The Silent Vulcan

by James Follett

  Chapter 6.

  AN HOUR LATER, MIKE MALONE, jogging his way home to his rented flat at Tillington after ten hours on duty, heard the spyder and knew what it was. He stopped and gazed up into the darkness in the direction of the unseen machine's progress.

  He was dressed in the same Day-Glo-marked running kit that he had been wearing on the night in March when the Wall had appeared although he had been unaware of the manifestation at the time. That was the night he had first encountered the spyder. He had been jogging home, as he was now.

  He had good hearing, his pounding trainers had made little sound and he had heard the clatter of the spyder's legs on the metalled road. Thinking that it was an injured animal and a possible danger to motorists, he had allowed it to follow him to a point where the road was flanked by steep retaining walls and therefore the creature was less likely to escape. Whereupon he had wheeled around and sprinted. He had actually been within a whisker of hurling himself on the machine but, to his astonishment, it had suddenly sprouted helicopter-like rotors and shot straight up into the darkness.

  The memory of that eventful night was stark in his mind as he stood scanning the sky.

  So what are you up to tonight, my mechanical friend?

  He resumed jogging. This time with a purpose. His strides shortened and his pace quickened as his powerful, well-trained leg muscles drove him up the hill. At the crest of the rise he stopped and unclipped his PMR radio. He knew that this was a good spot for simplex radio communication with the police station. He held the speaker-microphone to his lips, listened to ensure that the frequency wasn't in use, and identified himself to WPC Carol Sandiman.

  "Anything I need to know about, Carol?"

  "Four calls from TKs, Mr Malone. All the same thing. Members of the public reporting hearing an aircraft. I've assigned all reports to the same serial."

  "It's the Visitors' spyder," Malone replied. "Mark the positions of the telephone kiosks on the map and let me know where they are."

  A morris police patrol asked permission to break in and reported that they had heard a machine pass by overhead. They gave their location as the A283, Blackwoods Farm.

  "Isn't that on the Wall's northern perimeter?" Malone wanted to know.

  "Affirmative, sir. We're right by the Wall markers now. Whatever it was, it must've been nearly touching the Wall because it passed by above us. Quite low, too. We felt a downwash as it went by."

  Carol Sandiman came back with the location of the public telephone boxes. The calls had been received from Lodsworth, Halfway Bridge, Seaford...

  "All on the Wall's perimeter?" Malone questioned.

  "Yes, sir. They make a neat circle on the map."

  Malone thought fast. He considered turning out the Zodiac dingy with its outboard motor in the hope of catching the spyder when it returned to Pentworth Lake. But what would be the point? Most likely they would be too late, and even if they were early, the chances were that the spyder could evade them easily. "If there's a unit in the vicinity of the lake, tell them to keep a lookout. I think that's where our flying machine will return."

  The policewoman acknowledged.

  Malone resumed his homeward jog while turning over these latest events in his mind. The obvious conclusion was that the spyder was carrying out an inspection flight of the Wall. If so, why? Were they about to modify the confounded thing? So far it had been a benign presence -- no one had come to any harm as a result of contact with Wall. Nor had the spyder harmed anyone. Quite the contrary if anything when one considered what had happened to Vikki Taylor. Which brought Malone back to the perennial question of why had Visitors come? What purpose was served by incarcerating some 6000 people in a ten kilometre diameter, impenetrable sphere, and moving that sphere back 40,000 years in time?

  Among Bob Harding's many theories was that they were in some form of celestial zoo or that the rest of their universe had been destroyed and that the Visitors had arrived to save Pentworth. Malone prayed that the latter theory was incorrect. His two kids were Farside, living with his ex-wife. He missed them with an intensity that his friends and colleagues barely suspected. And when he wasn't thinking of them, his thoughts automatically returned to Ellen Duncan, and her fellow fugitives, Vikki Taylor and Claire Lake. But mostly he thought about Ellen Duncan and the time on a hot afternoon when he had carried her up the narrow stairs to her bedroom over her shop. That all three women had to remain in hiding to escape the religious fanaticism of Adrian Roscoe offended Mike Malone's sense of justice -- he was a staunch believer in the rule of law, but even he was forced to accept that the only way to destroy the Bodian Brethren would be to cut off its head.

  Chapter 7.

  AT 2:00PM THE SUN BEATING down in Market Square was at its hottest and the hundreds of documents that had been saturated by fire hoses, now spread out on trestle tables in front of Government House, were drying in a matter of minutes. The four-storey building was the former courthouse and one of the largest buildings in Pentworth town. It had been pressed into service as government offices shortly after the start of the emergency.

  Diana Sheldon was busy, fretting over documents that needed pressing, chivvying her staff, making sure that they returned dried papers to their correct filing boxes, and generally driving herself each day to point of exhaustion by mid-afternoon.

  But Diana was happy. Having been ousted from her job as town clerk by the ambitious Vanessa Grossman, she had been reinstated by Bob Harding immediately after the coup and was determined to fulfill her promise to him that she'd have Government House's administration back to normal within two weeks or less. Fortunately the damage caused by the fire at the onset of the coup was less than had first been feared.

  A blackened rafter crashed down from the roof of Government House where carpenters were repairing the ravages of the fire. It narrowly missed a methane-powered steam generator that was recharging the bank of batteries in the basement of Government House that provided the building with an electricity supply. The charred timber raised a cloud of charcoal dust that settled on her precious documents.

  "You're supposed to use the chute!" she yelled up at the foreman.

  "Too big!" he replied, and another burnt timber crashed onto the ancient flagstones. More black dust was kicked up as charcoal burners tossed it onto a horse-drawn wagon. Nothing was wasted in Pentworth.

  Market traders hurriedly covered their displays of unrationed salad vegetables and soft fruits. It was mid-summer -- high carbohydrate foods were relatively scarce although the signs were that all the main crops would be early. A bonus of Pentworth's isolation and the greenhouse effect of the Wall was that the community now enjoyed a humid Mediterranean climate that stimulated rapid growth.

  Diana considered that many of her small army of girl clerks were inadequately dressed -- distracting the repair workmen -- but the girls worked hard so she held her peace. They were certainly more useful than the men in her charge.

  She spotted Dennis Davis, the chief librarian, struggling ineffectually to unlock a heat-scorched steel filing cabinet. She homed in on him.

  "Having problems, Mr Davies?"

  The librarian smiled sheepishly. He was a confirmed bachelor, with a soft spot for the greying town clerk that went back many years before Diana had gone grey. For some weeks he had been nerving himself to invite her to have a drink or a meal with him. It was all a matter of choosing the right time. Probably when she had gone white.

  "The heat appears to have damaged the lock on this cabinet, Miss Sheldon," said Dennis.

  Diana seized a crow bar from a toolbox and jemmied the filing cabinet's top drawer open in about five seconds. She opened a folder at random and riffled through the documents, testing them between her thumb and forefinger. "All bone dry," she declared, slamming the drawer shut. "What's the situation on the second floor?"

  "All the books are okay but about a hundred volumes in paperback romances section got soaked beyond repair, but I don't consider that a great loss."
/>
  Diana smiled. After the Wall had appeared, one of the first actions of the emergency council had been to require everyone to donate their books to the newly established library which would become the repository of all the community's knowledge in case the Wall remained in place for many years, as Bob Harding had considered a possibility. As a result Dennis had became custodian of over a million books and magazines. Most of the clerks now sorting out documents in Market Square were girls who had been hired to write out the index cards.

  "I would've thought you'd regard the loss of any book as a misfortune, Mr Davies."

  "I'm sure they'll be replaced," said Dennis. "There are so many duplicates among the romances. Books, videos and DVDs are still coming in from the refuse sorting depot. I was wondering if you'd ask Radio Pentworth to make an announcement asking people to stop putting them out with their rubbish until we get things back to normal."

  "Ask them yourself, Mr Davies. As chief librarian, you don't need my authority. You know that their studio is now located in the Doll House Museum for the time being?"

  "Yes, indeed."

  "A big mistake housing the radio station in Government House. It compromised its independence."

  "Yes, indeed. A painfully learned lesson, if I may say so." He hesitated. "Do you have any idea now when we'll get back to normal, Miss Sheldon? Only the indexing is badly behind."

  Diana glanced up at Government House at the smoke stains above the top-floor windows of what had been Asquith Prescott's prestigious office. "Sorry, Mr Davies, but I'm going to need your clerks for a few more days salvaging and refiling this lot. As it is, we seem to have lost about ten percent of all our admin records -- more due to water damage rather than fire damage. Who would've thought our two fire engines could dump so much water on a blaze, and so quickly, too."

  "Miss Sheldon?"

  Diana turned to the girl who had approached them. "Yes, Mary?"

  The girl held out a sheet of paper covered in coloured bars and blobs. "A test print from the colour laser, Miss Sheldon. It seems to be working okay. In fact the complete Mac system is all okay. It's just that the monitor case is a bit melted but it's working."

  Diana was pleased. That Pentworth Council could still print the promissory notes that were now used as money within the community was one worry less.

  Chapter 8.

  DR MILLICENT VAUGHAN WAS AN iron-willed, greying lady who had been the senior doctor in Pentworth's largest group practice. The emergency council that had been established after the Wall appeared had tasked her with the setting up of a small hospital which she carried out with her usual brisk, no-nonsense efficiency that bordered on the ruthless.

  Much as she respected Bob Harding, she didn't spare him from her wrath when he paid his first visit to the disused church that had been scrubbed whistle clean from crypt to roof and redecorated before she had deemed it acceptable as a hospital.

  "You've got to get Ellen Duncan back working in her shop," she raged at the retired scientist, having cornered him in her office. "She's Pentworth's best herbalist -- correction -- our only herbalist, and we desperately need her back in production. The dispensary is running dangerously low on supplies."

  "I'm sorry, Millicent, but Mr Malone is concerned for her safety."

  "Because you granted that madman, Roscoe, an amnesty! Malone arrested him and you let him go!"

  "It was that or a civil war, Millicent," said Harding quietly.

  "It was a surrender!" Millicent snapped. "Pure and simple. You give an inch to loonies like him, and they take a mile."

  "And his supporters would've taken lives," Harding countered. "At least we're disarmed them. It's given us time. As you know, Roscoe controls some ninety per cent of our methane supplies. We couldn't afford to disrupt that. Look, Milly -- if you're unhappy with me as chairman--"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You can always refuse to ratify me as chairman at the next full council meeting. To be blunt, Milly, I don't want the bloody job. And if a majority don't want me either, then I'll be more than happy to stand down and let David Weir take over. And let us not forget that you discharged Roscoe and his sidekick yesterday."

  "I'd didn't discharge them, I threw them out. Roscoe started preaching his avenging God rubbish to patients and staff, and that animal, Nelson Faraday, had two of those Bodian girls visit him. Bringing him gropes rather than grapes."

  Bob Harding couldn't resist a smile at that.

  "It's not funny! My staff nurse caught them. Two girls dressed up as schoolgirls. I don't give a damn what they get up to in Pentworth House -- no worse than when Turner used to stay there, I daresay -- but I won't have such things in my hospital. You're going to have to dissolve that absurd sect; get the girls out and married off. Three deaths and only one birth in the last ten days. We need an intensive campaign on the radio to get more babies on the way. We'll all die out if the Wall stays for several years."

  Pentworth's birthrate, or lack of it, was fast becoming Millicent Vaughan's principle theme. Harding considered that he had enough issues to deal with without getting embroiled in that sensitive problem. He changed the subject. "I've actually come to see Asquith. How's he been?"

  "No trouble. His burns are healing well. He's a much-mollified man since the coup. More like the old Prescott. Still a prick, but no longer an egotistic prick. I'll get someone to show you up."

  A ward orderly showed Harding into Prescott's room. The landowner was listening to Radio Pentworth on headphones which he tried to pull off with heavily bandaged hands.

  "So how's things, Asquith?" asked Harding, helping disentangle the patient's hands and arms from the headphones.

  Prescott managed his usual ebullient smile despite the dressings around his face and head. He bore no ill will towards the man who had succeeded him. "Apparently my hair has started growing back. I won't be permanently bald as I had feared."

  "Is that all you've been worrying about?"

  "It's all I've preferred to worry about," Prescott replied with some feeling. He nodded to his hands. "All clearing up, but I'll be a marked man for life."

  "You rolled Vanessa Grossman up in a carpet. That was a brave thing to do."

  Prescott's florid features twisted into a scowl. "I should've let the scheming bitch die. She deceived me, Bob. They all did."

  That's right, blame everyone else but yourself, thought Harding. "Including Roscoe?"

  "Particularly Roscoe. He tricked me into signing those warrants for the arrest of Ellen Duncan and the Vikki Taylor girl."

  Harding knew that that was an over-simplification of what had happened but he hadn't come to see Prescott to start another argument. He came straight to the point. "Do you have any influence over Adrian Roscoe?"

  Prescott laughed and winced in pain. "None. Never have had. The only way to exert any influence over him is to tap into the direct line he thinks he has to God."

  "As you know, the reason I granted you all an amnesty is that I saw it as a way of averting a civil war. Also Roscoe controls Pentworth's main supply of methane from his piggerys' digestors. I felt that I couldn't afford to put that supply at risk. In your case, I decided on an amnesty because you did a lot of good in the aftermath of the Wall's appearance. The emergency measures you pushed through were necessary. The anti-pollution directives; setting up the morris police force. I'm not sure about Vanessa Grossman, but in Adrian Roscoe's case, I now believe that the amnesty was a mistake."

  "There is something that would influence Roscoe," said Prescott. "One thing only."

  "What's that?"

  "A bullet between the eyes."

  Chapter 9.

  TEN YEARS EARLIER, Roger Dayton's reaction to an enforced early retirement as director of a major yacht chandlery business in Chichester had been to fulfill a life-long ambition by renting out his house and paddock for two years and sailing around the world with his wife and cat. His 15 metre deep keel yacht didn't do any sailing now but sat on blocks in his paddock, it
s winter home that now looked permanent.

  "Go easy, you idiot!" he snapped at the elderly man who was scouring a rust patch on the hull with a wire brush. "You use just enough pressure to clean the rust the away, not wear a hole through the hull.

  Typical ex-officer knowall, thought Lennie Hunter. But he held his peace. He enjoyed his Saturday job working on the yacht. Better than his boring weekday job working in the supplies depot. Directed labour, just as he was getting used to his retirement. For one thing he was outdoors here. For another the Dutch steel-hull yacht was a fine craft -- well worth putting up with Roger Dayton's bellicose moods for the extra pay now that his pension had been slashed. "I think we're going to need the scaling hammer on this patch, Mr Dayton. I reckon it goes right under the paintwork."

  "Rubbish, man. She's rock solid." Dayton seized a hammer and rapped it sharply on the hull. There should've been a ringing sound, but the blow resulted in a dull thud. He struck the hull harder and a large flake of paint fell away, exposing more corrosion. "Dammit," he muttered. It didn't occur to him to apologise to an employee which was why his fellow directors had pushed him into early retirement. "What in hell caused that? She had new sacrificial anodes last year."

  "Could be a hundred and one things, Mr Dayton. A blowhole in the steel plate, a welding seam with a weak spot that's gone acidic. Happens to the best Dutch hulls. Some self-etching primer and filler and she'll be fine."

  "I haven't got any primer, you idiot!"

  "Good afternoon, Mr Dayton."

  The yachtsman spun around. Bob Harding was standing near the yacht's bow.

  "Your wife said you were here," Harding explained. He held out a package wrapped in dried grass and fastened with raffia. Dried grass was now Pentworth's primary packaging material for anything fragile. "Your echo-sounder, Mr Dayton. Returned with thanks. It's a fine instrument."

  Dayton grunted his thanks and took the package. "As you're now chairman, I would've thought you'd be far too busy to go running around on trifling errands."