World of the Gods

by Pel Torro, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

  “Is that the remains of a tree?” asked Pete.

  “Yes, I think it is,” replied Don.

  Draped around the wreckage were splinters of wood and green bark and leaves.

  “That’s it. They skidded into the tree,” said Cameron.

  The three officers began poking around among the debris. But as Cameron had suspected, the driver was dead.

  “Lucky he was alone—at least it saved other lives,” said Cameron.”

  “Recognise him? asked Joe.

  “You being sarcastic or something,” questioned Don. “How can you recognise that?” He indicated the pathetic human wreckage, tangled in the metal.

  “I wasn’t being sarky.” Joe defended himself. “I just wondered if there were any identifying marks.”

  Rather distastefully Cameron stooped and examined a shred of clothing.

  “Must have been doing over two hundred when he hit that tree.”

  “Here’s the wreckage of the speedo,” said Pete. “You’re right, chief. Look.”

  The needle was jammed well past the two hundred mark.

  “It might just have kicked over there when the car disintegrated,” said Cameron.

  “Then again it might not,” said Joe. “He was only a youngster by the look of those remains.”

  “Crazy speed kids,” said Cameron. “The roads won’t stand two hundred. If they want to do two hundred plus, why the hell don’t they go on a race track and do it. A hundred-and-fifty is quite fast enough for any of these roads.”

  “You can’t tell the kids that,” said Joe. “You know what they’re like, everything for kicks, everything for speed.”

  Cameron shrugged his shoulders.

  “I know Joe, I wish we could make it compulsory—I wish we could conscript a few of them into the IPF, when they’d seen as many of these wrecks as we have——”

  He suddenly raised an eyebrow thoughtfully. “Hey, isn’t this the identical spot where the fellow hit the tree three months ago?”

  “Come to think of it—it is!”

  “Must be a yard or two one way or the other, I suppose,” said Cameron, “but it seems queer. They don’t very often allow trees to stand by the side of the highway.…

  “Well, there aren’t any more here—these have been very expertly felled,” said Joe bitingly.

  “I didn’t think there were any more after that last smash,” said Cameron. He turned the matter slowly over in his mind.

  “By the way, who’s up there?”

  “What, that big old house on the edge of the cliff?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought everybody knew that,” replied Joe.

  “We aren’t all your age,” said Cameron with a grin.

  “I guess no,” said Joe. “People haven’t lived as long round this way as I have. But seriously, I thought everybody knew that.”

  “Well, who is it, then? Come on, come on, cut the suspense. This isn’t one of those prehistoric Hitchcock thrillers, you know. This is the 22nd century. Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake are out-of-date. Don’t keep us in suspense.…”

  “Well—that’s Anzar’s residence!”

  “Anzar? Who the devil is Anzar?” said Cameron, “Oooh, I remember!” He snapped his fingers suddenly. “You mean that crazy pseudo-scientist who was expelled by the council a few years back—something about carrying out some lines of experiment which were not supposed to be in keeping with the general pattern. Contravening professional etiquette—scientific etiquette. Had a real blow-up at them, didn’t he, I remember. Must be three years or more.… Claude Fotheringay was chairman that year, and there were several of the leading men on the tribunal—caused a big stink in all the papers. Fancy me forgetting Anzar, now he’s pretty well on our door step. There was Rorsh, and Koftmann, and Dorkel, MacIntyre, Evans, O’Rorke—I think. Yes, their names and photographs were splashed up over all the videos in the country at the time.… I wonder what the devil Anzar is doing out here.… I wonder.…”

  “What do you wonder,” said Joe interestedly.

  Cameron had been about to say something, but changed his mind. “Ah forget it, Joe. Just a crazy hunch I had. You know what the best detectives always say—play a hunch! Sometimes it comes off, sometimes it doesn’t. If this one didn’t come off I should be laughed out of the forces, I reckon,” said Cameron,” as the Jules Verne of the 22nd Century or the H.G. Wells type. The man with the super vivid imagination. I reckon if I told you what I was thinking I’d get the force booby prize. The IPF cup for jumping to conclusions!”

  “O.K. Keep it to yourself then,” answered Cameron. “If it’s as wild as you say it is, maybe you’re right about bottling it!” They went to the nearest call box and sent in a report.

  The hover car was big and new, she was a fine craft, looking for all the world like a miniature flying saucer. Her great jets hurled down her cushion of air, and she coasted gently over the big northern highway, then suddenly, she was no longer over the highway. She was two or three hundred feet up in the air. The driver and his passenger looked out of the window in sudden disbelief and abject terror.

  “Good heavens! What’s that—that—below us! That sort of ribbon?”

  “That’s the road,” answered the driver tersely, as he wrestled with the jet controls to get the hover craft back. The passenger sat wide eyed and staring … at a tall house atop a cliff, which floated by beneath them.

  “Something seems to have interfered with the jet-stream,” remarked the driver, “devil alone knows what though. Only a plane or a helicar ought to get this high. These hover craft are only meant to work on their own small cushion of air. They’re not meant to go this high. The jets aren’t big enough! Something’s increased the air velocity two, three, maybe four hundred times. I just don’t get it!”

  “She’s making the devil of a noise,” jerked the passenger. An air current took them, drifted them away from the house on the cliff. Drifted them over softer country with lush, green fields and soft brown earth beneath the grass. That was undoubtedly what saved their lives… For as suddenly as the strange aberration had taken place in their jet controls, it ceased, and the big hover craft plummeted down like a stone, with only her normal jets working. The driver threw the throttle up to maximum velocity and gave all the reserve fuel in, during those last few vital seconds, before they hit ground. Luckily he managed to create a sufficiently big air cushion, but both he and his passenger were badly bruised and shaken. They staggered out.

  “God!” said the driver. “I never want another experience like that. How are you feeling?”

  “I think I can make it to the road,” said the passenger. They began moving slowly and carefully, gingerly and rather tenderly, towards the highway. It was tough going over the soft earthy grass.

  “I’m glad this stuff was here. If we’d touched down on one of those rocks near the cliff we’d have been dead,” said the driver.

  “Yes, I realise that,” averred the passenger. They kept on walking in silence. A police patrol car was coasting past, as they reached the northern highway. They waved frantically to it. The IPF flag fluttered as the car pulled up smartly. A tall handsome, bronzed young IPF Officer leapt out. One glance at the two men by the roadside was enough to show him they had been involved in an accident of some kind.

  “Step into the car,” he said quickly. “I’ll drive you to town. What’s the trouble?”

  “Hover craft,” gasped the driver. She suddenly whirled us up to two hundred feet.”

  “A hover craft!” said Cameron. The driver nodded.

  “That’s it officer, a hover craft! Just an ordinary road model hover craft. She suddenly went up.…”

  “Where were you?” demanded Cameron. That same strange flash of intuition passing his mind again. “Where were you when this happened?”

  “Can’t have been far from where we are now … we weren’t up many seconds,” and again that gaunt, mysterious house atop the cliff thrust itself before Cameron’
s eyes. Forced itself upon his consciousness. I wonder, thought the young officer, I wonder very much indeed, what that house has to do with these accidents.

  First, cars crash into trees where there should be no trees, and then something goes insanely wrong with the jet controls of a hover craft. He drove to the station, listening to the story of the two men who had just had the miraculous escape. And the more he listened the more suspicious he grew of the house on the cliff and the weird embittered scientist who was reputed to live there!

  Old Tom Farrow was a gardener. He had been a professional gardener and now he was retired, to spend his dotage in the quiet cottage a few hundred yards from the great north highway in its own peaceful little cart track, meandering between the hills. He was still a gardener, he gardened for a hobby. He did for pleasure what he had spent his entire life doing for money. And he loved it. He had been a highly successful gardener, and he had amassed quite a substantial nest egg to augment his State subsistence pension. Despite his age he still had a keen intellect and a novel turn of mind, for he was not as staid in his ways and as conservative in his habits as most octogenarians. Whenever some new chemical or radioactive isotope fertiliser came out, old Tom Farrow would be among the first to try it. When some new method of grafting, some new product, some new plant was produced or introduced from one of the planets, Tom would purchase one and recreate the natural climatic conditions in which the strange blossom could thrive. He had, in fact, one of the finest agricultural collections anywhere in the district. He was pottering around his greenhouses and climatic domes, checking humidity and air densities with loving care, when he suddenly noticed something very odd in a bed of perfectly normal sweet peas. At least he thought they were sweet peas, he’d planted them as sweet peas, the packet that he had bought had been labelled sweet peas, but now the old man could hardly believe his eyes, they were moving. Not just swaying in the breeze, but absolutely moving as though they were animals foraging for food. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of intelligence behind the movement, it was rather random and haphazard, it didn’t display any more intelligence than the natural photosynthetic movement of plants turning towards the light. And yet these plants were moving. Tom racked his brain to think of any plant that had ever done any such thing before. There were, of course, the famous examples of the tumbling weeds that tore up their roots and went for a walk … but these were not tumble weed—these were ordinary, English, garden sweet peas. He could see the colours quite well, for his eyes were remarkably clear for a man of his age.

  He hesitated at first about going for assistance. He knew that his faculties were in good order, but after all, he was eighty. And when men of eighty go into the local police station and start saying that their sweet peas are walking about the garden, for all the world like foraging insects, there is usually only one logical outcome. The Old People’s Home, and medical and psychological care. Tom Farrow had no particular wish to join the senile brigade in the big old Manor House of a nearby town. Mind you, they were well looked after, and they had every convenience, but he wouldn’t be able to indulge his gardening hobby that he wanted to, if he was regulated and mucked about by doctors … he didn’t want his reactions tested and his reflexes analysed! He had no hidden phobias, no repressions. His libido was working in exactly the correct way, and his id was in perfect condition. All he wanted to do was to be left alone to tend his garden and yet, surely, if his eyes were not deceiving him, then he had here a scientific discovery which was far greater than anything which any man in the horticultural world had ever discovered before. Of course, there was one way to prove his point, obviously, it occurred to the old man with startling suddenness and clarity, if he gathered up an armful of the walking sweet peas, boxed them, and took them with him, without saying anything about their strangeness, and asked to have them analysed at the biological laboratory, that would surely answer the question entirely. He picked them up and boxed them with dexterity. They wriggled a little, but there was not a great deal of strength in them. It was more like picking up a handful of thin green worms or snakes, than handling plants. The sensation made the old man feel quite eerie. He tied the box down tightly put them carefully into a sack, tied the mouth of the sack, laid it on the back seat of his old vintage autocar. A few moments more and he was pottering steadily towards town at well under the hundred. Tom did not consider fast driving was good for a man of his age! In the back of the car there were strange noises, whimperings, and rustlings, as though the sweet peas were trying to escape from their confinement.

  “It’s the queerest thing I’ve ever come across,” muttered old Tom, as he pulled up outside the botanical research centre and carried his weird sack into the inner sanctum, where the botanical panjandrums lived, and moved and had their being, amid retorts and test tubes and sterilised soil.

  Jeff Grayson was a road engineer. He had been a road engineer for a long time, for a man of middle age he was still remarkably trim and fit looking. His iron grey hair was by no means thin, and the lines on his face were lines of character, rather than of sheer wear and tear. He stood new beside his measuring equipment, wondering just exactly what the blazes could have beyond dispute. The northern highway for three miles on either side of him was ruined by melted tarmac, and subsided surface. It looked for all the world as though someone had sent a red hot steam roller down that six mile strip. Jeff Grayson lurched and jolted over the damaged road surface in his highly sprung surveying vehicle. He paused here and there to take photographs and to pick up samples of the still warm tarmac. It was fantastic. It was a perfectly good road surface, he told himself. He had never come across anything like this. There had been no heat wave, there had been no unnatural cold spell. The road had been down about seven years, and there had never been so much as the slightest suspicion of any trouble before. He himself had designed and supervised the construction of this particular strip. He knew that the materials hadn’t been skimped and he knew that the work hadn’t been shoddy or haphazard. When Jeff Grayson supervised a job, it was supervised! When Jeff Grayson laid a road it stayed laid. This was the first time in the whole of his career that anything like this had happened. And to put it mildly he was worried. He was very jealous of his professional reputation as a road engineer, and he didn’t want anything to happen to damage that reputation. He didn’t want the slightest shadow of suspicion to be cast upon the quality of his work, and Jeff Grayson was one of those rather anachronistic people, a craftsman, albeit rather a remote craftsman, who worked with the slide rule and the designing bench rather than with his hands, but a craftsman none the less. A craftsman, architect and designer, who was extremely proud of the work which he designed, and the construction of which he supervised. He didn’t want his roads to collapse, above all he didn’t want his roads to collapse without reason. Any road he argued to himself, would give way, if it was subjected to excessive heat, excessive pressure, or weights far in excess of the safety margin which it was intended to carry. He looked again at the road. It had obviously been subjected to two things:—a heat sufficiently excessive to melt the tarmac, and either pressure or energy blasts. Only once in his life before had he seen a road in that condition, and that was one which he had been called out to repair. It was a road with a new metal underlay. This particular northern highway didn’t have one. But the road that did have one, had been struck by lightning. And having been struck by lighting the macadamised surface had been fused into strange new compounds. That was one of the things that had happened. Other things had happened as well—it had subsided, burnt, and blackened and holed where the lightning had actually hit. Now that he came to think about it, it was almost as if this road had been struck by lightning. But not for six miles! Lightning doesn’t dance along a six mile stretch of road from side to side. Why, even at the speed at which it travelled it would take several minutes to do it. It would take more than one fork. Far far more. It would take many flashes, and somebody would have been certain to see it. Some unfortunate in
dividual might even have been driving along when it happened and he would undoubtedly have been electrocuted. Fried to a crisp. Grayson finished taking his photographs and collecting his samples. He made his way back to his vehicle, and lurched and bumped over the damaged road surface, on his way back to his laboratory. A thousand conflicting and confusing thoughts were revolving in his mind. Only one thing seemed to form any kind of pattern at all. The road surface had been subjected to intense heat and intense energy over a wide area. What the source of that heat and energy was, Jeff Grayson had no means of knowing.

  The TV repair men coasted to a halt outside the big block of flats. Benny and Seth jumped from the van and made their way swiftly towards the lift at the entrance of the block. The town of Radville stood at the southern end of northern highway, and the flats to which they had been called by no fewer than eight complaints from the inhabitants, were on the northern end of the town. Four miles further away the ragged, broken hill, the sharp cliff edge of which supported the house of Anzar, could be seen dimly in the distance, a sloping valley between. A long broad valley, that had been gouged out centuries before, by the action of the long forgotten glaciers. North of Anzar’s house was Tom Farrow’s house and garden and the great highway stretching on beyond until it reached Brayton, some twenty miles distant. Benny looked at the sheaf of work-sheets in his hand.

  “Nearly everybody in this block has got a complaint about TV or radio interference,” he said, turning to Seth, “what do you make of it, mate?”

  “Don’t know what to make of it,” replied Seth. “Get the detecting gear out and we’ll have a look.”

  They took the equipment up into the block with them, and began examining set after set. They turned on, and transmission came through; it was marred by blurs and flashes; fault lines; and electrostatic crackles that could obviously only be the result of intense electromagnetic activity somewhere in the neighbourhood.