“It’s a meteorite,” he said after taking a prodigious gulp of ale. “And a dashed big one at that. We’re lucky it didn’t land in a more populated spot.”
“So where did it come from?” I asked.
He pointed upwards.
“Who knows?” he said. “It could have been up there for millions of years, minding its own business until caught in our gravity well. Or it could have been part of an asteroid, blown apart by some unimaginable cataclysm. We may never really know. But I intend that we have a jolly good try at answering those questions.”
It seemed to be implied that I was to be included in any investigations, so I did my best to keep my mouth shut and look interested. I was now on the inside of the biggest story of the day. McGuire would never forgive me if I messed things up now.
As it turned out, there was precious little investigation done in the course of a long afternoon. We drank beer, smoked more than was good for us, and we each ate several of the establishment’s excellent pork pies. I was feeling quite mellow, the only cloud on my horizon being the fact that I would have to leave soon if I was to meet the deadline for the evening edition.
But all thought of any such deadlines was suddenly forgotten. A white-faced squaddie arrived at a run and made straight for Challenger.
“The Colonel says you’re to come right away, begging your pardon, sir,” he said. “There’s something happening up at the site.”
The bar emptied fast as journalists tried to beg or bribe their way through the cordon. But I was the one with a smile on my face as I was waved through once more alongside Challenger, trying hard to resist the urge to wave gleefully at the glum faces we left behind.
I felt much less gleeful when we looked down into the hole.
Something had indeed changed. The surface of the rock was no longer smooth. It now looked more like a packed ball of gravel than a smooth stone, and even as we watched, a quarter of the topmost half slid off, pitter-pattering to the ground below. It left behind a deep scar on the surface and, showing through plain as day, a metal surface etched with many strange pictographs.
Of course this new discovery led to some degree of consternation. The Colonel’s first assumption was that this was indeed a bomb, just one that had not yet exploded. He ordered all the men to back off to a safe distance, but Challenger has never been much of one for listening to orders, and he stood his ground. I felt quite the rebel in standing at his side as the military men retreated, leaving us alone on the site.
“The Colonel might have a point,” I said as Challenger started to clamber down into the rubble-filled hole. “It might be a weapon.”
“Nonsense,” the Professor replied, already approaching within touching distance of the thing. “No weapon ever had carvings like this. Come down and see for yourself.”
He said it in a tone that brooked no argument. I picked my way down through the ruin and arrived at his side just as he started to wipe away what was left of the gravel. It crumbled, now little more than ash, below his hand, revealing the object beneath to be a solid metal sphere. As I put out my hand I felt the waves of heat that emanated, even now, from the metal.
“So if it’s not a weapon … it most certainly is not a meteorite. What in blazes is it?” I asked. I realized I had whispered, as if afraid of speaking too loud.
Challenger had no such qualms. “It’s a bally mystery, that’s what it is,” he said, and laughed loudly. “Look here.”
He pointed at the symbols on the sphere’s surface. The one immediately below his finger showed a series of concentric circles, with the fourth one out from the center having been etched deeper into the metal.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Challenger said, but I am afraid I didn’t get his point. He put his finger in the groove and ran it round the circle. “Four out from the center? It can only be one thing. This sphere has come to us from Mars. We’re getting a visit from the neighbors.”
Challenger was so taken with the idea that he looked at me, expecting me to be just as captivated. He didn’t see what happened next. The concentric circles under his finger collapsed in on themselves revealing a dark hole through to the center of the sphere. A wisp of gray smoke puffed out of the hole, and the next thing I knew Challenger was screaming blue murder. Something had leapt out of the cavity and attached itself to his hand. Blood spurted, and Challenger yelled again. He threw his hand away from his body, and whatever had been holding on finally let go. It flew through the air and landed, hard, on the remains of a kitchen sink. It was only then that I got a good look at it.
At first glance it looked like a bloody huge insect: a segmented body one inch in diameter and almost a foot long, with too many legs and a pair of antennae in front that seemed to taste the air. But this was no organic beast. It appeared to be totally made of a shiny, almost mercurial, metal. When the thing moved it flowed almost as much as it ran.
“Get it, Malone,” Challenger shouted, but I could not make my legs move. I could only watch as the thing slid into what had been the outlet of the sink and disappeared from view.
“Dash it,” Challenger shouted. I turned to apologize, just in time to see half a dozen more of the insects crawl from the aperture and taste the air.
“I think it’s time to beat a strategic retreat, old man,” I said. Challenger agreed. I had to give him a hand up the slope on the way out of the crater, for he seemed to be in some pain from the wound he had taken, but he insisted on stopping for a look back as we crested the lip.
More of the creatures, a score at least, had pulled themselves out of the sphere and were scurrying among the ruins. When three of them started to take an interest in us, we turned away and headed at speed from the site.
My first priority was to get Challenger to stand still long enough for us to get a look at the damage to his hand. He had been energized by the whole affair, and his prodigious intellect had burst into action, sparking ideas in all directions. Only the promise of a smoke and a Scotch got him to quiet down, if only for a minute.
The Colonel, of course, wanted to know exactly what had happened, what we had seen, but he refused to believe our stories of “insect machines” and, against our protestations, sent three young squaddies to investigate. I might have been more concerned for their well-being had not I been so keen to see to Challenger’s wound. I frog-marched him back to the Crooked Billet and finally got him to sit down.
The old man had gone quite pale, but seemed none the worse for wear, apart from a nasty wound in the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger. The thing had taken a fingernail-sized chunk out of the Professor. He let me wash the wound, and then he wrapped it in a handkerchief and promptly forgot about it as he kept up a constant flow of speculation.
“It has to be Mars,” he muttered as he lit a cheroot. I passed him a beer and a double whisky. He downed the Scotch in one gulp, chased it down with half a pint of beer and, apparently unaffected, kept muttering. “But why here? Why now?”
“More importantly, I think,” I said. “Where now? Where are those insects? What are they doing?”
He didn’t answer me directly. “The technology is many years beyond ours, of course,” he said. “But think of the challenges involved, Malone, to fling something across millions of miles of space and hit your target, something no more than a small dot in the vastness.”
“Again one has to ask: for what purpose?”
Challenger’s face lit up. “There’s one way to find out. We shall go and ask it.”
I do believe he might have done so there and then had not matters intervened.
At least I got the answer to one of my questions. It became quite clear where the creatures had gone when the screaming started on the far side of the bar.
Someone threw a tankard that struck the wall with a clang and splashed beer all over the floor. At the same time I heard a skittering as something with too many legs ran across wooden floorboards.
“What in blazes was that?” someone else sho
uted. Before anyone could answer, another scream rang out.
“It’s on me leg!” a woman called out. Then she screamed again, not in fear this time, but a high wail of pain. The bar descended into a nightmare scene of pandemonium with people trying to escape running into people trying to see what was going on, people screaming in panic or pain, and everywhere around us the skittering sound of metal on wood.
Finally the noise abated as the bar cleared of people. Challenger looked around. The skittering came again, from three separate points of the room. He drained his tankard of beer, stood, and started advancing toward the nearest spot, in the corner behind the bar itself. I followed, rather more circumspectly. I reached Challenger’s side as he turned around the corner of the bar, and I saw his face go pale again.
A body lay on the floor, dead eyes staring at the ceiling. The poor man had a small hole in his neck at the jugular, and it looked like most of his blood had poured out of him. Red tracks led away along the skirting board, and disappeared around the far end of the bar.
What followed was a seemingly endless round of recriminations, buck-passing and form-filling as the military tried to find someone to blame for the fiasco. Outside the bar, several people needed medical attention, and I busied myself helping them. In doing so I managed to avoid the Colonel’s obvious rage, which was mostly directed at Challenger. The Professor took it all remarkably calmly, which was a matter of some note in itself, for normally he would be giving as good as he got, toe-to-toe with the Colonel in a red-faced bellowing match. I realized why he had controlled himself when the Colonel finally stopped berating him.
“I need to go back up to the site,” Challenger said, calmly. He looked the Colonel straight in the eye. “And I’ll go over your head if I have to.”
The Colonel backed down first. There are not many men who can stand under Challenger’s gaze for too long. I guessed that the officer had already decided that Challenger would be the one to take any flak that might come down from above, and letting the Professor have his head was just another way to ensure that outcome. The officer did, however, have one parting shot.
“If you’re not back in ten minutes, I have given instructions that the site is to be mortar-bombed. I intend to level the area and ensure that nothing will survive.”
The man turned on his heel and left before Challenger could reply. The Professor looked over at me and raised an eyebrow.
“Well, Malone. What say you? Are you still chasing the story?”
It had started to get dark by the time we once again crossed through the cordon. We met three squaddies coming back down from the site.
“Rather you than me, sir,” the eldest of the three said as we passed. “Them creepy-crawlies give me the willies right enough.”
“No further attacks?” Challenger asked.
The man shook his head. “No. But they’re up to something, sure as eggs is eggs. They’re sneaky little buggers.”
I did not quite get his meaning at the time, but the short walk up to the site soon had me in full agreement. Every patch of grass, every row of hedge seemed to rustle with hidden activity. I had an almost-overwhelming feeling of being watched, and an equally strong urge to turn tail and head back to the bar for a stiffener. We only saw one of the insects, but it ignored us completely, seemingly intent on eating rowan berries from a young tree at the side of the road. Challenger took the chance to study it more closely.
“Careful, old bean,” I said, but he paid me no heed, standing almost directly beneath the creature as it fed, staring up at it. I had a mental image of it falling on his face and starting to burrow, and my hand trembled as I put it on his shoulder.
“Come away, man. We don’t have time to dawdle. Remember what the Colonel said about mortars?”
He eventually deigned to join me again on the path to the site.
“The engineering is quite exquisite,” he said, talking to himself. “But why would their insects look so much like ours? Is the course of evolution fixed so tightly to niche and structure that we can expect life to take the same forms wherever we encounter it?”
That was not a question I was qualified to answer in any shape or form, so I held my peace as we approached the site once again.
The place was the center of a great deal of insect activity. They scurried all over the rubble, to and from the sphere. Some of them seemed to be carrying debris or rock, others plant material from a variety of sources. All went into the hole in the sphere. It had started to hum, as if contented.
“I was right,” Challenger muttered. “It is collecting samples.”
“And tell me, old chap,” I said. “What was it sampling from that poor man it killed?”
Challenger’s scientific detachment was never more apparent than in his reply.
“Blood, don’t you think? I would imagine that they would be jolly interested in what makes us tick.”
He started down into the crater.
“We don’t have time, Challenger,” I said. “Those mortars will be flying any minute now.”
“Blow the mortars. We might never get another chance like this. I have to try.”
He kept going, leaving me no choice but to follow, if only to ensure that someone was on hand to fetch him out of the hole if required.
The hum was more insistent the closer we got to the sphere. It sent vibrations through my whole body, setting my teeth on edge and bringing on what would prove to be a monstrous headache. One of the insects ran over my foot, and it took all I had to stop myself from giving it an old-fashioned rugger punt into the distance.
Challenger advanced on the sphere, his hands held out in front of him, showing that he was weaponless. The hum from the sphere got even stronger. The hairs on my arms stood on end as blue electric sparks ran across the rubble underfoot.
“Challenger?” I said softly, and put a hand on his shoulder. I was too late to stop him. He reached out his right hand and put it directly on the sphere.
We went away.
I have no other words to describe it. One second we stood in the rubble in Penge, the next we seemed to be in a vast red desert under a sky that was almost purple. More of the insects scurried underfoot. In the distance a tall spire of blue glass rose high above a ruined city. Over in that direction larger things moved in a slumping gait, dark monstrosities of undifferentiated protoplasmic ooze that yet seemed full of benevolent intent as they turned their gaze toward where we stood. I felt something in my mind, drawing my memories forth to be studied, sampled.
We might have been there yet, being slowly emptied, had not a loud blast of a whistle dragged me out of whatever reverie I had succumbed to.
The mortars; I had forgotten about the mortars!
Challenger still had his hand on the sphere, a blank stare on his face. I had to use all my strength to move his arm and drag him off. He turned on me, anger clear on his features. He even went as far as to raise a hand, and I feared he might strike me. Then the whistle blew again.
“The mortars, Challenger,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”
“Bloody fools!” he bellowed. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
I thought for a split second that he might ignore me and go back to the sphere, but he turned and started to scramble out of the crater. I followed. Several of the insects passed me going in the other direction, moving faster than I had seen before. I followed their movement and saw that they were all headed back to their source, slipping back down fluidly inside the sphere. The humming was almost deafening now, so much so that I only just heard the third, and final, blast of the Colonel’s whistle. Challenger and I dragged our bodies out of the crater and broke into a staggering run. Another whistle sounded, closer now, as mortars rained from overhead.
“Down,” Challenger shouted. I did not have to be told twice. I threw myself face down to the ground, covered my head with my arms, and wondered whether I had just taken my last breath.
The mortars went up with a flash and a
bang. A wave of heat and pressure threw me forward, scraping my cheek on the gravel, then everything went black.
The next thing I knew, Challenger was helping me to my feet. I don’t know how long I’d been out for, but it can’t have been more than a few seconds, for the army men were only now starting to arrive on the scene. The Colonel headed straight for Challenger.
“Of all the stupid …”
He didn’t say another word. He wasn’t able to say anything for some time, as Challenger knocked him out cold with a single swift punch to the jaw. The squaddies showed no signs of acting on this insult to their officer; indeed, one of them, the older man who had spoken to us earlier, dropped me a wink and gave me a smile.
By this time Challenger had started to make his way back to the site … or rather what was left of it. The Colonel had been as good as his word. The site had been leveled, with no sign of either the house that had once stood there, or of the metal sphere.
“What have we done, Malone? This was our first chance at contact with an alien race. They may not be too happy at our belligerence to their approaches.”
The ground in the center of the new crater started to tremble and shake. I felt the vibration first in the soles of my feet, then the hum started, the same teeth-shaking noise as we had previously encountered. Something broke the surface of the soil; the shiny, metallic sphere, seemingly unharmed, rose up out of the ground.
Squaddies raised their weapons, but were given no time to shoot as the object rose up and away, at prodigious speed. We followed its flight upwards until it was no more than a speck. It blasted a perfectly round hole through the clouds then was lost to view forever.
“Will it be back, do you think?” a squaddie asked.
“Let us hope not,” Challenger said softly. “For, thanks to your Colonel here, I fear it has learned a great deal more from us than we did from it.”
Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths and Other Stories Page 10
