Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure

by David Hambling

  “As long as it stayed here, it would harm people. That’s why it had to go back.”

  That really was what it came down to. Of course, I would never know what happened to Stafford and Pierce and the others. Did Stafford achieve the mystical communion with a celestial being that he yearned for? Did Pierce really ascend with angels to merge with some astral heaven even as his body disintegrated?

  Miss De Vere’s view was that their brains had been infected with alien parasites and their opinions counted for nothing. I was much less sure. I could not even imagine what fusing with a greater being might entail or whether it could be desirable. A poet wrote about becoming “a pulse in the eternal mind” as though it was a good thing. Was being absorbed a horrible death or a form of blissful immortality?

  I was less sure of anything than Miss De Vere and had nobody to advise me. But faced with such an unknown situation, the safest thing was to try and keep things as they were, without alien forces. So in a sense, we were of the same opinion. But I did not think that her straightforward physical interpretation was much better than the religious and mythical framework that Stafford tried to shoehorn his experiences into. Neither was willing to accept how much they did not know, and they filled the gaps with their own angels and monsters.

  “Very smart,” she said sarcastically. “Know what you’ve done? You’ve let their scout get back with intelligence about our world. Now it has everything Stafford and Pierce and the others knew.”

  “I don’t think it was a scout. I think it was a collector. Like Mr Horniman, collecting his beetles and butterflies from exotic places. It wants to collect samples of everything. It didn’t even occur to Horniman to think that he was doing harm, and I don’t think the alien knows, either. The piece of it that landed here was like a deep-sea diver sent to collect exotic specimens and then go back. It can’t survive here; it just crumbles away when it tries to take on a form.”

  What I really wanted to say was that it was a librarian. Hoade was proud of his collection of books but not so mindful of the people who read them. And like him, the alien was not so interested in amassing objects as in collecting information and taking it back to some cosmic brain.

  The meteorite itself was something like ballast, allowing the visitor to get down to the surface. The visitor could move from one physical medium to another; its essence was intangible. I had guessed as much on the day the lightning struck. The alien visitor was like a tune that existed on a piece of sheet music and became a set of vibrations when the pianist read the notation, which might then be turned into radio waves and back into sound waves or be captured in the grooves on a gramophone record. The tune itself survived all those changes unharmed even if you burned the original sheet music.

  What had returned to space had been entirely nonphysical. All it took from our world was information, knowledge, and experience—and, as Miss De Vere seemed to confirm, something of the minds of the humans it had contacted. I remembered the cyclone of images—a glimpse, perhaps, of its memory.

  Perhaps it was like a galactic library or a gigantic Horniman Museum or even its own version of Everett’s freak show. Whatever it was, I was convinced that the motive was curiosity and not conquest. A nonphysical being would not want gold, like the Spanish conquistadores, or land or other physical booty. Just knowledge.

  “Scout, collector—that’s semantics,” she said. “Anything that comes down here has to die, period.”

  “If you saw them, I don’t know if you’d be so confident you could stop them.”

  “Try me,” she said.

  I told her about the scene at the pool, of the many bodies that crawled and slithered out of the ground, and of our struggle. That tiny line appeared between her brows again. I did not mention either the star stone or the secret blow that Yang had taught me, without which the encounter might have ended very differently. She must have been calculating whether I could have survived without help and what sort of help it could have been.

  “If we had tried to run away with the idol, there might have been dozens of them after us, and I don’t know what else.” What had she called it? A million fragments, discontinuous but cohesive—perhaps cohesive enough to eventually bring all its elements to bear on us, including myriad crawling and flying things. If it wanted to raise a battalion, how long would it have taken to drag unsuspecting householders from their porches and force them to drink from the pool?

  “I don’t know how far we would have got,” I went on. “And in such a heavily populated area, a lot of people might have been caught in the middle.”

  She sighed and looked out the window. “Christ almighty. You do realise, Stubbs, don’t you, that you can’t fight a war without breaking eggs?”

  “There would also have been a large number of witnesses. The police would certainly have been involved. And the government afterwards.”

  That irritated her too, but perhaps she was more irritated with herself than with me. There was a long silence as I waited for her to speak.

  “Anyway,” she said at last, seeming to brighten. “The contamination is gone. There’s no risk of it spreading any farther. Nobody is going to sell any more nuggets or drink anything they shouldn’t. And Stafford is out of the picture… maybe we just need a small fire in his library to be sure.”

  I suspected the alternative was burning the whole place down. I held my tongue.

  “And a few other loose ends. Where is Skinner?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s gone.”

  “Of course he has,” she said, amused. “As fast and as far as his little feet will carry him. Maybe I won’t send the hounds after him, if he lies low and keeps his trap shut. He’s smart. He got his fingers burned once, and he’s had enough. But what about you?”

  There was something about the way she asked that question, the little smile at the corners of her mouth. I was in her power, and she wanted me to know it. But I was not about to beg for mercy.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You… are ridiculous. You want to fight extraterrestrials with your fists, and your correspondence course in detective work? It’s pathetic. You haven’t got a clue. You don’t even have a gun.”

  I doubted whether a blazing six-gun in each hand would have stood me in any stead against those pale, unhuman things. And I knew when I was being baited. I saw no reason to apologise for my methods or my results.

  “In the jargon of your national sport,” I said slowly, “I’m batting three for three. I’ll stand by that record.”

  “Three for three, huh?” There was something disturbing in her gaze. It was not just that she hated me, though I was sure she did. There was something more than that. Somehow, I represented something she wanted but had never found. There was desire in her look… she looked at me as though I were food.

  I was the one who looked away first.

  “We’ll see how your batting average goes when you’re working for me,” she said.

  That was the real reason I was still alive and she had not turned me over to the police, as she no doubt could have done. We were, after all, broadly on the same side. And while I was not technically working for her, and the outcome had not been what she had desired, I had already been loosely working on her team.

  It was inevitable that she would view me as being either an ally or an enemy. Those who knew as much as I did must either be part of the organisation or be eliminated. Skinner had understood that.

  I considered the matter, and I felt that a working arrangement might be possible as long as I was given a degree of independence. Whether I could mitigate her excesses or we would come to blows was another question.

  “Alternatively…” I ventured.

  “Believe me, there is no ‘alternatively.’”

  “I see,” I said.

  She reached out and touched my damaged ear. “Maybe we can do something about this.” Her gloved fingers were cool.

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying not to shy awa
y.

  “Maybe I’ll put in a good word, and you’ll get a raise,” she said, enjoying my discomfiture. “Danger money.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Welcome to the cormorant fishing business.” She winked. “You’ll get your orders in due course. I believe I have your address.”

  “I can write it down if you like.”

  She contemplated me for a moment longer, like the new pet owner considering a dog that looked sound but might still require some training.

  “Goodbye, Stubbs,” she said, putting her hand on the lever that opened the car door. “I have to flirt with a bishop.”

  “Good morning, Miss De Vere.” I stepped out into dazzling daylight.

  I had survived, but the world was a darker place. My friend Skinner was gone, and I was deeply entangled with people who were no less dangerous than the alien influences they resisted with such ferocity. Conflict seemed inevitable, and my life or death might depend on Miss De Vere’s whim.

  Even on a clear day, meteorites rained down like hailstones, invisible in the summer sky, each an emissary from an alien star and bearing an unknown cargo. Some were harmless or perhaps even benign; some were burning brands. Miss De Vere’s circle was determined to stamp on all of them before they could spread, and stamp on anyone they deemed to be contaminated. And I was now part of the struggle.

  Sally, who had been sitting at a bench down the street, stood up as she saw me. It was not quite full summer. There was the faintest breeze, and already, I felt a diminution of the sun’s power. Perhaps it was only because I was so fatigued, but the weather seemed a little less warm than the day before. For the first time, I thought I sensed the inevitable approach of autumn in the air.

  Editor’s Note

  As usual, Harry Stubbs’s account is consistent with the known facts, as far as they can be checked.

  Annie Horniman was a friend and supporter of W. B. Yeats and bought the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for his nascent group of Irish playwrights. It was her patronage that secured Liddell Mathers much-needed work at her father’s museum. The collection was originally housed in the Hornimans’ family home, which it eventually outgrew. Horniman was prone to arguments with those close to her. She split with Mathers in 1896—due to a disagreement over “marriages” with elemental beings—and did not talk to Yeats after 1909. She broke with her family in 1897 when her father remarried.

  Paracelsus does mention “Necrocomica” in his work, referring to some type of meteor. The word is of obscure origin and is one of his many coinages. Paracelsus also originated the words zinc—he discovered the metal—alcohol, which is possibly derived from the Arabic, and gnome. He made an inspection of the Ennisheim meteorite, still on display in modern times, which he did not consider to be miraculous.

  There are no reliable records of Paracelsus writing a Liber Necrocomicon. He did, however, write a large number of scientific, medical, prophetic, and mystical works, many of which were not published until after his death. Heretical or other dangerous writings might have been kept secret, and collectors tend to hoard rare manuscripts, so a text may yet emerge—though other works have been falsely attributed to Paracelsus. The task of compiling a definitive bibliography will keep scholars occupied for some centuries more.

  The debate over panspermia and the possibility of microorganisms or diseases being carried by meteorites continues. Scientific evidence remains scant, although there is a rich folklore, such as that surrounding the mysterious outbreak in New England in 1882, which inspired H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.”

  Previous Harry Stubbs adventures:

  “The Elder Ice”

  “Broken Meats”

  Harry Stubbs will return in “Master of Chaos”

  By the same author: “The Dulwich Horror & Others”

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