The cynic might cite this dead assembly as typical of the stupidity of politics. Here, he might say, are the men who had urged every living person to seek safety elsewhere — and look how they took their own advice!
But I am convinced that it had not been like that. These men and women had known what dreadful menace hung over them, and had been caught here even in the act of trying to find a way of safety for others. It was an appalling sight, but one that made us proud.
Even as we walked quietly down the carpet that bordered the opposing lines of benches, many of the figures, disturbed by our steps, crumbled into dust, with a ghastly whisper of collapse.
This enormous building, and the enormous system that had been built up within it over the centuries, now stood derelict and useless. But for how long? The thought and the question could be taken as the whole theme of our own existence. When, we might have asked ourselves, would mankind rise to the level of those who had died there? And when would he have need again of such a building, or such a tribunal?
Across Parliament Square, at the Abbey, was a similar harrowing sight. Inside the Abbey a great congregation had been gathered when the blast — if blast it had been — had struck London. Here, though, there was little to remind one so sharply of humanity as there had been in the House of Commons. Heaps of clothes on the floor, stuffed with piles of the hideous grey dust, told their sad tale.
Between us, we spent an hour trying to close all the doors of the Abbey so that the winds and rains might not disturb those patient worshippers in their great shrine.
The railway termini, in contrast, were almost deserted. Humanity had sought out the swiftest escape from the overtaking plague, and trains — already in their decline in 1963 — had been abandoned on account of their slowness.
But even here there had been men and women going about their everyday life. Possibly they had been sceptics, who had been caught and struck down in their doubt even as they waited for the loop line train to Dartford, or the fast express to Edinburgh. The very sight of such trains, waiting at the platforms, was pathetic. Never again would they steam northward or glide out along the electrified lines to the suburbs and the South Coast.
At Euston we found a particularly distressing sight. The catastrophe must have struck as an express was drawing in, and the engine's crew had been destroyed before they could stop the train. It lay, piled up in an ugly mass of twisted, rusty steel, with piles of fallen masonry on top of it.
The titanic shock had wrecked the two great pillars opposite the entrance to the station, and they leaned against each other drunkenly. Walls and steel columns inside the station had toppled as the express had sheered through the buffers and crashed into the street beyond.
Everywhere in the streets we saw London's red buses, mostly drawn up neatly to the kerb, as though the drivers had at least received a few seconds' warning. Few of the drivers' cabins. held an occupant, which lent support to the theory we had formed, that some seconds must have elapsed between awareness of approaching, death and the calamity itself.
Here and there, though, as at Euston, death had struck too swiftly. Where this had happened, we found vehicles massed together, and sometimes an overturned car or bus told of the sudden death that had overtaken the drivers. But on the whole, London's streets were comparatively sparsely populated. The world had migrated swiftly — and vainly — to the Poles when the warning came, leaving behind only a few who could not, or would not, go.
We did not doubt that, had no warning of any kind been received, the streets themselves would have been veritable charnel pits. As it was, although there were plenty of vehicles to be seen in the streets, there must have been a vastly greater number that headed North when the exodus started.
One fact that impressed us all deeply was the loyal attachment so many victims had shown to their work. Wherever there was a machine, there beside it was the man whose duty it had been to tend it.
Staffs may have been depleted, but nearly always someone had stayed behind to mind the machines.
In the odd instances where people had left their machines and fled, they had carefully made everything safe first. But sometimes we found machines with their minders lying beside them amid a scene of indescribable confusion. Sometimes, the man had died before he could turn off the machine, which had gone on running. Here and there, where the power had been taken from the mains, the machines had run down of their own accord as the power failed. But in places where power had been generated on the premises some of them had raced madly on, until at last their bearings had burnt out, or until the grossly accelerated speed had flung off the connecting drive.
More than one fire had been started by these means, and it was rare to find a workshop or industrial plant that had been left perfect by the sudden catastrophe.
Our hurried tours of investigation took us, too, to such places as the B.B.C., where we found almost a full staff lying dead in the offices and studios. Beside one microphone lay the body of an announcer, whose hand still held the script of the warning he was to have delivered to the country. On the table before him was a tea cup, long dried up, and now filled with the unpleasant fungoid growth that seemed to have attacked all inanimate organic substances.
The wide spread of this fungus seemed to indicate that there was a form of life that had been determined to blossom to the full now that higher life was no longer there to menace it. Where-ever we found a dairy, there sprouted great forests of greenish fungus. All unprotected food had given harbour to the uncouth growth, and we early made it a rule to leave such premises alone.
Had the catastrophe come ten or twenty years earlier, the fungus would no doubt have gained a far greater hold. But by the time the blow struck, England, at least, had gone far towards protection of food. Only such items as milk, bread, meat and vegetables were sometimes sold unprotected, and the bottles of milk — once thought the safest and best protected of all food — had burst as the fungus impatiently spread within them.
It was a frightful sight, and had we not had the knowledge that the fungus had only seized hold of these comparatively few substances we should have been disheartened in all our work.
Our weak position, as a handful of men and women battling against fungoid growths, would have been intolerable, and we should in all likelihood have given up all effort and settled down to live out our own lives and then leave the world to the fungus. We had expected to find such substances as paper attacked, too, but here the fungus had held off. True, in the great domed reading room of the British Museum we found slight coatings of it, but the air purification system there seemed to have held the growths at bay.
We spent some days conducting the Virians round the museums, expecting them to be awed at our civilisation's progress. The opposite was the case, however, as we should have known if we had thought about it beforehand. Their own civilisation, even before their captivity by the Vulcanids, had been inexpressibly longer than ours. They saw in the museum exhibits, however, evidence of our rapid progress in reaching the civilisation that had produced Professor Vogel and his bungling assistants.
We did not confine ourselves to London. Small parties, who knew the districts, were sent out to other cities. Birmingham was the farthest exploration point. Everywhere our scouts found the same story told by the poor heaps of dust that had once been men and women. Seaports on the south coast were investigated, but we could not do this anything like efficiently in the time we had to spare.
The cars we sent out on these trips were, of course, fitted with two-way radio communication. We could not afford the risk of even one member of our small party being lost or injured, and anyone who travelled beyond walking distance of his home always carried two-way radio.
At Parkside and at the farm, radio receivers had been installed, tuned to the wave-lengths of any travellers who might be out, and to the main party's wave-length, besides that of the opposite station.
Thus, Parkside always had a receiver tuned to the farm, to the main p
arty, and to the travellers. The farm receiver was similarly tuned, except, of course, that its first tuning was to Parkside.
Loudspeakers in various rooms and outside both premises ensured that someone always heard the message being transmitted. There was, though, an operator always supposed to be on duty at each station. These precautions were necessary, we believed, because we dare not lose touch with one of our small band. Our numbers were so small that, for instance, a severe outbreak of influenza might have reduced us to nothing.
On health grounds, though, we had little to complain of. Axel carried out weekly checks on every one of us, Virians included, and it was rare for him to prescribe any treatment. Our initial timidity and innate fear of losing each other made us especially careful of accidents, too.
During the first winter, Axel pronounced three more of the women pregnant, one of them being Elinor House, the coloured girl. She had taken Eddie Springer, her brother's friend, as her "husband," although — to her disquiet — there had been no wedding ceremony possible.
There had been several "marriages," each ceremony being confined to the official announcement that So-and-So was now the wife of This-or-That. With such a small number of women among us, it might be thought that there would be trouble between the men, or that polyandry would spring up. But here again, our plight seemed to have changed the nature of such matters. We just could not afford trouble between ourselves, though I have no doubt that, under more populous conditions in the world, such a proportion of women to men would have precipitated disaster.
This, then, was our system of living at the end of the first winter. We had come through the cold weather well, and were now able to look around us and assess the long hours of work we had put in.
We had plentiful supplies of everything we needed for our immediate use; we had stored away everything we could imagine as being wanted by other generations; and we had become acclimatised to our position.
In April came a sickening shock.
A frenzied radio message from the farm announced that Vulcanids had been seen in some force.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Harry Crow Eyes, the Indian, had been on radio watch all day, and as we all returned in the dusk of the evening, he turned the switch to the loudspeaker positions as he sauntered out to meet us.
He stood on the steps as we got out of our cars, and lazily stretched. He hated radio duty.
"Shouldn't mind it," he used to say, "if only I could bring in the Groucho Marx Half Hour now'n again.
And what wouldn't I give, brother, to hear a ball game again!"
He stood yawning on the top step, when a breathless voice came over the loudspeaker over his head.
"Parkside! Parkside! There are Vulcanids at Primswood!"
We missed the next few words as we all scrambled to the microphone.
"All right, farm!" Leo called back. "Steady... we're with you... Are you in any danger?"
"Not yet," the voice came back, "but we don't know much about 'em. Couple of the Virians saw them first and just got back with the news."
"O.K. — put 'em on the mike if they're with you now," Leo ordered.
A second later came a Virian voice. "Yes. We saw them round the Disc we left there. How many? I think thirty — perhaps forty. Full grown."
"How did they get there? Any Discs been sighted?"
"No. No Discs sighted. We think they were in the Disc that was already there..."
Arabin caught his breath sharply. It was a startling thought that we might have had Vulcanids among us all this time.
He turned to Krill Hvensor. "How can we destroy them?" he asked. "Can they be shot?"
Krill Hvensor shook his head. "We never knew that," he replied. "That's not the sort of thing they'd allow us to know."
"All right, farm." Arabin turned to the microphone again. "We'll send a party down now. Be with you in twenty minutes. Meanwhile... if there's danger keep out of their way. They can't move about much, thank God! Keep 'em in sight if you can — and keep tuned to this and the traveller wave-length."
A score of us took eight cars. We had a stock of arms at Parkside — as they had at the farm, too — and each of us took a sub-machine gun and an automatic pistol. We also flung a dozen rifles in the back of one of the cars, in case we could not get close enough for the smaller weapons.
It had grown dark before we reached Lewisham, but our powerful lights, and the absence of any other traffic, enabled us to keep up speed, and we swung into the farm gates less than half an hour after the call had come through.
We found the Virians at the farm panic-stricken — almost the first time we had seen them show any emotion. They had reason, of course, for they knew the Vulcanids and we did not. Their fear was based on the belief that they would once more come under the mental control of the creatures from Vulcan, rather than that they would suffer physically.
However, we succeeded in quietening them to some extent, but left them at the farm — except for Krill Hvensor, who wished to accompany us — when we set out for Primswood Place.
The Virians who had first sighted the monsters had told us where to find them, and Krill Hvensor believed that we should still see them in the same place. They could move, he had told us, but only slowly.
We drew up our cars outside the rails of the park, and turned them to face the spot where we knew the Disc to be. The headlights of the cars picked it up after a little manoeuvring, and we saw, for the first time, true Vulcanids.
Thomas Ludlam had been right.
They were sea anemones.
And yet — they could not be; they just could not be. A sea anemone withdraws into itself and folds into a flabby mass when taken out of water, but these...
They stood, in a bunch to one side of the Disc. Each one must have been eight feet tall. Semi-transparent, they moved slightly, seeming to bow and bend flexibly. A great mass of willowy tentacles spread from the top of each of the monsters, and as our lights picked them up, they all seemed to lower these fringe-crowned heads and bend them in our direction.
"I'm going to try a shot," whispered Arabin, reaching over for a rifle. He stood in the driving seat of the big open tourer, and flexed his knees as he lowered the rifle on to the top of the windscreen. Then he withdrew his eye from the sights.
"Keep them covered, everyone. Take 'em five to a car, in order from the end as they stand. I'll try the pinkish one on this side first," he called.
He set his sights and took aim.
All ten shots he fired, but with no effect.
"I'll swear they all went home on this pink chap," he muttered.
I grabbed my binoculars from the side pocket of the car. 'Try again, and I'll mark the shots," I told him.
I focused on the pink creature. "All right. Let him have it," I breathed.
The car windscreen jerked violently from the recoil of the rifle, and I hurriedly slipped out and stood on the ground, where I could watch without my binoculars being jarred off my target.
I saw nine shots crunch into the body of the Vulcanid, but the creature showed not the slightest awareness of being hit. It flexed and bowed towards the others, just as if it was carrying on a polite conversation with them.
Arabin picked up his microphone. The channel had been open throughout our journey and during our halt by the park rails.
"Hello, farm!" he called. "You heard that? Twenty shots at the bastards — and no effect. Got any clues?"
Back came the voice of our good old Thomas.
"I don't think they even know you're trying to destroy them, Leo," he answered. "They've no bone structure, and their tissues most probably heal at once. I've been trying to get the Virians here to talk.
They might have seen a Vulcanid injured, or dying, at some time. That would help us. But, rot them!
They say they can't ever remember seeing one injured."
The Vulcanids made no move, and seemed rooted to the ground.
"Krill Hvensor!" Leo called. "Do these damn things t
ake root! Will they move if I go over there?"
"They stand still in darkness, Leo Arabin — but keep away from them. These do not seem like the ones on Hafna. These are different... I am afraid. Leave them until daylight."
But Leo was out of the car, carrying his sub-machine gun, and through the gates of the park. He walked slowly towards the monsters, keeping to the dark fringe outside our headlights' beams.
The creatures apparently took no notice of his approaching presence, and continued to bow slowly towards each other, their swaying tentacles questing round in the air about their heads.
Three more figures stalked Leo, one of them Isidore Lopez, carrying a woodman's axe picked up at the farm.
As Arabin came within a dozen feet of the nearest Vulcanid he halted and levelled his gun. There was a sudden prolonged burst, and we saw that his drum was loaded with tracer ammunition. Every flaming bullet pierced the gelatinous body of the creature, and emerged. The streaming streaks of fire continued on their glowing arcs, many of them piercing other Vulcanids.
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