Children of the Void

by William Dexter

  Here, behind the red steel door of this underground safe, was what I sought. I stepped back, and the Geiger slowed a little. A pace to the right and it accelerated. The whole wall, I found, was honeycombed with bright red doors like so many safe deposits.

  It was no part of my duty at this stage to handle radioactive material; that had been agreed upon before I left the main party on the tower. My job had been to check that access to the lower vaults would be practicable, and that the lift would stand the strain of being operated after so many years.

  So I took a slow look around the place and started off back for the metal staircase. As I shone my light along the floor I saw that two sets of rails ran the length of the cavern. They ran in pairs, with a third rail close beside the inner of each pair, and were sunk to floor level.

  I thought at once of an electric railway, and flashed my light to the end of the cavern. There my way was closed by two massive doors, coated inside—as I found on experiment—with lead sheeting. The rails ran under the doors and I lost them. The same thing occurred at the far end of the hall.

  I may have been slow, but there were too many other matters to occupy my mind for me to realise at once what the rails were. Then it came to me—this was the old Southern Electric line that ran below Crystal Palace, with Gipsy Hill station at one end and Crystal Palace Lower Level station at the other. The line had been closed to traffic, I remembered, in 1962, and no explanation had been offered to an irate public by British Railways. Now, it seemed, I had the reason for its enigmatic closure. The old tunnel—probably one of the oldest in the country—had been requisitioned as a store for fissionable minerals or radio-active material. Deep beneath the hill, it no doubt offered as secure a cache as could be found anywhere in the London area. When the place was converted from tunnel to storehouse it had been greatly enlarged, but the railway lines had been left in place—probably as a means of delivery.

  I turned and climbed the stairway, and soon returned to the lift, its light still bravely shining out into the long-abandoned secret vault under the Fog Factory. This time, when I pressed the “Up” button, the lift shot upwards freely, evidently working smoothly now, and in a few seconds I was standing once more on the top terrace of the tower, sweating copiously and wiping dust and grime from my plastic face-piece as Arabin and the others thumped me delightedly on the back.

  We made a preliminary survey of the great underground storehouse early in our work, but Arabin insisted upon more details being available before we at last searched for the thorium we felt sure would be there. It was in the office of the late Assistant Director that we found the information we sought. A chart there showed the exact location of each mineral stowed away in the converted tunnel.

  With this to help us, we located a supply of thorium in one of the red safes buried in the walls of the deep store. The opening of it occupied some time, but at last we found a large three pronged key.

  During the next few days, while we prepared one of the laboratories in the tower for investigation of our new-found prize, I often thought about the tragic race for success between the modest, unpublicised little band of scientists who had worked here, and Vogel and his associates, whose triumph had blasted humanity from the Earth.

  If only the British team had reached their goal first, the study of thorium as a weapon of war might have been diverted to really productive ends.

  Some knowledge of the experiments conducted here must have leaked out, I suppose, to explain for that “Vogel Men” taunt chalked on the Earls Court boarding house wall. And it was only that cheap Belshazzar’s warning that had at last set us upon the track of what must have been the country’s most valuable supply of the mineral we sought.

  If some angry neighbour with a piece of chalk and a vindictive political creed had not so memorably made his mark on a wall in the years gone by, we might never have located this cache of thorium. And without it. . .

  We were content with the day’s work and returned next day, this time with more equipment. The Virian technicians, Hani Skirr and Alatto Skirr, brought along a mobile power plant of their own device and construction—it had been used many times already for lighting our explorations—and connected it to the internal lighting circuit of the great building.

  We went through the place this time under more helpful conditions, taking the entire building floor by floor. Nowhere above ground level did we find evidence of anything but investigation into atmospheric pollution. But in those secret lower vaults we found amazing evidence of the building’s real purpose. It was in the big drawing office that we found our main clue. Locked in two larger safes—which the Skirr brothers opened with a little more contempt than I thought necessary— we found drawings of what could only be space craft.

  And their design was modelled on the Vulcanid Discs.

  “So somebody knew that the ‘Flying Saucers’ weren’t hallucinations, despite what they used to tell us,” murmured Arabin. It was obvious, as we found after very little study, that the government had held accurate knowledge of the external design of the Vulcanid Discs, but the interiors and the source of power were quite different, so we realised that there had been no examination beyond observation of the Discs from ground level.

  These projected Terrestrial Discs were to have been powered by atomic engines, and we traced the experiments through a range of radio-active and fissionable materials from plutonium to thorium. Thereafter, thorium, apparently selected as the final choice, was referred to only by its chemical symbol. Th, or by its atomic number, 90.

  XVII

  Just how near Britain had been to discovering the secret of space flight we had no means of judging, for our theoretical knowledge was too little to enable us to understand fully the drawings we found. So we reluctantly laid them aside, and they are now carefully filed among the essential documents in our fireproof store on the Downs. Perhaps some day our decendants may resume where the scientists of 1963 left off.

  Our search of the great porcelain-lined crypt under Crystal Palace brought forth ample stocks of thorium. I will not describe in detail our long and tedious experiments to find the critical mass and quality needed for our work. We worked on the assumption that a certain accurately measured quantity— if we could discover that quantity—might possibly amplify the vague reaction we got from the juxtaposition of our thorium with the stone-like mineral from Varang-Varang. To our perceptions, the reaction wag negligible, but to the bat-men’s heightened sensibility something happened when the two minerals were placed near together.

  We had to be guided by them from the start, and as our work proceeded we got increased results. We should have brought our experiments to a conclusion far more speedily, I am sure, if we could have had the help of the Nagani, but this was refused us. It was refused, I admit, with apologetic sincerity, but it was refused none the less firmly.

  Each time we appealed to the Nagani they had something more important to do. As often as not some question of their periodic ritual (for they are, we find, devoted ritualists in some incomprehensible sphere) forbade their intervention at that particular moment. Not once did we suspect that they had any knowledge of the reaction we were soon to witness.

  It was a delicate business, this final investigation. We spent many days balancing one mineral against another in varying degrees of juxtaposition, but it was more than eight weeks before we obtained results that were perceptible to us.

  Then, when at last we felt ourselves to be wearying of this apparently meaningless quest, we received sudden and dramatic encouragement.

  The Esoes were constantly in a high state of tension and, looking back, I believe they had received their optimum emotional impetus when once their own mineral had been approached by any quantity of thorium. Detailed experiments produced no more exact results with them, although the batmen pleaded with us to disregard their own reactions now and to go ahead with our work. They could no longer give us any defined aid, delicately attuned though their externalised sensory o
rgans were. It was as though they had now been faced with something their organisms could not measure—as though a speedometer geared to a maximum of sixty miles an hour were fitted to a car running twice as fast.

  And so we began to despair of any means of measuring the results of our work until. . .

  It was late in the year that it happened. The look-out man on top of the tower came running down to our laboratory there with the news that four warning flares had been fired into the air from our permanent radio post, which was now established at Primswood.

  We halted our work and drove as fast as we could to the radio post. There we found Harry Crow Eyes fitting new transistors into his control transmitter.

  “What have you dopes been doing up there?” he grumbled. “Every one of my valves blew out suddenly. Some of the transistors fused, too, and brother, it takes a blow-lamp to fuse one of them!”

  He held out a handful of small scraps of molten glass and wire. Some were shattered, some were melted into grotesque shapes.

  “These things,” he complained emphatically, “are supposed to be pretty well indestructible. Come on now, give out: what’s cookin’ up there in that tower?”

  We sat with him as he rapidly assembled an emergency set on its printed circuit base.

  “Blown a lot of my wiring in the old set, too,” he said. “M hook this one up until I’ve checked over the big set.”

  Ten minutes later, Harry sat with head-phones clamped to his ears. “Not a whisper,” he murmured as he set his dials to our standard wave-lengths. “Whatever you did up there, it blew every other set in the colony.”

  He was right, too.

  A rapid tour of all our people showed that each transmitter and each receiver that had been in operation had been ruined.

  After that, we carried out our experiments to a timed schedule each day, to coincide with periods of radio silence. Thus we avoided further damage to our communications system, but our work was seriously slowed down.

  The knowledge that our experiments could affect radio communication gave us a new line of thought, and we brought Harry into our work schedule. He set up a considerable quantity of radio testing apparatus, and took the keenest interest in what we were doing.

  On his first visit to our tower workshops he strolled round our benches inspecting our rather primitive laboratory and our carefully screened radio-active materials. “My, my! You got a junkyard here!” he breathed scornfully.

  He turned over a piece of lead sheeting lying on the bench. “Do you super-brains really know what you’re doing?” he asked, with a note of alarm in his voice. He waved a hand towards our approximation balance, where the Varang-Varang boulder and a cylinder of thorium were clamped to a graded scale. Then he took a closer look at the crude equipment.

  “Want to know something?” he asked, opening his eyes wide. “If those two rocks were plutonium, you’d be building up the biggest atomic blast there’s ever been!”

  He idly flicked the switch of the Geiger counter, which immediately set up its brisk chatter.

  “And damn me! It is radio-active, too! Say—what sort of a mess are you working on?”

  We tried to explain, but it was only when we had taken apart our experimental approximation set that he would listen. Then we let him erect his test kit in peace. We pointed out to him that this was not plutonium we were working with, and that our two specimens were not, indeed, of like minerals. He, equally patiently, insisted that one of our specimens was at that moment potentially radio-active and the other was of an unknown substance. How, he asked pleadingly, were we to know that the conjunction of the two could not be even more deadly than the approximation of two critical quantities of plutonium or other fissionable materials?

  “Crazy, crazy set-up,” he moaned, thumping his forehead, “They drag me away from my nice little radio set and where do I find myself? In with a lot of crazy guys, monkeying about with God knows what! Listen! Either we do this thing properly —and by properly I mean with me telling how—or else I want out. What’s it to be?”

  It was as well that we had called Harry in, for his technical knowledge was greater than we had guessed. From then onward we took orthodox precautions and worked under his guidance. Now we carried out our work from a distance, controlling our specimens with remote-handling gear, while Harry watched over a bank of electronic indicators.

  And now we were able to listen to our work, as well as watch it, for a high whine through Harry’s loudspeakers modulated steadily with the movement of our mineral specimens.

  “Smaller piece there in the left balance,” he would warn, and we would switch in a piece of thorium weighing a gramme lighter. “Closer . . . closer . . . hold it!” and the modulation would reach its peak. Then Harry would shake his head. “It sticks at that. Try another degree round the compass card.”

  So it went on. We varied our proportions, Ve adjusted their distance one from the other, we slewed them through a whole circle, degree by degree, we canted the circle systematically until we had all but taken our specimens through every degree in a spherical orbit.

  “Too much static,” Harry would complain on some days. “But somewhere behind this background noise I’m getting something else . . . Can’t pick it out and isolate it, but there’s something.”

  Then came the day when for the first time we reached perpendicular alignment with our specimens.

  Through the howl of static came a steady, pulsing note, heavy and drum-like.

  “Here it is!” shouted Harry. “That’s what I’ve been hearing. Now let’s get going again!”

  We worked fast, going over our old trial-and-error system of adjusting our specimens. At each change, the tempo and note of the pulsations varied. Sometimes they would almost die away; at others, the whole tower would be shaking with the insistent beat.

  Sweat poured from us as we worked on. We closed down our communication radio system, cutting off all the members of our colony except for five minutes every hour, and we worked in relays through the night.

  Harry now worked with head-phones, and the speakers were switched off. By hand signals he controlled each of our moves, listening intently, with head cocked to one side, holding his breath for what seemed like minutes on end, and keeping us at it until dawn.

  Whenever we asked him what he heard, he pursed his lips and shook his head, waving an admonitory finger to silence us. For the whole night he sat there, adjusting, holding his breath, readjusting, biting his lip, holding his controls—and listening.

  Then as the sun began to rise, he sat back wearily and took off his head-phones.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I certainly could deal with a mug of coffee,” he whispered.

  As he sipped from the mug we brought him, his eyes never left the bench where, in our weird apparatus, Karim’s boulder and a tiny, slender tube of thorium were poised one below the other.

  He laid down the mug and took a deep, deep breath.

  “Know what I heard through those?” he asked, nodding towards the still faintly whispering head-phones.

  “I heard . . . a voice.”

  “Yes sir,” he went on. “Someone’s been talking to me steady for better than an hour. Listen . . ,

  And he switched in a loudspeaker.

  A low voice filled the room.

  It was a voice heard distinctly, but not understood. At times it seemed to tremble on the verge of comprehensibility. I thought of voices heard when one is dropping off to sleep, of voices heard dimly through the mists of anaesthesia . . .

  We looked at each other in something very near to terror.

  Harry drained his coffee mug.

  “Anyone understand it?” he asked. “Seems to me sometimes that it’s saying something I can nearly get. Then, just as I’ve got a hold of the ... of the tempo, and it seems to be getting near the understandable, another voice comes in.” He

  paused. “Like that!” he added in a hoarse whisper, as the voice changed suddenly.


  We sat in silence then for nearly an hour, hearing one voice after another, each speaking in a different pitch and tempo. Arabin broke the silence.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “they’re trying out every tongue they know. But so far, there’s been nothing like' any language I’ve ever heard on Earth.”

  Harry shook his head with decision. “Not so, Leo,” he declared. “I’d bet everything I have that I heard Cherokee Indian a while back. Not a language I speak—my folks were Blackfoot—but I’ve heard it spoken, and I’d know it again. Whoever’s speaking does have at least one language ... on Earth.”

  Could it be, we asked ourselves, that there were other humans alive on Earth? But Harry argued us out of that idea. If there’d been any living soul able to speak into a microphone he’d have heard them during his long months of radio watch, he insisted. Whereas, instead, he’d listened to the distant chatter of static and nothing else, save our own voices.

  And as if to prove his unspoken argument that these voices were extra-Terrestrial came a dismal, cooing whistle, broken down into passages that could have been speech—but no speech ever spoken by humans.

  There came a long series of similarly alien voices. Some crackled and hissed; some boomed and drummed. We trembled to think of the unthinkable creatures that could speak in these unknown distortions of sound.

  We were weary with our long night’s work, but not one of us could have slept as long as the alien voices went on speaking to us. We were waiting—though none of us told his neighbour —for a voice to speak in a language we could understand.

  For each of us seemed to divine that a familiar tongue would come if we did but wait for it. At last it came.