by Sam Enthoven
He looked down, eyes streaming, and saw . . . yes: the holster with his sidearm was twitching on his hip. Now it was opening, and his gun had flown out! Now, all across the park, men’s weapons were being snatched out of their reach. Rifles, pistols, grenades, machine guns, napalm dispensers – all of it flew up into the air and vanished like the tanks had before them.
When the men were completely disarmed, when all of them just lay there in disarray, strewn around the grass wherever they’d landed, the tornado abruptly seemed to suck back up into the main mass of the cloud. The wind dropped. Then there was silence.
‘Right,’ said a voice. ‘Are you ready to talk seriously now? Or are you still dead set on acting like idiots?’
Blinking, Field Marshal Thompson sat up.
There, standing only a few metres away, was Professor Mallahide. Behind him the patch of park that, up until a moment ago, was all that Field Marshal Thompson and his men had managed to destroy in their ferocious attack, seemed to have magically repaired itself. The black mass of cloud still loomed menacingly overhead, but apart from that – and the vanished weapons and equipment – there was absolutely no sign anywhere of what had just taken place.
Mallahide still wasn’t smiling, though: he was getting impatient.
‘Are you understanding this yet?’ he asked. ‘Is this getting through to you? You can’t hurt me. You can’t shoot me; you can’t blow me up; in fact, you can’t really do anything whatsoever to stop me. So the only way you and I are going to make any progress is if you stop trying to cling to what little power you think you still have and just listen to what I have to say. Listen to me,’ Mallahide repeated. ‘That’s all I ask!’
Field Marshal Thompson knew he had lost control of the situation. For a moment, as he lay on his back on the grass, blinking up at the figure of the professor, it felt to him like the whole episode – in fact, everything since last week – must be part of some sort of awful dream. Well, there was one more chance. He reached up and touched his throat microphone.
‘Bravo Ten Zero,’ said Field Marshal Thompson, ‘this is Hot Spot, authorizing Operation Pandora’s Box – code seven, seven, nine, seven, five. Repeat, Operation Pandora’s Box, you are clear for your attack run. Acknowledge, please.’
‘This is Bravo Ten Zero,’ said a voice in his ear. ‘Commencing attack run.’
‘All right,’ said the professor wearily, ‘what have you done now?’
‘Air strike,’ croaked Field Marshal Thompson. ‘I’ve just given the order to have the whole of Hyde Park carpet-bombed.’ He smiled weakly. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake . . .’ Making a soft sucking noise of annoyance with his tongue, Mallahide looked in the direction the planes were coming from – even though, at that moment, they were still too far away to be visible or audible to any ordinary human being. ‘You really are being very tiresome about this,’ he added, looking down at the field marshal again. ‘I think when I’ve dealt with this latest idiocy of yours, you and I are going to have to have words.’
Then – horribly – Professor Mallahide started to change.
A column of sparkling golden light seemed to extend downwards from the waiting mass of cloud above, covering the professor in an extraordinary orange-brown aurora. Instantly his arms, his legs – his whole body, in fact – began to thicken and turn dark.
Spots of shiny brown – so dark as to be almost black – were spreading and expanding all over him: running up his legs, pooling across his torso. At the same time, the professor seemed to be growing – expanding in size at an incredible rate.
His legs, completely covered now in thick plates of a kind of armour, stretched outward, swelling, lifting him into the air. Abruptly, with a soft crackling sound that Field Marshal Thompson found especially hideous, each of the legs then split apart right up the middle, dividing in two, then four, while the professor’s lower body seemed to elongate out behind him.
Now Mallahide towered over the park. Multiple insect legs had suddenly arched up into shiny brown ridges overhead, like the vaulted ceiling of some unspeakable cathedral – and Field Marshal Thompson gaped. He’d been reminded of something: he was so appalled and absorbed in the terrifying transformation taking place right before his eyes that it took him a moment to work out what. But he knew where he’d seen the shiny brown armour before.
On a cockroach.
Professor Mallahide had reconfigured himself, condensing his swarm of machines into a single shape, the first one that had occurred to him that would still be long enough to protect the park from whatever these military idiots were about to come up with next: the shape of a cockroach. However, Mallahide had decided to leave his upper body more or less as it was. From the waist up, his proportions were the same as those of his human body – torso, two arms and a head – but all were now armoured in the same tough carapace as the rest of him, and magnified to incredible size.
Clicking his giant new jaws, Mallahide looked down at himself and smiled. The whole transformation had only taken something like thirteen seconds, but he had to admit, the effect was pretty spectacular. He was now more than 150 metres tall – and that wasn’t even including the length of him from the waist down. His new compound eyes – each dinner-plate-size lens of which processed vastly more information than any insect eye had ever been capable of before – focused on the oncoming squadron of jet fighters.
No doubt about it: he was really going to enjoy himself now.
‘Dear God – what the hell is that?’ screamed a voice in Field Marshal Thompson’s ear as one of the fighter pilots got his first eyeful of what Mallahide had now become.
‘Cut the chatter, Eagle Four,’ said another voice. ‘All units keep it tight on my wing. Weapons systems armed and ready.’
Six Tornado fighter planes streaked through the air over London, making crockery rattle on shelves all over the city with the shattering boom of their jet engines.
In the cockpit of his plane, the squadron leader eyed the looming shape through his windscreen and suppressed a shudder.
‘Eagle One, this is Eagle Five,’ said a voice in his headphones. ‘Shouldn’t we have missile tone by now?’
‘Eagle Five, this is Eagle One,’ said the squadron leader, ‘hold your course and stand by.’ But it was true. All the planes in the squadron had been loaded with the latest air-to-surface weaponry, supposedly capable of locking itself onto a target without any input necessary from the pilot. Sophisticated computer systems in each warhead were supposed to search for their marks by themselves before signalling to the pilot their readiness to be fired by a teeth-grating whine from speakers in the cockpit. The fighters were well within range, but so far no sound had been forthcoming.
‘Eagle One, this is Eagle Two – I’m not getting a fix either! I can see the target visually, but it’s not coming up on anything else – no radar contact! Nothing!’
‘He must be jamming us somehow,’ Eagle One replied. Running his tongue along his teeth, he made a decision.
‘We’re getting too close. We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way. All units, prepare to release payload manually on my mark! Three! Two! One! Now!’
And just as it seemed the formation of fighters was about to overshoot the park, the warheads were released to find their targets as best they could.
WhaKHOOM!
WHUMP!
CRUMP! FUP! FOOM!
KaBOOM!
A roll of explosions echoed across the London skyline as the missiles – their sophisticated targeting equipment reduced to the simple ‘on-impact’ activation of the most basic bombs used in the Blitz – struck Mallahide’s carapace and detonated.
Still frozen on the grass underneath the gigantic dark canopy of Mallahide’s hind legs, Field Marshal Thompson and his men stared upwards, helpless with amazement and terror. The great pillar-like armoured black legs seemed to quiver for a moment as the bombs hit home. For an extraordinary fraction of an instant
just before he heard the explosions, Field Marshal Thompson caught a flash of their light passing through the swarm – before it condensed even tighter to absorb the damage.
Instantly, without Mallahide even having to think about it, scores of millions more of his nanobots converged on the places where the bombs had struck, shoring up the parts of the swarm that had been destroyed by the bomb blasts.
But Mallahide hadn’t felt a thing.
The fact was, he had told Field Marshal Thompson the truth. The vast cloud of machines that made up Professor Mallahide’s body was now simply incapable of being seriously harmed by anything a conventional army could throw at him. Individual nanobots could be damaged or destroyed, sure, by the trillion if need be – but that wasn’t going to stop Professor Mallahide. He was too big. He could just make more of himself! And as the squadron of fighters, their jet engines howling, wheeled round for another pass at the awesome creature bestriding Hyde Park like some dreadful half-insect colossus, their pilots did not have the faintest conception of what was about to happen to them . . .
Field Marshal Thompson was still lying frozen where he’d fallen. The grass of Hyde Park was completely overshadowed by the vast and looming shape of Mallahide’s gigantic cockroach-like body. Thompson was staring upwards at the raging battle taking place high above – but he still noticed when a haze of something bright and sparkling shivered into being in front of him.
Professor Mallahide had reappeared.
There was a little blurriness about his face and the edges of his silhouette, and occasionally (a result of him being in two places at once: most of the swarm was concentrated elsewhere for obvious reasons) parts of him were a little transparent. But basically the professor’s human form was exactly the same.
‘Call off the attack,’ Mallahide said.
‘No,’ said Field Marshal Thompson.
‘Call off the attack,’ Mallahide repeated, his features going out of focus for a moment in his annoyance. ‘I won’t ask you again.’
‘Why?’ said Field Marshal Thompson, with all the bluster he could manage. ‘What’s the matter? Are you scared?’
Mallahide pursed his lips – or did his best to. It was hard to get the facial nuances right when so much of his processing power was concentrated on the battle: Eagle Squadron was just making its second attack run. Suddenly the air was shuddering again with the crash and shock of another volley of missiles detonating – spectacularly if harmlessly – on Mallahide’s back, high above.
‘It’s not me who should be scared,’ he told the field marshal. ‘It’s you. This is getting dangerous: not for myself of course, but for this whole surrounding area. I mean,’ he added, beginning to lose patience again, ‘what do you think you’re doing, launching an air strike like this here of all places? For heaven’s sake, man, we’re in the centre of London! What about the buildings? What about the people?’
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ said Field Marshal Thompson. Sitting up, he took a deep breath. ‘I protect this city,’ he told the shimmering form of the professor. ‘I protect this whole country, and I’m proud to do it. You are a threat, an invading force, and as the head of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, it’s my duty to respond to that threat with any means at my disposal.’
‘Hot Spot, this is Eagle One!’ Thompson’s radio broke in suddenly. ‘Hot Spot, this is Eagle One; please respond!’
‘Hot Spot here,’ said Thompson. ‘Go ahead, Eagle One.’
‘Sir – our missiles are having no effect. This thing, it’s just taking everything we can throw at it!’
‘Call them off,’ said Professor Mallahide quietly. ‘You see? It’s useless.’
Thompson scowled. ‘Eagle One, this is Hot Spot. There’s only one thing left to try.’ He paused, took another deep breath, and then – looking up at Mallahide – he said: ‘You know what to do.’
Professor Mallahide frowned. This made his eyes pixellate a little at the corners, but he didn’t care about that any more. ‘What have you done now?’ he enquired.
‘Hot Spot, this is Eagle One,’ said the voice from the radio. ‘Confirm, please: “Last Post”?’
‘“Last Post,”’ said Thompson. ‘And may God have mercy on your souls.’
‘All right, boys,’ said Eagle One. ‘You heard the man. Everybody form on my wing.’
‘Thompson, what have you done?’ Mallahide repeated.
‘You’ll find out,’ said Field Marshal Thompson – and smiled.
‘Oh no!’ said Professor Mallahide. ‘Oh no, no, no. Those poor pilots!’
But then, with a noise like thunder, all six planes from Eagle Squadron drove themselves screaming into the swarm.
It was the last option. Every member of the team was a volunteer. They had known what was at stake when they’d taken off from base: they’d known that if all else failed, the last chance was to hurl themselves into the fray. A suicide run, right into Mallahide’s heart – assuming he had one.
In front of Field Marshal Thompson, the part of Professor Mallahide that still looked human abruptly vanished. What was taking place up above now would require a concentration of almost all of his processing power. Vast millions of individual members of the swarm writhed and bunched into position, ready for the impact of the six full-size oncoming fighter planes.
At the last instant, all six pilots of Eagle Squadron closed their eyes, waiting for the shock, the flood of heat and flame that would wipe them out of existence.
Professor Mallahide reconfigured himself again –
The swarm rippled and quivered –
And one by one, when annihilation didn’t come, the pilots opened their eyes.
Eagle One looked out of his cockpit and blinked.
His plane had stopped – brought to a halt gently but firmly before any damage could be done. Now, it seemed, pilot and plane were suspended in a kind of boiling cockroach-brown fog that seethed and shivered against the cockpit’s windows.
For a long moment he stared out helplessly.
Then the windows – the nose – the wings – the whole plane was dissolved. A thick brown cloud poured in all over him. There was a moment of stinging and unbelievable agony—
Then nothing.
Eagle Squadron had vanished with all hands – or not vanished, exactly: they’d been absorbed. Mallahide had them now.
On the shadowed ground in Hyde Park, Field Marshal Thompson stared up at his enemy.
No change. The attack had failed.
The air shimmered in front of him, and Mallahide’s human form appeared again.
‘I am very angry with you,’ Professor Mallahide announced – though from the way his eyes were flashing, Field Marshal Thompson hadn’t really needed to be told this.
‘How could you do that?’ asked the professor, gesturing upward with one tweed-jacketed arm. ‘How could you order your men to kill themselves like that? What gives you the right? And why did they obey you?’
‘Professor Mallahide,’ said Field Marshal Thompson wearily, ‘for someone who has spent as many years working for the military as you have, you really don’t seem to understand us very well. Look at yourself.’ He too gestured upwards. ‘Look at what you’ve become. You’re a danger to the world, and my men and I are willing to die to stop you.’ He drew himself up proudly. ‘That’s what being a soldier is all about.’
‘I didn’t want to have to absorb those people,’ said Mallahide. ‘And believe me, I don’t want to have to absorb you. For what it’s worth, I want you to know that you won’t be harmed, and that I can bring you back whenever I see fit.’
‘How very reassuring,’ said Field Marshal Thompson.
‘But you are the dangerous one here, to yourself and to others,’ Mallahide announced, ignoring the sarcasm. ‘You – and all those like you, who see the world only in terms of violence – are the last remnants of our caveman days. And now, I’m happy to say, humanity has outgrown you.’
‘Oh, shut up and get it over with,’ s
aid Field Marshal Thompson.
‘Fine,’ said Mallahide.
DIPLOMACY
THE CABINET ROOM, 10 Downing Street, not far beyond the most famous black front door in the world. A long table dominated the room: the biggest decisions about the running of Great Britain were made, supposedly, around this table. This occasion was to be no exception.
At one end, the end nearest the room’s soundproofed double doors, stood Mr Sinclair, flanked by a couple of very worried bodyguards. At the other – in his old human form, for the time being, at least – stood Mallahide.
Behind the professor, a pair of windows allowed the hazy grey light of the day outside to leak into the room. The windows were made of Plexiglas and a metre thick, a security precaution installed after they’d been shattered one time in a terrorist attack. To make his entrance, Mallahide had just reduced them to their component atoms, reconstructing them behind him.
‘Well, Prime Minster,’ he said, beaming widely, ‘here I am. What can I do for you?’
Mr Sinclair cleared his throat: Mallahide’s sudden appearance had scared him badly. But a lifetime’s experience as a politician and public speaker helped the prime minister control his voice.
‘Thank you for coming, Professor,’ he began in his most ingratiating tone, ‘but I think we both know it’s more of a question of what we can do for you. Am I right?’
Mallahide raised an eyebrow. ‘Sorry? I’m not sure I follow—’
‘What do you want, Professor?’ Mr Sinclair asked him, hoping this was plain enough.
‘Oh,’ said Mallahide. He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s like I said in my broadcast. I have taken humanity’s next step up the evolutionary ladder. I now possess a gift, the most incredible gift you can imagine – and I want to share that gift with the rest of the human race.’ He beamed again. ‘That’s about the size of it.’