THE ASTRAL DISRUPTOR
Somebody stole the sky. In broad daylight! That wasn’t our first thought when it happened, of course. No, we were too bewildered to understand the facts. I remember my own reaction clearly enough. I was standing at the railing of my roof garden looking across the city and when the world suddenly went dark I assumed the sun had just died, that it had broken for some reason, maybe because of an asteroid impact, and winked out like a shattered light bulb, but without the faint popping sound. Then I realised how ludicrous that speculation was.
The sun is a star and stars don’t go out abruptly; they explode first and the remaining core fades away over millions of years. I stepped back and stumbled over a plaster gnome. My roof garden isn’t sophisticated; I like the slight
