Nearly four days since the bombing, and Jos found himself glued to the News once more. They had found someone alive, buried under the remains of Canary Wharf in the London Docklands. After so long, it was something of a miracle. They had detected a faint heartbeat, somehow, and even now the emergency services were gathering to dig them out. An engineer was explaining how a falling girder could have formed a roof, a tiny pocket of air, saving the person’s life. While he spoke, the ruined skeleton of the tower, its steel structure, was bare and black - a stark silhouette against the dawn sky.
Jos looked at the time. It was five to six in the morning. After that monstrous dream, he had been unable to go back to sleep, and he no longer felt like walking, or sitting in the bar. Snakeskin shoes flashed across his eyes when he least expected them, and Jonah’s words seemed engraved on his brain. Jos was too tired to read, even to think, so he watched the News, and hoped.
It was difficult work, the engineer was saying, trying to remove the rubble without disrupting the equilibrium that kept the person alive. They couldn’t use heavy machinery and were relying on hand-tools to get the job done. He gave a demonstration, and the reporter nodded earnestly, as if she had never seen a shovel before.
Suddenly, the projected image disappeared, and Jos was left staring at the wall, in near darkness. He sent a thought command to turn the lights up, but nothing happened. The clock was still working but seemed to have frozen at 5:56. What was going on? Jos reached out an arm for the controls to try to call technical support. He did not succeed. Instead, he found himself floating out of his bed. Artificial gravity had been lost, he thought, shocked and surprised. Jos had always hated weightlessness and he felt vaguely sick. If gravity had been lost, would life-support be next? How much air did they have? This was bad - really bad. He had done this trip countless times and nothing like this had ever happened before. Had they been attacked? He tried to move towards the door but ended up spinning uselessly half a metre above his bed. His breathing was fast, his pulse accelerated - he had to get out of here.
And then he collapsed into the bed as gravity reasserted itself. He banged his head against the sideboard and was still nursing it when the lights came on to medium, as he had asked. What was going on?
