The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  The milk bottles were still clattering into infinity when I left the hut. The mist dried up the sound, tightening it in, muffling it.

  Outside again, I could tell, by the unsoothing rhythm of that fatigued bit of corrugated roof, that the breeze was rising, very slightly, all the time. I went to the building with its roof thus afflicted, tried to read the weather-stripped paint on the door inscription. Illegible. And the board hung down from one rusted screw. On entering, clearly offices.

  Office to office…muck and rubbish everywhere. It did not have the appearance of a unit that had merely been closed down. There was even a sheet of paper inserted in one of the typewriters…Half-finished letter:

  Research Institute, Moorbridge, Cumberland. April 21, 1959

  Mr Guy Endleby,

  K.L.K. Electronics Ltd.,

  Trasgate New Town,

  Herts.

  Dear Guy:

  ref: Closed-Circuit Television

  Thank you for your letter dated April 15. I am sorry I could not deal with this sooner, as I explained on the telephone yesterday, but pressure of work has delayed the decision concerning the use of television to examine the internal processes of Structure 1.

  I understand, though, from you that you have a complete unit available for remote-controlled operation, adapted for colour on 625 lines. This would suit very well, although I understand that your research department are not keen to let us have the use of it as they have unofficially promised it elsewhere.

  In the absence of a committee decision, it is not possible to comment on priorities and I am not empowered myself to make a decision, as you know.

  At the same time, you must be aware that there are certain aspects of this matter which have become far more urgent lately, and in the circumstances I feel that your department should be urged to bjhxcppp

  Just that. The edge of the paper had been chewed away by rats. The corruption of letters at the end implied sudden catastrophe and my eyes shot up to the clock on the wall. Exactly the same time as the one in the guard-room: 4.31.

  Whatever they had proposed to look for inside the egg with a television camera they had evidently been too late.

  I re-emerged into the fog-bound lane, wondered where I might locate the canteen building where Nicola once had lunched. I tried to picture it: a sprucely-clean, pale-blue-painted rectangle with chequered tablecloths? Her little group…the father, Julian Gray, over-paternal, over-interested in his beautiful daughter of seventeen, less so in the mother who was dying? — vaguely aware of his inadequacy and making up for it by producing a puppy out of some pet shop in haste, only to see it absorbed into Time/Space out there in the clearing?

  I found the place, eerie as it was now, with cobwebs hanging low over the tables and mould growing on shattered dinner plates.

  I tried to open a window, for it looked out directly, I knew, on the electrically-fenced area where the egg-shaped thing had stood. The filthed-up glass of the window was impenetrable; and I had to break the corroded hasp to get the window open.

  The fence was there…no doubt about it. Porcelain insulators supporting copper wire gone green with oxidation. I felt a thrum of dread as I tried to see beyond the wire. Although swirls of mist still rolled across my eyeline the wind was picking up and blowing it away rapidly. I couldn’t quite see far enough, but decided to follow in the wake of Bandy six years before. I guessed at the door he must have taken, went through it, found it took me on to a kind of patio and I followed this around till I was facing the clearing.

  Hill mist like this can be deceptive, and quite suddenly it cleared.

  I could see everything: I could see the superstructure on which the egg had stood; I could see the main building of the Institute — a handsome, modern affair of three stories, but — again — strangely pitted for its age. The clock on the front showed the predictable hour at which everything, apparently, had stopped.

  And I walked toward the concrete mounting.

  This, then, was terror.

  I hadn’t experienced it before…though I had used that word — erroneously — to describe fear of a different kind.

  But I had never experienced that needle-bath of tormented nerve ends, all over my body, sending areas of my skin alternately numb and rigid, like tulk. This sudden bath of universal sweat, which seemed to pour into my clothes like a menthol injection into freezing fuel — this was new. So was the difficulty I had over muscular co-ordination, as I took the last few faltering strides which brought me up short at the foot of the superstructure that dominated the clearing.

  The only sound was the moaning of the rising wind in the uppermost struts — those which would no doubt have clamped down the top of the egg, and the eternal tink-tank-tink! of that loose bit of roof…

  And then, suddenly, after a kind of mental ‘click’, complete silence.

  I’d never before been aware of such astonishing silence. In acoustical research they sometimes use a room known as a padded cell. This is merely a chamber so deadened by padding that you can hear your own head-noises — that background hiss like an amplifier turned full up but with nothing to amplify.

  It felt like that up here; yet I was out in the open. And the nearer I drew to the louvres in the vent the more intense the silence became.

  This was sheer madness. You can’t have a source of silence. Silence is merely absence of noise; and if I moved a couple of feet from the louvres I could at least hear the shuffling of my own feet, the faint aggregate of tiny night-noises that make up what we call silence but which nevertheless falls far short of it.

  With my ear nine inches from the louvres the dizziness returned.

  And with it, something else…something that came from within me…a sort of static experience.

  An event trying to happen.

  I drew back sharply, and thought this out. I thought of the apparently asinine remark I’d made to the doctor and repeated to Tesh:

  ‘I don’t know: it hasn’t happened yet.’

  *

  And then it did.

  I was in brilliant sunshine.

  My eyes travelled slowly up the sun-blazed superstructure before me.

  And there it was…this huge, shining-copper capsule, an elliptoid…slightly egg-shaped, mounted above a steel ladder, the focal point of the fenced-off clearing.

  The focal point of Space/Time.

  The clock! What did it say now? My eyes darted across to where I expected to see that pitted concrete building.

  The building wasn’t the same — or rather, it was as it once had been…blanche-white, now, flooded in sunshine.

  The clock had jumped backwards to four-fifteen.

  Around me everywhere was excited activity. And the man who emerged from the concrete building then ran across the clearing, swinging wide the gate of the electric fence and breaking the circuit, suddenly saw me and yelled: “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Get the blazes out of the danger area, and report to the gate!” He turned to someone in a white coat who had run up beside him. “I thought,” he raged, “I made it quite clear on the loudspeaker system that the area was to be cleared of all visiting personnel an hour ago?”

  The white-coated man seemed quite used to this kind of thing. He put a hand on his boss’s shoulder and said: “Okay, Herbie, I’ll deal with it.” To me, politely: “They shouldn’t have given you a pass. It’s not your fault. Do you know your way out?”

  I stood there immobile for a few seconds, uncertain what to do.

  Over Brundash’s shoulder I could see that on the zigzag road that led to K.L.K.’s laboratory a group of cars had stopped halfway down the hill, the sun reflected with brilliant dazzle in the chrome of their headlights. A few people had got out and were gathered near the edge of the escarpment, looking down in our direction. Dimly, I wondered whether they were out of range, whether they might be influenced by anything the egg might be capable of at thirty-one minutes past the hour.

  Brundash stood with his wiry a
rms folded. He wore a large, black-dialled wristwatch and his shirtsleeves were rolled back, revealing powerful, hairy arms. His face, topped by short grey hair bristling straight up, was browny-red tanned, was immensely powerful, was the emblem of his own total obsessions. Science drove him on and he was its executor.

  I looked from Brundash to his white-coated assistant, then I turned and left the area, feeling Brundash’s eyes burning through my back.

  I walked off as if I were about to take the exit road. But when I reached the patio I doubled back into the office that I had found dead and dilapidated when I had last seen it.

  Now it was alive with action, with anticipation. I went straight to the typewriter in which I had found the unfinished letter. At this time there was nothing on the platen. The secretaries and staff didn’t question my presence there…they were far too busy. Some of them were snatching brief glances at what was going on outside in the clearing, then returning to the hum of a crescendo-crisis.

  I went up to one girl, indicated the typewriter I was interested in, and asked her: “Whose typewriter is that?”

  She paused for a second, in the act of snatching something or other out of a file. Impatiently someone across the room shouted: “And hurry up, Jane. Please!” Jane, the girl I had approached, mouthed “keep your hair on!” under her breath and turned her attention irritably to me. “Which? Oh, that’s mine. I’m afraid you can’t borrow it. I shall need it in two minutes.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Jane!”

  “Com-ing!”

  She crossed, handed the man whatever it was he wanted and clicked a pair of heels through into the corridor.

  I followed her.

  She went through a glass door, but left it ajar.

  A voice said: “Jane, we must get on with this.”

  “All right. Sorry. There’s such a panic on.”

  “You should be used to it.”

  I knew the voice, tried to place it for a moment. Couldn’t.

  He said, sarcastically: “I suppose you know where we got to?”

  She read back the dictation from her shorthand. “‘I understand, though, from you, that you have a complete unit for remote-controlled operation, adapted for colour on six-two-five lines.’”

  “Right…er, same paragraph…’This would suit very well, although I understand that your research department are not keen to let us have the use of it as they have — quite without authority from here — promised it somewhere else…’ Yes?”

  “You’d better not say that, Dr Davvitt. It’s difficult enough to get anything out of Mr Endleby as it is.”

  “Oh, very well! Well put: ‘As they have unofficially promised it elsewhere…’ Finish off the letter how you like. But get some action.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m due in the control room. No calls till after the Pulse.”

  “Dr Davvitt?”

  Irritably: “What now, for God’s sake?”

  Hesitantly (afraid? — hard to tell): “Why…is the control room built in that funny way?”

  “Funny? It seldom makes me laugh.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Davvitt (now reluctant, guarded): “Are you referring to the shielding?”

  “What’s it for?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say.”

  The girl persisted: “It’s…it’s for when the Pulses grow stronger. Isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. But that won’t be yet.”

  “But when they do?”

  “Well, naturally we’ll evacuate the whole area.”

  “But how does anyone know for certain what the…”

  Angry, patronizing: “The amplitude of such pulses is known to an enormous degree of accuracy. What do you think we have computers for?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Stop wondering. Type my letter instead.” Afterthought, as he scraped back his chair. “It’s urgent. I particularly want to see the inside of the shell. It’s very important after this Pulse especially.”

  Something about his tone seemed to worry the girl. But I couldn’t wait to study her reaction. Davvitt was coming through, into the corridor.

  I got out of the way to let him pass, staying out of sight. From my position I could see both what was going on outside and the activities in the office; and Jane went through and sorted top sheet, carbon and copy-paper. As yet: puzzled, uneasy perhaps…but calm.

  4.22.

  Davvitt paused for a moment by the electric fence, watching Brundash, who was still with the white-coated man who had spoken to me earlier. Davvitt shouted something — he seemed angry, or at least irritable — but Brundash raised an impatient hand. Davvitt continued across the clearing.

  Meanwhile I had a nice piece of doublethink to work out.

  Should I warn the people around me?

  On the face of it, there was good reason for doing this. By virtue of the desolation I knew was to follow it was apparent that all these people were in very grave danger from some force which was completely inexplicable in normal terms. Were they, then, in range of the thing? — and was it about to give forth a Pulse of greater dimensions than the one calculated?

  By what rubbishy brand of over-confidence had this madman Brundash supposed he could compute the epic force of that Creativity responsible for the Genesis of an entire Universe?

  In that brief moment I dared — in my capacity of ‘playboy’ — merely to be angry with him, angry for the chaotic conceit of the cult of the Smug.

  How dare they not learn from the dead trees of Hiroshima?

  It was unmistakable now: Brundash was panicky.

  Fighting it, he avoided rushing the steel ladder that runged-up the latticework of the structure. He was trying to hide his own fears. Yet his portable instruments had told him something he dreaded. Death and he mounted that ladder as one — but with discretion.

  Knowing what I did, could I do anything for these people?

  Then the loudspeaker system — Davvitt’s voice. It boomed all around: “What’s the trouble?”

  The words belched harshly — with just the merest hint of impatience rather than anxiety — from pairs of loudspeakers mounted on poles around the camp.

  The valley echoed back: ‘What’s the trouble?’ in duplicate, triplicate…endlessly.

  Davvitt from the control room, then.

  So where was the control room?

  There were several concrete blisters, just showing their domes above ground. Sealed-in tight, in an effort to be safe from something? So what about the other people? — Didn’t they matter?

  Davvitt’s voice again, reverberating importantly around the valley. Still not seriously troubled. Still not realizing. Just giving the count-down mark…“Eight minutes.”

  I glanced up for a moment at the zigzag. One of the sun-flashed cars was turning. Had someone got the message of fear somehow? Even up there? — a couple of miles off?

  Davvitt, of course, would be watching everything on TV. All except the inside of the egg. They hadn’t been in time with that. What would they have seen if they had?

  Brundash gesticulated toward one of the blisters, then pointed toward his cars. The white-coated assistant with him nodded and handed up a black box with headphones and a mike.

  Evidently Brundash started talking rapidly into the mike, and equally evidently he wasn’t being heard.

  Again, the loudspeakers. More urgent, now: “I can’t hear a thing. I don’t think your transmitter is working. Less than eight minutes to go, Herbie. Do you want me to come over?”

  Brundash shook his head energetically, then said something short and sharp to the white-coated man, who nodded several times, then hurried off at a run, through the gate of the electric fence, toward the control-room blister.

  I looked again into the office. There was now quite a huddle of people by the window. I couldn’t lose anything by going over. Nobody was interested in the slightest about who I was. At the same time they didn
’t realize how bad things were out there.

  I chose Jane. She was pretty, mouse-haired; normally she would be efficient, calm, able to ride crises as a matter of routine. Now she looked pale, was screwing and unscrewing the winder of her watch, had to do something to calm herself.

  I offered her a cigarette. It happened to be a Sterling.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Sterling! Is that a new kind?”

  I remembered with a jolt that the brand hadn’t existed in her day. “There’s a new sort out every week,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  She tried to look unconcerned. “Just a routine Pulse.”

  “Do they occur at regular intervals?”

  “No. I think they’re on a…what is it? — a parabolic curve…whatever that means.”

  “It means they start off close together and get farther and farther apart.”

  She looked at me suddenly. “As they get bigger?”

  “Yes.” — How odd though. A parabola is virtually half of an egg…

  Still looking at me, still sounding casual, she went on: “There seems to be a breakdown of communications or something. Radios don’t always work near that horrible thing, anyway.”

  I asked: “Is it so horrible?”

  She smiled it off. “Probably I’m exaggerating.”

  “Try me.”

  “Well…a few weeks ago there was that dog…Did you know about that?”

  Evenly, I replied: “I heard about it.”

  “The girl was terribly upset.”

  “But what happened to the dog?” I asked.

  “They say it died.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  She shrugged, drifted across to her typewriter, made a desultory attempt to go on with the letter, typed a few words. ‘In the absence of a committee decision…’

  Not far to go now.

  And I couldn’t help it. I said: “I have a feeling we ought to get out of here.”

  She looked up, very surprised. “Are you a scientist?”

  “Not exactly. What made you ask that?”

  “I didn’t think you could be. They’re all so confident.”