Quanderhorn picked up a sturdy wooden chair and handed it to alien Gemma. ‘We have to be sure. Break this over his head.’
‘All right! All right! I admit it!’ Brian confessed. ‘I’m a human, and proud of it. I was playing for time. And it worked! Ha ha. Jenkins is warning London as we speak. So do your worst, you filthy alien swine.’
Bravely, and without any thought for my personal safety, I interposed myself between the evil aliens and Brian, and made my heroic stand. ‘You’re not alone, Brian, for I, too, am One of Them. If any of you despicable alien fiends want him, you’re going to have to come through me.’ I struck my sensei Shaku-wocky fighting stance and defied them to make a move. †
* Clearly, this is one of Guuuurk’s many Martian expressions which fail to translate into any Earth language. Thank goodness.
† Guuuurk often boasts of his proficiency in various Martian martial arts. Oddly, they are never called the same thing twice.
Chapter Seventeen
The Rational Scientific Journal of Dr. Gemini Janussen, Wednesday January 2nd 1952 (Again)
Guuuurk fell to his knees and grovelled disgustingly before the possessed Q., tears running down all his cheeks. ‘All right! All right! I was immune to the meteorite! Please, I beg you, don’t inflict the extreme violence on me. I’ll do anything to help you conquer this planet . . . or my planet. Mars is ripe for the picking. We’re all useless fighters anyway. Our Death Rays don’t even work! Just don’t hurt me.’
I resisted the temptation to break the chair over his head.
Personally, I’d never even made it to the post office. Just crossing the street, I’d been approached by five different villagers, obviously in some hypnotic fugue state, who’d tried to insist I look at their wretched meteorite. Clearly, it was no ordinary space debris: it was some kind of extraterrestrial life form bent on exerting its deadly thrall on humanity. I could see only one chance to save life on Earth – to get back to the lab and call Yesterday-us with a dire warning.
I found it rather shocking to overhear that both Brian and Guuuurk had apparently been taken over. Swallowing the key to the Future Phone was pure rationality – who knows what havoc these demons might wreak with such a device!
But, now with Guuuurk and Brian both unmasked, the situation was altered: we humans outnumbered the aliens.
I stepped forward. ‘You may as well know, I didn’t look at the meteorite, either.’
Brian started hauling himself unsteadily to his feet. ‘Dr. Janussen!’ he grinned stupidly, ‘Gemma! You’re – you! How very marvellous!’
Q. sighed. ‘And so am I. Troy also.’
Brian wrinkled his brow. ‘So . . . none of us was ever “One of Us”? But I saw you and Troy in the village, Professor.’
‘We’d gone to examine the nearest meteorite, but it soon became apparent it was dangerous to approach it. When I saw you’d all been subsumed, my plan was to get you to knock yourselves out one by one. I’m afraid this required a certain amount of creative deception.’
‘And I didn’t mean a word of what I said just now about being a miserable snivelling traitor.’ Guuuurk patted down his trousers to clean the knees. ‘Ha ha. I bet you completely fell for it!’
Troy smiled. ‘I’ve no idea what’s going on. But I quite liked kicking Brian.’
‘Sorry, Brian, no offence,’ Guuuurk apologised. ‘But actually it was surprisingly enjoyable.’
Brian plonked himself into a chair and winced. ‘At least we don’t have to do that appalling chant again.’
At which precise moment, we heard it, from outside the walls:
‘One of Us . . . One of Us . . .’
Barely audible at first, but getting inexorably louder. Of course, the inevitable klaxon sounded and the announcement we’d been dreading came over the tannoy.
‘ Angry mob storming the outer compound! Engaging primary security protocols. ’
‘Not to worry,’ the Professor snapped. ‘We’ll simply call Yesterday-us on the Future Phone, and tell them the dire—’
‘I’ve swallowed the key,’ I confessed. ‘Don’t all look at me like that. I thought you were all alien invaders. It was the only expedient course of action.’
‘Not to worry.’ The Professor was unfazed. ‘Nylon has the situation covered. Good old reliable Jenkins will have delivered the message to London. He should be back here, according to my calculations . . .’ He pulled out a slide rule and fiddled about with it ‘. . . assuming he took his usual bicycle and didn’t get a flat . . . He’ll be here . . .’
Jenkins burst back in through the side door, panting and sweaty. ‘I done it, sirs!’
‘. . . any moment . . .’
‘I delivered the message!’
‘. . . now!’ Quanderhorn looked up. ‘Jenkins,’ he scolded, ‘you’re early’.
‘I greased the chain yesterday, sir.’
‘Well, why didn’t you tell me, dammit? How am I supposed to calculate anything properly when you’re randomly adjusting parameters all over the place, willy-nilly?’
‘I didn’t know it was a parameter, sir. It just looked like a normal chain.’
It beggars belief. There was a baying crowd of alien invaders outside, and these useless males were bickering about bicycle components. I steered the conversation back to sanity. ‘Hadn’t we better turn on the wireless?’
‘ Angry mob penetrating outer defences! ’
‘And hadn’t we better do it quickly?’
‘Excellent thought, Dr. Janussen. Jenkins – take the largest forklift truck to warehouse number nineteen and load up Gargantua – the portable Quanderadio. And a very long lead.’
‘Or,’ I suggested, ‘we could just use the set in the briefing room.’
‘Almost as good, Dr. Janussen. Almost as good.’
I arrived first, immediately tuned into the Home Service and twisted up the volume. The reassuring honeyed tones of the BBC announcer filled the room:
‘Here is an urgent and important announcement on all frequencies: Go to the Post Office! Go there at once and look at the glowing meteorite! I repeat . . .’
Horrified, I twiddled the tuner to another station. Radio Paris:
‘Au Bureau de Poste! Y aller à la fois et regarder la meteorite glowing! Vite! Vite! . . .’
I zipped through the medium wave:
‘Go zur Post! Gehen sie dort sofort und blick auf die glowing meteorite! Schnell! Schnell!’
‘Ichido sugu ni y u binkyoku ni ikimasu!’
‘ перейти к почтамту сразу сразу !’
A dark cloud was forming on Quanderhorn’s brow. ‘Jenkins? Did you send that message by telegram?’
‘I did, sir.’
‘And where did you go to send that telegram?’
‘Why, the post office, of course.’ A strange, cold grin bled over the janitor’s features as his voice descended below the depths of human pitch. ‘And soon, you will all be One of Us.’
Chapter Eighteen
The Rational Scientific Journal of Dr. Gemini Janussen, Wednesday 2nd January 1952 (Again) [cont’d]
It’s extraordinary to record at this moment that throughout all of this protracted situation none of the men, not a single one of them, had mentioned my rather striking new haircut. Not that I wanted them to, of course, but the sheer poverty of their observational facilities never ceased to amaze me.
For the record, and not that it matters in any way, I’d elected to have a Doris Day bob, because it was the most efficient style on offer. The sheer expediency of it, by coincidence, also subtly flattered my oval face, which I’d have thought would have been apparent to all. Clearly, I was wrong. Again, not that it matters. Frankly, this was not the time to be concerned with such piffling trivia. I can’t think why it had crossed my mind. My hand went up instinctively to my right ear. I’ve no idea why – what an odd thing to do!
The alien who had hijacked Jenkins had produced from his pocket what appeared to be a banana
, and was holding us at bay with it, as if it were a gun.
‘Stay where you are. You will all be absorbed shortly.’
‘I say, Jenkins.’ Brian sidled forward with a rather unconvincing nonchalance. ‘Ha! You chaps have a lot to learn about our Earth weapons.’ He leapt and made a grab for the banana, which emitted a bright electric arc, repelling the foolhardy idiot across the room into the back wall with a rather sickening thud.
‘You’ve a lot to learn about our weapons,’ the Jenkins monster crowed. ‘Ho ho ho.’ He looked up, as if receiving a telepathic signal. Clearly he was operating as a component in some sort of hive intellect. ‘We are approaching the main gates. Soon you will be subsumed.’
Q. barked: ‘Delores, seal the main gates!’
‘ Sealing main gates now. ’
‘That should hold them for a few hours.’
‘ Crowd broken through main gates .’
I heard a loud crash in the distance, and the chant suddenly grew in volume and, distressingly, fervour.
‘Dammit!’ Q. thumped the desk. ‘What idiot thought it was a good idea to install chocolate gates?’
That person, of course, was him. He’d claimed he could make them stronger than vanadium steel. We’d all had our doubts after the caramel submarine disaster.
‘Ho ho ho,’ the Jenkins alien laughed mirthlessly. ‘A little thing like chocolate gates can’t stop us!’
I estimated the marauding horde would achieve total incursion within seven minutes and thirteen seconds, with a probability of .97 recurring they would ingest us into their collective.
Guuuurk’s voice almost reached dog whistle pitch. ‘Chocolate gates! Chocolate gates! What were we expecting? An attack by Hansel and Gretel? What’s the next line of defence? A wall of meringues? A marzipan drawbridge over a pink blancmange moat?’
The alien waved his banana tauntingly. ‘It’ll take more than confectionery fortifications to stop us.’
Q. rounded on him with a cunning expression. ‘What will it take then, Jenkins?’
The human part of Jenkins was clearly battling his alien interloper, because he hesitated just an instant – the sound of His Master’s Voice had somehow got through to him – but the alien regained control. ‘You can’t trick us with your intellectual shenanigans, Professor! We’ll never let on about the music.’ The alien’s face twitched in irritation. Bravo, Jenkins! He’d managed to slip us a clue!
Brian had hauled himself back into the fray. ‘What does he mean, musi—’ He stopped and stared at me rather unnervingly. ‘I say, Dr. Janussen, have you changed your hair?’
Typical shallow male! How could he be thinking about such trivialities at a moment like this?
‘You’ve had it cut, haven’t you?’
I sighed. Might as well get the nonsense out of the way. ‘Well, yes, if you must know.’
‘It’s rather fetching.’
‘I don’t care.’ I waited. No doubt this conversation was going to drag on for some considerable while, ranging over various irrelevant aspects of my appearance. I waited a little longer. And a little bit more. Nothing!
‘And now,’ the Jenkins creature waved his bizarre weapon at us, ‘if you’d all like to queue up politely, it’ll be quicker to absorb you into the hybrid swarm.’
Q. closed his eyes wearily. ‘Troy – push that idiot into the broom cupboard and bolt it shut.’
‘OK, Pops!’
Jenkins pulled a lopsided grin. ‘You can try, sir, but you’ll find I have the strength of ten—’
The banana weapon was snapped in half and the alien was in the broom cupboard quicker than wax off a floozy’s hairpin. *
‘Oh. Well done, Master Troy.’ Jenkins’ muffled voice issued from the cupboard. ‘You’re a lot more muscular than I thought.’
This delighted Troy of course, who is Vanity incarnate. ‘I am though, aren’t I?’ He flexed his arm. ‘Would you like to feel my biceps?’
‘Very much, sir.’
Before we could stop him, Troy had released the bolt and it took Guuuurk, Brian and myself combined a great deal of effort to push the door shut again. Clearly Jenkins was drawing strength somehow from the collective.
‘Hey!’ Troy protested. ‘What are you doing? He wanted to feel my biceps.’
‘He wanted to escape , Troy,’ I pointed out.
‘Wow! These aliens must have like super-duper intelligence of some kind or other. I never saw that coming.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ came the muffled voice, ‘I can’t hear you properly.’
‘Nice try!’ Troy called. ‘Fool me once, shame on you – Fool me twice . . .’ He paused, frowning. ‘What was it again?’
‘ Shmmmm ogggg yggg ,’ came faintly from the cupboard.
Troy pulled it open. ‘Sorry – what was that?’
This time it took all four of us to close it. The alien’s strength was increasing all the time, presumably as the horde got closer.
Brian was braced against the cupboard door, panting. ‘I was just saying, what did he mean about music back then? Only, I did faintly hear something strange coming from the meteorite.’
Guuuurk, who was the only one of us to have actually encountered the thing at close hand, said, ‘Music . . . ye-e-es. There were some kind of peculiar, unearthly tones vibrating from it.’
‘Just a minute.’ Q. ruffled through the papers on the desk. ‘Where’s that meteorite report, dammit?’
And from the cupboard: ‘Mr. Nylon hasn’t got it in his jacket pocket, that’s for sure!’
‘Thank you, Jenkins.’ Q. held out his hand. Brian unfolded the report and passed it over.
Q. scanned it quickly. ‘Of course! Look at these waveforms.’ He slapped the report with the back of his hand. ‘The meteorites must exert control with a sequence of harmonic emissions. All we have to do is generate blocking soundwaves in the directly opposing frequencies!’
Guuuurk half-closed all his eyes. ‘I hope nobody’s going to suggest we form a barbershop quartet. Because I’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson from the deadly sing-off with the Cockroach Kaiser’s Battle Choir. I still have mandible scars on my throat.’
Troy was exasperated. ‘I said I was sorry! We hadn’t eaten in three days!’
‘ Crowd has broken through the marzipan drawbridge— ’ The Professor avoided Guuuurk’s gaze ‘— and overcome the attack penguin. ’
‘Attack penguin!’ Brian exclaimed. ‘So that’s what was in the sentry box!’
‘ Occupation of this building estimated in five minutes. ’
Q. snapped into action. ‘We’d better get moving. What we need is some kind of device that can reproduce a succession of tones on a variable harmonic scale. We’ll have to construct some sort of jerry-built Hammond organ from what’s available in this room. Everybody: what do we have?’
We all scattered around the briefing room, calling out what we found:
‘A broken chair . . .’
‘Half a banana . . .’
‘Three slices of National Loaf . . .’
‘A paraffin heater . . .’
‘The other half of the banana . . .’
‘A fire axe . . .’
‘A ream of foolscap paper and a Hammond organ . . .’
PROFESSOR PROBLEMS
‘Splendid!’ The Professor clapped his hands. ‘We need to move fast! Start chopping up the Hammond organ with the axe, and we can combine the keyboard with the slices of bread and rolled-up strips of paper to fashion a sort of primitive hurdy-gurdy . . .’
Again, we were all thinking it, but this time I was the one who spoke. ‘Or we could just plug in the Hammond organ and play that.’
The Professor regarded me blankly for a moment. ‘Well, if you insist on being hidebound by conventional thinking . . .’
Guuuurk had plugged the organ in and flicked the switch. A low hum began to swell as it warmed up. ‘But what will we play on it?’
The Professor flipped open the organ stool and gr
abbed a sheaf of manuscript paper.
‘Here!’ He scribbled quickly and handed the sheet to Guuuurk.
‘“Order . . . larger . . . penguin?”’ he read, baffled.
‘Professor?’ I urged. ‘The tune?’
‘Of course.’ Consulting the meteorite report, he deftly scrawled down a series of elaborate musical notations on the manuscript paper and held it out with a flourish.
There was the sound of breaking glass from round about the reception area.
From the cupboard, the Jenkins thing crowed. ‘We’re breaking into the main building!’
Which provoked the irritated response from the tannoy: ‘ Are you trying to do me out of a job, Mr. Jenkins? They’re officially breaking into the main building. ’
I grabbed the sheet music, propped it up on the stand and started to play. Surprisingly, what came out was a jerky little gavotte. Strangely catchy, too.
There was a distressed rattle from the cupboard, and the door seemed to bulge. Could the music, by any miracle, be working?
‘I think I know that tune . . .’ Brian’s face scrunched up, as if he were in pain. ‘I can’t remember where I’ve heard it. Somewhere. I can’t recall . . . Play it again.’
I did, this time pulling out the Trompette Militaire stop. The Jenkins creature wailed in anguish and hurled itself around the cupboard. Dust began to erupt around the architrave. ‘ Arrggh! Not the opposing tonal frequencies!’
‘It’s working!’ Q, yelled. ‘Keep on playing!’
‘Stop it! Pleeeeease! I can’t stand it!’
I literally pulled out all the stops and played. And played.
There were banshee shrieks and deep glottal groans as the alien thrashed around in intolerable agony. Then it abruptly fell totally silent.
I stopped.
We all watched the cupboard door leerily. Was the creature trying to dupe us again? If we approached, would it suddenly burst out and overpower us? Brian took a tentative step forward, then stepped right back again as whatever was inside let out a sudden groan.
Finally, there was a respectful tap on the inside of the door, and Jenkins meekly called, ‘Can I come out now, sir?’
The Quanderhorn Xperimentations Page 11