World in Eclipse

by William Dexter

  There we found them, huddled in the middle of the cross-roads, apparently distressed by the heavy rain.

  There was little doubt that they had all assembled there, for the best count we could make showed that there were more than eighty of the monsters.

  We kept at a discreet distance, and wondered whether they knew of our presence. Then the rain stopped, and they moved on once more. Still maintaining their speed of a brisk walking pace, they pushed on until they reached Westminster Bridge. They progressed in a steady glide, and we were near enough to note that they moved by thrusting forward and extending the front edge of their stem, and then withdrawing the rear portion in an almost continuous movement.

  At Westminster Bridge they paused again and divided, half of the party going to each side of the road.

  There was a very long halt of two hours here, and we concluded that they feared the proximity of the water beneath the bridge. Then a curious thing happened. One of their number flung a tentacle over the parapet of the bridge.

  The limb — if I can call it that, was as thick as a man's arm, but as it stretched downwards, it became thinner and thinner until by the time it had reached the water it was no stouter than a finger.

  The creature appeared satisfied with its experiment, and swiftly withdrew the tentacle. If the Vulcanids had feared that the water might harm them, they were now reassured, for after what was obviously a parley, they moved forward again.

  Arabin watched the water-testing with a frown.

  "Wonder if they're afraid of liquids?" he murmured. "Might have something there! They were plainly worried by the rain..."

  We followed them as they crossed the bridge, and again there was a long pause in Parliament Square, with considerable weaving back and forth of the fringe-crowned heads. At last they seemed to be satisfied with the direction they wished to take, and half an hour later saw them in St. James's Park.

  Here they hastened towards the lake — and slid straight into the water.

  For an hour or more they moved around in the shallow water at considerably increased speed, and then assembled at the westward end of the lake and emerged.

  "Now what can they want in the water?" Arabin asked.

  "They seemed fearful of the river, and yet here they slither in like seals."

  Krill Hvensor had the answer.

  "The river has salt in its water, Leo Arabin," he said. "This water is pure, with no salt. I think that perhaps the Vulcanids (he called them 'Hafnarigi') fear the salt and not the water."

  "Yes, but they're come out of the water again," Leo pointed out, rather needlessly. "What were they doing? Having a jolly bathe? I just can't understand this."

  Again the monsters moved on, and this time we were perturbed to find that they were making for the Serpentine, in Hyde Park.

  Again they slid into the water, and their tall, massive bulks cruised around exploring every yard of the lake, finally emerging as before. We were considerably relieved when they turned eastward. Had they continued in the direction they had first taken in Hyde Park they would have finished up outside Parkside.

  By now dusk was beginning to fall, and we had added to our small following party three lorries carrying salt, taken from the London County Council highways depot.

  "It'll be too easy if we can catch 'em by putting salt on their tails," Arabin chuckled. "But it's worth trying."

  In the Edgware Road — for the Vulcanids were now making a fast northward trek — we sent two

  lorries forward and had their crews shovel salt round three sides of the Marylebone Road crossing.

  They left a deep pocket of salt extending a hundred feet or so up the road, and had just finished spreading it smoothly by the time the leading Vulcanids approached. The third lorry drove as near as it dare behind the last Vulcanids, and as they entered the great loop of salt, the crew' of the third lorry got to work shovelling salt madly out on to the road.

  The creatures were now surrounded by salt on all sides. As their leaders came upon the salt that barred their path, they halted and there was another frenzied parley as they all collected together in the middle of the crossing. We had them ringed in our headlights, for it had now grown quite dark.

  After three hours of watching, we decided that they were going to stay there all night, but we waited until two in the morning before posting guards and returning to Parkside for a few hours' rest.

  By seven they had not moved, and we were beginning to be hopeful that we had found the means to quell them.

  Then, at half-past seven, one of the creatures oozed delicately towards the five-foot stretch of salt, stretched out a long tentacle and flipped it slowly across the salt.

  At once, the others approached, and four of them slid slowly across the salt barrier, effectively sweeping the way clear for those who followed.

  They hated the salt, it was easy to see, but it was by no means fatal to them. Still, the knowledge was useful. We could now channel them into the path we chose for them, to some extent.

  All that day we crawled behind them. We found it necessary to use relays of cars, for the constant driving in bottom gear was overheating our engines. However, we kept them in sight up to Hampstead Heath, and there the performance of dipping into the ponds was repeated.

  That night we mounted guard again while some of us slept, and in the morning took up the slow chase again. Then followed a three-day pursuit back and forth across North London. The Vulcanids seemed to be searching for something, but for what we could not guess.

  On the third day after their exploration of the Highgate Ponds on Hampstead Heath, our quarry reached Finsbury Park. Once more there was the tiresome business of slithering about in the park's lake, and once more there was the conference on the banks when they emerged.

  Now they left the park by the main gates on the corner, of Green Lanes and Seven Sisters Road, and this time they turned with a positive decision down Green Lanes.

  By the high banking of the reservoir they stopped again, but only for a few minutes. Then one of the creatures wrapped seven or eight tentacles round the cast iron railings, and with the Vulcanid equivalent of a grunt, heaved them out of the ground.

  The whole party turned resolutely up the banking, and with considerable effort reached the top. We had rushed round to the bridge across the reservoir in Lordship Road, and through binoculars — although the distance was no more than three or four hundred yards — we watched the next amazing development.

  One by one, the Vulcanids slithered into the water — and sank.

  "By God! We've got them now!" Leo breathed. "All we need do is tip a few dozen carboys of acid into the water, and..."

  "Oh! But no!" Axel was with us now, and his disapproval came as a shock.

  "Why not?" asked Arabin. "Don't you want to see them exterminated?"

  "Yes, please! Very much so!" Axel replied. "But please to think. Here are many million kilos of water.

  How many bottles of acid — and what sort of acid, please? — are you going to put into the water?

  You have been thinking about this? No! Well, I am tellink you. Now please to listen.

  "I have experimented with my two Vulcanids at the farm, and I fear too much that acid will not kill them."

  We had to take Axel's word for it.

  And on using cold reason, it was plain that we should need many, many gallons of even the most concentrated acid to make more than a weak solution.

  Axel explained his experiments with acid. He had found — and he told it with a sort of proud relish — that the substance of which the Vulcanids were constructed reacted only very slightly to acid tests. Salt, yes. That brought a shrinking reaction, a measurable decrease in volume, but it would not destroy.

  There was one consolation. We now had the Vulcanids effectively concentrated — except for the eighteen at Primswood — under our eyes, and could ring the reservoir with electrified cable. If we could not destroy them in the water, we could destroy them when they came out..
. unless...

  Leo hurriedly drew out his large-scale map, on which we had plotted every move of the monsters.

  The map showed two exists from the reservoir: one to the north-east, into the New River Canal, and the other to the south-west into the New River reservoirs and water-beds.

  The latter was a blind alley, but if the creatures should make their way out and into the canal they had an open thoroughfare before them.

  There was some hurried phoning over the radio, and in response we received four more loads of salt, which we set to work spreading round the path surrounding the sheet of water. We had a double task, for the reservoir is duplicated on the other side of the Lordship Road Bridge.

  We worked madly all night and through the next day, until our combined efforts had piled up a two-foot layer of salt, six feet wide, all round the reservoir. Lorries came in relays and the salt piled up in the road for six-wheeled jeeps to bring up the banking.

  We had kept a careful watch on the water gates leading into the canal, and had reinforced these with electrified cable stretched tightly above the surface of the water.

  The salt, of course, was a temporary deterrent to the Vulcanids, and was laid down in the hopes that it would keep them in the water while we set about the considerable task of wiring up the electrified barrier round the path.

  One factor disturbed us: in water the Vulcanids were almost invisible, being semi-transparent to start with. Now and then we would catch a glimpse of one of them near the edge, when it would appear as a vague, nebulous shape, hard to discern unless one knew it was there.

  The electrified fence, while it seemed a sure shield at first glance, was — and we realised it — not the certain defence a layman might have imagined. One monster short-circuiting the current could enable the rest to cross in safety. But we had, by this time, posted axe-men at ten or twenty-yard intervals all round. These, protected by insulated clothing and gloves, were to chop the dead Vulcanids free as quickly as they could, should the monsters attempt to escape by shorting the current.

  The plan had one serious defect: it left us with no reserves of manpower. The most we could spare for off-duty spells were a dozen at a time.

  And all the time there was the fear of the black Disc that had been sighted ten days earlier.

  There had been no further news of it, but we still kept the Virians on watch in the Discs that now lay before our hangars on the Downs. We had not forgotten, of course, that the scanning screens they were using could only cover a small fraction of the earth's surface and the sky — simply from horizon to horizon. The black Disc — there might even be more than one — could land anywhere else and we should not know.

  But, as the Virians reminded us, their scanners covered a vast funnel of space that converged on our own little spot. To avoid flying through the funnel, the black Disc would have to make an enormous detour. As it was almost certainly working from its Lunar base, one scanner concentrated upon the Moon whenever she was visible over the horizon. Once or twice there had been a tiny blip on the screen, but it had vanished immediately, and we attributed it to atmospherics or lack of maintenance on the equipment.

  The scanners were not at all like our old-fashioned radar screens. They resembled more the ground glass screen of a reflex camera, for the actual image of the object registering was seen upon them. And by an intricate focusing device the image could be magnified to enormous dimensions. So we did not expect a radar blip on the screens, but a true image of the object.

  Many times we planted Virians close to the Vulcanids in the park at Primswood, and around the edge of the reservoir in North London, but never once did we succeed in receiving a mental communication from them. We began to believe that they had secured their object, whatever it was, and wished to have nothing more to do with us. Our first thought was that they had sought fresh water deep enough to submerge themselves — but then we wondered whether that was all they wanted.

  For the eighteen who had stayed with the Disc at Primswood showed no signs of leaving, and remained huddled together round their mechanism that lay on the grass there.

  As the days passed we began to lose our fear of them. They had been aggressive at first, true, but so had we. In fact we had struck the first blow, and they had done no more than try to defend themselves.

  We took to joking about them, and walked much nearer to them than we had previously dared.

  They showed no sign that they knew of our presence, and we began to take heart. There were even some of us who began to pity them in the way that one feels a remote sort of sympathy for a rat caught in a trap. They could have been a menace, we reasoned, but here they were, and they seemed pretty tame.

  But the Virians would share none of this feeling with us. They insisted that the Vulcanids were evil, and that their very existence depended upon subjugation of a more active and mobile species of creature.

  A month after our first battle with them we had settled back into our old life, only conceding their danger by posting guards round the reservoir and round the group at Primswood. We saw nothing whatsoever to alarm us.

  The feeling was growing among us that we might even share our world with them, and this nearly caused a breach with the Virians. They promised solemnly that they would one and all leave us and betake themselves to the furthest attainable parts of the world if we ceased for a moment to regard the Vulcanids as our mortal enemies.

  Heaven knows where the controversy would have ended if we had not one day received evidence that the Vulcanids were as much to be feared as ever they had been.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  If one of the scanning screens had not suddenly broken down, we might never have learned that the Vulcanids had multiplied still more, and, what was far more serious, had managed to leave the reservoir without our knowledge.

  The screen of one of the Discs — the one that had shown radar blips some days earlier — ceased to function one morning. It was a Friday, I remember, because the Virians worked on it for the best part of two days. Then on the Sunday they announced that it was in working order again. But, to make sure, they would like to test it for range and accuracy.

  Arabin went up in an auto-gyro so that the Virian technicians might check their instruments. He cruised round at varying heights until the Virians were satisfied that for extremely short range their screens were all working in concert. Then they called for long-distance checking.

  Leo was not anxious to take his aircraft to any great height, as it was constructed more for horizontal progress, and too much vertical flying would exhaust his fuel supply. He accordingly took a westward course, and then turned north, and after various checks at pre-arranged distances began to return.

  We were in constant radio communication with him, and he was chatting idly over his microphone when he suddenly stopped talking, and we heard what we thought was a cough.

  Then he came in again.

  "Sorry for that hiccup," he said. "Matter of fact, I had a bit of a shock then — thought I saw something moving. I'll go back. Plot me carefully, please."

  We fixed him as being over Richmond Park, and he checked the position. Then he moved off north, calling out his position every few moments.

  "Crossing railway by Richmond station," he called. "Making for Kew Gardens. Over a football stadium or something now. Can't think what it was that caught my eye. There just seemed to be a flicker of something moving round here, and it caught me in an unprepared moment. Cricket ground to my right now, and I'm flying due north towards that pagoda thing in Kew Gardens... No. Must have been mistaken. Can't see anything."

  He muttered worriedly for a minute or so as he circled.

  "Poor old greenhouses down here seem to have suffered from the weather," he called. "Scores of broken panes."

  David Cohen checked him in sorrowful reproach. "Now, Mr. Arabin, please! Those are conservatories dahn at Kew. Greenhouses, he says! At Kew!" David was a keen gardener.

  I was pencilling a red track on the
mica of the large-scale map when Arabin spoke again.

  "There is something down there!" he called. "There's something, or somebody, in the greenhouses.

  Something's just poked out four or five more glass panes from the inside!"

  By this time I had already called up everybody on the radio, and every one of us was accounted for. I switched Arabin's circuit to that of each of us, so that everybody could hear him who was near enough to a loudspeaker.

  "I'm dropping down closer," Leo called. "With luck, I might see through all that glass, though it's pretty murky. Closer, now — down to fifty feet. Going down again — twenty feet over the roofs of the greenhouses..."