World in Eclipse
by
William Dexter
This CONSUL edition, complete and unabridged, published in England, 1962,
by WORLD DISTRIBUTORS (MANCHESTER) LTD. .
Le Scrob
CHAPTER ONE
I am Denis Grafton, Terrestrial Archivist Number One, and these are my words, written in the First Year of Return, for reading by those who come after.
In the Years Before, history was cold and unappetising fact. This will be different, for I am told that I am to write in my own words. Moreover, I am to include such opinions of my own as I think may interest those who read this work. This will be no anonymous history book, for I have already put my name to the start of it, and the names of all those who collaborate with me will also be credited to their contributions.
Thus will those who read be brought closer, if only a little, to those who write. Thus, in the remote future, we shall live as something better than figures of legend and subjects for learned debate.
And so, if this is to be the start of a new history of intelligent beings, to be read by intelligent beings, I mean that it shall be factual, and each of the writers shall write of what he himself has experienced. In the past, history has depended too much upon half-forgotten incidents being revived by argumentative scholars. This history will be written by those who have lived it.
That is my preamble. Now I must tell of the Return, and the part I played in it.
I was a newspaperman with the Daily Mercury, whose proprietor, Lord Fasting, had bestowed upon me the quaint title of "Scientific Commissioner." I suppose I could have been described as a reporter, but the assignments I had to cover were invariably confined to one type: the severely scientific. These assignments it was my duty to break down — Lord Fasting's phrase — into easily-digestible material for the Mercury's eight million readers.
It was my unhappy job, in the 1950's, to "put some life into Einstein's revised theory" (again I quote Lord Fasting), and to turn out readable, 200-word stories on such subjects as the future breakdown of the world's oil supplies, the significance of the giant redwood trees of California in the fiscal system of the United States, and the application of the quantum theory to Hoerbiger's cosmological principles. All of these being fatuously hatched schemes of Lord Fasting and my editor.
This kind of work I endured for some thirteen years. If my proprietor heard of some abstruse scientific fact, it was my lot to turn it into bright reading for the millions. I cannot begin to describe my revulsion for the work, to which I was only attached by a kind of umbilical cord consisting of £3,000 a year.
I would have left the Mercury at any given moment, but for one thing: no other newspaper would consider publishing the kind of article I could write. And so I endured it, comforted only by the thought of my £3,000 a year.
In the year 1963 I was assigned to cover some rather odd — as we thought at the time — events on the north-west coast of England, and it is at that point that my story really starts.
The Mercury correspondent at Lytham, a quiet little seaside resort in Lancashire, had sent us a curious story about a fire. His first message told of a small wood, known locally as the Green Drive, being burnt down quite suddenly. At our end of the telephone line there wasn't much of importance in the incident. Then came the correspondent's second message.
The wood, it seemed, had not simply caught fire and blazed away for a few hours. It had suddenly become completely ignited, and in ten minutes' time had turned to a heap of black ash.
The man taking the message read over the sentence.
"Would you say it was an explosion?" he asked.
But there was more to this fire than any mere explosion, our correspondent insisted. He couldn't tell what it was; his contacts had only been able to tell him that suddenly there was a great blaze, then — no wood. No explosion, either. No detonation, no blast — just a mile of trees instantly going up in flames.
They sent me to have a look at the place. Normally, a reporter would have gone up there with a cameraman, and made a flashy little picture story of it, but there had been words between me and the editor, and it was a case of getting me out of the office until I'd cooled down, and at the same time giving me a more interesting story than usual to handle.
I was driven to Lytham in one of Lord Fasting's Rolls Royces that same night. We arrived at daybreak, and pulled up on the sea front. We found the wood on our map and went to see the damage. All we saw, of course, was a mile-long strip of black ash.
Daybreak, after a 250-mile drive, is no time to stand in a cold breeze wondering what set a mile of trees alight, so we drove on to an hotel three miles away — the Majestic, at St. Annes. Rooms had been booked for the two of us and we went straight to bed.
I was awakened by my bedside telephone ringing. The time by my watch was something before noon.
Six hours' sleep seemed due to me, but my news editor didn't think so. He wanted information immediately.
The story of the next few hours could be a long one, but I must abbreviate it. I could tell of the crowds we ploughed through to get near enough to see the ashes of the Green Drive. I could tell of the furious arguments I had with a Colonel of the Royal Artillery who refused to let me go nearer than half a mile to the damage. I could tell of the score of fruitless appeals to air lines, who refused to fly me over the scene. I could tell of the near-panic that seized the country when the news finally leaked out that the cause of the damage had been tracked down to an enormous hovering black shape that had been seen by the sole survivor of the fire.
I was not the one to get the story, this time. The Mercury was beaten to it, and beaten by twenty-four hours, by the Guardian. The only witness was safely in the hands of a team of Guardian men, and could not even be located by the police or the Army authorities.
His story was that he had been heading for home at ten o'clock the previous night when he looked up and saw a round black shape of colossal size overhead. It had appeared to slide off sideways, and then had tilted. From its lower edge had come a blinding jet of flame that had swept the wood from end to end.
The poor fellow was in danger of losing his sight, and the Guardian reluctantly handed him over to the medical people, after first paying a large sum of money into his bank account as the price of his silence.
The upshot of it was that I had to stay on in the district. There used to be a saying that "Lightning never strikes in the same place twice," but Lord Fasting was taking no chances. I stayed, and the lightning did strike twice in the same place.
Three days later I was driving round the flat area at the back of Lytham. It had occurred to me that if the black thing seen over Lytham had been as big as the eye-witness said, it must have been seen from some distance. The townspeople had been warned not to discuss the event with strangers, and there was little to be got out of them. In the rural areas at the back of the town there was great activity among the military people who had descended on the district. Justifiable, of course, because the War Office had a pretty sound idea of what had happened, and what had caused the happenings.
There I was, then, driving around in Lord Fasting's Rolls and knocking on cottage doors. Here and there I got a glimmer of a story from a farmer, but on the whole the day was unsuccessful.
It was while the driver and I were standing on the top of a low hill — the country in general up there is as flat as a sheet of paper, but we found a slight rise to stand on and look around us — it was while we stood there that we saw the Thing.
Quite suddenly the sky became overcast, and this was followed by the appearance of a round black shape, big enough to shut but the sunlight and plunge us into a sort of twilight gloom. In a second the darkness vanished, though, a
nd we saw what had caused it — a flattish disc, measuring a good 500 yards across.
In complete silence, it slid off to our right and touched the ground. I started to run towards it, and then remembered Lord Fasting's £3,000. I stopped the driver of the Rolls, who was running breathlessly beside me, and sent him back to the car. If anything happened, I reasoned, we should stand a better chance of telling our story if we separated.
I never saw the driver again.
Indeed, I saw nothing again — until I awoke and found myself in bed. A strange bed, in a strange room.
Here again, I must abridge my experiences. To many who will read this, they will offer nothing new.
The craft that carried me to Vulcan is well enough known to us in these days, and the Vulcanid plan for observing Terrestrial human culture is thoroughly understood.
Even in 1963 we Terrestrials had come to look upon the Vulcanid Discs as something more than a rumour. True, ten or fifteen years before we had dismissed them as hallucinations. We had grown weary of the often-revived story of the Flying Saucers, and then we had accepted them into our mythology much as we accepted the sea serpent, and ghosts, and fairies. By 1963 the Flying Saucers were established as something that someone might have seen, rather than as figments of imagination.
However, as the factual record would not be complete without it, I interpose here a record by another hand.
CHAPTER TWO
I am Krill Hvensor, former Vulcanid Receptor Number Eight Thousand and Four, and these are my words, written in the First Year of Colonisation, for those who come after.
I am to write of the Vulcanid plan for observing Terrestrial human culture, and I am to explain the position of Vulcan in the cosmic scheme.
Vulcan is my world. It is called Vulcan by Terrestrials, and Hafna by us whose home it is. In this account, I shall use the name Vulcan for my world.
Terrestrial astronomers have given it that name since their year number 1960, when they first saw it with their astronomical instruments. For many years they had believed that between the planet Mars (we call it Haransidor) and the planet Jupiter (we call it Marghannor) there existed nothing but a belt of asteroids. They acknowledged that according to the principle of planetary intervals, there should have been a tenth planet, but had never located it until 1960.
I must add that we of Vulcan have known of fourteen major planets for eight thousand years, but then, our civilisation is incomparably older than that of the Terrestrials.
Vulcan is an old and dying world. Its distance from the sun has made it a cold world, and life on its surface is almost un-tenable. Nevertheless, its capacity for supporting life is infinitely greater than Terrestrial astronomers have believed possible. Their fallacious reasoning has decreed that life is not to be found on any planet in the solar system but their own, but we of Vulcan, who have travelled the Solar System for more than 3,000 Terrestrial years, know better.
We know of the dying race of silicon men on the planet Uranus (we call it Varna), we know of the sentient mineral life on the heavy planet Saturn (we call it Moroc-Dor), we know of the thread-like filaments, living, breathing and thinking, that populate the giant Jupiter. We can tell of the aquatic life on Venus (we call it Itos-Bar), and the unapproachable incandescent beings on boiling Mercury (we call it Suma). We have communed with the insect intelligences of Mars, and with the rare albino man-like creatures of Neptune (we call it Logandor). On Pluto (we call it Ens-Ens) there is no life.
We know, too, the giant race of savage beast-men on Earth's nearest neighbour, unsuspected Varang-Varang. On three other of the sun's planets, never known to Terrestrial science, there is no life, nor will be until their atmosphere's content of chlorine and ammonia is dissipated.
Vulcan is old and cold. For that reason, our people have sought a new home in the solar system. For 3,000 years by Terrestrial time, we have scoured the system to find our new home. Only one planet known to us has been recognisable as able to support our forms of life: the planet Earth (we call it Fahan, because it has for long been known as our twin planet). We are peaceable beings, and would never steal the planet Earth. We have hoped that some day, before the days of Hafna are ended, the Terrestrials would accept us as guests, to live side by side with them. For that reason, we have adapted our form to resemble that of Terrestrial men. Once, many thousands of our years ago, we were beings of an alien form, with small resemblance to what we are now, but our scientists have achieved the wonderful mutation of our shape and habits until they almost match that of Terrestrial humans.
I have told of our search for a new home, but I have not told of our previous visits to Earth. Not once, but many times during 3,000 Terrestrial years have we visited Earth and attempted to establish colonies, but each time men have driven us out. They have called us devils in ages past, because our scientists had not been able to match our colouring to theirs. They have called us goblins in later ages, because again our science had gone astray, and had turned us into creatures far too small to be recognised as akin to men. Again and again has mankind been unwilling to receive us, and so we have been compelled to form our own human colonies on Vulcan, so that we might study Terrestrial man, and learn how to become his good neighbour and live side by side with him. Now I must tell of Vulcan itself.
In size, my world is somewhat larger than Earth, with a correspondingly increased gravitational pull.
This means that those who live on Vulcan must be stronger in build and more skilled in agility, in order to move freely on our heavier world. Conversely, it also means that Vulcanids are able to move about much more easily on Earth, and can exert their greater strength to greater results.
Vulcan is so much further from the sun that our period of revolution — our "year" — is equal to more than three Terrestrial years. And here is the secret of a mystery that has at times puzzled our Terrestrial guests on Vulcan: from the moment they enter our gravitational field, their life span is adjusted to that of the Vulcanid year. Thus, a Terrestrial human taken to Vulcan 200 years ago (by Earth time) could be — and still is — alive at the time of this writing. We have thus been able to observe the advance or retrogression of civilisation on Earth, by observing our older humans alongside our newer guests. And it has seemed to us that the mode of thought on Earth has not changed in comparison with Terrestrial practical achievements, unless it has become more aggressive.
Our Terrestrial colony in Vulcan has been transported to our world by our Flying Discs and by our Spheres of Light. The journey is made by Disc from Earth to the Terrestrial Moon and by Sphere from thence onward to Vulcan. Our landing places have never been suspected by Terrestrial astronomers, because we have sited them on the remote side of the Moon. Our visits to Earth by Disc have many times been observed, but this has been unavoidable.
For more than 3,000 years our Discs have been known to Terrestrials. In the olden days, humans have watched them with wonder, and have described them as "golden horses," "chariots of fire," and the like.
In later times, many have seen our Discs, but few have believed the story told by the witnesses. In the Terrestrial year 1945 and onwards, governments have suppressed the news of our visits, for fear of panic among their peoples.
But they have known.
We have taken many hundreds of Terrestrial humans to Vulcan. In the early days, their taking has been described by priests on Earth as "an ascent to Heaven" or "a stealing by the gods." In later times, men have wondered at the taking, and then have forgotten it. We have taken men from the streets of towns, we have taken them in their crude aeroplanes, we have taken them from ships at sea. By a cruel error, one of our Discs once took the whole of a ship's crew and passengers.
The ship was named Marie Celeste.
We have taken famous thinkers, we have taken soldiers, we have taken women. But on Hafna they have been unable to breed.
The list of men and women whom we have taken to our world is to be seen, name by name, in the Grand Archives.
&nb
sp; Once taken to Vulcan, the Terrestrials have been honoured as guests, and have been provided with everything they wished for. Their homes in our Terrestrial Colony have been made exactly in the fashion of homes on Earth. Their food has been cultivated and prepared by their own people in the identical form to which they were accustomed on Earth.
But they have not been able to breed on our world.
That has been our greatest sorrow.
We have tried to make the best use of all our human guests. Specialised knowledge possessed by them has been used to their own advantage as well as to ours. Never have we taken a human by design; each man or woman has been taken by pure chance.
But never has a human been allowed to set foot on Earth again. To have returned our guests would have disclosed our secret — the fact that we needed a new home. Once known to humans, that secret could have destroyed us, because humanity is ever suspicious of alien beings such as we are. Humanity would have sought us out in the depths of space and destroyed us, as other beings from other worlds have attempted to destroy us.
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