World in Eclipse

by William Dexter

  But the eighteen who stayed behind were clearly there for the purpose of guarding the Disc, and the apparatus we had seen on the grass between them the night before still lay in the same place.

  All night we kept them under close observation, changing our guards at two-hour intervals all along the route they were slowly taking. We saw no movement among them, save the constant waving of their thin tentacles. If any of them had changed their position during the night, it was so slightly that it was imperceptible.

  With dawn they livened up slowly, and by ten o'clock in the morning, the three leaders were heading straight into our compound. We allowed them to get well inside before we closed the improvised gate behind them, and then looked up the hill towards the main body of the Vulcanids. The nearest were still two hundred yards or so in the rear.

  Alatto Skirr, wearing insulated clothing, stood near to the electrified fence, while his brother remained twenty yards away ready to start up the generators.

  Then Arabin dropped his hand as a signal to Hani Skirr, who pressed the starter on first one and then the other of the mobile generators.

  There was a low hum from the motors. The compound was now totally enclosed by bare cables carrying eight thousand volts.

  For an hour, the three Vulcanids crept slowly, slowly around the compound, which measured ten yards across in each direction. They were obviously aware of the obstructing wires, but would they divine that they were anything more than wires?

  A dozen times one of the creatures slowly approached the fence, and its waving filaments hovered — suspiciously, it seemed — over the gleaming copper cables.

  Then one of them struck.

  One of its tentacles shot out like a whiplash made of rubber, and grabbed the top wire.

  There was a vivid flash and sharp sizzling, but the Vulcanid held on.

  Would the current destroy it? Arabin waved his hand to Hani Skirr, and signalled by an urgent lifting motion to the Virian to step up the current.

  Hani Skirr slowly turned the resistance.

  "Twelve thousand," he called out to Arabin.

  And then the Vulcanid crumpled.

  The translucent limb grasping the cable slowly became opaque, and the greenish opalescent hue gradually ascended to the crown of the thing's head as the creature curled over and released its hold.

  The remaining two cruised round, apparently heedless of their fellow's death — if it had died.

  Again, we felt a glowing encouragement. The dead Vulcanid had not, it seemed, communicated its sensations to the others. And as we looked up the hill we saw no wavering by those approaching the compound.

  But we were congratulating ourselves too soon. A moment later the other two Vulcanids struck, as if by a preconcerted plan. Both at the same instant shot out a long, stretching limb, and both grasped the cable at the same spot.

  Again Hani Skirr increased the power as the two creatures tugged at the cable. This time they seemed to have increased their resistance to it, but that very resistance ended them more quickly.

  Both of them collapsed at the same time, and the limbs holding the cable changed colour even more rapidly than had that of the first of our victims.

  At that moment, Arabin, who was watching the other Vulcanids, gave a shout.

  "My God!" he called. "They're breaking out!"

  As if by a signal commonly understood, the Vulcanids that had been heading our way now turned slowly away, and they quickened their slow pace as they started to move off in other directions.

  The hedges and other light obstructions that had stood in their way were ploughed aside as they forced their great bulk through them, and now they had started to take to the country. Instead of following each other in a more or less orderly procession, they were fanning out in every direction.

  Arabin switched on his walkie-talkie microphone and called the guards at the park.

  "We've killed three," he whispered into the microphone. "What's happening at your end?"

  The answer came back in the slow Mid-Western tones of Harry Crow Eyes.

  "Kinda wondered what you'd been doing to 'em," he said. "Down here my eighteen babies got into one hell of a sweat a few minutes back. Reg'lar square-dance they made of it, but they're quiet now."

  "Any sign of them leaving their box of tricks?"

  "Not a sign."

  Arabin knocked his forehead with the back of his clenched fist. "Oh what a bloody fool I was not to have 'em surrounded with that fence!" he groaned. "We know now that they don't suspect us of electrocuting them — otherwise they'd have pressed the plunger on that damn switch, or whatever it is.

  We could have done in the lot, and they'd have thought they were meeting some natural hazard!"

  It is always easy to realise just what one has overlooked, but the omission was pardonable in this case.

  We had run a tremendous risk in destroying three of the creatures. Our interference with them might well have been appreciated — to use a tactical term — by the Vulcanids, who could have avenged themselves by exploding the Disc.

  Meanwhile, the rest of them, save those guarding the Disc, were spreading across the country at a steady walking pace. It was a turn of speed we had not expected, and had not suspected they possessed.

  The warning delivered by the two to die last had been strong enough to warn all of the monsters that they must separate. One death had not made enough impression on the mass minds of the hundred or more, but three had been sufficient to stir up awareness of the danger to them.

  And the terrible thing was that we could do nothing — nothing we knew about — to stop them. One hundred Vulcanids were now at large around us. Tomorrow there might be two hundred — the next day four hundred; who could tell where their diabolical multiplication would end?

  Axel was with us by the compound when the three had been killed. As the remainder deployed right and left, crushing obstacles or dragging themselves over them, the little doctor was agog to get into the compound and examine the dead specimens. There was little danger of the others approaching

  anywhere near the compound, so Arabin signalled Hani Skirr to cut the current.

  As the hum of the motor died away, Alatto Skirr opened a gate on our side of the fence, and we all three — Arabin, Axel and myself — went through.

  Leo and I were fearful of approaching the dead monsters. That they were dead seemed certain enough, in view of their ghastly change of colour, but we had thoughts of poison, of static current that might shock the first to touch them, of nameless horrors and fears that there might still be some legacy of death lingering about the creatures.

  Axel, though, had no such fears.

  If it had not been for the awful significance of the moment, his anticipatory eagerness would have been highly comical. In one hand he carried a large black leather bag with his instruments in, and in the other he had a canvas satchel containing tools. From one end of it protruded a fine-toothed hacksaw of large sire. "Is better for cotting op," he had explained, patting the saw as he packed it that morning.

  That saw, it appeared later, had been a butcher's, and he had cannily taken it from a shop next to the inn where we had made our plans.

  There was no fear about Axel as he boldly walked over and slapped one of the dead Vulcanids. The three bodies lay stretched on the grass, each one curved gracefully, and with the once-active head filaments now spread around in disorder.

  Axel explained that his first object must be to ascertain whether the reproduction of the monsters could go on indefinitely. He expected to learn that when he could analyse the cell structure under his microscope — which had been brought from Parkside by Cohen the night before.

  Having taken samples of the flesh of each creature, he hurried over to the shooting brake in which he had installed his microscope.

  Twenty minutes later — and a long, long twenty minutes they seemed to us! — he returned. One of the creatures, he informed us, had apparently been recently produced, for the scar
of the fission was still visible upon it. The others had been complete, and he believed they had neither been "born" nor divided for reproduction.

  The cells of the first were of a simpler nature, while those of the "prime" Vulcanids, as he called them, were more complex. There was much more that he tried to explain to us, but although most of was incomprehensible — thanks to his execrable English and his plentiful use of Nordic technical terms — we gathered that he had formed a conclusion. He was convinced, he said, that the "secondary" Vulcanid could not reproduce its kind until its cells had acquired the complexity he had found in the others. That might mean that there would be no further multiplication for some time — or it might only give us a few hours' respite.

  Axel worked industriously upon the prone, jelly-like figures in an effort to trace their source of nourishment. There was no stomach and no trace of digestive organs. These, it seemed, were creatures drawing their sustenance from solar rays. If that were true, it would explain their urgent need to leave their own world, where, even at midday, the sun appeared like a tiny red ball in the sky, and the surface temperature seldom rose more than a few degrees above zero.

  Although their digestive system offered nothing that Axel had ever experienced before, their brain structure he found more familiar.

  The upper portion of the Vulcanid he dissected seemed to be almost wholly brain, and the organ was protected by a horny, flexible shield of green composition. The convolutions of the brain were incredibly complex, as might have been expected, and Axel expressed a ghoulish pleasure at the prospect of examining a Vulcanid brain at his leisure and in his London laboratory — or rather the laboratory he had annexed as his own from the Ministry of Health.

  We learned that the Vulcanids achieved movement by extension and retraction of their under-surface, much as a snail used to creep along before the catastrophe that ended snails as well as man.

  There was a vague tripod formation incipient on the under-surface, as though Vulcanid nature had at some time intended these creatures to posses three legs.

  The muscular structure, too, intrigued Axel. There was nothing resembling bone in the carcass he worked on, unless it was the cranial carapace, but the muscles! Ah, the muscles! He was filled with objective admiration for the powerful tensile muscles he laid bare with his scalpel.

  As for us, though, we were filled with nausea during the whole operation. It was more than curiosity that kept us there, however; it was the vital need to understand these monsters as fully as possible.

  For three hours we watched as Axel worked. Throughout that time Leo kept in touch with our scouts who were keeping the Vulcanids in sight as best they could, and we plotted their general course on the mica cover of his map.

  It was difficult to form a complete picture so early, but as the time progressed, we saw the lines on our map beginning to converge. Those Vulcanids that had headed northwards had kept up their pace and direction, and those who turned south had accelerated their speed and were now turning back north, after moving westward to circumvent the compound in a wide arc.

  By nightfall, we had assembled at the farm, leaving Axel to pursue his gruesome investigations in the one-time dairy, to which he had conveyed two of the monsters complete, except for the strip he had sliced off for cellular examination.

  I must not convey the impression that Axel was careless in his examination of them. Although he had tackled the sickening job lightheartedly enough, he had worked with meticulous care, wearing sterile "spider-web" gloves, and having his face covered with a Norbett respirator and goggles. He had insisted upon Leo and me keeping at a distance of seven or eight feet, and we had been more than glad to comply. When it came to the task of moving the carcasses, he carefully supervised the dressing of his helpers in insulated garments of plastic, complete with respirators and goggles.

  In the glistening white dairy he was in his element as he had the two monsters laid on the marble slabs.

  And there we left him, as I say, while we discussed the day's activities and the prospect of what the next day might bring.

  As the reports continued to come in from the observers tracking the Vulcanids, we found the lines on our map slowly growing together until by midnight the monsters were making a steady and single-minded march towards the Thames.

  They had reached Croydon by half-past twelve, and still kept going through the darkness, keeping to the main roads as though they knew where they were going, and how to get there.

  The eighteen Vulcanid guards at the park had not increased their numbers, we were thankful to note.

  The fact brought us hope, because having only eighteen to contend with, we might be able, with the greatest of good luck, to wrest the switch-box from them. However, they showed no signs of relaxing their watch, and never for a moment left the apparatus on the grass.

  Axel had kept Leo and myself and Krill Hvensor going by regular dosing with benzedrine, but the others had taken turn and turn about, getting sleep when they could. Now we began to feel the need of rest, despite the stimulation of the drugs.

  So the three of us, aided by a sleeping draught from Axel's store, took eight hours off to sleep.

  We felt that we deserved a rest, and were safe to take one for a few hours. Had the monsters headed towards our Downland stores I cannot imagine what we should have done. That danger, though, had passed as they turned their course northwards.

  During the evening we had talked of aggressive action. Tanks? We could no doubt get one or two rolling. There was a Territorial Drill Hall at Bromley, where the covered yard held a squadron of heavy Eden tanks. We numbered three former R.T.R. members among us, and these were strongly in favour of an attack with armoured vehicles.

  The menace of the electrical discharge the Vulcanids were able to bring to bear on their attackers halted us in that plan.

  Attacking with flame-throwers was also considered, but here we were thwarted by the simple fact that we had no flame-throwers. It might be possible to improvise something, using high-grade petrol, but ever-present in our minds was the terror of burning London.

  Acid, too, received some consideration, but until Axel had more information for us as to the Vulcanids'

  vulnerability to acid, we could formulate no plan.

  It was the news that the Vulcanids had halted — and stayed halted for an hour — that sent Leo and Krill Hvensor and myself to our beds.

  For myself, I slept soundly, thanks to Axel's sleeping draught, and when I awakened eight hours later, I could hardly believe that I had slept at all, or that so long a time had passed since my head touched the pillow.

  We awoke to a dull morning of pouring rain — and news that almost electrified us.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Thomas Ludlam, who woke me, gave me the news, which was truly unnerving.

  A giant black Disc had been sighted, coasting high over North London.

  We were entitled to fear such a craft, for it was in the large black Discs that the Vulcanids were accustomed to be flown on their space journeys. These were usually conducted with Nagani crews, although on special occasions — such as that when I was picked up in 1963 — Virians were carried as well.

  The warning had come from the small detachment we had left behind at Parkside. The man on the dawn watch had sighted the craft, and had alerted the hotel and the farm. He had kept the Disc in sight for ten minutes, after which it had shot upwards at high speed and had vanished behind the heavy cloud formation that was blowing up at that time.

  They had thought it unwise to wake us at the farm, after our long and exhausting hours battling with Vulcanids. A constant watch was being kept, and the Virians had slid three of the Discs out of our Downland hangars. On the scanning screens of these they were maintaining a watch on the sky from horizon to horizon, and so far, by nine in the morning, no further warning had been received.

  The Virians were willing to man the Discs on the ground, but positively refused to fly them. They had little fear of com
ing under the mind control of the Vulcanids again, but they were concerned most seriously with the possibility of their Discs being exploded by some Vulcanid or Nagani device while in the air.

  The necessity of dividing our forces, already small enough, between combating the Vulcanids and keeping a look-out for black Discs added greatly to our worries. It may, in the future, when this account is read, seem that we were unduly fearful at this time, and that we snowed little spirit in our adversities.

  If that is the case, I must remind the reader that we were a small handful of people miraculously restored to our own world, and terrified of being pushed off it again.

  After we had eaten, Arabin took Krill Hvensor and myself out with a dozen others to follow up the Vulcanids. By now, their trail had extended through Streatham and Lambeth to Westminster Bridge Road, where they had halted again at the end of Kennington Road.