Meteor and Other Stories 2500 Headwords

by John Wyndham

  There was silence in the room as they all began to realize the truth of what Alice Morgan had said. The big man looked round at the others, and then his eyes rested on Alice.

  ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘You should have been a lawyer. We shall have to consider this matter before our next meeting. But, for the present, John, will you make sure there are eight pieces of paper, as the lady said …’

  It’s her!’ said the Second Officer, looking over the Captain’s shoulder.

  ‘Of course it’s her,’ said the Captain of the rescue ship. ‘What else would you expect to find spinning head-over-heels round Mars? Of course it’s the Hunter.’ He studied the screen very carefully. ‘Not a sign of life.’

  ‘Do you think there’s a chance that there’s anyone left alive?’

  ‘What, after all this time! No, Tom, no chance at all,’ said the Captain.

  ‘How shall we board her?’ asked the Second Officer.

  If we can get a steel line on to her, we may be able to pull her in gently, like catching a big fish,’ replied the Captain.

  It was a difficult job. Five times they fired the steel line at the Hunter without success. At the sixth attempt they managed to attach the line. Then it took them three hours of very careful pulling at exactly the right moments to stop the Hunter spinning. At last they were able to get close to her. There was still no sign of life aboard.

  The Captain, the Third Officer and the doctor put on their space-suits. They left the rescue ship and used the steel line to guide themselves on to the Hunter. They waited together at the entrance while the Third Officer took a tool from his belt and fitted it into a small opening on the entrance door. He turned the tool as far as it would go, and then fitted it into a second opening, and turned it again. The tool was a key that closed the airlock inside the entrance, and then switched on the motor to clear the air from the lock. That is, if there was any air still left in the Hunter, and any electricity to drive the motor.

  The Captain held a microphone against the body of the spaceship and listened. He heard a buzzing.

  ‘OK, the motors are running,’ he said. He waited until the noise stopped. ‘Right. Open the door,’ he commanded.

  The Third Officer put his tool into a third hole, and turned it. The door opened inwards. The three of them looked at each other very seriously, and then the Captain said very quietly: ‘Well. Here we go!’

  They moved carefully and slowly into the darkness.

  After a few moments the Captain asked: ‘What’s the condition of the air, Doctor?’

  The doctor looked at his instruments.

  It’s OK,’ he said in some surprise. He took off his breathing equipment, and the others did the same.

  ‘This place smells horrible,’ said the Captain uneasily. ‘Let’s get our work done.’

  They went on, and entered the large central room. Though the rescue ship had stopped the Hunter spinning, all the loose things inside her were still floating around in space.

  ‘Nobody here, anyhow,’ said the Captain. ‘Doctor, do you think …’ He stopped as he noticed the strange expression on the doctor’s face.

  Among the things floating around was a long bone. It was large and clean, and it had been cracked open. The doctor was staring at it.

  ‘That bone is from a human leg, Captain,’ he said, his voice shaking.

  And then the silence of the Hunter was broken by a thin, clear voice singing:

  Go to sleep, my baby. Close your lovely eyes … Alice sat on the side of her bed, rocking a little, and holding her baby close to her. The baby smiled and put up one tiny hand to touch her face as she sang: Mummy’s going to give you Such a sweet surprise … Her singing stopped suddenly as the door opened. For a moment she stared at the three figures in the doorway, and they stared back at her, amazed. Her arms were as thin as sticks; the skin of her face was stretched tightly over the bones. Then the mouth moved to imitate a smile. Her eyes became brighter.

  She let go of the baby, and it floated in mid-air, laughing a little to itself. She put her hand under the pillow on the bed, and pulled out a gun.

  The black shape of the gun looked enormous in her thin hand. She pointed it at the three men in the doorway as they stood there, too surprised to move.

  ‘Look, baby,’ Alice said. ‘Look there! Food! Lovely food…’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BODY and SOUL

  The Ford Hospital of Psychology New York 28 February

  Thompson, Hands and Thompson,

  Lawyers,

  512 High Street,

  Philadelphia, Pa.

  Dear Sirs,

  As you requested, we have thoroughly examined our patient, Stephen Tallboy, and are quite certain that he is Stephen Tallboy. The relevant legal documents are attached to this letter, and completely prove that Tallboy’s claim to the property of Terry Moreton is false.

  However, we must admit that we are surprised. When we last examined the patient, his mind was undoubtedly weak and sub-normal. But now he is completely normal, except that he believes he is Terry Moreton. He supports his claim in a number of surprising and extremely interesting ways, and we think he should stay here for a time so that we can observe him. This will give us the opportunity to clear his mind of this fantastic idea, and to find the answers to a few questions that are puzzling us.

  We are also sending you a copy of a statement written by the patient. Please study this statement before reading our final remarks.

  STATEMENT by Terry Moreton

  I know this is difficult to believe. In fact, when it first happened, I didn’t believe it myself. I have been taking painkilling drugs long enough for them to affect my mind. But the whole thing seemed very real from the first moment.

  Four years ago my legs were smashed by enemy bullets. They operated on me nine times, and although I lived, I was nothing more than a wreck in a wheel-chair. ‘Don’t take so much of the drugs,’ the doctors told me. What a joke! They couldn’t cure the pain, and if they’d stopped the drugs, I would have killed myself. They knew that.

  I don’t blame Sally for calling off the wedding. Some people thought I was bitter about it, but I wasn’t. She’d got engaged to a healthy young man, and the man she found in the wheel-chair was a very different person. Poor Sally. It nearly broke her heart, and I think she would have stayed with me out of kindness and pity. But I didn’t try to keep her, and I’m glad I didn’t - at least I don’t have to feel guilty about her. I hear that her husband is a good man, and her children are lovely. And I’m pleased for her.

  However, when every woman I meet is kind to me - as though I were a sick dog … Oh, well, there was always the drug.

  And then, when there seemed to be nothing ahead but pain and a slow death, there was this … this … vision.

  I’d had a bad day. My right leg was hurting badly, and so was my left foot. But as my right leg had been cut off soon after the bullets had smashed it, and my left foot had followed not long after that, there was not much the doctors could do to help.

  I was trying hard to reduce the amount of drugs I was taking. I had persuaded myself that it was good for my soul to resist them. I was wrong, of course. I was only making myself and everyone round me miserable with my bad temper. Anyway, I had decided to make myself wait until ten o’clock. For the last quarter of an hour I watched the big hand of the clock moving very slowly round, and the second hand crawling, and then I took the top off the bottle.

  The moment I took the drug, I knew that I had been a fool to wait for so long. I lay back, the pain faded away and I seemed to be floating. But the day of pain had made me very tired, and before I could properly enjoy feeling comfortable, I knew I was falling asleep.

  When I opened my eyes, there, in front of me, was the vision of a young woman. She was singing very quietly. It was a strange song, and I couldn’t understand a word of it.

  We were in a room - well, yes, it was a room, though it was rather like the inside of a ball of cool, green
, shining glass. The walls curved up so that you couldn’t tell where they became ceiling. There were two arches making openings in the sides, and through them I could see tree tops and blue sky.

  The girl was sitting near one of the arches, and she turned to look at me. She saw that my eyes were open, and said something that sounded like a question, but I couldn’t understand a word of what she said. I lay there looking at her, and admired what I saw. She was tall, with a beautiful figure, and brown hair tied back on her neck. The material of her dress was very light and transparent, but there was a great deal of it, and it was arranged cleverly in folds.

  When I did not reply, she frowned and repeated her question. I didn’t listen very hard, because I was thinking: ‘Well, that’s that. I’m dead, and this is a waiting-room for heaven - or somewhere.’ I wasn’t frightened, or even greatly surprised. I was pleased I had come to the end of an unpleasant and painful experience.

  The young woman came towards me and said slowly in English with a strange accent:

  ‘You - are - not - Hymorell? You - are - some - other -person?’

  I’m Terry Moreton,’ I told her.

  There was a block of the green glass near me. She sat down on it and stared at me. Her expression showed that she was very surprised and that she only half believed me.

  By this time I had begun to discover myself. I was lying on a long sofa with a kind of light blanket over me. I tried moving what ought to be my right foot, and the blanket moved all the way down to the foot. There wasn’t any pain, either. I sat up suddenly, very excited, feeling my legs, both of them. Then I did a thing I hadn’t done for years - I burst into tears.

  I can’t remember what we spoke of first. I suppose I was too excited to concentrate on what she was saying. I remember learning her name - Samine - and wondering, as I listened to her foreign-sounding English, why there should be a language problem at the gates of Heaven. But I was really more interested in what had happened to me. I threw back the blanket, and found that I was naked beneath it. That didn’t worry me, nor did it seem to worry Samine. I sat staring at the legs. They weren’t mine, and the hand with which I felt them was not mine either - but I could move the toes and fingers. I moved the legs over the side of the sofa, and then I stood on them. For the first time in more than four years, I stood …

  I can’t describe my feelings, and I didn’t try to say anything about them.

  There was a dressing machine in the room. Samine operated it in some way, and the article came out of a drawer in the front of it. The cloth was very light, in one piece, and there was a great deal of it. I thought it was too

  pretty for a man, but Samine told me I was wrong, and showed me how to put it on. Then she led me out of the room into a great hall, also built of the green material like glass.

  There were people in the hall, none of them hurrying. They were dressed in the same light, transparent cloth, and the way it floated out as they moved made me think of dancers performing. Our soft shoes were silent on the floor, and there was hardly any sound except the gentle noise of soft voices. I found this lack of natural sound depressing.

  Samine led me to a row of double seats against the wall, and pointed to the end one. I sat in it, and she sat beside me. It rose a little, perhaps eight centimetres, from the floor, and began to move across the hall. In the middle we turned and slid silently towards a great arch at the far end. Once we were outside, we rose a little more until we were about a metre above the ground. From the low platform to which the chair was attached, a curved screen rose to cover us, and as it did so, we began to go faster. We went smoothly at about forty kilometres an hour across open land, following lines between occasional trees. I suppose that Samine was controlling the machine in some way or other, though I could not see how.

  It was a strange journey and it went on for over an hour. In all that time we never saw a road or a farm or a garden; the land was like the parks round the great houses of the past. The only signs of human life were some large buildings among the trees. Ahead of us I saw a building on a hill. I can’t describe it because it was unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined. It looked more as if it had grown than been built to a plan. The walls looked as if they were made of pearl, and there were no window openings. Plants grew close up against it, and on top of it. As we got closer I could see that it was unbelievably huge, and the plants on top of it were in fact fully grown trees. The building rose before us like an artificial mountain.

  We flew gently in through an entrance sixty metres wide and a hundred metres high, and found ourselves in a hall of amazing size. A few men and women were walking slowly in the hall, and a few chairs like ours were floating silently along. We went through some passages and smaller halls until we came to one where several men and women were waiting for us. The chair stopped and came to rest on the floor. We got out, and the chair lifted itself again and moved over to the wall, where it stopped. Samine spoke to the group of people, and they nodded in my direction, their faces very serious. I nodded politely back. Then they began to ask me questions.

  They wanted to know my name, where I came from, what I did, and a great deal more. From time to time they stopped asking me questions and discussed what I had told them. While this was happening, I began to feel that something had gone seriously wrong with my dream. My dreams usually jump suddenly from one scene to another, and seem quite unreal. 1 was convinced that what I was experiencing was real and true. I was also very certain that I was wide awake.

  We were making slow progress with the questions, as Samine’s English was not good, and everything had to be passed through her to me and back again. At last she said:

  ‘They - wish - you - learn - our - language.’

  ‘That’s going to take a long time,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Quarter - of - a - day.’

  Then she gave me some food. It was in a box, and looked like chocolates; it tasted good, but not like sweets.

  ‘Now - sleep,’ said Samine, pointing to a cold, hard block of glass.

  I got on it, and found that it was neither cold nor hard. I lay wondering whether this was the end of my vision, and whether I would wake up to find myself back in my own bed with the old pain where my legs ought to be. But I didn’t wonder long - perhaps there was something in the food.

  When I woke up, I was still there. Hanging over me was a sheet of rose-coloured metal, which had not been there before. I guessed that it was part of a teaching machine, not because I had seen anything like it before, but simply because I could now understand what the people were saying. Well, I now understood their language, but not always the ideas behind the words. There were whole ideas that were meaningless to me. An ancient Egyptian might have had a word for ‘jet’ and another for ‘plane’, but he would not be able to understand what a ‘jet plane’ was. And if you showed him one standing on the ground, he would have no idea what it was for or how it worked.

  When the group of people began to question me again, we made better progress. However, certain words representing ideas completely unknown to me were used again and again, like dumb notes on an old piano, and I was so puzzled that I began to feel very unhappy. The people realized this, and told Samine to take me away and look after me. I sighed with relief as I sat down beside her again on our seat, and we floated out into the open air.

  Before I knew much about Samine’s world I was greatly impressed by the way her mind could adjust to strange circumstances. It must have been frightening to find that someone she knew well had suddenly become a complete stranger. But she showed no alarm, and only occasionally made the mistake of calling me Hymorell.

  I very much wanted to know the answers to a number of questions, and as soon as we were back in the green room, I began to ask them.

  Samine looked at me doubtfully.

  ‘You should rest and relax and stop worrying,’ she said, if I tried to explain, you would be even more confused.’

  ‘Nothing could make me more conf
used,’ I told her. I can’t pretend any longer that this is a dream. I shall go mad unless I can make some sense of it.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘What do you need to know most urgently?’

  I want to know where I am, who I am, and how it happened,’ I told her.

  ‘You know who you are,’ she replied. ‘You told me you are Terry Moreton.’

  ‘But this’ - I smacked my left leg - ‘this isn’t Terry Moreton.’

  It is for the moment,’ she said, it was Hymorell’s body, but now everything that makes it individual - in mind and character - are yours. Therefore it is Terry’s body.’

  ‘And what has happened to Hymorell?’ I asked.

  ‘He has transferred to what was your body,’ she told me.

  ‘Then he got a very bad bargain in the exchange,’ I said. ‘He’ll find that my body, and the pain, and taking drugs, will change his mind and character. And I, too, shall soon become a different person if I stay in his body.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Samine asked.

  ‘Science tells us - everybody knows it’s true,’ I answered.

  ‘But doesn’t your science tell you that there’s a part of a person that remains constantly the same? It’s that part that decides how a person will react to any experience. I’m afraid you don’t understand.’

  I decided not to argue. Instead, I asked:

  ‘What is this place? I mean is it on Earth?’

  ‘Of course it’s Earth,’ she said. ‘But it’s in a different salany.’

  I looked back at her. Salany was one of those words that had no meaning for me.

  ‘Do you mean it’s in a different…?’ I began, and then I stopped, defeated. There didn’t seem to be a word in her language for ‘time’ - not with the meaning I wanted.