Thornwald nodded, then waited in the doorway. When Glanville returned with the tray he went back to his seat, eyes searching the pavilion and the surrounding beach as if looking for a missing element in a puzzle. ‘Glanville, I have to prefer charges against you — you’re aware what you face when you get back?’
Glanville shrugged. ‘Of course. But after all, the offence was comparatively trivial, wasn’t it?’ He reached for Thornwald’s bulky flight-suit which was spread across the veranda-rail. ‘Let me move this out of the sun. Where’s Judith gone?’
As Thornwald glanced at the door of the pavilion Glanville reached down to the steel pencil in the right knee of the suit. He withdrew it from the slot, then deliberately dropped it to the metal floor.
‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘A torch?’ His thumb pushed back the nozzle and then moved quickly to the spring tab.
‘Don’t press that!’ Thornwald was on his feet. ‘It’s a radio reflector, you’ll fill the place with—’ He reached across the table and tried to grasp it from Glanville, then flung up his forearm to protect his face.
A blinding jet of vaporized aluminium suddenly erupted from the nozzle of Glanville’s hand, gushing out like a firework. Within two or three seconds its spangled cloud filled the veranda, painting the walls and ceiling. Thornwald kicked aside the table and buried his face in his hands, his hair and forehead covered with the silver paint.
Glanville backed to the steps, flecks of the paint spattering his arms and chest, hosing the jet directly at the policeman. He tossed the canister on to the floor, where its last spurts gusted out into the sunlight, swept up by the convection currents like a swarm of fireflies. Then, head down, Glanville turned and ran towards the edge of the sandreef fifty yards away.
Two hours later, as he crouched deep in the grottoes of the reef on the west shore of the lake, Glanville watched with amusement as Thornwald’s silver-painted figure stepped out of the pavilion into the sunlight. The cloud of vapour above the pavilion had settled, and the drab grey panels of the roof and sides were now a brilliant aluminized silver, shining in the sunlight like a temple. Framed in the doorway was Judith, watching as Thornwald walked slowly towards his capsule. Apart from the two clear handprints across his face, his entire body was covered with the aluminium particles. His hair glittered in the sunlight like silver foil.
‘Glanville…!’ Thornwald’s voice, slightly querulous, echoed in the galleries of the reef. The flap of his holster was open, but the weapon still lay within its sheath, and Glanville guessed that he had no intention of trying to track him through the galleries and corridors of the reef. The columns of fused sand could barely support their own weight; every few hours there would be a dull eruption as one or other of the great pillar-systems collapsed into a cloud of dust.
Grinning to himself, Glanville watched Thornwald glance back at the pavilion. Evidently intrigued by this duel between the two men, Judith had sat down on the veranda, watching like some mediaeval lady at a tourney.
The police captain moved towards the reef, his legs stiff and awkward, as if self-conscious of his glittering form. Chortling, Glanville scraped the sand from the curved reef over his head and rubbed it into the flecks of silver paint on his sleeves and trousers. As he drank from the flask of water he had hidden in the reef three days earlier, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly three o’clock — within four hours phantoms would move across the sandlake. He patted the parcel wrapped in grey plastic sheeting on the ledge beside him.
At seven o’clock the time-winds began to blow across the Sea of Dreams. As the sun fell away behind the western ridges, the long shadows of the sand-reefs crossed the lake-floor, dimming the quartz-veins as if closing off a maze of secret pathways.
Crouched at the foot of the reef, Glanville edged along the beach, his sand-smeared figure barely visible in the darkness. Four hundred yards away, Thornwald sat alone on the veranda of the pavilion, his silver figure illuminated in the last cerise rays of the sun. Watching him across the lake-bed, Glanville assumed that already the timewinds were moving towards him, carrying strange images of ships and phantom seas, perhaps of mermaids and hallucinatory monsters. Thornwald sat stiffly in his chair, one hand on the rail in front of him.
