World in Eclipse

by William Dexter

  Now it is different.

  I must now tell of the subject of this record.

  The human, Denis Grafton, was one of the last to be brought from Earth. He was received into a Disc that had developed a fault, and had circled too close to Earth while its field of force was in operation.

  The Disc had, most unhappily, burnt a small portion of the surface of the Earth and destroyed some vegetation, and, alas! some humans. Denis Grafton and many others were investigating the sad mishap.

  The commander of the Disc had brought it to earth in order to re-establish the vessel's field of force, and Denis Grafton was caught up within the sphere of implication. The commander adopted the usual procedure of suspending Denis Grafton's animation until he should be brought to Vulcan.

  On arrival at Vulcan, Denis Grafton was placed in a Reception Ward, and was there taught the truth of his translation to Vulcan. He was then introduced to the Terrestrial Colony, into which he was received as an honoured member.

  It was I, Krill Hvensor, who had the privilege of teaching Denis Grafton the truth of his translation to Vulcan.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I am Denis Grafton, and I resume the record, for those who come after.

  Krill Hvensor has told of the Vulcanid plan for observing Terrestrial human culture. The full story of this plan, like the long story of Vulcan's own ancient culture and place in the cosmos, is to be read in the Grand Archives. Krill Hvensor's short summary is inserted solely for the purpose of this record's completeness.

  It was Krill Hvensor who introduced me to the new life I was to live on Vulcan. It was he, descendant of a long line of Receptors, who schooled me in the mind-shaking thought that I was on a new world. It was he — and I bless him for it — who preserved my sanity in imparting the awful information.

  To the Vulcanid mind, there is little awe in travelling into space. But to the Terrestrial mind the very thought is horrifying once its reality is appreciated.

  We humans have stood with our feet firmly planted on our world for all the ages. The Vulcanids have been accustomed to travelling the Solar System for many hundreds of years. To them it is even less novel than a car ride was to humanity in the years I lived on Earth.

  The Vulcanid method of "teaching the truth of translation to Hafna (or Vulcan)" has been devised over thousands of years.

  It has developed into a combination of elementary hypnosis, deep-implanting psychology, and

  explanation of fact The subject, if sane to begin with, is acclimatised to Vulcan in a matter of weeks.

  And by the time he has become acclimatised, he has become invigorated unbelievably by the Vulcanid method of "teaching."

  The subject's physical health is greatly improved, and the feeling of fitness and general high-key health is a thing unknown on Earth.

  In this manner, the Terrestrial Colony on Vulcan is composed of individuals who might have been looked on as almost super-human, were they on Earth.

  I was introduced to this Colony six weeks (Vulcan reckoning) after arrival.

  I must not digress unduly (for the vital portion of this record still lies far ahead of me) but it is necessary, for the sake of continuity, that I make some slight mention of conditions on Vulcan as they appear to the human mind.

  It must always be remembered by humans, if any shall survive to read this, that Vulcanid life is not human life. The inhabitants of that planet — the native inhabitants, I should say — are not human.

  They are an alien form of life that has matured and developed well ahead of humanity. Originally, they bore no resemblance to Terrestrial humans, as Krill Hvensor has suggested.

  They have suffered mutations of form and habit in order that when the time came they should be adapted to life on Earth, for they have long known that the day must come when they must leave their Hafna and dwell on Earth.

  But they have preserved a small nucleus of their elementary form of life. Few humans have been allowed to see these beings, as the variation between them and the present form of Vulcanid life is so vast as to be almost incomprehensible to humanity. The shock to the unprepared human mind, in realising that it is not dealing with its own kind — for the "revised" Vulcanid resembles a human uncannily — is truly unnerving.

  I have seen members of the aboriginal colony of Vulcanids.

  I must not describe them. It is against the Law, both of humanity and of Vulcanid life.

  This I will say, though. I believe the present form of Vulcanid is something more than a mere imitation of mankind. I believe it is a benevolent being, with the interests of what remains of mankind as close to its heart as are its own interests. I have come to respect the Vulcanid way of life and of thought. It can never replace humanity, but it may, at some remote age in the future, merge with humanity — if, as I said before, any of us remain.

  And now I pick up the threads of this narrative.

  After I had been prepared by Krill Hvensor for my new life in a new world, I was allotted living quarters. The phrase "living quarters," though, hardly describes what I found. I had imagined that I should be sent to live in some bizarre dwelling of the Vulcanid kind — though I had no idea of what that kind might be.

  In fact, I found myself installed in a pleasant apartment that might have been my own flat in the London suburbs. I had the nearest imitation to English furniture I could wish for, I had wonderful food — that might have been prepared in the kitchens of the Ritz, I even had radio and television. These two amenities were the Vulcanids' greatest pride. With the aid of Terrestrial technicians they had established a radio station and television transmitter delivering better programmes than London's B.B.C. The artists, actors and others were Terrestrials, and amazingly good material they produced. The technicians, once the installation of the transmitters was accomplished, were the incredibly brilliant Vulcanid radio experts.

  I had good company (of which I shall speak soon), I had comfort, I had leisure or I had work, as I wished.

  But I had no view from my windows.

  The reason was that life is confined to the lower levels of the planet's surface. If my flat had been sited in the arcade of Piccadilly Underground Station, I would have had as good a view as I found when I tried to look out of the windows of my rooms on Vulcan. Later, I found that some enterprising members of our Colony had had television screens installed instead of windows, and they had but to turn the right switch to get the view they wanted. But — it was an artificial view.

  I mentioned Piccadilly Underground's arcade. The parallel might be drawn even further, for "outdoors"

  in the Colony was much like that. True, the inexhaustible zeal of the Vulcanids for our welfare provided fine walks and excellent surroundings wherever we went in our Colony. But — it was all artificial.

  We lived, in short, underground. We had to live there, because the planet's great distance from the sun meant that the external surface temperature was almost too low to support life.

  Our apartments were devised in small groups, and our plight made us all moderately good neighbours.

  After all, there were not so many of us humans there that we could pick and choose our friends. The total muster of the Colony amounted to something over eight hundred, and, whether it was because of our marooned condition, or whether it was because better health brought better tempers, we got on pretty well together.

  I had as immediate neighbour an extraordinarily good fellow named Thomas Ludlam, who, combined with Krill Hvensor, was responsible for my mental acceptance of my position there.

  When I was introduced to my new home, I found Thomas Ludlam in possession of the kitchen. He was engaged in the very homely — and very terrestrial — task of boiling eggs in a pan over a hot plate.

  He might have been an old friend by the way he spoke to me.

  "I've invited myself for tea," he said. "And I thought eggs wouldn't come amiss."

  This was my first word from a member of my kind in weeks of time and millions of miles of travell
ing.

  For a moment I doubted whether Krill Hvensor's "teaching" were genuine, but something in my mind seemed to click (as it always did when I felt a doubt in the reality of my situation).

  We sat down to tea like a couple of old bachelors. Old, did I say? I was (by Terrestrial reckoning) thirty-six years old. Thomas, I later learnt, not without a sharp twinge of shock, was nearly 200 years old (again by Terrestrial reckoning). But, according to Vulcanid measurement of time, he was barely sixty.

  He was a stoutish, rosy-faced fellow, was Thomas Ludlam. He had been a serving soldier with (I still find it hard to believe, but I must believe it) the British Army in the Peninsular Wars. And he had been a Vulcanid "guest" for something like 150 years. Later, I learnt that he was the first human contact provided for most newcomers, and he and I became most attached to each other.

  The great object of Thomas's life was to educate himself to the standard of his older brother, who had been a country parson when Thomas was "annexed" by the Vulcanid Disc. Thomas himself had been, I later learnt, the black sheep of a good, decent farming family. He had been a good soldier, although he himself was modest and reticent about his achievements in that direction, but had always regarded himself, in his later years on Earth, as being an ignorant man.

  From the beginning of his time on Vulcan, he had set himself to improve his standards of education, with the result that when t met him he was a veritable encyclopedia of assorted knowledge. He spoke — and spoke well — most European languages, and could rarely be floored with any question that would normally be answerable by a person with a first-class university education of the twentieth century.

  His self-chosen work as "first contact" for most of the Terrestrials brought to Vulcan had given him a wide circle of friends who came to value him highly. He was father-confessor, tutor and guide to the ways of Vulcan to most of us there, having lived in the Terrestrial Colony for longer than any of us. But with all this, he was essentially a modest, self-effacing fellow always.

  His contemporaries among the Terrestrials had all died, and Thomas had adapted himself amazingly well to the style and customs of those who came later. Sometimes, his speech would betray his period, but it was in vain that one could hope to catch him out in the soldier's language — or even common slang — of his period. His search for knowledge had brought with it a fine manner of speaking, and he had gathered on the way none of the odd mixture of different periods of slang that abounded in our Colony.

  For it was one of my greatest surprises to find that our English speech had changed so much in the comparatively short time in which all my fellow-Terrestrials had been taken to Vulcan. There was the odd, and to me, absurd slang of Victorian days exchanged in conversation for the forced heartiness of the 1914-1918 war vernacular. There was the brittle and ill-adapted speech of the early American sound films bandied for the affected argot of the Kensington of the Bright Young People's era. There was schoolboy idiom of every period in the last hundred Terrestrial years, and there was the spurious bonhomie of the sporting hearties spread over the same period.

  But Thomas just spoke good English that would have been good in any age. Here and there a phrase or two that sounded over-polite to my ears showed that he had been brought up in an age when courtesy was appreciated, even by a private soldier of Wellington's army.

  It took me several weeks to get even slightly accustomed to the fact that I was there on Vulcan for good. For Thomas had broken it to me — philosophically, but nevertheless positively — that, at least in his time, no Terrestrial had ever made the journey back. He himself sighed more than once for a sight of a cricket match, for he had heard such glowing accounts of the pleasures of watching cricket (grossly over-rated accounts, to my infidel way of thinking) that he longed above all else to see the giants of cricket. But they were giants, alas! whom neither he nor anyone else on Vulcan would ever see. He could recite the prowess of W. G. Grace, although his own Terrestrial experience of cricket had been confined to knock-abouts on a few village greens as a lad. He could recount accurately the records of Bradman and Fender, and could discourse on the advantages of stonewalling as against those of flashy play.

  It was Thomas who gradually presented me to our fellow-exiles, and Thomas who took me on the grand tour of our tiny Colony.

  The first Terrestrial I was to meet, apart from Thomas, was Leo Arabin. The name had been blazoned across the front pages of the world's newspapers in the 1950's — "Where Is Arabin?" — "Arabin Reported Seen Behind Iron Curtain" — "Arabin Witnesses Recalled Again" — that was the sort of thing we had come to associate with the name. I had even been sent out to Egypt by Lord Fasting to do one of my ridiculous bright "specials" on Arabin's disappearance.

  Leo Arabin had been a famous pilot in his day. His feats had been the aim and envy of every schoolboy until the inter-planetary craze overtook the world's boyhood. In 1950, he had been in Fayid, working with a Royal Air Force detachment on testing the then new Lightning interceptor plane. The great feature of this aircraft, as I had good reason to know, having swotted it up on my way to do my story, was its incredible speed in what was an almost vertical climb. Its ceiling was several thousand feet higher than any other plane of its type, too.

  Arabin had taken his Lightning up one morning, and — he had never come down. There were plenty of witnesses who deposed, again and again, that they had plotted his near-vertical course until the aircraft was out of range of their instruments. This statement had been the cause of inquiries without number, for the instruments in use had included optical equipment of an unprecedentedly high quality.

  But there it was. Question how they might, the inquirers could never get beyond that point, on which all the witnesses were fast. Arabin had gone up and had never come down.

  There was another insoluble point. Besides the new optical apparatus to enable the flight to be followed by the eye, there was a quantity of electronic equipment, and the radar spotters had seen and heard Arabin's plane speed to its vanishing point. That meant that it had shot through its normal ceiling by many, many miles; so many miles, in fact, that every medical authority swore that Arabin must have been a dead man before the spotters lost sight of him.

  When Thomas lightly mentioned to me one morning, then, that he proposed bringing Leo Arabin round for a game of chess, I was, for a second, incredulous. And then I knew.

  Where else could Arabin have vanished to?

  And when Arabin came, and had laughed sufficiently at my amazement, we talked about his

  disappearance, and the disappearance of so many others who had presented everlasting riddles to the people of their day.

  Later, Arabin took me to see the identical Lightning that had carried him out of the sight of men that morning in 1950. It had been brought to Vulcan as easily as he himself had been brought, and there it lay, in an underground salon, alongside other aircraft that told their own tale. There were planes from the vintage years of the early 1900's, there were flimsy biplanes of the first World War period, there were American fighters without number, apparently — and every one completely useless on Vulcan.

  For unprotected flight in the atmosphere of Vulcan was impossible, owing to the almost constant barrage of asteroids and meteorites that fell on the surface.

  Vulcan, I learnt, was, in truth, in the asteroidal belt that Terrestrial astronomers had long known and plotted in that orbit. It had not always been so. Within the history of Vulcanid civilisation, there had been complete immunity from the deadly deluge that had driven all life underground.

  But for several thousand years now, existence on the surface of Vulcan had demanded the shelter of a repellent screen. The Disc ships were entirely armoured in this manner against the terrible

  bombardment from space, but even so, it sometimes happened that an electrically charged particle of cosmic matter defeated the screen, and disintegrated the Disc.

  Through the good offices of Krill Hvensor, Arabin and I were privileged to make a short
tour of the surface of Vulcan. Shot obliquely into the outside atmosphere, we found our Disc high above what had been a great city. Now it was nothing more than a series of neat conical piles of masonry. These, I learnt, were in actual fact structures that had resisted, to some extent, the tremendous barrage. Their shape, viewed from above, brought a vague memory to my mind, and it was Arabin who enlightened me.

  "Ever fly over the Pyramids at Gizeh?" he asked, nodding downwards towards the regularly shaped mounds below us.

  He nodded as I apparently showed my recognition of the shapes.

  "That's what they are — no more, no less — pyramids," he said. "And that's all that remains in the way of external structures on this world."

  We looked down, in deep thought.

  "You know — or did you know? — that they originated the pyramid shape?" he asked.