Paul sauntered over to the crane, looked it over from end to end, chatted to the crew for a while, and returned with an ill concealed smile on his face.
‘Normally it wouldn’t make a hundred metres, but they were forewarned about the height requirement, and have spent most of the night constructing an extension. Trouble is, it won’t take a great deal of weight, so we can’t get any heavy equipment up there.’
‘That’s OK, Hans isn’t very heavy,’ said Greg, and before Hans could object, turned to him, ‘after all, you’re the one with the laser cutter, and I expect that’s the only thing that’ll make any impression on the sphere, but keep it out of sight until you need it’
After another quick meeting with the General and a few of his higher ranking subordinates, at which nothing much was decided, they all piled into their respective vehicles and headed for the sphere, the massive crane and its extension unit having gone on ahead, on the longer but safer route.
The Arrival
They arrived at the site before the sun had fully powered itself up for the day, so all were cool and smelling sweetly as they assembled for the onslaught on the alien sphere.
The armed forces were alerted to be alert, with weapons primed and ready to shoot if things looked as though they might get out of hand. This was small comfort to those who would be close to the sphere should the unthinkable happen, as Hans was very quick to point out, most volubly.
The huge crane was manoeuvred into position and extended to its full height, it then being quite obvious that the extension would be needed. The telescopic crane arm was lowered again, the crane moved back and the extension added after much shouting and swearing, as it didn’t quite mate up with end of the arm.
A portable welding unit materialized out of nowhere, and the extension was firmly attached, every move watched over by Hans who was going to trust his life to it.
The welding completed, Hans was loaded into the bucket at the end of the extension with his laser cutter wrapped in a sheet he had purloined from his camp bed.
Slowly the great crane lumbered over towards the sphere, nosing in as close to it as possible so that there wouldn’t be too much of an overhang of the arm, as there was some concern that the extra weight of the extension arm might unbalance the base of the crane.
Hans gave a cheery wave as the hydraulic pumps whined into action, the huge arm gradually extending upwards while the other four members of the team looked on anxiously.
When the crane arm was fully extended, Hans in his extension section, was just able to reach the top of the sphere, and radioed down to that effect.
‘Its not much different up here,’ Hans said, ‘it’s as smooth as the proverbial babies bottom, except for a little knob like lump at the centre top, but I can’t reach that. If I had a piece of rope or some of our super cord, I could tie myself onto the extension and then walk the last few metres.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ Greg radioed back, ‘are you sure you’re happy to do it?’
‘Yep.’ came back the reply.
The arm was lowered again, Hans was handed his rope, and then the pumps began their noisy duet once again.
The rest of the crew, and anyone else who wanted to watch Hans, had to move out some way from the sphere, as the curvature of the globe hid him from view.
‘I’m attaching the rope now,’ he called down, followed by ‘I’m now stepping onto the sphere. It’s not as slippery as it looks.’
‘Any movement or sound, and you get back into the bucket,’ Greg radioed, ‘and then we’ll whip the crane around through one hundred and eighty degrees before lowering you. That will give you maximum distance from the sphere, and anything which might come out of it.’
‘OK. I’m now at the lump thing. It looks like a child's dummy, but the ring couldn’t take the weight of this thing, so it can’t be for lifting. I’ll give it a knock.
‘That didn’t do anything, so I’ll try turning it.
‘It won’t budge, OK to use the cutter, Greg?’
‘Affirmative, but slowly does it.’ Greg called back.
‘Must be made of the same sort of stuff as the big doors in the complex, the light just sinks into it, and it doesn’t even get hot.’
‘You’d better come down, Hans, while we think of something else, but God knows what.’
Hans climbed back into his bucket on the end of the extension arm and signalled the crane operator to lower him down, disappointed that he had been unable to cause the sphere to open, or do whatever it was intended to do.
The constant vibration from the pumps and the movement of the crane arm had done little for the stability of the crane’s base, and it began to tip forward as the arm lowered, the front wheels sinking into the soft sand.
An unprintable string of words came over the radio as Hans leaned over the side of the bucket, his eyes staring in horror as the heavy metal container swung ever closer to the sphere.
One final lurch of the crane, and the bucket hit the sphere with a resounding clang, nearly throwing its terrified and heavily sweating occupant out into space.
‘Get this bloody bucket down,’ he screamed into his radio mic, ‘something’s happening, I can hear it.’
The crane operator opened the dump valves, and the arm came whooshing down, hitting the ground with a thump, spilling the irate Hans out onto the hot sand.
He scrambled to his feet and sprinted for the rest of the team, wrenching off his head set and throwing it to one side.
‘I could hear some sort of mechanical noise from inside the sphere,’ he said, gasping for breath, ‘something’s going to happen, I know it.’
Greg grabbed the microphone from the startled General.
‘Now hear this. Now hear this. There is some activity within the sphere. Do not, repeat, do not shoot unless I give the order. I will personally dismember anyone who does.’
They all stood there, waiting for the alien device to make up its mind as to what it would do next, surrounded by a trigger happy army of men equipped with heavy weapons capable of reducing a whole city to rubble, if need be.
Half an hour later, and nothing had happened to the sphere, so Greg asked for a microphone on a long lead and some sticky tape.
To everyone's horror, he walked up to the sphere, taped the microphone onto the surface, and walked back to the others, paying out the lead as he went.
‘Right, let’s connect it into an amplifier, I want to know what’s going on in there, if anything.’
The amplifier clicked on, and the sound of machinery busily working away could be clearly heard over the still desert air. There were a series of clicks and whirring noises, the occasional screech as dry metal rubbed on dry metal, and the odd clang as something heavy was repositioned or dropped.
‘What do you think it’s doing?’ asked the General, sounding like a frightened little boy.
‘Getting ready to...’ and Greg stepped on Hans’s foot.
The noises continued on, well into the late evening, and every one was either bored to the point of going to sleep, or tensed up like a coiled spring, depending on what they thought the sphere might do.
‘We can’t leave it now,’ Greg said to the General, ‘so perhaps someone could organize some food, it looks as if we may be in for a long wait, but wait we must.’
The General turned to one of his aides and muttered something, Hans thought it must have been a death threat by the speed with which the man took off towards the control centre.
A while later, and the ominous sounds from within the sphere had changed, but still continued, and then came the distant ‘whop whop’ of helicopter blades. The food had arrived.
‘If the bloody thing doesn’t do something soon,’ said Hans, impatiently, ‘I think we should whop it one with the crane’s bucket, it certainly did the trick last time.’
‘I don’t think we need to go to that length,’ replied Greg, with a mouthful of steaming hot meat pie, ‘it’s still muttering away to
itself, so something’s happening in there.’
By midnight, the air had cooled to an unbelievable level, and everyone was looking for something to wrap around themselves to keep warm.
Greg suggested that they split into two groups, one group getting some sleep while the others kept watch, but when it came to who should take the first turn to sleep, there were no takers, so they all stayed awake, bleary eyed and tired, but determined to see what the sphere would do.
As the sun broke the horizon with a generous splash of colour, a piping hot fried breakfast was served with copious amounts of hot coffee, and that cheered everyone up, except perhaps the overworked cooks, but no one saw them.
As the day began to warm, and the blankets around their shoulders were discarded, a new sound came over the loudspeakers. A series of sharp cracks sounded out, as if a continuous series of thick sticks were being broken over someone's knee.
‘That sounds hopeful,’ said Paul, rubbing the sleepy dust from his eyes, ‘we’ve not heard that before.’
A gong like boom sounded, echoing back again and again from the distant hills, and the sphere began to unfold.
At first, only faint cracks appeared, running from top to bottom of the globe, but these slowly opened so that the walls of the sphere looked like the petals of a giant flower, the movement being so slow, it was only just discernible to the fascinated watchers.
By mid morning, the petals had reached ground level, and before unbelieving eyes they seemed to go soft and limp, hugging the contours of the surrounding ground like a piece of very thick pliable plastic sheeting.
The contents of the sphere were now clearly on display, a series of girders forming a spider’s web like lattice began to open out, as had the outer shell petals, but this time they looked like giant multi jointed fingers, slowly unfurling.
Along each finger were hundreds of shiny cylindrical objects, strapped in place by bright metal bands, making the arms look like the backbone of a giant fish.
‘God, there must be thousands of ’em.’ exclaimed Ben.
Slowly the giant cradles with their cargo of cylinders lowered themselves towards the ground, all moving in perfect symmetry. As the cradles neared ground level, the petals suddenly expanded, forming a foam like bed for the lowering arms to rest on, the arms flattening out as they made contact, and then all was still and silent once more.
‘Now what do we do?’ asked the General, turning to Greg.
‘Wait and see what happens, as before, and if nothing does, we’ll give one of those cradles a gentle kick, it seemed to work before.’
The almost hypnotic effect of the lowering process had taken longer than they had expected, and the burning heat of the sun had now reduced to a more tolerable level, a sure portent of the coming night.
‘I think something must have gone wrong with the sphere,’ said Hans, ‘there’s no reason I can think of for it to have taken so long to open out like that.’
‘I think you’re right,’ replied Greg, ‘so therefore other faults may have developed, like it just sitting there. I think we’ll have to give it a hand, somehow.’
‘Must admit, I feel like giving it a helping hand right now,’ Paul said, ‘or do you think the next stage of the operation has a time delay fault on it also?’
‘Could be,’ mused Greg. ‘I think it would be safer to leave it ’till morning, when we have plenty of light.’
‘We have very powerful floodlights,’ interjected the General, sounding impatient, ‘I think we should go ahead right now, who knows what it might do if left to its own devices.’
‘I don’t think it’ll do anything,’ Greg wasn’t going to be rushed. ‘It’s been a long day, and we need to be on our toes if we’re going to tamper with that thing and not get bitten. God knows what’s in those containers.’
The General looked disappointed, but gave way, he wasn’t going to take the blame if anything should go wrong.
It was decided that a close watch should be kept on the opened out sphere, while everyone else had a much needed sleep, not that many would, under the circumstances.
Tents had miraculously appeared in a nearby gully, and the smell of freshly cooked food wafted among the group, momentarily taking their minds off more important matters.
‘God, I could kill a steak.’ John muttered, unconsciously licking his lips.
‘OK, gentlemen, let’s take a break,’ said Greg, ‘if anything happens, they’ll let us know, don’t worry!’
The food was excellent, the camp beds passed their expectations, and it wasn’t long before the sonorous sounds of deep snoring pervaded the now chilly night air.
The sustained tension of the previous day took its toll, and everyone slept long and deep, only being awakened by the smell of breakfast cooking, and then it was a mad rush to get washed, dressed, and fill their now empty stomachs with enough food for the coming day.
The folded down sphere was just the same as when they had left it the night before. The now straight arms, like the spokes of a giant wheel, led to a large hump like mass in the centre, where the spokes met, and John asked Greg why they hadn’t paid much attention to it the day before, when the sphere unfolded.
‘We saw it all right, but I think we were more concerned about what the cylinders and their carrying arms might do.
‘By the look of it, I’d say it was the power plant which drove the sphere, and that should contain some useful technology, if we can get into it.’
The team gathered around the end of one of the extended arms to examine the first cylinder.
The foam bed, generated from the petal like skin of the sphere, had now hardened, and took their weight without deforming as they climbed up level with the first of the storage pods.
‘Hey, look at this,’ an excited Hans called out, ‘the arms aren’t solid as we thought, they’re made in sections and joined together, that’s why they were able to fold down so smoothly. Just look at the workmanship of those joints, we couldn’t do anything like that.’ He stood there, transfixed, as he admired the skill of the alien engineers.
‘Let’s see if we can get the straps off this thing,’ said Greg, ‘and then we can see what’s inside the pod.’
In the meantime, the army had moved up, and were within fifty metres of the group, carrying two flame-throwers and a rocket launcher.
‘Get those bloody things out of here!’ said an infuriated Greg, ‘you’ll kill us all if you use them.’ The General nodded his head, and the annihilation squad withdrew, looking very disappointed.
‘I don’t see how these straps are attached,’ said Paul, ‘they just seem to go down and join the main framework, but there are no bolts or anything to hold them on.’
‘What’s that lumpy bit down there?’ Ben said, pointing at it, and then running a finger along the bulge. As he did so, the bulge retracted level with the surface, and the strap sprung up past their heads as the tension came off, only just missing Paul.
The other strap came off easily, now that they had found the secret of releasing them, and the pod was free from constraints. A small crane was moved up to lift the six metre long pod from its cradle, and then lower it to the ground well away from the rest of the collapsed sphere.
‘How do we open it?’ asked John, standing well back, ‘I don’t see any catches or anything, not even a seam.’
‘There’s another of those raised sections on the end,’ said Ben, ‘shall I press it?’
‘Go ahead,’ Greg replied, ‘but step back quickly.’ The others had already put a respectful distance between themselves and the pod.
Ben ran his finger along the ridge, and stood back. A soft click was followed by a section of the pod opening a mere few millimetres along its entire length.
‘See if you can open it with this,’ said Paul, handing him a length of wooden batten, ‘but be careful nothing jumps out and tries to bite you!’
Ben gave him a withering look as he easily wriggled the end of the batten into the open slot
. Once in, he was able to lift the lid, letting it swing back, exposing the contents.
Tentatively, they crept forward, not knowing what to expect, but as there was no movement from within the pod that they were aware of, they edged closer.
Ben was the first to peer over the edge of the open pod,
‘Good God! It’s full of material, bales of some kind of cloth.’ The sound of relief in his voice brought the others quickly forward. ‘Shall I take one out?’ Before anyone could answer, he had, unrolling a length of deep purple silk-like material from the bale, and draping it over his arm.
The others crowded around, feeling the thin diaphanous, but strong, material, and marvelling at its ultra fine weave.
‘This’ll fetch a fortune on the open market,’ said Hans, a gleam in his eye, ‘but I doubt if we’ll be able keep it,’ he added sadly.
The amount of material that had been packed into the pod was staggering, and after a while Greg suggested that they put it all back, and move on to the next pod.
After several more pods had been opened, one containing a mixture of tools which Hans was most reluctant to put back, they decided to take a break as the heat of the blazing sun was beginning to take its toll, and liquid refreshments were called for.
Now that the contents of the pods had proved to be so innocuous, the armed forces which surrounded the sphere visibly relaxed, and the terrible tension which had pervaded the area was slowly ebbing away.
Resting in the shade of a tent, the team discussed the pods.
‘I think I can see what must have happened,’ said Greg. ‘The Martians shipped everything they thought they might need to set up a new home in these transport spheres, and this group got left behind for some reason. Somehow, we must have triggered off the sending mechanism, and when it lifted into space, it couldn’t find the rest of the transports, as they had left earlier, possibly thousands of years before, so it did the next best thing, and followed us.’
‘I think the army’s disappointed they didn’t have a chance to prove their mettle, but we’ll at least get one thing from this, and that’s a whole leap forward in technology.’
The Martian Enigma Page 16