you?”
         “Can you make pressure tanks?”
         “Can I...” Steve did a double-take. “Well... I've never tried, but I suppose... How much pressure's it got to take?”
         “As much as you can make it take!  And I'll need a lot of them.” She gave him a sideways look. “You can do it?”
         One  glance at her face convinced him that, odd as the request seemed, she wasn't joking.. “So what the heck d'you want them for?”
         Pamela ignored this. The waiter arrived with their meal. “Steve. I have to know. Why were you flying? Why did you pick that particular night of all nights to fly?”
         Steve felt the wind taken out of his sails, for he'd been about to ask her the same question - why had she chosen that night to be at the hillside.  Her face warned him to tell the truth.  “Because of a UFO.” He gave a weary sigh.  “Before you phone the men who bring the suits that button down the back, I'm telling you the goddamned truth here. Because of a UFO that's been singing to me, deep inside, for years. I tracked it down to this hill, I don't know why it appears over here, I just know...”
         “...That the  music makes you feel warm, and wonderful, and wanted. And shivery inside.”
         “Yeah. That's its! That's It !” Steve leaned forwards. “You've seen it too. Haven't you? You must have...”
         Enigmatically, Pamela cut a delicate forkful and sampled it.  “You know, Steve, they've got the sauce just about perfect.  Though I'd have added a touch more basil...”
         Steve gave her a furious look which she parried with the blandest of smiles. 
         
         “Pressure chambers. Within a month.  Why on earth?” She'd seen the golden sphere. She even knew more about it than he did, Steve was willing to bet on that. She'd parried every question he'd tried to ask her about it.
         A couple of slightly unsettling questions occurred to him.  If her friends could construct something like the Sphere, why couldn't they make their own pressure chambers? And why did they want them? Plots of every spy-B-movie he'd seen ran in fast-forwards through his head, but he found himself dismissing them all. He couldn't believe anything that made the music he'd heard could be evil.
         He'd make them. If he could. But, he'd make sure he saw what they were being used for.  That point being settled, he threw himself into researching how to make them at all. 
         Over the next three weeks, Steve's back garden became a Mecca for small boys who'd sit on the walls, on the branches overhanging his garden from theirs, taking bets on when the next explosion - or implosion - would happen.  Steve, who was too used to trying out crazy ideas in the open to let an audience faze him, led the cheers every time his car-engine powered pump caused a container to rupture and explode.  At the third week's end, he found he'd discovered two points which he could have found out from the Net, had he known where to look or what questions to ask when he started. The first was: if you overcompensated for the pressure on the inside of an object by putting too much pressure on the outside, you got a spectacular combination of im-and-explosion. Shrapnel from this cleared trees and walls of kids faster than anything else he'd come across.
         Filing that point for future reference, it could well come in useful if he grew tired of having an audience; he thought of Point Two. If you had an object inside another object, you could fill both with air at once.  As the pressure on the outside of the inner object was then equal to that on the inside, the object would stay the same shape and not explode. Assuming the material both were made of could take the strain.
         When the junkyard owner saw the battered Transit easing its way between the junkpiles guarding the yard's entrance, he rolled up his eyes and folded his paper. “Nah what.” He reached the van as Steve bounced down.  “Steve. What can I do you for this time.”
         “Barrels. Metal ones.”
         “Got a stack of old beer barrels in the corner. They do you?”
         “Brilliant! And any bigger ones they could go inside?”
         “What you making this time, Russian dolls? Got the paint for their faces if you want.”
         “Sid, this is serious. I need...”
         “Steve, it's always serious. It's always to stop World War Three, or to launch our latest answer to Einstein. Hokay, hokay. Can't help you with the bigger ones, but I know what you need.”
         “What's that?”
         “Metal water butts. Get ones easy big enough to put one of them barrels in. Garden centre's straight down the road, 'bout five mile or so. And whoah, before you goes rushing over there.” Holding out his hand, he rubbed his fingers together.
         “Money?”
         “Could get a fiver each for them barrels, play my cards right with that cut-price brewery dahn Saunerston way. Fifty of them, there is.”
         “That's...”
         “Two-fifty in blueys, if me math's still working. And no need to look at me like that, it's for a client, I know you when you're eager. Bung it on his bill.”
         Sighing, Steve pulled out his wallet.  “Only got a oner now.”
         “That's OK. Cashpoint in the garden centre. I knows I can trust you, you need to come back here too often.” 
         Steve returned home £400 poorer, after buying the butts and barrels. Stacking the last of the barrels in his garden, he began unloading the stack of sheet metal and boxes of heavy-duty valves.  The idea was simple enough. Place whatever you wanted inside the inner barrel.  Slide the front-door metal circle in place. Simultaneously pump air into the outer and inner barrel. Because the airpressure remained equal, the inner barrel wouldn't distort, or explode. Or implode, because both barrels were being filled equally.
         He cut a circle from one of the metal sheets. Slid this 'door' into place, through a sawn slit in the outer barrel, in front of the opening of the beer-barrel inside. Power-pumped air through both valves
until the pressure meter on the pump came up TILT, then carried on pumping until the pump's rising tone warned him it simply couldn't force any more air in. “Right.” He walked back down the garden, expecting every step to hear the CRACK of the barrels exploding and feel metal shards ripping through him. 
         When he was in the house, a brick wall between him and the garden, he breathed a shivery sigh of relief. 
         When the sun rose the following morning and the double-barrel was still in one piece, he began thinking he might just be onto something. He slowly released the air through the valves - just to make him feel a little safer - and then he went into mass production.  Soldering struts around the beer-barrels, then soldering them to the insides of the metal water-butts. Cutting circular 'doors', from the metal sheets. Carefully setting up the double-valves that held the pressure in place. Early evening came and he drank a great mug of tea as though it was nectar, savouring what he'd done. 
         “Of course,” he said meditatively, fastening the stacks in the back of his van with well-used straps, “this is assuming she can pay for these. Five hundred. Not taking a penny less. Nice bit of profit, this.” Which, of course, was the only reason he'd thrown himself into the work. The thought of making money.
         The enigma of Pamela and the Golden Sphere,  the memory of rich, glossy curls and a face that, briefly, had burned with a desperate urgency and sorrow which had, for one second only, changed to exultation when he'd said he could help her had, of course, nothing to do with it.
         Like hell, he said wryly to himself, revving the engine and putting the van into gear.