World in Eclipse

WILLIAM DEXTER

Version 1.0

WORLD DISTRIBUTORS • LONDON

This CONSUL edition, complete and unabridged, published in England, 1962, by WORLD DISTRIBUTORS (MANCHESTER) LTD. 36 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, LONDON, W.C.I

First published 1954 by Peter Owen Ltd.


CHAPTER ONE

I am Denis Grafton, Terrestrial Archivist Number One, and these are my words, written in the First Year of Return, for reading by those who come after.

In the Years Before, history was cold and unappetising fact. This will be different, for I am told that I am to write in my own words. Moreover, I am to include such opinions of my own as I think may interest those who read this work. This will be no anonymous history book, for I have already put my name to the start of it, and the names of all those who collaborate with me will also be credited to their contributions.

Thus will those who read be brought closer, if only a little, to those who write. Thus, in the remote future, we shall live as something better than figures of legend and subjects for learned debate.

And so, if this is to be the start of a new history of intelligent beings, to be read by intelligent beings, I mean that it shall be factual, and each of the writers shall write of what he himself has experienced. In the past, history has depended too much upon half-forgotten incidents being revived by argumentative scholars. This history will be written by those who have lived it.

That is my preamble. Now I must tell of the Return, and the part I played in it.

I was a newspaperman with the Daily Mercury, whose proprietor, Lord Fasting, had bestowed upon me the quaint title of "Scientific Commissioner." I suppose I could have been described as a reporter, but the assignments I had to cover were invariably confined to one type: the severely scientific. These assignments it was my duty to break down — Lord Fasting's phrase — into easily-digestible material for the Mercury's eight million readers.

It was my unhappy job, in the 1950's, to "put some life into Einstein's revised theory" (again I quote Lord Fasting), and to turn out readable, 200-word stories on such subjects as the future breakdown of the world's oil supplies, the significance of the giant redwood trees of California in the fiscal system of the United States, and the application of the quantum theory to Hoerbiger's cosmological principles. All of these being fatuously hatched schemes of Lord Fasting and my editor.

This kind of work I endured for some thirteen years. If my proprietor heard of some abstruse scientific fact, it was my lot to turn it into bright reading for the millions. I cannot begin to describe my revulsion for the work, to which I was only attached by a kind of umbilical cord consisting of £3,000 a year.

I would have left the Mercury at any given moment, but for one thing: no other newspaper would consider publishing the kind of article I could write. And so I endured it, comforted only by the thought of my £3,000 a year.

In the year 1963 I was assigned to cover some rather odd  —  as we thought at the time  —  events on the north-west coast of England, and it is at that point that my story really starts.

The Mercury correspondent at Lytham, a quiet little seaside resort in Lancashire, had sent us a curious story about a fire. His first message told of a small wood, known locally as the Green Drive, being burnt down quite suddenly. At our end of the telephone line there wasn't much of importance in the incident.  Then came the correspondent's second message.

The wood, it seemed, had not simply caught fire and blazed away for a few hours. It had suddenly become completely ignited, and in ten minutes' time had turned to a heap of black ash.

The man taking the message read over the sentence.

"Would you say it was an explosion?" he asked.

But there was more to this fire than any mere explosion, our correspondent insisted. He couldn't tell what it was; his contacts had only been able to tell him that suddenly there was a great blaze, then  —  no wood. No explosion, either. No detonation, no blast  —  just a mile of trees instantly going up in flames.

They sent me to have a look at the place. Normally, a reporter would have gone up there with a cameraman, and made a flashy little picture story of it, but there had been words between me and the editor, and it was a case of getting me out of the office until I'd cooled down, and at the same time giving me a more interesting story than usual to handle.

I was driven to Lytham in one of Lord Fasting's Rolls Royces that same night. We arrived at daybreak, and pulled up on the sea front. We found the wood on our map and went to see the damage. All we saw, of course, was a mile-long strip of black ash.

Daybreak, after a 250-mile drive, is no time to stand in a cold breeze wondering what set a mile of trees alight, so we drove on to an hotel three miles away  —  the Majestic, at St. Annes. Rooms had been booked for the two of us and we went straight to bed.

I was awakened by my bedside telephone ringing. The time by my watch was something before noon.   Six hours' sleep seemed due to me, but my news editor didn't think so. He wanted information immediately.

The story of the next few hours could be a long one, but I must abbreviate it. I could tell of the crowds we ploughed through to get near enough to see the ashes of the Green Drive. I could tell of the furious arguments I had with a Colonel of the Royal Artillery who refused to let me go nearer than half a mile to the damage. I could tell of the score of fruitless appeals to air lines, who refused to fly me over the scene. I could tell of the near-panic that seized the country when the news finally leaked out that the cause of the damage had been tracked down to an enormous hovering black shape that had been seen by the sole survivor of the fire.

I was not the one to get the story, this time. The Mercury was beaten to it, and beaten by twenty-four hours, by the Guardian. The only witness was safely in the hands of a team of Guardian men, and could not even be located by the police or the Army authorities.

His story was that he had been heading for home at ten o'clock the previous night when he looked up and saw a round black shape of colossal size overhead. It had appeared to slide off sideways, and then had tilted. From its lower edge had come a blinding jet of flame that had swept the wood from end to end.

The poor fellow was in danger of losing his sight, and the Guardian reluctantly handed him over to the medical people, after first paying a large sum of money into his bank account as the price of his silence.

The upshot of it was that I had to stay on in the district. There used to be a saying that "Lightning never strikes in the same place twice," but Lord Fasting was taking no chances. I stayed, and the lightning did strike twice in the same place.

Three days later I was driving round the flat area at the back of Lytham. It had occurred to me that if the black thing seen over Lytham had been as big as the eye-witness said, it must have been seen from some distance. The townspeople had been warned not to discuss the event with strangers, and there was little to be got out of them. In the rural areas at the back of the town there was great activity among the military people who had descended on the district. Justifiable, of course, because the War Office had a pretty sound idea of what had happened, and what had caused the happenings.

There I was, then, driving around in Lord Fasting's Rolls and knocking on cottage doors. Here and there I got a glimmer of a story from a farmer, but on the whole the day was unsuccessful.

It was while the driver and I were standing on the top of a low hill  —  the country in general up there is as flat as a sheet of paper, but we found a slight rise to stand on and look around us  —  it was while we stood there that we saw the Thing.

Quite suddenly the sky became overcast, and this was followed by the appearance of a round black shape, big enough to shut but the sunlight and plunge us into a sort of twilight gloom. In a second the darkness vanished, though, and we saw what had caused it  —  a flattish disc, measuring a good 500 yards across.

In complete silence, it slid off to our right and touched the ground. I started to run towards it, and then remembered Lord Fasting's £3,000. I stopped the driver of the Rolls, who was running breathlessly beside me, and sent him back to the car. If anything happened, I reasoned, we should stand a better chance of telling our story if we separated.

I never saw the driver again.

Indeed, I saw nothing again  —  until I awoke and found myself in bed.  A strange bed, in a strange room.

Here again, I must abridge my experiences. To many who will read this, they will offer nothing new. The craft that carried me to Vulcan is well enough known to us in these days, and the Vulcanid plan for observing Terrestrial human culture is thoroughly understood.

Even in 1963 we Terrestrials had come to look upon the Vulcanid Discs as something more than a rumour. True, ten or fifteen years before we had dismissed them as hallucinations. We had grown weary of the often-revived story of the Flying Saucers, and then we had accepted them into our mythology much as we accepted the sea serpent, and ghosts, and fairies. By 1963 the Flying Saucers were established as something that someone might have seen, rather than as figments of imagination.

However, as the factual record would not be complete without it, I interpose here a record by another hand.

CHAPTER TWO

I am Krill Hvensor, former Vulcanid Receptor Number Eight Thousand and Four, and these are my words, written in the First Year of Colonisation, for those who come after.

I am to write of the Vulcanid plan for observing Terrestrial human culture, and I am to explain the position of Vulcan in the cosmic scheme.

Vulcan is my world. It is called Vulcan by Terrestrials, and Hafna by us whose home it is. In this account, I shall use the name Vulcan for my world.

Terrestrial astronomers have given it that name since their year number 1960, when they first saw it with their astronomical instruments. For many years they had believed that between the planet Mars (we call it Haransidor) and the planet Jupiter (we call it Marghannor) there existed nothing but a belt of asteroids. They acknowledged that according to the principle of planetary intervals, there should have been a tenth planet, but had never located it until 1960.

I must add that we of Vulcan have known of fourteen major planets for eight thousand years, but then, our civilisation is incomparably older than that of the Terrestrials.

Vulcan is an old and dying world. Its distance from the sun has made it a cold world, and life on its surface is almost un-tenable. Nevertheless, its capacity for supporting life is infinitely greater than Terrestrial astronomers have believed possible. Their fallacious reasoning has decreed that life is not to be found on any planet in the solar system but their own, but we of Vulcan, who have travelled the Solar System for more than 3,000 Terrestrial years, know better.

We know of the dying race of silicon men on the planet Uranus (we call it Varna), we know of the sentient mineral life on the heavy planet Saturn (we call it Moroc-Dor), we know of the thread-like filaments, living, breathing and thinking, that populate the giant Jupiter. We can tell of the aquatic life on Venus (we call it Itos-Bar), and the unapproachable incandescent beings on boiling Mercury (we call it Suma). We have communed with the insect intelligences of Mars, and with the rare albino man-like creatures of Neptune (we call it Logandor). On Pluto (we call it Ens-Ens) there is no life.

We know, too, the giant race of savage beast-men on Earth's nearest neighbour, unsuspected Varang-Varang. On three other of the sun's planets, never known to Terrestrial science, there is no life, nor will be until their atmosphere's content of chlorine and ammonia is dissipated.

Vulcan is old and cold. For that reason, our people have sought a new home in the solar system. For 3,000 years by Terrestrial time, we have scoured the system to find our new home. Only one planet known to us has been recognisable as able to support our forms of life: the planet Earth (we call it Fahan, because it has for long been known as our twin planet). We are peaceable beings, and would never steal the planet Earth. We have hoped that some day, before the days of Hafna are ended, the Terrestrials would accept us as guests, to live side by side with them. For that reason, we have adapted our form to resemble that of Terrestrial men. Once, many thousands of our years ago, we were beings of an alien form, with small resemblance to what we are now, but our scientists have achieved the wonderful mutation of our shape and habits until they almost match that of Terrestrial humans.

I have told of our search for a new home, but I have not told of our previous visits to Earth. Not once, but many times during 3,000 Terrestrial years have we visited Earth and attempted to establish colonies, but each time men have driven us out. They have called us devils in ages past, because our scientists had not been able to match our colouring to theirs. They have called us goblins in later ages, because again our science had gone astray, and had turned us into creatures far too small to be recognised as akin to men. Again and again has mankind been unwilling to receive us, and so we have been compelled to form our own human colonies on Vulcan, so that we might study Terrestrial man, and learn how to become his good neighbour and live side by side with him. Now I must tell of Vulcan itself.

In size, my world is somewhat larger than Earth, with a correspondingly increased gravitational pull. This means that those who live on Vulcan must be stronger in build and more skilled in agility, in order to move freely on our heavier world. Conversely, it also means that Vulcanids are able to move about much more easily on Earth, and can exert their greater strength to greater results.

Vulcan is so much further from the sun that our period of revolution  —  our "year"  —  is equal to more than three Terrestrial years. And here is the secret of a mystery that has at times puzzled our Terrestrial guests on Vulcan: from the moment they enter our gravitational field, their life span is adjusted to that of the Vulcanid year. Thus, a Terrestrial human taken to Vulcan 200 years ago (by Earth time) could be  —  and still is  —  alive at the time of this writing. We have thus been able to observe the advance or retrogression of civilisation on Earth, by observing our older humans alongside our newer guests. And it has seemed to us that the mode of thought on Earth has not changed in comparison with Terrestrial practical achievements, unless it has become more aggressive.

Our Terrestrial colony in Vulcan has been transported to our world by our Flying Discs and by our Spheres of Light. The journey is made by Disc from Earth to the Terrestrial Moon and by Sphere from thence onward to Vulcan. Our landing places have never been suspected by Terrestrial astronomers, because we have sited them on the remote side of the Moon. Our visits to Earth by Disc have many times been observed, but this has been unavoidable.

For more than 3,000 years our Discs have been known to Terrestrials. In the olden days, humans have watched them with wonder, and have described them as "golden horses," "chariots of fire," and the like. In later times, many have seen our Discs, but few have believed the story told by the witnesses. In the Terrestrial year 1945 and onwards, governments have suppressed the news of our visits, for fear of panic among their peoples.

But they have known.

We have taken many hundreds of Terrestrial humans to Vulcan. In the early days, their taking has been described by priests on Earth as "an ascent to Heaven" or "a stealing by the gods." In later times, men have wondered at the taking, and then have forgotten it. We have taken men from the streets of towns, we have taken them in their crude aeroplanes, we have taken them from ships at sea. By a cruel error, one of our Discs once took the whole of a ship's crew and passengers.

The ship was named Marie Celeste.

We have taken famous thinkers, we have taken soldiers, we have taken women. But on Hafna they have been unable to breed.

The list of men and women whom we have taken to our world is to be seen, name by name, in the Grand Archives.

Once taken to Vulcan, the Terrestrials have been honoured as guests, and have been provided with everything they wished for. Their homes in our Terrestrial Colony have been made exactly in the fashion of homes on Earth. Their food has been cultivated and prepared by their own people in the identical form to which they were accustomed on Earth.

But they have not been able to breed on our world.

That has been our greatest sorrow.

We have tried to make the best use of all our human guests. Specialised knowledge possessed by them has been used to their own advantage as well as to ours. Never have we taken a human by design; each man or woman has been taken by pure chance.

But never has a human been allowed to set foot on Earth again. To have returned our guests would have disclosed our secret  —  the fact that we needed a new home. Once known to humans, that secret could have destroyed us, because humanity is ever suspicious of alien beings such as we are. Humanity would have sought us out in the depths of space and destroyed us, as other beings from other worlds have attempted to destroy us.

Now it is different.

I must now tell of the subject of this record.

The human, Denis Grafton, was one of the last to be brought from Earth. He was received into a Disc that had developed a fault, and had circled too close to Earth while its field of force was in operation. The Disc had, most unhappily, burnt a small portion of the surface of the Earth and destroyed some vegetation, and, alas! some humans. Denis Grafton and many others were investigating the sad mishap.

The commander of the Disc had brought it to earth in order to re-establish the vessel's field of force, and Denis Grafton was caught up within the sphere of implication. The commander adopted the usual procedure of suspending Denis Grafton's animation until he should be brought to Vulcan.

On arrival at Vulcan, Denis Grafton was placed in a Reception Ward, and was there taught the truth of his translation to Vulcan. He was then introduced to the Terrestrial Colony, into which he was received as an honoured member.

It was I, Krill Hvensor, who had the privilege of teaching Denis Grafton the truth of his translation to Vulcan.

CHAPTER THREE

I am Denis Grafton, and I resume the record, for those who come after.

Krill Hvensor has told of the Vulcanid plan for observing Terrestrial human culture. The full story of this plan, like the long story of Vulcan's own ancient culture and place in the cosmos, is to be read in the Grand Archives. Krill Hvensor's short summary is inserted solely for the purpose of this record's completeness.

It was Krill Hvensor who introduced me to the new life I was to live on Vulcan. It was he, descendant of a long line of Receptors, who schooled me in the mind-shaking thought that I was on a new world. It was he  —  and I bless him for it  —   who preserved my sanity in imparting the awful information.

To the Vulcanid mind, there is little awe in travelling into space. But to the Terrestrial mind the very thought is horrifying once its reality is appreciated.

We humans have stood with our feet firmly planted on our world for all the ages. The Vulcanids have been accustomed to travelling the Solar System for many hundreds of years. To them it is even less novel than a car ride was to humanity in the years I lived on Earth.

The Vulcanid method of "teaching the truth of translation to Hafna (or Vulcan)" has been devised over thousands of years.

It has developed into a combination of elementary hypnosis, deep-implanting psychology, and explanation of fact The subject, if sane to begin with, is acclimatised to Vulcan in a matter of weeks. And by the time he has become acclimatised, he has become invigorated unbelievably by the Vulcanid method of "teaching."

The subject's physical health is greatly improved, and the feeling of fitness and general high-key health is a thing unknown on Earth.

In this manner, the Terrestrial Colony on Vulcan is composed of individuals who might have been looked on as almost super-human, were they on Earth.

I was introduced to this Colony six weeks (Vulcan reckoning) after arrival.

I must not digress unduly (for the vital portion of this record still lies far ahead of me) but it is necessary, for the sake of continuity, that I make some slight mention of conditions on Vulcan as they appear to the human mind.

It must always be remembered by humans, if any shall survive to read this, that Vulcanid life is not human life. The inhabitants of that planet  —  the native inhabitants, I should say  —  are not human. They are an alien form of life that has matured and developed well ahead of humanity. Originally, they bore no resemblance to Terrestrial humans, as Krill Hvensor has suggested.

They have suffered mutations of form and habit in order that when the time came they should be adapted to life on Earth, for they have long known that the day must come when they must leave their Hafna and dwell on Earth.

But they have preserved a small nucleus of their elementary form of life. Few humans have been allowed to see these beings, as the variation between them and the present form of Vulcanid life is so vast as to be almost incomprehensible to humanity. The shock to the unprepared human mind, in realising that it is not dealing with its own kind  —  for the "revised" Vulcanid resembles a human uncannily  —  is truly unnerving.

I have seen members of the aboriginal colony of Vulcanids.

I must not describe them. It is against the Law, both of humanity and of Vulcanid life.

This I will say, though. I believe the present form of Vulcanid is something more than a mere imitation of mankind. I believe it is a benevolent being, with the interests of what remains of mankind as close to its heart as are its own interests. I have come to respect the Vulcanid way of life and of thought. It can never replace humanity, but it may, at some remote age in the future, merge with humanity  —  if, as I said before, any of us remain.

And now I pick up the threads of this narrative.

After I had been prepared by Krill Hvensor for my new life in a new world, I was allotted living quarters. The phrase "living quarters," though, hardly describes what I found. I had imagined that I should be sent to live in some bizarre dwelling of the Vulcanid kind  —  though I had no idea of what that kind might be.

In fact, I found myself installed in a pleasant apartment that might have been my own flat in the London suburbs. I had the nearest imitation to English furniture I could wish for, I had wonderful food — that might have been prepared in the kitchens of the Ritz, I even had radio and television. These two amenities were the Vulcanids' greatest pride. With the aid of Terrestrial technicians they had established a radio station and television transmitter delivering better programmes than London's B.B.C. The artists, actors and others were Terrestrials, and amazingly good material they produced. The technicians, once the installation of the transmitters was accomplished, were the incredibly brilliant Vulcanid radio experts.

I had good company (of which I shall speak soon), I had comfort, I had leisure or I had work, as I wished.

But I had no view from my windows.

The reason was that life is confined to the lower levels of the planet's surface. If my flat had been sited in the arcade of Piccadilly Underground Station, I would have had as good a view as I found when I tried to look out of the windows of my rooms on Vulcan. Later, I found that some enterprising members of our Colony had had television screens installed instead of windows, and they had but to turn the right switch to get the view they wanted. But  —  it was an artificial view.

I mentioned Piccadilly Underground's arcade. The parallel might be drawn even further, for "outdoors" in the Colony was much like that. True, the inexhaustible zeal of the Vulcanids for our welfare provided fine walks and excellent surroundings wherever we went in our Colony. But  —  it was all artificial.

We lived, in short, underground. We had to live there, because the planet's great distance from the sun meant that the external surface temperature was almost too low to support life.

Our apartments were devised in small groups, and our plight made us all moderately good neighbours. After all, there were not so many of us humans there that we could pick and choose our friends. The total muster of the Colony amounted to something over eight hundred, and, whether it was because of our marooned condition, or whether it was because better health brought better tempers, we got on pretty well together.

I had as immediate neighbour an extraordinarily good fellow named Thomas Ludlam, who, combined with Krill Hvensor, was responsible for my mental acceptance of my position there.

When I was introduced to my new home, I found Thomas Ludlam in possession of the kitchen. He was engaged in the very homely  —  and very terrestrial  —  task of boiling eggs in a pan over a hot plate.

He might have been an old friend by the way he spoke to me.

"I've invited myself for tea," he said. "And I thought eggs wouldn't come amiss."

This was my first word from a member of my kind in weeks of time and millions of miles of travelling. For a moment I doubted whether Krill Hvensor's "teaching" were genuine, but something in my mind seemed to click (as it always did when I felt a doubt in the reality of my situation).

We sat down to tea like a couple of old bachelors. Old, did I say? I was (by Terrestrial reckoning) thirty-six years old. Thomas, I later learnt, not without a sharp twinge of shock, was nearly 200 years old (again by Terrestrial reckoning). But, according to Vulcanid measurement of time, he was barely sixty.

He was a stoutish, rosy-faced fellow, was Thomas Ludlam. He had been a serving soldier with (I still find it hard to believe, but I must believe it) the British Army in the Peninsular Wars. And he had been a Vulcanid "guest" for something like 150 years. Later, I learnt that he was the first human contact provided for most newcomers, and he and I became most attached to each other.

The great object of Thomas's life was to educate himself to the standard of his older brother, who had been a country parson when Thomas was "annexed" by the Vulcanid Disc. Thomas himself had been, I later learnt, the black sheep of a good, decent farming family. He had been a good soldier, although he himself was modest and reticent about his achievements in that direction, but had always regarded himself, in his later years on Earth, as being an ignorant man.

From the beginning of his time on Vulcan, he had set himself to improve his standards of education, with the result that when t met him he was a veritable encyclopedia of assorted knowledge. He spoke  —  and spoke well  —  most European languages, and could rarely be floored with any question that would normally be answerable by a person with a first-class university education of the twentieth century.

His self-chosen work as "first contact" for most of the Terrestrials brought to Vulcan had given him a wide circle of friends who came to value him highly. He was father-confessor, tutor and guide to the ways of Vulcan to most of us there, having lived in the Terrestrial Colony for longer than any of us. But with all this, he was essentially a modest, self-effacing fellow always.

His contemporaries among the Terrestrials had all died, and Thomas had adapted himself amazingly well to the style and customs of those who came later. Sometimes, his speech would betray his period, but it was in vain that one could hope to catch him out in the soldier's language  —  or even common slang  —  of his period. His search for knowledge had brought with it a fine manner of speaking, and he had gathered on the way none of the odd mixture of different periods of slang that abounded in our Colony.

For it was one of my greatest surprises to find that our English speech had changed so much in the comparatively short time in which all my fellow-Terrestrials had been taken to Vulcan. There was the odd, and to me, absurd slang of Victorian days exchanged in conversation for the forced heartiness of the 1914-1918 war vernacular. There was the brittle and ill-adapted speech of the early American sound films bandied for the affected argot of the Kensington of the Bright Young People's era. There was schoolboy idiom of every period in the last hundred Terrestrial years, and there was the spurious bonhomie of the sporting hearties spread over the same period.

But Thomas just spoke good English that would have been good in any age. Here and there a phrase or two that sounded over-polite to my ears showed that he had been brought up in an age when courtesy was appreciated, even by a private soldier of Wellington's army.

It took me several weeks to get even slightly accustomed to the fact that I was there on Vulcan for good. For Thomas had broken it to me  —  philosophically, but nevertheless positively  —   that, at least in his time, no Terrestrial had ever made the journey back. He himself sighed more than once for a sight of a cricket match, for he had heard such glowing accounts of the pleasures of watching cricket (grossly over-rated accounts, to my infidel way of thinking) that he longed above all else to see the giants of cricket. But they were giants, alas! whom neither he nor anyone else on Vulcan would ever see. He could recite the prowess of W. G. Grace, although his own Terrestrial experience of cricket had been confined to knock-abouts on a few village greens as a lad. He could recount accurately the records of Bradman and Fender, and could discourse on the advantages of stonewalling as against those of flashy play.

It was Thomas who gradually presented me to our fellow-exiles, and Thomas who took me on the grand tour of our tiny Colony.

The first Terrestrial I was to meet, apart from Thomas, was Leo Arabin. The name had been blazoned across the front pages of the world's newspapers in the 1950's  —  "Where Is Arabin?"  —  "Arabin Reported Seen Behind Iron Curtain"  —   "Arabin Witnesses Recalled Again"  —  that was the sort of thing we had come to associate with the name. I had even been sent out to Egypt by Lord Fasting to do one of my ridiculous bright "specials" on Arabin's disappearance.

Leo Arabin had been a famous pilot in his day. His feats had been the aim and envy of every schoolboy until the inter-planetary craze overtook the world's boyhood. In 1950, he had been in Fayid, working with a Royal Air Force detachment on testing the then new Lightning interceptor plane. The great feature of this aircraft, as I had good reason to know, having swotted it up on my way to do my story, was its incredible speed in what was an almost vertical climb. Its ceiling was several thousand feet higher than any other plane of its type, too.

Arabin had taken his Lightning up one morning, and  —  he had never come down. There were plenty of witnesses who deposed, again and again, that they had plotted his near-vertical course until the aircraft was out of range of their instruments. This statement had been the cause of inquiries without number, for the instruments in use had included optical equipment of an unprecedentedly high quality.

But there it was. Question how they might, the inquirers could never get beyond that point, on which all the witnesses were fast. Arabin had gone up and had never come down.

There was another insoluble point. Besides the new optical apparatus to enable the flight to be followed by the eye, there was a quantity of electronic equipment, and the radar spotters had seen and heard Arabin's plane speed to its vanishing point. That meant that it had shot through its normal ceiling by many, many miles; so many miles, in fact, that every medical authority swore that Arabin must have been a dead man before the spotters lost sight of him.

When Thomas lightly mentioned to me one morning, then, that he proposed bringing Leo Arabin round for a game of chess, I was, for a second, incredulous. And then I knew.

Where else could Arabin have vanished to?

And when Arabin came, and had laughed sufficiently at my amazement, we talked about his disappearance, and the disappearance of so many others who had presented everlasting riddles to the people of their day.

Later, Arabin took me to see the identical Lightning that had carried him out of the sight of men that morning in 1950. It had been brought to Vulcan as easily as he himself had been brought, and there it lay, in an underground salon, alongside other aircraft that told their own tale. There were planes from the vintage years of the early 1900's, there were flimsy biplanes of the first World War period, there were American fighters without number, apparently  —  and every one completely useless on Vulcan.

For unprotected flight in the atmosphere of Vulcan was impossible, owing to the almost constant barrage of asteroids and meteorites that fell on the surface.

Vulcan, I learnt, was, in truth, in the asteroidal belt that Terrestrial astronomers had long known and plotted in that orbit. It had not always been so. Within the history of Vulcanid civilisation, there had been complete immunity from the deadly deluge that had driven all life underground.

But for several thousand years now, existence on the surface of Vulcan had demanded the shelter of a repellent screen. The Disc ships were entirely armoured in this manner against the terrible bombardment from space, but even so, it sometimes happened that an electrically charged particle of cosmic matter defeated the screen, and disintegrated the Disc.

Through the good offices of Krill Hvensor, Arabin and I were privileged to make a short tour of the surface of Vulcan. Shot obliquely into the outside atmosphere, we found our Disc high above what had been a great city. Now it was nothing more than a series of neat conical piles of masonry. These, I learnt, were in actual fact structures that had resisted, to some extent, the tremendous barrage. Their shape, viewed from above, brought a vague memory to my mind, and it was Arabin who enlightened me.

"Ever fly over the Pyramids at Gizeh?" he asked, nodding downwards towards the regularly shaped mounds below us.

He nodded as I apparently showed my recognition of the shapes.

"That's what they are  —  no more, no less  —  pyramids," he said. "And that's all that remains in the way of external structures on this world."

We looked down, in deep thought.

"You know  —  or did you know?  —  that they originated the pyramid shape?" he asked.

"It is true," Krill Hvensor confirmed. "And more than that  —  we built your pyramids."

When you think about it, a man transported to another planet in the solar system has undergone such a terrific test of credulity (if he remains sane) that he will believe almost anything. This was my reaction to Krill Hvensor's statement. After all, if the Vulcanids could come and snatch me away from Earth, what was to prevent their having been there many times before, and what was to prevent their having sojourned there?

And so I accepted, as indeed I must, the statement.

In the course of time, too, I accepted many more statements. Some were fantastic, some were only logical.

There was the almost incredible matter of the Terrestrial life span on Vulcan. This, of course, is now common knowledge to all who live today, and may well be forgotten as ever having been a novelty by those who read this in the future. But nevertheless, no Terrestrial transported to Vulcan ever found it easy to believe that while he was existing for one Vulcanid year, his fellows back on Earth were going through three Terrestrial years.

There was the fact of interplanetary flight, too. Could a man, tied to Earth through the ages, ever accept the fact that for some beings the Solar System had no bounds? We all found this simple fact difficult to assimilate, and no less difficult on account of our own interplanetary journey. However, the fact was simple enough. True, the motive power for such flight was new to Terrestrials, but to the Vulcanids, who had used it for many centuries, it was no more mysterious than would be a sack of coal to an English housewife.

The Vulcanid science of flight, of course, had followed a different course from that on Earth. While our technicians were fiddling with the internal combustion engine, the rocket, and jet propulsion, the Vulcanids had gone straight to the source of movement and adapted it to their own ends.

Using magnetic fields of force for their "short" flights, such as that between Earth and Moon, they were able to travel anywhere within an astral body's field of gravitation with the barest possible use of any apparatus.

And for the long flights through space, their Spheres of Light (this term is the nearest translation one can get in expressing Terrestrial thought in Vulcanid terms) transported them, literally, in a flash.

When I tried to understand this propulsive power, Arabin kindly helped me. He brought to me a small glass sphere, hollow, and containing four thin vanes, each one black on one side and white on the other.

Of course, I had seen this device hundreds of times in opticians' shop windows. The light falling on the white side of each vane caused the four tiny spokes to revolve. More than this Arabin could not tell me. There was the elementary theory, but how the Vulcanids had harnessed it to drive them through space at the speed of light, neither Arabin nor any other Terrestrial could tell me.

But I digress. This chapter must tell of more than my doubts and wonderings.

It must tell, for instance, of another acquaintance I made under the aegis of Thomas Ludlam.

I have mentioned chess. Arabin was not my usual opponent at chess (which game, I should mention, had almost assumed the status of an international sport in the Terrestrial Colony).

My introduction to chess was made by another Terrestrial whom I have not yet mentioned  —  Casimir Karim. Casimir was a broad, squat figure who might well have been a wrestler. Indeed, I later learnt that as a youth he had toured the world  —  or those parts where the civilising influence of wrestling and kindred sports has exerted its beneficial influence  —  as a wrestler.

Casimir was an amiable Egypto-Syrian who had made his home in Alexandria, where he had been a moderately prosperous building contractor. He always lauded his native Syria, though, as being vastly superior to Egypt. He was one of the few members of our Colony whose wife was with him. This fact must be explained more fully, as it involved issues of the greatest importance.

Casimir and his wife had been preparing to celebrate the Moslem festival of Shemel-Nessim at their top-floor flat in a suburb of Alexandria, and on the night preceding the feast had spent some time on the flat roof of their building, looking over a pair of fat sheep that had been given to them, as is the custom on this festival. They had seen the animals safely penned up for the night, and had returned to their apartment, where they were talking over the slaughter of the sheep for the morrow's feast  —  to which they had invited a swarm of friends.

Suddenly, they had been alarmed by the loud bleating of the sheep. Suspecting thieves (for in Egypt, a third floor flat offers no obstacles to an enterprising youth) they had dashed out on to the roof. They had found the night unusually dark, and had stumbled across the roof to the improvised sheep pen.

That was the last conscious act they performed upon Earth, for they regained consciousness, as I had, in the Vulcanid reception ward. A coasting Disc had claimed them as "guests" for Hafna.

The significance of this quadruple kidnapping is far-reaching. Not only had the Vulcanids added a married couple to their lists of guests  —  which was a rare occurrence  —  but they had also carried off a pair of animals. The Terrestrial fauna on Vulcan was confined to a few smaller domestic animals, and a herd of cattle which had to be constantly replaced, owing to the sterility imposed on all Terrestrial creatures on that world. Sheep were a valuable novelty, and had proved the only exception to the law of sterility.

This break-away from Vulcanid conditions had set the Vulcanid scientists to work investigating the phenomenon, in the hopes of remedying the sterility of other Terrestrial creatures.

Among many of us in the Terrestrial Colony there was a theory that sterility was imposed upon all of us  —  men and beasts  —  by the Vulcanid rulers of the planet. Had we been allowed to reproduce ourselves, we argued, we might eventually have outnumbered the Vulcanids themselves.

Casimir and his wife were near neighbours of Thomas Ludlam and myself, and, with Arabin, we made up a fairly happy quintet.

There were, as has been said, something like 800 of us in our Colony. Within the space of two Vulcanid years I met most of these exiles, and formed strong attachments for several of them. We were of all nationalities and grades. A more assorted bunch was never found in such a small community. As a rule, however, the Vulcanids had attempted to annex several of each race and grade, so that each guest might not have cause to feel lonely. This was but one of the many admirable traits of our hosts, who sincerely made every effort to improve our otherwise appalling plight.

I shall tell of others of our group in the course of this narrative, but now, having  —  most inadequately, perhaps, but none the less conscientiously  —  attempted to explain my first orientations in a new world, I pass to another subject. The responsibility for the introduction of this vital factor of life on Hafna has been delegated to me, Denis Grafton, for inclusion in this work.

In treating of it, I make every apology for any apparent lack of instruction I may possess on the subject. The full technical records, embracing many volumes and many spools of Vulcanid stereo-projections, are available for study.

And one thing I must say, although I am not necessarily bidden: this task has shown me that my thin veneer of "scientific" knowledge was as much a sham as the "scientific" articles I wrote for my £3,000 a year... so long ago.

CHAPTER FOUR

I, Denis Grafton, continue my record. These are the words of a Terrestrial, attempting to transmute Vulcanid thought to human conceptions.

Krill Hvensor and others of the planet Hafna have spent many long months  —  I still use the Terrestrial term, although Vulcan has no months, in the lunar sense, for there is no moon by which to count them  —  they have spent many long months, I say, instructing me in the matter of the Great Fear.

Krill Hvensor has written in these pages of the Vulcanid knowledge of the Solar System, and has told of the Vulcanid astronomers' knowledge of three dead planets, where no life exists, nor will exist, until atmospheres of chlorine and ammonia have been dissipated.

That is not to say that life has never existed on these three dead worlds. Once, within Vulcanid history, they were populated by sentient beings of varying intelligence. They communicated among themselves, and interchanged visits one with the other. Their inhabitants, being of immature status intellectually, had fought innumerable battles, devising more terrible weapons and more complex defences with each era of their existence.

Then had come the last war of all. According to the best reckoning that can be made, this cataclysm of three worlds occurred  —  by Terrestrial terms  —  about eight thousand years before the beginning of the Christian era on Earth.

The rulers of the smallest of the three now-silent worlds had stumbled upon a secret of nature that offered to their minds the secret of conquest. By a complicated process they had arrived at a means for procuring atmospheric corrosion. The term is the only one that fits, in my vocabulary. Their device was carried first to one of their enemies' worlds, and then to the next.

One flaw ruined them. The corrosion, by which the atmospheres of the two worlds were rendered corrupt and poisonous, functioned more slowly than they had planned. Varying gravitational force on each planet caused the delay, which was sufficient to enable space ships to leave each of the doomed worlds  —  and bring back the corrosion, or some degree of it, to the aggressors.

The result was that three worlds died a death that may last for ever, unless, in remote aeons hence, life can spring up again when the venom of chlorine and ammonia shall Have cleared.

This triple cosmic catastrophe was learned of by the beings of Hafna within a comparatively short space of time. The dread it inspired in their minds was such as to plunge the whole of the planet's thought into the problem of averting a similar disaster within the Solar System. Such a spur produced their vast leaps across space which were later to become matters of routine.

It also produced a planet-wide network of warning devices so delicate that the slightest variation in gravitational or atmospheric conditions on any of the Sun's family of planets could be detected infallibly and almost immediately.

Necessarily, their calculations took into consideration the possible effects of atomic reaction, whether it should be disruption, annihilation of atmosphere, polar displacement, or chain reaction.

This gigantic system of detectors had told them within recent years of Terrestrial atomic experiments, and the atomic explosions on Earth had been the signal for all of Hafna's intelligence to focus upon our own planet. To me, this offered an explanation of a problem that had puzzled me: the reason for the concentration of Vulcanid observation of Earth.

I cannot begin to describe the vast amount of thought, extending over many thousands of years, that had produced the Vulcanid alarm system. I learnt, without surprise, that more than one half of the planet's population was dedicated to the task of observing the reactions of every planet, and improving the Hafna system of detectors. I learnt that means of swift annihilation were ready to prevent any contagion spreading from world to world. I learnt, too, with horror, that our Earth had been focused in crossing paths of destroying rays for half a Terrestrial century.

The Great Fear, nevertheless, was always alive on Vulcan. There was always the thought that some day, some year, perhaps in some remote future era, advancing thought on another planet would produce an unexpected weapon that would not register on the Hafna detectors.

The development of atomic energy on Earth had produced the immediate despatch of Vulcanid expeditions to the Terrestrial Moon, where observation stations had been set up, and where every atomic impulse was recorded and its meaning and effect translated into counter-plans by the inhabitants of Vulcan.

It had always been an article of astronomic faith on Earth that our Moon would not support life. But then, Terrestrial astronomers had no means of assessing the properties and biological construction of Hafna's aboriginal forms of life.

These facts, as I have briefly recorded them above, were known to a small proportion only of our Terrestrial Colony on Vulcan. It may be  —  I believe it was  —  that the Vulcanids responsible for our existence on their planet wished to spare us the bitter knowledge that our planet was a potential target for complete destruction. It may be that they thought, rightly enough, that no good either way could come of spreading the knowledge.

Those of us who had been tutored in this matter included myself, Thomas Ludlam, Arabin, Casimir, and a very few others.

Our Vulcanid instructors had taken many weeks over our tuition, and from that time onwards, we were told, the matter would not be discussed again.

Unless...

There was one proviso.

If the destruction of our own world became necessary, we were to be told.

But something happened that changed that plan. The thing all Hafna had feared for thousands of years came to pass. A weapon was devised  —  devised and used, alas! on my own world  —  that failed to register on the Vulcanid detector system.

CHAPTER FIVE

I am Leo Arabin, Commander of Project Adam, and these are my words, for those who come after.

I have read the words of Denis Grafton and Krill Hvensor, which have been inserted before this document, and I am to enlarge upon those words.

Denis Grafton has told of my annexation as a guest of Vulcan. There could be much more to tell, but it has no place in this narrative. What Denis Grafton has not told  —  and indeed, what he did not know and could not tell  —  was the fact that I, Leo Arabin, had been appointed to my position before his own arrival on Vulcan. One Vulcanid year after my acclimatisation on Vulcan, I was called before the Vulcanid Grand Council. The Grand Council was formed of seven pseudo-humans, whose one task was complete liaison with the Terrestrial Colony.

It was at that time that the Grand Council decided upon the urgency of preparing plans for an expedition to Earth  —  a colonising expedition. This was the culmination of thousands of years' planning, in the course of which previous expeditions had attempted to establish a footing on Earth. Each time, though, Terrestrial humanity had driven out the Vulcanids.

Now, the Grand Council learned, a menace faced Terrestrial humanity such as had never arisen before  —  the menace of self-destruction. Atomic fission, long understood but rarely practised by the scientists of Vulcan, would, they believed, annihilate the human race. Worse, it might render Earth uninhabitable for many thousands of years, by which time Vulcan itself would have become a dead world.

On the occasion of which I write, three of us were summoned before the Grand Council to hear the opinions of those who governed Hafna. I may not say anything of these governors of the planet, but I am permitted to say that the Grand Council merely represented those opinions in a quasi-human concept. The semantics of a completely non-human race are impossible of translation into human speech, and the Grand Council, alien but yet akin to humanity, were the mouthpiece of the governors of the planet. Their rendition of Hafna thought into something approaching human terms is usually intelligible to humans, but there are times when the two races are unable to understand the motives and meanings of each other.

It is for this last reason, of course, that humanity has been installed on Vulcan, that the Vulcanid mind, under a pseudo-human mutation, might approach somewhere near to our reasoning and learn our ways.

Thomas Ludlam, Casimir karim and myself, then, waited upon the Grand Council to learn its will. What we heard astonished and horrified us, even though we had all given up all hope of returning to Earth.

We learned then of the threat hanging over our world; heard in terms we scarcely understood — for none of us was anything of a scientist — that chain reaction set up by atomic fission would almost certainly destroy human life on Earth.

We learned, too, that the first Vulcanid colonising expedition was even then being prepared.

But we heard, too, the most staggering news of all. Some members of our Terrestrial Colony were to accompany the expedition. We three Terrestrial humans were told — ordered might be the more correct term — that we were to be members of the human expedition. If it came in our time we should return to Earth!

Much as we each wished for a return, though, the price would be appalling — nothing less than the annihilation of the rest of humanity on our world.

However, there was no choice left to us, and it was not for us to decide whether the price was too great — as it undoubtedly was. If it was to happen, we should not have willed it so. With these thoughts we consoled ourselves, and heard the rest of the will of the governors of Hafna, transmitted to us in the strange, mechanically precise English of the Grand Council.

They had already decided upon the personnel to lead the human section of the expedition. I was to command it — though I would prefer the word "lead" — and Ludlam and Karim were to aid me. There would be a further half dozen or so humans, and these I was to choose. The choice would have to be made discreetly, and I was ordered to allow no hint of the project to reach any other members of our Colony. Even those other half dozen or so humans who were to be of our party were not to be told until the time for embarkation came.

The expedition was named "Project Adam" by the Grand Council, who thus betrayed something of that artificial wit which sometimes shone out through their otherwise mechanical relations with us. And to continue the parallel of the expedition's title, "Project Eve" was to follow after a given time.

I must not speak of the Grand Council beyond oblique reference such as I have made here.  And indeed, I could say little, even if I were minded, for no human ever saw the Grand Council. Our communication with its members was conducted under a brilliant light, with the Grand Council sitting in complete darkness beyond the edge of the light which illuminated us.

So much for the official statement I have to make.

Now I may tell of what happened after our orders had been given to us. We were all three schooled in the handling of the Vulcanid Discs, a course of tuition which took long weary years, for the conception of mechanics to which the Vulcanid mind has applied itself is completely and utterly alien to anything resembling Terrestrial mechanics.

The tuition involved an exhaustive schooling in Vulcanid mathematics, and the effort to forget the Terrestrial decimal system of calculation and learn an entirely new scheme wherein irregular repetitions of a series of fourteen digits occurred was colossal.

Even now, we have only a parrot-like knowledge of the system, having assimilated only enough for the purpose of gaining an elementary knowledge of Vulcanid physics. And even the laws of those physics, on the planet Vulcan, vary slightly from time to time, and case to case, from similar laws of Terrestrial physics.

The introduction of magnetic fields of force into every branch of calculation adds a dimension never introduced into comparable subjects on Earth.

However, after our years of instruction, we developed a fair knowledge of handling the Vulcanid Discs, although we were never out of radio communication with our tutor Discs at any time. The essential instructions were always transmitted to us automatically at the right moment, otherwise we should have been disintegrated, together with our Discs, within a few seconds of starting to operate the controls.

I am as certain that humans could never operate the Vulcanid Discs, as they are constructed now, as I am of the fact that a crew of monkeys could never have flown a Terrestrial aircraft of my time.

Our long course of instruction in these matters was brought to a close shortly before Denis Grafton was brought to Vulcan. After studying him privately for some months (we still retained the old Terrestrial method of calculation of time) I decided that he, as one of the most recent "annexations," should be a member of Project Adam. He was never told of this decision, of course, until the time arrived.

Some two years after Denis Grafton's arrival among us, I was summoned again before the Grand Council, together with Ludlam and Karim.

Before us, on our illuminated dais, we saw that a stereo-link had been set up, with its viewing cavity illuminated with the faint violet haze that is projected before the action is switched in.

Out of the darkness where the Grand Council sat (or stood or reclined — how were we to know?) came a voice — a Vulcanid voice, but with a note of urgency that seldom crept into the habitually mechanical Vulcanid mode of human speech.

"Leo Arabin!"

I replied with the customary "I am Leo Arabin."

The voice called the names of the other two humans, and they replied.

"You are to watch, and to remember," the voice went on.

The cavity of the stereo-link suddenly became filled with irregular shapes as the hidden operator in the darkness adjusted the controls. We watched closely, for the use of the stereo-link, coupled as the system is with the thought processes of the Vulcanids themselves, and themselves only, was forbidden to Terrestrials, whether human or non-human. On rare occasions some of us, under Vulcanid supervision, had been allowed to view some short demonstration of Vulcanid activity on the stereo-link, but here was a wider opportunity.

As the shapes evolved and dissolved, we saw vague nebulous forms, unintelligible to human thought. The shapes twisted and writhed, and were in turn tuned out, much as a Terrestrial human might tune in a radio programme and pass through the whistles and tuning notes of a dozen or so carrier waves as he turns the dial.

Then we saw a familiar shape take form and stand out in the cavity. There could be no mistaking it: the Terrestrial Moon. We saw the craters and "seas" of that side of the Moon with which every human on Earth was once so familiar. Then the Moon started to turn in the cavity, and we knew we were seeing what no human eye had seen before — the remote side of the Moon. What would the revolving globe in the stereo-link cavity show us?

The image darkened slightly, and then brightened, and we saw the strange landscape of the remote side. Around the edges, the familiar crater-landscape showed plainly, and then merged, towards the middle, with a more geometrical formation. Here was obvious evidence of intelligent planning — evidence that had been bidden from humanity for how long? The thought was a frightening one.

Then the image expanded, and quickly the geometrical centre section grew and grew. A change of focus, repeated again and again, brought into our view a monstrous flattish building with sloping walls. The roof was almost hidden by a mass of cables, projections, regular loops like the line drawn by a designing machine, and complicated detail which was completely unintelligible to any of us: Vulcanid construction typical of the aboriginal species of Vulcan's inhabitants.

Nearer and nearer the image seemed to come, and then the roof gave way to the interior of the structure, and was dimmed out for a few seconds. Not before we had seen, however, that the occupants were indeed aboriginal Vulcanids. I may not speak of the nature of what we saw in that second.

The image in the cavity then brightened and we saw that yet another stereo-link cavity was before us. We were, in fact, seeing in our own cavity what a Vulcanid was seeing in his cavity on the Moon.

We saw a long-shot of our own Earth, turning slowly in the sunlight — much brighter sunlight than any of us had seen on Vulcan. The image swept towards us, and again shifting focus brought us nearer and nearer to Earth.

Soon, we were able to see dark patches here and there on the continent of Europe, and the continual shifts of focus slowly resolved them into perceptible things. We were looking at a bright patch of ocean, bordered by land. Still the image grew, until a checker-board of streets filled the cavity. Then the image seemed to wander uncertainly in the cavity, and new views took form there, showing us the sea, buildings on the shore, green fields inland, and dark lines criss-crossing the image.

Then the operator seemed to make up his mind, and the image settled and grew again until we seemed to hover above a few streets. At that stage it stopped. We struggled with our thoughts to try and tell ourselves what was wrong with the image, and then we knew.

There was no movement.

Everything was still.

The middle of a bright, sunny day on Earth, and nothing moved.

The image vanished, and another took its place. Again we were above a city — a city with a river running through it.

Again it swept towards us, and the cavity became filled with towering buildings above which we seemed to skim. We saw a great triangle of structures, with a large dome-capped edifice at the apex.

The image turned on its axis a little, and we saw the dome a little obliquely, and then I recognised it.

We were looking at St. Paul's Cathedral, in London, and at the great triangle of white buildings that had replaced the bomb-scarred legacy of the 1939 war.

And again, all was stillness and silence.

Not a vehicle moved, although there were plenty visible. Nowhere could we see any trace of a human being or even a prowling cat.

The image blurred again, and another city came into the cavity. A sweep of sea (so close, apparently, that we could see the white-capped waves driving against the shore) gave way to a tangled mass of streets and squares.

"Inshallah!" murmured Karim, "Iskanderia!" And indeed it was Alexandria, with its long curving Corniche fronting the sea, and its hodge-podge of narrow streets behind the great main thoroughfares.

Again, save for the regular sweep of the waves in the upper part of the stereo cavity, there was no movement.

In the dim light around us, I looked at Karim and Ludlam. Karim was sitting with head bent, and in his fingers was a Moslem rosary. On it, he was telling the nine-and-ninety attributes of Allah, the all-knowing, the all-merciful, the generous, the protecting...

Ludlam watched the cavity silently, his lips moving without speaking. There was a look on his face such as I have seen on that of a child looking in a toy-shop window. What could the image show him of any England he would recognise? His time on earth had preceded great changes which had altered the whole face of his country.

I touched his arm, and then stood.

"Councillors!" I called.

"Leo Arabin!"

"Will you show us Thomas Ludlam's country?"

The cavity swirled with shapes as the operator attempted to cover an unfamiliar countryside.

Then we were looking down on a village, with white walls and thatched roofs. Here and there red brick houses came into view as the focus carried us, at rooftop level, over the scene. But the older houses predominated, and finally we saw a narrow lane leading from a road. On the corner stood a square building with dormer windows, and we were so close that a signboard showed us that this was an inn called the Crosskeys.

Down the lane a thin thread of water meandered into and out of the image as a stream dodged beneath trees.

Ludlam nodded and sighed.

"Aye," he breathed.   "That is my Oxted.   And the brook still runs there..."

The brook moved, but that was all the movement there was. And the image showed us city after city, waste after wilderness, with not a trace of human movement. Trees bent in the wind, waves dashed upon the rocks, and here and there fragments of debris blew along deserted streets, but no man or animal moved. The changing image faded out of the cavity, and the violet glow took its place as the lights shining upon us increased their intensity.

The machine-like voice came again out of the darkness. "You have seen?" "We have seen," I replied.

"That is as your world is today. Man has crushed himself. It is empty… Are you ready to return?"

The other two nodded, as I turned to them.   There was infinite sadness on the faces of Karim and Ludlam. "We are ready to return."

"In fourteen days you shall return, then. All will be ready for you then. By that time you will have received your instructions. Have you anything to ask of us?"

What could a man ask? It did not seem to matter whether we returned or not, whether we started out and failed to reach our world, or whether we stayed as we were. One thing was certain: although none of us had ever held any hope of return, we had lived more or less happily together. Now that we knew we were the only survivors of our kind, life for us, too, seemed at an end.

It was a stagnant life we had led there on Vulcan, in any case. It could lead nowhere, and now it meant nothing.

We were ushered out of the Council Chamber and back to our own quarters. Fourteen days lay before us. What then?

CHAPTER SIX

I am Denis Grafton, and I resume the record, for those who come after.

I now learn, from the words of Leo Arabin, that the Return, in which I was to take part, was planned before — long before —  I was told of it. Indeed, I am not surprised, and I have no doubt that as this record is unfolded by the different hands that write it I shall learn much more that has been hidden.

There was no previous warning for any of us who were to make up the first party to return to Earth. I believe that, had our Colony on Vulcan not been so small and compact, the other members of it would never have known when we left, but our absence from among them must have told its own tale. Although no Terrestrial human had ever left Vulcan before, the ambition to leave was so strong that it sustained a secret hope among us all that one day we should go back.

I could tell a long story of our life on the alien planet Hafna, but the main portion of this narrative is concerned with the story of our return, and the other story must wait.

When the time came for us at last to leave, I was told of it casually, almost. Arabin and Casimir were with me in my quarters, and we had been talking of the Earth we had left behind.

Arabin suddenly asked me what seemed a needless question. "Are you particularly grieved at the thought of never returning?" he asked.

This was the sort of question that each of us had always avoided asking of another, for there could only be one answer. I am not a particularly demonstrative type, so I had to consider how I should frame the answer. And then I seemed to understand that the question was not asked for the sake of curiosity, or to gain an answer, but to lead to something else.

I challenged Arabin about the reason for his asking.

He looked at the ground for some moments and then drew a deep breath.

"Grafton," he said, "you're going back."

I had been on Vulcan for long enough to be completely stunned by this statement.   But I could not doubt its truth when he went on.

"You're going back — with us.  The four of us — Karim, you, Thomas Ludlam, and I — are to be guinea pigs. The Vulcanids are sending us to see if they could survive there."

And then he told me, though not in the fullness of detail with which he has written the previous chapter, something of what we might expect on arrival. We might not even survive the first impact of Terrestrial atmosphere, he explained, for not even the apparently omniscient Vulcanids knew what had caused the desolation on Earth, nor whether some lingering remnants of the catastrophe might not remain to destroy us when we landed.

I expected him to ask me whether I was willing to go, though there again there could only have been one answer — a positive "yes." But instead of asking, he made it clear that I would go under orders, as he and our other friends were going.

There was no time for fears or hopes, no time for farewells or last words, for we were to start at once. Arabin had timed his approach to me to coincide within minutes of our departure.

There was nothing, after all, that I needed to do. All our belongings were provided by the Vulcanid hosts, and everything we should require would be already installed in the craft that was to return us.

Weapons?

But why should we need weapons? That was our reasoning, and we were satisfied that if weapons were needed they, too, would be provided. We were so completely in the hands of the people — the word comes easier than "creatures" — of Vulcan that we had come to rely upon them for everything. If we wanted anything that they could make or devise, we had but to ask for it and it was ours.

And so, dressed as we were, carrying only what was in our pockets, we left my rooms for the last time. There was no time for reluctance. As when a man goes — or I should say, went — to the dentist's, it was better to go at once. After all, what could harm us any more than we had been harmed already? The strong sense of euphoria resulting from our initial treatment on Vulcan was always with us, even at that moment.

We embarked in semi-darkness in a great globe that stood in a sort of underground hangar. We could see nothing of the shape or dimensions of our craft, and save that it was constructed of some brilliant metal I could not even now describe it more accurately. But it is not my duty to describe the Spheres of Light; my task is to tell of our return.

Krill Hvensor and a score or so of Vulcanids, most of them well known to us, were with us. Whether they were to accompany us to Earth itself we did not then know. In the few moments between Arabin's telling me of the exodus, and entering the globe, I was roughly briefed on the course our journey was to take.

Inside the globe, we were led to a long chamber fitted with thickly cushioned reclining seats. There was no sign of pilot or crew here, and each of us, Vulcanids and all, strapped himself into a seat.

Soon the atmosphere in the room — for it was more like a room than a cabin of any description — became warm. Then by noticeable and distressing degrees the temperature rose until the humans there were panting in the almost unbearable heat. Still the temperature rose, and I saw Krill Hvensor, who had been eyeing us closely, drop his arm to a small control panel beside his seat. After some minutes the temperature seemed to stop rising, and we found that we were able to breathe steadily, if still uncomfortably, for a time. For what seemed several hours we reclined there, and we suffered considerably. I have since learned that the great increase in temperature is caused by the Sphere's take-off, but I must say that apart from this we felt no indication of movement, no sudden impetus such as one would expect.

At the end of some hours, we were told that we might rise, and so we unbuckled our straps. There was a queer sense of instability as we hesitantly moved from our seats. It was not that we felt light, or that any movement seemed to threaten our balance, but simply that we seemed shaky on our feet and insecure in our movements.

We remained in that long chamber for nearly five days by the watch I still wore, though how significant even mechanical measurement of time was I did not try to comprehend. I later heard the fascinating theory, expressed by Arabin, that time, as we had known it, ceased to exist when once a craft was outside the gravitational field of any astronomical body.

I understand that he intends to devote further study to this apparent phenomenon. I feel that it may have some background of fact, because how else can I explain the incredibly short time  —  "time"? I still have to use the word — before our journey was ended? It may be that we were drugged, or that by some means our vital processes were retarded, but I can record that, still judging by my watch, we reached the Sphere's destination in something less than 800 hours.

During that time we saw nothing outside the Sphere, but twice were allowed a sort of second-hand view by radar screen, or something very like it, of our surroundings. The experience was a vast disappointment to us all. We might have been looking out of a window on a particularly bright, starlit night.

There came a time when we were instructed to take our seats again, and once more the temperature rose, this time even more unbearably than for the take-off. Happily, the experience was much shorter in duration, and before we were seriously distressed the temperature returned to what we had become accustomed to as normal.

During the whole of the voyage we saw no sign of any members of the crew, nor, save for our peeps at the radar screen, of any indication that we were indeed in any sort of moving craft. I can only conclude that the knowledge of anything beyond our immediate experiences was not intended for us.

When we were taken out of our seats, we returned down a long winding passage to the sliding door that had admitted us, and found ourselves in — a perfect replica of our own quarters. At first, we believed that there had been no journey through space, and that the Sphere had stayed in its hangar throughout those 800 hours. But as time went on, we found here and there scraps of evidence that this was a copy, and not the identical surroundings we had left. There was my chessboard there, on what seemed the selfsame table it had stood on before. But there was a difference. One of the black squares on the other board had had a deep notch, where Arabin had dropped a drinking glass months before. This board had no notch. The table, too, had always been the source of irritation to us, because one leg was too short. We had driven a drawing pin into the under side of that leg. This table stood perfectly, and there was no drawing pin.

These facts set us looking out for more. We found plenty, and were convinced that this was only a copy  —  though an incredibly accurate one — of the places we had left.

I must continue, though.

We stayed in these rooms for nearly ninety days, living our old life, and wondering what had become of "Project Adam." Then one morning we knew that the time had come for the last stage of our journey. In place of our usual clothes we found overalls of a black, silky substance, much like the old-fashioned battle-dress worn by soldiers. We had seen similar material on Vulcan, usually worn by the Vulcanids, but had seen nothing quite like this in design.

They were all the clothes we had, for our own had been taken away, so we put them on.

The day, apart from our change of costume, started like any other. We breakfasted on the fruit diet we had become so used to on Vulcan. We loafed about and chatted, although our conversation was forced and nervous. We walked round our quarters, and tried to appear at ease.

But it was impossible to keep up the pretence, and we were glad, when, a few hours later, Krill Hvensor and another Vulcanid, Vavlik Nyan, came for us. They were oddly silent, compared with their usually amiable frame of mind, as they led us out to another underground hangar.

This was much smaller than the one where we had embarked on Vulcan, and was brightly lit, and in it I saw one of the Vulcanid Discs.

There may be a time when the Discs are superseded, or perhaps forgotten, so I may as well give some space to describing the Disc we were to travel in. It was much smaller than the great black craft that had taken me up from that field at the back of Lytham, and was apparently used for a different purpose.

I should say that it measured no more than fifty or sixty feet in diameter, and was about twenty feet in thickness, with a cupola on top, surmounted by a thick, tapering black mast.

Around the edges were slots, let into a close-fitting ring which — I have since learnt — revolves separately and in opposition to the direction in which the Disc itself revolves. The Disc seemed to be constructed of a coppery metal, but whether it was a compound of copper or phosphor-bronze I am unable to say here.

We entered through a small aperture in the under-surface —  so small that Casimir, with his massive shoulders and slight corpulence, had difficulty in entering. Behind us came Krill Hvensor and Vavlik Nyan, and when they were inside, the door clanged shut.

The interior, lit by a pervading light apparently emanating from the inside walls, was cramped and hot. There seemed to be three tiers, or floors, inside. As we entered the narrow passage and were thrust forward into the widest tier running across the median plane of the disc, we saw a number of smaller apertures, covered by gratings, leading to the upper and lower layers of the Disc.

Inside, we were again secured in reclining chairs, but this time our surroundings were much smaller. Along the whole face of one of the narrower walls was a screen, occupying half the depth of the wall, and beside the two seats immediately facing the screen were duplicate control panels. In these seats the two Vulcanids took their places, and after securing their safety belts, Krill Hvensor dropped his hand to his control panel.

Then came the most appalling sensation of vertigo, as the Disc took off. In a few seconds, the screen along the wall became illuminated dimly, and I gathered that we had left the hangar and were in open space. Although our positions with relation to the screen remained unchanged, we had the utmost difficulty in focusing our eyes on it, and we found the strangling sense of dizziness even more difficult to endure than the dreadful heat of the Sphere we had left ninety days earlier.

However, it was again the initial impetus that caused the distressing vertigo, and within minutes we were able to relax as our surroundings seemed to steady themselves.

On the screen we saw first a great bright strip down one edge, which, after some hours, gradually became curved, and finally resolved itself into a crescent.

We were looking at the remote side of the Moon, Krill Hvensor told us.

The strip we watched turn into a crescent, as we drew away from it, became the sunlit limb of the Moon, and bore the familiar appearance of the side seen on Earth. The central portion of the Lunar landscape — the very part we would most have wished to see — was in complete darkness.

When we asked our Vulcanid pilots about this, Krill Hvensor shook his head slowly, and a tight-lipped smile played across his face. It was clear that our departure had been timed so that we should not see the planned system of the Vulcanid operational base there.

Then our Disc appeared to turn, so that the sunlit landscape of Lunar craters slid across to the middle of the screen, and slowly passed across to the far edge. Before it passed out of range of the screen, though, a bright bulge seemed to grow out of its edge, and by the time the Lunar crescent had moved out of vision, we were looking at another, more distant crescent  —  the Earth itself.

I think that none of us took his eyes away from the screen until the whole sphere of the Earth was in view. It was a curious sensation, seeing the crescent widen visibly, due to the more rapid waxing and waning of the sunlit section. Whereas on Earth we had been used to seeing the Moon wax and wane through a whole month, now we saw the Earth grow to a full circle within less than twelve hours.

By the time the Sun had spread across the whole of the visible surface of the Earth, we had drawn close enough to distinguish the continents and oceans, and could distinguish the great globe's spinning motion, just as a man on Earth could watch the same phenomenon by noting the movement of a ray of sunshine across a wall.

The uncanny thrill of thus seeing our own planet grow nearer and nearer arrested our sensation of the passing of time. Occasionally, the terrifying thought occurred to one or another of us — what if some catastrophe should destroy our Vulcanid Disc out there in space?

And then, from time to time, we were reminded that we were returning to a dead world, for we never for a moment doubted the evidence that had been shown to Arabin on the stereo-link back on Vulcan. But despite this hollow thought, some vestige of hope flickered in the minds of each of us. Perhaps we should find some remnants of life? Surely, every living mortal could not have been destroyed? And yet...

I have no notion how many hours the flight back to Earth occupied. Every minute of the time was occupied for us, in greedily watching the Earth draw nearer and nearer to our tiny Disc.

As we came within the Earth's gravitational sphere, our speed increased, and the sharply outlined shapes of continent and ocean seemed to leap towards us. Then there came a stage when our Disc took on an oblique motion, first sliding one way and then the other, as a leaf falls to the ground. In great sweeps, the Disc covered hundreds of miles, apparently, as it swiftly shot from side to side, zigzagging in its forward trajectory to counter-act the vastly increased gravitational pull of our world.

And at last the Disc changed its motion yet again, and the image of Europe, which now filled our screen, spun slowly round and round as we approached with a spiral dive. Even at this stage, our journey was not finished, and it was some hours before Krill Hvensor finally tensed to the controls and started to bring us down. Now our Disc hovered, and slowly took a direct vertical line downwards.

Krill Hvensor turned to us with a smile, pointing to the screen.

"England," he nodded.

By this time, the outlines of cities and rivers, roads and railways appeared plainly before us. A great city, sprawled right across the screen and overlapping the edges, was spread before us. A silver thread of river wound across the middle of it, and as the thread of water widened on our nearer approach, its shape flashed recognition to my brain.

We were above London.

The Disc shot off sideways, whether north or south, I could not tell. I had not been able to orientate myself yet, and could only tell that the Disc was heading for one side of the river. Across the tops of buildings we sped, at an altitude of no more than five thousand feet.

When we had passed over the close mesh of the city streets, and green fields were beginning to appear on the screen — for the image was translated to the screen in true colours — Krill Hvensor took the Disc in a steep dive, flattening out as the ground seemed to come up to meet us.

Then we hovered for a few seconds, and the screen became filled with the image of waving tree-tops. Gently Krill Hvensor brought the Disc downwards until at last, after all our vast journey through space, it touched ground.

I suppose it may be thought that we should have flung off our safety belts and dived for the air-lock. Instead, we sat there, hardly daring to believe that we had returned.

Arabin was the first to move. He unbuckled the straps of his safety belt slowly, and rose to his feet. The Disc had come to ground with a slight list, and when we stood we found some difficulty in keeping to our feet.

Krill Hvensor kept to his pilot's seat, as did his Vulcanid companion. He turned to us, though, with shining eyes and an expression that seemed truly human, and held out his hands to us.

We shook his hands in that curious Vulcanid double grip, and he nodded quickly.

"Now I must return," he said. "But  —  I shall come back to you. And I shall bring others. Watch for us here." And he pointed downwards to the spot our Disc had landed on. "Four days," he reminded us, "and I shall be back  —  with others."

Now, we knew, we must alight.

Before we moved down to the air-lock, Krill Hvensor handed me a small package. As he spoke, he appeared to make the greatest effort to control some emotion that gripped him. He closed his eyes tightly, and appeared to be murmuring some soundless words. Then his eyes opened, and in his normal voice, he spoke.

"Your instructions are in this package, Denis Grafton," he said. "You will also find therein some written papers. These you will place in their correct position in the narrative you are to write."

Again, he seemed to struggle with some unformed thought, and for a time was silent, although his lips moved again in swift but silent words.

When he did speak again to me, his features had resumed their usual impassivity.

"Your first and only duty now," he urged me, "is to carry out these orders.  You must obey."

I took the package from him with some surprise. As I held it in my hands, the surprise vanished, and I realised that I must obey.

I seemed to know, as soon as I touched the package, that the others must handle it, as well. I held it towards Arabin, whose expression showed the amazement I must have portrayed in my turn at this odd piece of ritualistic behaviour. He, too, lost his look of surprise as he held the small bundle, and he passed it to Karim, who touched it and nodded.

"Of course," said Karim. "Of course…. But naturally…."

Arabin turned to Thomas Ludlam, but Thomas had made his way to the air-lock, and we followed him.

As we left the navigating cabin, Krill Hvensor called after us, in a strained voice.

"Remember," he said. "Four days from now… here… I shall be back, with others."

Then I found myself stepping through the air-lock, and I heard the swish of the inner door closing behind us. For a second we stood there, not knowing what we should find outside the outer panel, but somehow, confident... sure... 

The panel opened, and we stepped out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

This is Denis Grafton, and by God! he is writing in his own words now. Now that we have shaken off that damnable mental control, I can speak freely.

This writing will continue — this writing that set out to be history — but will continue as a warning to those who come after. It is better that way. The first chapters will stand as they are, as a proof of what the world may come to if my warning is not heeded.

I will go back to the moment when we stepped out of the Disc, and will bring events into their proper perspective.

When the outer panel of the air-lock opened, if we had been in complete control of our minds, we would no doubt have feared the annihilation that had overtaken mankind. But those damned Intelligences ruling us had glossed our minds over with a veneer of confidence that would have killed us, if the atmosphere of Earth had been unbreathable.

Fortunately, the catastrophe that had destroyed humanity had not affected the composition of the atmosphere, and we were able to breathe perfectly normally.

We found ourselves in open parkland as we crept out from beneath the shadow of the Disc. Arabin grabbed my arm, and hustled me away quickly.

"Move quickly…. It'll take off at any moment," he urged.

The four of us ran until we had left the Disc a couple of hundred yards behind, and then turned to watch it. We were quite safe, though, as we might have known, for Krill Hvensor had us under observation on his screen.

We stood silently, as the great Disc, appearing even larger now than we had believed when we first entered it, gently lifted from the ground, hovered, and then shot away in an incredibly swift upward spiral.

I carried the package I had been given by Krill Hvensor, and looked round for a building of some sort. I knew, and Arabin and Karim knew, that we must open the package and follow the instructions we found inside it.

In our hurry, we had forgotten to pass the package on to Thomas Ludlam, who had been first out of the Disc and now stood a little distance away from us.

Leaving him slightly to our rear, we all three hurried across the park where we had landed, and made for a large building standing among trees. We had no thought save to obey our orders.

We entered the building with little thought as to what it was or what lay within, and made our way to a large room with a central table. On the table we laid the package, and started to open it.

Inside, we found a document addressed to me by name, which instructed me to start immediately on the task of setting down on paper the history of our Return. It called upon me as "First Terrestrial Archivist" to continue this work until the "guidance" I was to receive should end.

Well, those who have read so far know that I complied unquestioningly. They know, too, that — apparently with some remnants of newspaper training battling with the Intelligences that guided my hand — I persuaded Arabin to write his share.

The document written by Krill Hvensor was already completed in the package, and this I inserted in its proper place in my narrative.

In four days, Krill Hvensor had told us, he would return, and I was sure that he would keep his word.

We thereupon set about the immediate task of creating a record of events, as we had been ordered, and three days were taken up in the work.

We occupied ourselves almost blindly with the writing of this account. There had been no arrangements made for our subsistence, and we had no thought of the necessity for food. Arabin and I carried out the actual work of writing this record, while Karim and Thomas Ludlam stood by patiently. At night we slept when the sun set. During the day we wrote and wrote and wrote.

By the afternoon of the third day I had written the last words of this "guided" account. As I drew the paper out of the type-writer — for the building where we worked had been used as an office, as I shall presently tell — I set it on top of the other sheets and sat back.

What was I to do now? I wondered. I supposed, vaguely, that I should soon know. I moved away to the french windows of the room where we had been working — it had been the Mayor's parlour, we found later — and looked out. Krill Hvensor would return on the morrow. Doubtless by then I should have more idea of my work.

As I stood there, Thomas Ludlam touched my sleeve.

"All finished?" he asked.

I nodded. "All finished to date, Thomas," I replied.

"Then you and I and Leo and Casimir must now speak together," he said, with an air of urgency that seemed new to his placid nature.

He drew me through the french windows to a table that Leo had set out on what had been the lawn. There, he and Karim were sitting idly, as unlike two men returned to Earth from the fabulous distances of space as could be conceived.

We sat down with them.

"Well, Thomas, old friend?" said Leo, questionably. "How now? No chess, here, old boy  —  though that will no doubt be rectified later."

Thomas drew his chair closer, and gripped Arabin by the arm. He shook his head sadly. "Even here  —  at this distance  —  they can reach you," he said.

"Of course they can," replied Arabin, dreamily. "We're never out of their reach..."

Then he shook his head, as a man does who is trying to make a tremendous effort of will.

Thomas nodded excitedly. "That's it!" he urged. "They can't reach you if only you demand of your will that you should be the master!"

Arabin dropped his head on his outstretched arms with a gesture of despair.

Thomas shook him violently, then threw up his hands to his head. He walked up and down quickly, obviously under the spell of some overpowering emotion. I can see the commanding reason for his despair now, but at the time I accepted everything as part of a fore-ordained scheme of things.

Casimir sat with his head down, taking no part in all this.

"You, Denis, I can at least talk to you," Thomas pleaded. "You are the newest of their victims. I am the oldest. I know them...  and I know how to beat them. You shall listen to me."

Somewhere at the back of my mind, a tiny voice kept telling me that Thomas was mad. But yet, I was beginning to reason, I must hear him. He apparently saw my divided loyalty to the damnable Intelligences ruling me, for he seized my arm in a viciously tight grip.

"You will listen to me — you must hear me. And you must understand and believe me," he commanded.

"Listen, Denis. Can you not see that these two" — he waved a hand towards Leo and Casimir — "that these two are not their own masters? You yourself are not your own master —  are you?"

Then I began to appreciate the truth of what he was saying to me. I understood at once that we, men returned from the dead to a world of the dead, had acted like robots in obeying our orders. We had not even troubled ourselves with the elementary necessities of life. We had walked out of the Disc into a world that, for all we knew, might poison us with the first breath of its atmosphere; we had accepted the fact that if we must die, we must; we had been unquestioning, unreasoning machines.

And still, all the time, that compelling voice told me that Thomas was mad, that he was not to be believed, that The Voice was the only truth.

Thomas was talking to me, talking hurriedly and urgently.

I made a great effort. What was he telling me?

"You are the newest... their influence can't have reached the depths with you that it has with Leo and Casimir...  Listen!"

I found myself sitting down on a park bench beside him. I read on the small metal inscription screwed to the back of the bench that it had been "Donated (dreadful word!) by Alderman H. J. Possett in commemoration of..."

Thomas dragged my attention away from the trivial detail.

"Nod your head if you hear and understand me," he said. I nodded, but the effort was appalling. That voice' was now rising to a thin scream in my ears, that tiny, silent voice in my own mind.

"I've been living on that other world for nearly all my life," Thomas was telling me, and I heard his Voice coming to me thinly through the shimmering veil of yet more whispers in my mind's ear.

"They are diabolical, ruthless beings, those Vulcanids," he went on. "I know them...  I learned their secret long ago... Now they want our world, now that their own is dying... your world.  Will you give it up to them so easily?"

The commanding voice in my mind was now a roar of many voices, and Thomas seemed to be speaking to me from a great distance.  Still, his words came through that frightful barrage.

With an effort, I formed words to answer him. Something told me that I could confute his story so easily.

I must have whispered, for Thomas had to bend his head to hear me.

"Krill Hvensor is no diabolical, ruthless being," I managed to say, and the voices in my head seemed to be applauding me, praising me.

"Krill Hvensor," Thomas declared, "is no Vulcanid".

In my mind arose a great conflict. My will told me that Thomas spoke the truth, but the host of voices that only I heard roared a denial.

Then, with the unintelligible confusion of mind such as comes to a man under an anaesthetic, I lost consciousness.

CHAPTER EIGHT

When I awoke, it was dark. Somewhere above my head a tiny light glimmered.

I lay awhile lazily, wondering whether to turn over and sleep again. Then I saw a figure stooping over me, and the light shone on Thomas's gleaming bald pate.

"Awake?" he breathed.

Back to my mind came my last sight of him, and the memory of what he had been trying to tell me. I sat up at once. I felt inexpressibly refreshed, and my head was now clear as it had not been for literally years.

"Krill Hvensor," I said. "You were telling me that he was no Vulcanid..."

Thomas lifted the candle — a candle! How long since I had seen such a homely object?  —  and placed it on the floor between us.

"That is the truth," he said solemnly. "Krill Hvensor is no Vulcanid. The true Vulcanids have been seen by no Terrestrial  —  save one. I have seen them. I know them. They are evil — the embodiment of everything foul."

Then I heard the story of this brave old man, who had lived out nearly two hundred of our years on an alien world, hoping every moment that some day he might help to save humanity from the mind-stealing scourge of the Masters of Hafna.

All I had been taught on that world was now shown to be false. My mind had been cunningly filled with the desirable propaganda fostered by the Intelligences ruling all of us. Krill Hvensor and his kind, I now heard — and I believed it, so urgent was Thomas Ludlam in the telling of it — were members of a race inhabiting yet another world, who had been taken into captivity by the Vulcanids countless years ago.

Their own world had been left lifeless, as it had been found of no use to the Vulcanid Rulers. Its people had been subjugated and had lived as semi-robots on Vulcan. They had acted as the mobile intelligences of the Masters, and had carried out their bidding unquestioningly. They had scoured the Solar System for the new home planned by the true Vulcanids; they had sojourned on one planet and then another in the aeon-long search.

"Then — Krill Hvensor is not a mutation from some alien species?" I asked.

"Krill Hvensor and his kind are as they always have been." Thomas assured me. "They inhabit the shape that was given to them by God, but their wills are the wills of the Vulcanids. At least — that has been the case, but now, a change has been brought about.

"During the last generation, they have been made aware of their plight. And now they have elected to leave their Masters —  if they can.

"In a few hours — for it will be dawn shortly — Krill Hvensor will be leading the first of his kind to their new home. This world of ours is to be theirs, and they will be sharing it with us and those members of the Terrestrial Colony they are able to bring with them."

I pictured a vast armada of Discs descending upon our little patch of public park, bearing the eight hundred members of the Colony, and heaven knew how many of Krill Hvensor's race. Thomas, however, corrected me.

"We don't know  —  we can have no idea — how many will come," he said. "It may even be that not a single Disc will arrive. This I do know: when we left the Vulcanid base on the Moon, there were more than five hundred Discs ready to depart, and standing by them were nearly a thousand of Krill Hvensor's people."

"But — the people from the Terrestrial Colony — our people," I said. "Casimir's wife — all those poor souls trapped out there on Vulcan — how are they to return?"

"No need to worry," Thomas replied. "Part of the original plan by the Masters of Hafna involved the sending of at least half the Colony a few days after our arrival. The rest — well, they are the unlucky ones. They will remain on Vulcan... But... they are the old ones. They have not many more years of life, in any case. Oh! I know it sounds callous, but believe me, I would gladly have stayed myself if just one other could have returned."

"Even now, it is probable that three or four hundred of our people will be embarked on the Discs ready to return. But I fear that few of them will reach us. The Intelligences must by now be aware of the plan to desert them. They will contrive to destroy many of the Discs out in space."

It was a terrible thought. But, looking at things in an objective light, I realised that we should triumph if only a few dozen humans returned. In ages to come the Earth would be repopulated...

Thomas interrupted my train of thought.

"Time is so short," he urged. "In a few hours, if they are to come at all, the first Discs will be here. We must arouse Leo and Casimir and break this damned hold the Vulcanids have over them. Now that there are two of us, I am hopeful. We shall — we must — make their minds their own again, if that is impossible, only one thing remains: we must destroy them utterly."

I was horrified, but Thomas waved away my objections.

"We cannot have any human's mind ruled by the Vulcanids," he pointed out, logically enough. "Otherwise, we shall lose what we have already won, and the Vulcanids will take over this world eventually."

We sought out Leo and Casimir. Casimir would be the easier of the two, we agreed, and we woke him as silently as we could. He was still half asleep when we drew him into our candle-lit room. That fact helped us — and we were able to make use of the knowledge to infinite effect later. In his half-waking state we secured control of his faculties in less than half an hour, and he was ours.

Arabin was much more difficult. The Vulcanids had implanted their control much deeper in his mind, and we found that the utmost endeavour was needed to battle with the alien mind gripping his own. At last, weary and wretched, we seemed to have succeeded just as day was breaking. At least, we judged that we had succeeded, for, like myself, he collapsed under the ordeal.

We left him for half an hour, and then we returned to the attack by waking him.

Thank God! When we had him fully awake he had rid himself of the Vulcanid control.

From that moment onwards we were feverishly active. Leo took charge, and we planned the programme necessary for the reception of any Discs that might come.

Firstly — food. Leo stayed by the landing ground to which Krill Hvensor's Disc would return, and the rest of us hurried out of the park to find what provisions we could. We had reasoned that at least five months must have passed since the catastrophe that had destroyed Terrestrial humanity. That was a minimum estimate. If, as we believed, time had literally stood still for us out in space, the period might be incalculably greater. We had one slight clue: the grass of the parkland where we had landed was only about ten inches deep. The flower beds, too, had not yet run completely to seed, and although they were filled with weeds, they were not yet choked.

I have reason to believe, as I write this, that some eight or nine months must have passed since mankind annihilated himself.

But to return to our quest: within a quarter of a mile of the park gates we came out into the little town's High Street. We covered its length hurriedly, and counted nine food shops of one sort and another that would be sure to carry stocks of tinned food. There were others, but here the goods were perishable, and we saw great forests of fungus and mildew growing over such stocks as bread and vegetables.

We gave such places a wide berth, fearing that the fungoid growths might be connected with the as yet unknown cataclysm. Whatever forms of life had been destroyed, we noted, the lowest form of all — the unicellular structures and the fungi —  still thrived.

We saw few bodies, and at that time found it hard to understand why the streets were not strewn with them. We learned later, as I shall explain in due course.

Within an hour we were back at the park with as much tinned food as we could carry. There was a plentiful supply of water at several points in the park, and we had, in our blind confidence fostered by the Vulcanid Intelligences, proved by drinking that the water was pure.

We made four such trips, and our return from the last saw a good stock of tinned stuff piled in what had been the Borough Treasurer's office. Then we sat down to rest and to wait for Krill Hvensor's Discs to arrive.

Before noon we sighted the first Disc, and greeted it by furious waving. If we had been shipwrecked men we could not have welcomed our rescuers more vociferously. We shouted and waved excitedly as the Disc spiralled down to a gentle landing on the rank turf.

As we ran across what had been the lawns around our — we called it "our" for long after that — Town Hall, Krill Hvensor slid out from the under side of the disc, followed by  —  what?

Had he brought our own people, or members of his own kind?

As he stooped to assist those who followed him, we cheered again. There was Otto Langer, the German, an old friend of ours. There was Neil Flower, the playboy of our old Colony, and behind him came another welcome character, David Cohen.

Then as they approached us, we lost our enthusiasm. Each man was still, only too obviously, controlled by the minds that had controlled us.

They walked across to us in a too-confident manner; their greeting was too matter-of-fact; they had, it was all too plain to see, accepted the fact that here they were, and everything would be looked after for them.

Accordingly, we humoured them, and fell in with their mood. We chatted lightly, as though we had but recently left them under normal conditions.

Using the knowledge we had already gained, we impressed upon them the need for sleep. We led them to the make-shift dormitories that Leo had fixed up in our absence, and saw them comfortably installed therein. Arabin stayed with them  —  "I'll catch 'em as they wake." he whispered.

Krill Hvensor, though! He was in a truly pitiable state.

With generations of control by the Hafna Intelligences as his background, he had consciously tried to break the control. And the result of the mental battle showed sadly on his face. He, too, we tried to persuade to sleep.

We should probably never have succeeded if Casimir had not solved the problem.

"I saw a doctor's house as we left the park," he said, thoughtfully.  "Do you think... morphia?"

I ran to the park gates, and searched around. There was a row of neat houses fronting the park, and I soon found the one bearing a doctor's name plate. The front door was swinging open, and I hurriedly explored the ground-floor rooms. At the back of the house was a small dispensary, and there I found, after ten minutes' search, a small anaesthetics cupboard.

I smashed the lock, and, by the greatest of good fortune, found a metal box containing ampoules of morphia, packed in cotton wool. On a lower shelf I found a hypodermic syringe.

It would be a risk to use it, I thought, as I ran back to the building in the park, but surely — yes! there were instructions printed on the inside of the lid.

I jabbed the point of the syringe into Krill Hvensor's arm. Within a few minutes he was sleeping peacefully.

I must abridge the story of our battle with these four minds. The three humans were comparatively easy to deal with, as we caught each one in the first moments of his awakening. Krill Hvensor took longer.

At the end of four hours, though, we had won, and, for the first time in countless years, one of his race was freed from the Vulcanid control.

CHAPTER NINE

When we had successfully revived Krill Hvensor, he sat breathing heavily for a few moments, and then rose and walked to the windows. In the west the sun was beginning to decline. He stood a moment and gazed at it, and then, with his left foot, drew a spiral pattern in the thick dust on the floor. With his hands crossed on his chest, he stood with bowed head contemplating the pattern, and his lips moved in silent words.

We stood back while he performed this ritual — a ritual we were to see repeated often in the next few days — and kept silence. We knew that Krill Hvensor's people followed what I can only describe as a religion, but we knew little of it. The spiral pattern, with the outer limb linked by a straight line to the inner starting point, we had seen often on Vulcan, and recognised it as the symbol of their religion.

There were now eight of us; eight free man to battle with the hosts of Vulcan for the minds and bodies of those who should follow us.

Krill Hvensor assured us that every available Disc would by now have left the Lunar base, and that we might expect those lucky enough to reach Earth, to arrive ten or twelve hours hence.

That gave us another breathing space, and time to lay our plans. We agreed that we would use anaesthetics, if necessary, to nullify the effects of the Vulcanid control. Krill Hvensor supported this project whole-heartedly. Such measures for procuring loss of consciousness were unknown on Vulcan, thanks to the extensive mind control existing there. They would, therefore, offer a valuable weapon against the Vulcanid Intelligences, who could have had no experience of combating them.

But none of us believed that we should have many hours' advance on the Vulcanid minds. By now, we reasoned, they would have realised that their loss of control over eight of their subjects was no mere accident, and would no doubt strike forcibly to keep other humans out of our grasp.

However, we could do nothing but wait, now.

We slept little that night. There was much to understand, and many questions to ask. For the first time we heard the truth about Krill Hvensor's race, and their age-long captivity. For the first time, too, we learned of the form the Intelligences of Vulcan took.

Many thousands of years ago, we learned, the secret of space travel had been discovered by the beings on a planet revolving in an orbit between that of Mars and Earth. They had travelled from planet to planet, until they reached Vulcan. These were the people of Krill Hvensor's race. They had called their own world Amar-Viri  —  "Daughter of the Sun"  —  and, with something like thirty thousand years of civilisation as their background, had evolved an almost ideal form of society. They spoke a common language, and had left nationalism far behind them, achieving a common race with common ideals.

Then had come their tragic journeys to Hafna. For some centuries they had visited the ill-omened planet, until at last they found themselves in the inextricable mental grip of the rulers of Hafna. They had been influenced into bringing more and yet more of their people to Hafna, so that the Intelligences ruling that world might study them, just as, later, they had decided to study Terrestrial humanity — with the object of habilitating the Vulcan form of life to life on a newer world.

But the Vulcanid plan to annex Amar-Viri was thwarted by a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions. That planet, dwelling in an orbit between Mars and Earth, gradually came within the gravitational influence of the Earth, and in the course of the centuries, was disintegrated by the ruthless attraction of Terrestrial gravity.

As Krill Hvensor told us of the traditions of his race, he pointed to the Moon, which was in its third quarter.

"That," he declared, "is the last visible remnant of Amar-Viri."

Earlier in this narrative, I referred to what is known as Hoerbiger's theory. 1 never thought, either when I first studied it, or when I wrote those words, that I should ever be afforded proof that Hoerbiger was right when he assumed that our Moon was the wreckage — or all that remained of the wreckage — of another planet.

What of the Vulcanid Intelligences? we asked Krill Hvensor. Thomas Ludlam sat silent. He knew. I thought that I, too, knew. I had been shown the two-foot high, froglike creatures on Vulcan, and had believed, as I was told, that these were the progenitors of the Vulcanid race as personified by Krill Hvensor. Arabin, also, had seen these, and had believed the story.

Krill Hvensor shook his head. The froglike beings were no more than a skilled race of craftsmen who were indigenous to Vulcan. They, until the Virians were enslaved, were the mobile intelligences of the planet. Now they had been restored to their earlier status as independent creatures, though working for the Rulers of the planet.

What, then, were the Intelligences, we persisted?  They must have some physical form. What was it? Krill Hvensor hesitated before he replied. They were almost static beings, he told us. They were capable only of slow movement under their own volition, and therefore must possess a subservient race to effect their movement for them, and to carry out their practical work. But as for brain work, they were entirely self-sufficient.

He explored his mind for a parallel that would enable him to offer us an explanation in English — which language, with others, he had learned, of course, in the course of his studies as host for the Vulcanids.

Thomas Ludlam helped him.

"Krill Hvensor," he explained, "has never seen such a thing as a sea-anemone, so cannot describe one. If he had seen such a thing, he would tell you that the Vulcanids are like that. They are bigger — much bigger — of course. If you imagine a sea-anemone, rooted on dry land, and growing to a height of seven or eight feet — that is a Vulcanid."

While he spoke, he sketched his thoughts in the dust of the floor.

Krill Hvensor nodded vehemently. We shuddered.

The unknown, especially in an alien  —  completely alien  —  form of life can be terrifying.

We looked at Thomas's sketch in the dust. These, then, would have been our masters had we not escaped them.

David Cohen managed to make a joke. "Cor save us!" he said, "and I used to think bus drivers were the lowest form of life!"   David had been a taxi driver in London.

His interruption reminded me of a small puzzle that had been at the back of my mind for days.

"David," I said. "We're somewhere north or south of London, aren't we?"

He nodded. "Don't know where you are, eh?" 

"We don't. Do you?"

"Sarf-east London. Or maybe Metropolitan Kent. Yes. Metropolitan Kent, I should say. We came over Lewisham and Eltham, and we're out in the open here. Tell you what... Give us the candle a minute."

He took the candle — Thomas had prudently placed one or two in each room — and left us. In two minutes he was back, carrying a sheet of headed notepaper.

"There y'are," he declared triumphantly. "Primswood, Kent."

We looked at the notepaper, and read "Primswood Borough Council."

Of course! Why hadn't we thought of looking under our noses before? The only answer can be that we had been too busily occupied, first under the Vulcanid control, and then arranging our future movements.

"And this 'ere," David went on, "is Primswood Place. Turn out of the gates, and three miles up the High Street you come to Eltham. Keep on left, and you're in the Old Kent Road in no time.  Blimey, and that nearly takes me home!"

That started another train of thought. If this was the Borough Council Office, there'd be a newspaper file somewhere about. Arabin and I went off to look for it.

Now that we had leisure, we took our time, and explored rooms we had not entered before. In one ground-floor room, we found the caretaker.

He was sitting at a table, his jacket hanging over the back of his chair and his head leaning forward.

Arabin walked over and touched him.

The man rolled off his chair at the touch, and collapsed in a bundle of clothes on the floor.

Where there had been a dead man, there was now a heap of dust inside the garments.

We stood silently for a moment. Here was something we could not yet explain. The poor fellow had died suddenly, whatever death had overtaken him. But this disintegration? Perhaps we should learn later. Now — there was a job to be done.

We must find out what we could about the disaster that had fallen upon the world.

In the next room we entered, we found our newspaper file.

It was the local weekly, and there on the front page we read of the terror that had struck the world the week that copy of the Kentish Chronicle had been printed.

The date-line at the top of the page was September 7th, 1973. Then more than ten years had passed on Earth since I ran across that Lancashire field to the black disc!

Under the banner heading, "Millions Head North to Escape Sonic Belt," we read the grim story the printers had stayed behind to publish. The front page of that paper is now preserved for future readers, and I copy the opening paragraphs of the tragic story here:

London, Thursday Night.

More than eighteen million more British subjects have been evacuated to Arctic areas during the past five days. Here in the Press Room of Evacuation Headquarters (writes a Kentish Chronicle reporter) the daily toll mounts so fast that we can only speak in thousands. Wave upon wave of refugees has surged across the 50th parallel from other European countries, and radio messages from Reception Centres in Murmansk, Hammerfest and Novaya Zemlya tell of further millions who are now encamped on the ice within the Arctic Circle.

Within 24 hours, it is expected that those who have reached Arctic zones will know whether they are safe there, for it is calculated that the advance of the supersonic death will have reached the polar regions by then, if it is going to extend so far.

Between the 50th parallel and the Arctic Circle, many more millions are speeding northward, but their journey will be tragically vain, for reports continue to pour into these head-quarters telling of isolated limbs of the supersonic belt reaching out faster than the leading edge is travelling.

Radio communication with Antarctic regions has now ceased, and it is feared that evacuees from the Southern Hemisphere who sought refuge there have perished.

If this is so, Professor Vogel's theory that there may be safety in surroundings of intense cold will be proved fallacious.

On the other hand, according to a statement to the Press of the world by General Weaver, it may be found that the super-sonic belt has affected radio transmissions only, and that mankind has found safety amid the ice, but is unable to communicate the fact.

It is now estimated that more than nine-tenths of the population of Great Britain has been evacuated. Of the four million remaining, many more will have gone within four hours' time. But it is now realised that many thousands will remain voluntarily in their home surroundings.

General Weaver has repeated his promise that every man, woman and child will be evacuated speedily upon application to local Evacuation Centres. Every aircraft the country possesses, including the fleet of eight hundred 300-seater trans-world Goliaths shared by the United States and this country, is at the immediate service of those wishing to be evacuated. By Saturday, he warns, it will be too late.

Already, it has been observed that the supersonic belt is advancing much more rapidly across the North Pacific and Eastern Asia. The leading edge approaching Europe from the South may accelerate its speed if the wind backs to the South.

This headquarters, General Weaver promises, will remain and function from the deep shelters in which it is now installed. Radio communications will be maintained as long as possible.

The staff here are optimistic that the sound belt will not travel far enough below ground to reach them in their 800-feet deep shelters When these deep shelters were constructed in 1968, they were proved safe from atomic radiation and all forms of atmospheric pollution, so it may be that those manning their posts here will survive.

The only element of doubt is created by the unknown nature of the sound belt itself. When Professor Vogel's thorium bomb was prematurely exploded, the experts had not yet analysed the reactions obtained by the laboratory experiments with the test bomb.

The list of cities overwhelmed by the belt now includes many centres further North. Rome, Marseilles, Athens, Washington, Vancouver and Seattle have now ceased radio communication.

…. And so the appalling story continued.

We carried the newspaper through to the others, who read it with growing horror. Less than a year ago, by my reckoning, a provincial newspaperman sat in some underground dungeon in London and telephoned his catastrophic story through to some less fortunate copy-taker here in Primswood. And ten or twenty gallant compositors, stone-hands and pressmen had stayed behind to set and print the story. Who had remained to read it?

We were certain that there had been few people in the little Kentish town there on the fringe of London when the end came, for we had seen less than a score of dead in the streets and buildings.

There could be no doubt that those who had stayed had known full well what their fate would be. Previous issues of the paper, as we read them in the file, had told of the preliminary experiments with Professor Vogel's pernicious thorium bomb. And throughout the story ran a grim thread of doubt that had swelled to certainty the week before the cataclysm.

"Chain reaction," murmured Arabin. "The bloody fools. Vogel must have suspected... It's what we were always warned against. Up goes the bomb — and atoms go on splitting on all sides and can't be stopped."

We sat in silence for a time. There was little we could say that would seem decent.

One thing seemed certain: the Arctic ice had afforded no protection whatever, despite Vogel's hopes.

CHAPTER TEN

By dawn we were all out to await the arrival of any other Discs that might reach Earth. Krill Hvensor had assured us that they would not land in the dark, and that each following pilot would "home" on the radio impulses constantly being sent out by our one grounded Disc.

It was nearly noon when we saw our first Disc.

It gleamed a dazzling golden colour in the sunlight, and we caught our first glimpse of it when it was perhaps as much as ten miles away. Krill Hvensor sat by the controls of his own Disc — talking down the newcomer, we imagined, for we had little knowledge of the handling of the craft. Arabin, Karim and Ludlam had some elementary experience of flying the Discs under outside control, but of their means of communication we had everything to learn.

These Discs, I may not have mentioned, were much smaller than, and apparently quite different from, the enormous black Disc that had taken me back in 1963. The black Discs were the "mother" craft, Krill Hvensor told us, and were flown by the Nagani — the small, frog-like creatures I had seen on Vulcan.

As it spiralled down to earth, the newcomer fluttered oddly in the air, as though the pilot was having difficulty. When it landed, the seven of us who were out in the open stood at a distance and watched its passengers alight. They were led by two Virians, one of whom was half dragging the other. Then came eight people, most of whom we recognised. The gladdest sight of all was Casimir's wife, Rachelle, but we were saddened to see that she, like the others, was still under Vulcanid control.

However, time was too short for grieving, and we hustled all ten of the Disc's passengers into the rooms we had prepared for them. With drawn blinds keeping out the daylight, and after their fatigue of the journey, we had little difficulty in getting the newcomers to sleep.

We set Neil Flower the task of keeping a roll of all new arrivals, together with their occupations and every detail we knew of them.

Arabin was looking over the list, when a name caught his eye.  He beckoned me over to him, and pointed to it.

"Dr. Axel Bjornstrom," he read.   "Remember him?"

"Only slightly. Didn't see much of him. Why?"

"He's our man for attending to the newcomers as they arrive. Don't you see? A surgeon... he can give 'em all the dope that's safe. Might speed up the process of getting rid of the control."

We accordingly set to work on the doctor first.

Here we were extremely fortunate, for we found that the doctor — a tough, rugged Swede — had known that he was being controlled. His release was thus comparatively easy, and after ten minutes' talk with him, we had him free.

Before we awoke the others, I took him across the park to the doctor's surgery I had looted earlier. I stood by while he ransacked the dispensary, and together we carried back to the building every bottle, every instrument, that he needed.

He selected a man who was sleeping by himself in a separate room as his guinea pig. While the man was still sound asleep, Dr. Bjornstrom gave him a stab in the arm with a syringe, into which he had carefully measured a clear liquid.

"Pentothal," he explained. "Will take longer time, the pentothal, but will be more good — more easy to tell him all we want to tell him."

. His patient started to wake after the shock of the stab, but Bjornstrom gently pushed him back and held him down. In a few seconds the man was deeply unconscious.

Flower checked the fellow's name on his list.

"Frenchman," he said. "Someone'll have to speak to him in French."

We sent for Karim, who was outside with the Disc-spotters. His second tongue was French, though he also spoke — as most educated Alexandrines do — Greek and some Italian. We left him with the man, and went outside to watch for Discs.

For three hours there was no sign from the sky, and then we sighted no less than eight Discs, circling in formation high overhead. Six of them made perfect landings in line across the park, but the last two suddenly shot upwards.

While they were still clearly within sight, we were horrified to see them take on an incandescent glow, and a few seconds later, with a burst of flame, they vanished completely.

Krill Hvensor bowed his head and crossed his arms on his breast and made the sign of the spiral with his foot.

But again, there was no time to waste in mourning the loss of the two Discs and their passengers, and each one of us, save Karim and Dr. Axel, ran to lead the Discs' passengers into the darkness of the building.

As we entered, we found Karim and Dr. Axel joyfully leading out the previous ten newcomers. The pentothal treatment, it appeared, had worked well, although the Virians, as was to be expected, had been difficult to free of their controls.

Flower was kept busy with his register, and by the time he had listed all those who had come in the last six Discs to land, we found that we could muster sixty-five humans and thirteen Virians.

This, Arabin and I agreed, was almost better than we had hoped for. Another encouraging factor was the presence of Dr. Axel. His efforts had freed every newcomer within the hour, and we no longer feared the Vulcanid mind-control.

So cheered were we, that as night fell, and we sat round a veritable blaze of Thomas's candles in what had been the Council Chamber of our Town Hall, we planned our schedules for meeting other incoming Discs day by day. We would wait here  —  or a party of us would wait here  —  indefinitely as long as the Discs came in, we agreed.

The Virians were singularly quiet, though, as we laid our plans. They had reason to be, as we found during the next week. During that time, although we now mounted a twenty-four-hour watch, not a single Disc landed.

On the fourth day, Krill Hvensor and I stood on the roof of our building, straining our eyes skyward. We now had binoculars to aid us, for we had raided many shops in Primswood's short High Street.

"I think no more will ever come," said the Virian, sadly. The thought had long ago occurred to most of us. I waited for him to continue.

"Those of us who did reach your world," he said, "were gifted with luck that cannot continue. It has been so easy for the Vulcanids... They had but to plant a thought in a pilot's mind: 'I must destroy my Disc,' and it would be done. Who will ever know how many of my people and yours they have destroyed out there in space?"

It became apparent during the next three days that he was right. Not one Disc — not even the flash of an exploding Disc —  was seen. Each of the Discs we had lying on the grass there at Primswood had been on radio watch continuously, and not one faint signal had any of them received.

There was a grim consolation in the thought that every Virian Disc pilot had been annihilated, for the Virian population on Vulcan had never been large.  The fewer there were to remain in Vulcanid servitude, the less chance there was of any counter-attack upon us.

After a week we still maintained a daylight watch every day, in the faint hopes that a Disc or two might break through the Vulcanid mind-barrier, but none came.

At last, we assumed that none had left the Lunar base once the first flight had taken off. By then, the Vulcanid Intelligences had learned of the plot to desert them, and had either prevented other Discs following the first flight, or had destroyed them in space. Whatever the truth of the matter was, it was agreed among us that our immediate concern was our own survival.

During our week of waiting, much had been done in addition to our watch on the sky. Dr. Axel, aided by Arabin and a former laboratory assistant — our nearest approach to a physicist — had been in London gleaning what information they could about the nature of the great catastrophe. They had combed through the files of newspapers in Fleet Street for shreds of clues that would tell them just how mankind had died.

Axel and Ducrot, our stand-in for a scientist, had conducted extensive laboratory tests with what cadavers they had succeeded in finding in a state of anything like preservation. For the most part, the poor corpses they found had long ago disintegrated into a fine ashy dust, but here and there, where a man had been especially well protected, they were able to examine his remains.

Axel had formed the opinion that death had been caused not by asphyxiation or poisoning, but by a sudden shock to the brain, and he held the theory that supersonic impulses — "sound" too incalculably high-pitched to be heard by human ears — may have been responsible.

The disintegration of the bodies, he believed, had been caused by some side-effect of the explosion of the Vogel bomb. This theory, however, he had not yet been able to investigate fully.

Another aspect of our work while we waited was inspired by David Cohen. He had idly wondered aloud what should be done in the event of a black Disc, or perhaps some other and as yet unsuspected space ship, approaching Earth.

Arabin had at once seized upon the idea, and we had debated it at length. The result was seen next day, when half a dozen men were despatched to the Primswood Drill Hall, and there installed as anti-aircraft gunners. Each had seen service in that role during the war of 1939-1945, and with the glibly optimistic motto, "Once a gunner, always a gunner," had set to work on the anti-aircraft guns we found at the Drill Hall.

We were not too happy about our defensive situation as yet. For all we knew, the repellent screen of the Vulcanid world might have been incorporated into the Discs, in which case, our shells would merely bounce before hitting the target.

But the main thing was, in those early days, to provide occupation, and necessary' occupation, for all our people.

Some we set to scouring the countryside by car, in the hopes  — vain, they turned out to be — of finding cattle that had survived the catastrophe. Poultry, too, was non-existent, and even as we planned the search, we compared notes and found that none of us had heard a bird singing since our return.

True, we had unlimited supplies of canned food at our disposal. Every shop throughout the world was a potential larder for us, but — how long would such food be eatable? It might even last out our lifetimes, but what of the next generation?

For we were confident that there would be a next generation. We had every reason to believe that the sterility of humanity on Vulcan was imposed by the Vulcanids' devilish science.

And so, through that first week, we planned a make-shift defence of our tiny patch of inhabited world, we tried to learn what had killed our kind, we sought for food, and we talked —  how we talked!

It was the talk that determined us on some sort of rule among ourselves.

Perhaps by right of our having led the Return, perhaps because nobody better offered, a Council of Five was elected to organise our affairs. Arabin, Krill Hvensor, Thomas Ludlam, Casimir Karim and myself found ourselves responsible for the administration of seventy-eight people there in Primswood Place.

And at the end of the first week, we assembled everybody in the Council Chamber to discuss our future.

There were vast problems to be solved, and the first question was: could we attempt their solution out there in the country?

Those who knew their London were at once in favour of moving to the Metropolis, which was but twelve miles to the north of us. Those who did not, and especially those who had been bred in other cities, demanded the right to remain on the fringe of the city. For, they reasoned, food must be cultivated, and in the absence of animal food, mankind would have to depend upon a vegetarian diet in the future.

David Cohen, the shrewd Jewish Cockney, interrupted quietly with: "...an' a nice bit o' fish, perhaps."

There was a chattering in many tongues, as the English-speakers translated for the others.

David waited for silence, and went on: "Nobody seems to have taken a peep at the fishpond right outside this window, do they? 'Ave a dekko."

Someone by the french windows slipped put, followed by others, and there was a sudden glad shout. There were living creatures left on Earth, then! The pond contained a score or more of lively goldfish.

What had they fed upon? For fish in a pond could not sustain life without some kind of food.

There must, then, be insects.

Examination showed that insect larvae were thick in the pond, although, when we considered, we had seen no signs of any insects ourselves.  Still, that was a question for the future.

The immediate question: where were we to settle? was coped with by planning a tour of London and the surrounding countryside, and a couple of dozen representatives were selected to spy out the land in this manner.

There was no lack of transport: the main roads even out here were thronged with empty cars. It appeared that evacuation of this particular district had been carried out from the neighbouring Biggin HD1 airfield, and many cars and buses had been parked by the roadside as their passengers had been picked up by the evacuation vehicles for transportation to the airfield.

On the ninth day of our Return, a bus load of us left for the Cook's Tour, as David, driving the bus, called it. The route was left to him. With his native shrewdness, in view of the fact that most of his passengers were anti-London voters, he drove round the Royal parks, and halted after driving up the Edgware Road and Marylebone Road to Regent's Park.

He leaned on the wheel as the passengers alighted and walked wonderingly round on the overgrown lawns of Queen Mary's Garden.

"You can grow anything here," he solemnly declared, "anything at all — melons, coconuts, wheat, anything you like. Wonderful soil in London!" He winked at me.

"An' if this don't suit 'em," he added, confidentially, "we'll take 'em to Kew Gardens."

When we returned, there was another conference, whereat it was agreed that London had the advantage. For four hours we discussed our movement, and finally solved the problem by dividing our Terrestrials into two parties. The smaller party, numbering twenty-three, would settle on some suitable farm, when one should have been found. Thomas Ludlam, who had been a country lad — and so many, many years ago! — was to lead this section.

The Virians were to come to London with the larger party, which would leave as soon as quarters had been reconnoitred.

Here it seems appropriate to mention the composition of our parties.

Among the Terrestrials were half a dozen married couples, and the rest of us were, under the present circumstances, and whatever we had been before, single. Apart from the married couples there were forty-two men and youths, and eleven women and girls.

Of the women and girls, eight were of marriageable age and three were frankly past middle-age.

There were many nationalities among us, including three negro youths and the sister of one of them, two Eskimos, two Chinese, and three full-blooded Blackfoot Indians.

As I write this, it seems difficult to believe that those who read it will have little notion of what these descriptions mean. It will be taught in years to come, though, that the first people of the Return were of mixed colours and spoke various languages. And as the years pass, it may even be that the people inhabiting the world will divide into nations again.

Who can tell, at this stage? Indeed, who can tell whether there will be any human survival at all?

Of the Virians, nine were male and four female. For long I and the other Terrestrials had been schooled in the belief that these were non-human creatures. The belief lingered until even now I find myself writing "humans" and "Virians," whereas perhaps I should write "People."

The fact is, of course, that humanity until this day has never conceived of the possibility of living side by side with beings from another world. We shall long find it hard to separate the Virians in our minds from the concept of non-humanity.

And yet, seeing them among us, hearing them speak our own languages, observing them closely and studying their physical make-up, I am coming to the realisation that, if they are not human, they are indistinguishable from that state.

Even Dr. Axel, who should know, if any man does, proclaims that bodily, the Virians are identical with us. Their mental processes vary, sometimes incredibly. For example, we have only found since the Return that members of the same family of Virians are able to communicate soundlessly with each other. I hesitate to describe this communion as telepathy, but I have yet to find a better word for it.

They have a complex system of taboos, and their religious ideals are, they tell us, incomprehensible to a non-Virian mind.

But physically, they are our match in everything. If I had not known them to be inhabitants of another planet, I would have believed them to be North American Indians. Side by side with our three Blackfoot Indians, they are almost indistinguishable as non-humans.

Perhaps, some day, we may find that the two races, from two different worlds — the Terrestrials and the Virians — are akin enough to intermarry.

In the meantime, they are our brothers in adversity.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Once the decision to divide was made, the necessary moves were quickly planned. Within four days we had found what had been a fine, flourishing small farm half a mile from our first landing ground, and there the rural party settled in as comfortably as was possible under the unique circumstances.

The town party moved up to London, where Arabin had picked out a small private hotel, the Parkside. It overlooked Hyde Park from the Bayswater Road, and was one of the few buildings we had reconnoitred where there were no corpses left behind. The larder was well-stocked, as though the landlady ("Prop. Mrs. E. Flewitt") had laid down a good hoard when first the news about impending trouble had leaked out.

The women in each party undertook to look after all house-keeping duties, and it gave us all great happiness to find ourselves so comfortably placed.

Quartering and food supplies were, for the moment, no problem. Canned foods of every kind were ours for the taking. For the present, the water supplies functioned perfectly, but nevertheless we made early plans for obtaining water if the mains supply failed.

After some exploration, we found a deep shelter, beneath the Admiralty, where water was tapped from a natural spring, but as this was some two miles from Parkside, we made plans to move over there in a complete body, if necessary, rather than transport water to Parkside.

There were other matters of organisation that were not so simple, however. Much would have to be done by trial and error principles, but we started in what we hoped would be an efficient manner.

There was the question of our farming community, for instance. Not one of them had experience of the necessary kind, although there were several enthusiastic gardeners among that party. We could not guarantee that we should be provided with crops of any sort, save the easier vegetables. Accordingly, one of the first details to be organised was a research party, of which Arabin made me the nominal head.

This "information bureau" took up its headquarters in, of all places I had never expected to see again, the library of the Mercury offices in Fleet Street. There, with a scout to rob other libraries of books we did not possess, we sat in state, prepared to advise upon any problem that might face the others. Ours was the easy task — to find the information. To the others fell the harder work of putting our advice into practice.

The first problem we tackled was a schedule of food production for the farm. This again was easy — from the advice point of view  — for the Mercury's agricultural man had amassed a splendid filing system, and we turned the whole thing over to Primswood Farm.

Arabin also arranged a workable system of communications between Primswood and Parkside, by installing radio phones at each place. For the time being, dry batteries would see us through, but we realised that the day would come when other power would have to be devised. That, however, fell into a bigger scheme — the provision of power for our workshops and homes.

As well as the two-way radio phones, each centre kept a full log of the day's events, with duplicate copies that were passed on to the other centre. Runners from London and Primswood passed each other twice daily on this errand. It may not have been necessary, but the idea was designed to establish a regular communication for use in emergency.

For the first week or so life moved lazily and amazingly comfortably. Then came news that we had been partly expecting, but which enlivened us to efforts for the future, none the less.

Rachelle Karim announced that she was pregnant.

We celebrated the news with a party, but the next day we settled down to serious thought.

If there was going to be a future generation, we had to provide for it, and that meant more than simply supplying ourselves with enough food and comfort.

My information bureau was set the task of learning all we could — and passing on the information to our mechanics —  about water power. We spent days with the mechanics, both of them Virians of great talent, combing the library for workable schemes of providing power by "harnessing the tides," as Lord Fasting had so often and so glibly described the process.

It had been a Fasting shibboleth in its time, this provision of power from the winds and the waters, but our Virians thought little of his experts' plans, which were to have made the country idle and rich in their day.

Instead, they walked out thoughtfully after we had gone through all our material on the subject, and stood for a day watching the Thames from Blackfriars Bridge. They had a plan, they admitted, but it would need time to put it into operation. Arabin gave them all the time they wanted, inside two years, and offered all the manpower we could spare.

However, the Virians, Alatto Skirr and Hani Skirr, brothers trained in Vulcanid mechanics, kept silent about their scheme for many weeks before laying it before us.

Another necessary part of our activities, and a colossal task in itself, was the removal of those corpses we found in our Ways about the city. Fortunately, most of these were found to be disintegrated into the fine ash we had come to know so well, but there still remained the job of burning the clothing. It was distasteful work, but we had come to look upon it objectively, and did it with the best spirit we could muster.

For two months every available person went about this unwholesome work, and in that time we had created a wonderful change in the appearance of the city streets. Underground, in the Tube stations, though, it was a sorry sight. Great droves of people had apparently taken refuge there, and we found their remains packed tightly along the platforms and corridors.

To protect our health, we sealed each Tube station with the airtight doors provided under the Act of 1959. And as our scavenging work progressed, we took to dumping the bodies and clothing down the nearest Tube lifts. It seems — or would have seemed before the catastrophe that precipitated it — a callous way of disposing of the dead, but we carried it out with all possible reverence, and even conducted some sort of committal service over the bodies.

At first, as we moved about the streets, whether walking or riding, we found the eerie empty atmosphere everywhere quite unnerving. We walked or rode in parties of two or more, rather than face the unpleasant thrill of walking along an empty street wondering... what would come round the next corner.

I shall always remember the first trip I took alone in the streets. I had decided to walk to Fleet Street, and was making my way along the Strand, when there was a sudden rustle and a flurry from round the corner of Wellington Street, a few yards ahead of me.

I stood, frozen with terror, as a cat sped out and across the road.

Then it stopped, and collapsed into the thick dust.

When I could muster the courage, I walked over to it — and saw a woman's fur necklet lying there. It had blown down the slope and a sudden gust had picked it up and flung it into the middle of the Strand.

Then there was the dust.  Everywhere — dust, thick dust.

It was as soft as a carpet on a still day, but when the wind blew it became a blinding horror. It was hard to believe that this same dust had settled when London and the world were thickly populated, and had had to be cleared away each day by the road sweepers. Now there was nobody to sweep it except the wind. When rain fell, the dust turned to mud too thick to be carried away down the sewers.

The dirt had settled on brick and glass, and to look into a shop window it was necessary to smear a clear patch. More than once I had found myself standing before a shop window admiring something inside, and wondering — actually wondering, with all the world's shops my property! — whether to have it. An unusual electric torch, advertised on the show card as having the new Ever Ready Condensed Longlife Batteries, caught my eye one morning, and I hesitated. Was it worth the £8 asked for it? The card said it would last ten years under guarantee, but wouldn't a simpler, cheaper model be more economical?

I tried the door, which was locked, and thoughtfully I walked away.  Ah, well!  Door locked — no torch.

Then I realised where — and when!  —  I was. I went back and kicked in the door and took the torch, after finding the requisite batteries on the shop's shelves.

Torches were as necessary to us as clothing, for, without lights blazing out when we wanted them at the turn of a switch, we depended entirely on a source of light we could carry. Our homes had heavy battery lamps installed everywhere, for even in daylight there are many rooms in the London private hotel that must be illuminated. Even in the shops we raided for food, light was necessary. The thick coating of dust on the windows had long ago made them almost opaque.

Early in our settlement, we had adopted an arbitrary calendar, and had tried, with the aid of sextant and star charts, to establish the exact period of the year. We made it out that we had landed at some time in July, and dated our affairs from July 3rd, which was, according to our solar and astronomical readings, the date of the Return. The time of day was easier to check, for we referred to the sundial in Kensington gardens, and had a daily radio check for the farm.

The Virians, among themselves, used a calendar based on their own reckonings, which was a combination of Vulcanid mathematics and Terrestrial timing.

They spoke, too, in their own language when talking to each other, but at other times they used the Terrestrial languages with which they were familiar. Most of them had been in constant touch with Terrestrials on Vulcan, and had long practice in speaking various Terrestrial languages.

We had as mixed a batch of tongues among us as ever clattered unintelligibly anywhere. Several linguists were able to translate everything successfully though, with the exception of Chinese, and the crackling Blackfoot Indian dialect that the Indians spoke between themselves. However, these three usually conversed in normal American, and indeed, one of them, Harry Crow Eyes, had a degree from some Middle West University of which he was very proud.

The Chinese, fortunately, both spoke English of sorts, as did the two Eskimos, who had been whipped up by a Disc while trekking to the Mission Station where they were employed.

The women who kept house for us made a wonderful job of it. It may be thought that they had no worries, and that everything they wanted was there to be had for the picking, but there must have been endless problems to face.

True, food was there in good supply, although for days we ate nothing but tinned stuff. Then — it was a Sunday by our calendar, and we had decided to do as little work as possible on Sundays — then Harry Crow Eyes announced at breakfast that he was going fishing.

We none of us paid any attention for a second until the realisation broke through  —  fresh fish!

Inside half an hour we had all, except half a dozen left behind regretfully for household chores, piled into cars and were heading for Lillywhites, in South Regent Street. Inside the good old sports dealers' shop we made for the fishing counter, and under Harry's advice picked ourselves the best equipment we could find.

We took a police launch from Westminster Bridge Pier, and a couple of respectable looking motor boats, and spent the day in the Thames estuary, returning in the late afternoon with more fish than we could eat in a week.

Over supper that night we were more like children on holiday than poor wanderers on a deserted planet.

It was this suddenly acquired habit of making Sunday a day for loafing about or going on excursions that brought us our greatest shock — and our best piece of news.

I must now introduce a character whom I have not yet named  — Lucille Paname. Lucille had been taken by a Disc when she was a tiny child. Her father had been an engineer on the Panama Canal, and she had been too young to know her surname, so had always been known by the name of the place she had lived in.

By Terrestrial standards, she would be about eighteen when she first thrust herself — and thrust is the right word — on my notice. She had attached herself to me persistently, although at first, I fear, I had rebuffed her constantly.

Then, at Parkside, she began to take a distinctly proprietorial interest in me, until at last I found it necessary for my peace of mind to defer to her. From then on, she rarely left me when we were not working.

My acceptance of the position moderated her attentions, but she gave me to understand most distinctly that she would be Madame Grafton before she had finished with me. It may have been her Gallic, business-like approach to the matter that had put me off in the first place, but I later appreciated Lucille for the good, kind creature she was.

On this particular Sunday, I had been pressed into service to take her to Primrose Hill, so that she could see the view of London spread out below her.

We had climbed the hill and admired the view — which was wonderfully clear in the now smoke-free air — and were on our way home again when she took a desire to return through Regents Park. I could agree with her most heartily, for walking through the ankle-deep dust of the streets was a tiring matter, whereas the parks always seemed to absorb the dust into their surface.

I explained to her as we came to the entrance of the Zoo that there, at one time, she could have seen the animals she so dimly remembered from her own days on Earth. She was at once eager to see the place, although she knew that all she would now see would be empty cages.

We climbed over the turnstiles, which had been locked in the shut position, and crunched our way across a patch of gravel swept clean, momentarily, by the breeze. Our footsteps sounded unusually loud, and the crunching was almost a novel sensation to us, after ploughing through dust, grass, and mud for so many days.

Then we heard another sound, that made us open our eyes in astonishment. It was a simple enough sound, but one we had not heard since the Return.

We heard the "Moo" of a cow.

And round a bend in the path came lumbering three great Highland cattle.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lucille was terrified. She had never seen cattle, that she could remember, and these three monsters, with their shaggy polls and wide-spreading horns, were very different from the pictures of cows she had seen.

She stood stock-still, her fists clenched, and great sobbing breaths shaking her frame, as the beasts trotted up to us. I was not too sure of them, myself, but the shattering surprise of seeing living animals in a world of the dead kept me from making a dive for the turnstiles.

The leading beast, though, chased away our fears as quickly as she would have chased us away, had we been able to run, and had she taken exception to us. She trotted up to me, lowing, and bent her great head and snuffled at my sandals. I stretched out a timid hand and scratched her poll, whereupon she rubbed her nose over my face in what can only be described as an affectionate greeting.

The other two clustered round us, nuzzling us and lowing in obvious delight at seeing humans again. When she had conquered her fear, Lucille was delighted, and petted the beasts extravagantly.

"Mais — comme elles sont belles! 'Sont des vaches, oui?" she chuckled, scratching the thick straw-coloured curls of the biggest animal.

"Oui — elles sont des vaches — vaches Ecossaises," I told her, although at the time I was none too sure, so shaggy and unkempt were the beasts, whether they were "vaches" or "taureux"!

Whether they were cows, bulls, or oxen, though, they were tame enough, and we talked delightedly of driving our three wonderful finds back to Parkside. When it came to the point, though, there was no driving to be done, for try as we would, we could not separate the animals from us. While I broke into the turnstile house to find a key to open the gates, one of them, a fine honey-coloured beast, obligingly broke the window still further by poking an inquisitive head and four feet of horns through.

I found the key, and we also managed to discover forty or fifty feet of rope, but the cattle would have none of this. But there was no need, as I said, to tether them together, as they walked out of the gate joyfully, and Honey, as we christened the leader, stood breathing heavily down my neck as I locked the gate behind us.

We each carried a broomstick, looted from the turnstile house, but this was more to make a show of driving our trio than for actual use, for the animals trotted alongside us most sociably.

As we trudged down the Edgware Road and through Sussex Gardens to Lancaster Gate, we imagined the surprise we were going to spring upon Thomas Ludlam and the others at the farm when we delivered our little herd. Lucille was full of bright ideas of fresh milk for our coffee, and beefsteaks for every meal, and to avoid developing the argument on too biological a theme, I let her go on hoping. Perhaps, though . .. if only they weren't such shaggy beasts.. . Still, we should find out their sex soon enough — and no doubt they were well aware of it themselves.

But long before we had reached Parkside, the uninhibited beasts disclosed their secret to us, and I was greatly rejoiced to learn that we had one bull and two cows on our hands.

At Parkside there was a general turn-out to greet us, as Manuela, the wife of Isidore Lopez, had spotted us approaching as she leaned on an attic window sill. Never was there such a to-do! The poor beasts were terrified by the hullabaloo as the whooping throng surrounded them. They were fussed over, patted, scratched, pummelled in their well-upholstered ribs, and generally feted.

Oddly enough, the animals took at once to the Virians, and shamelessly abandoned us to make up to them. Later, we learned more of the Virians' uncanny ability to commune — I am sure that is the appropriate word — with animals. It was that eerie streak of telepathy most of the Virians possessed that gave them their ascendancy over beasts of every kind they met.

We all set to work then and there to construct a compound within the gates of the park, and installed the animals there. All night, off and on, they lowed and called to us, as though they wanted to make sure that mankind had not deserted them a second time.

Arabin was out when we arrived, but when he returned, he was as madly excited as any of us. Then he fell quiet.

"How did you find 'em, Denis?" he asked me.

I told him that they had found us, and that we'd come straight back with them.

"Come on — we're going back to the Zoo!" he said. "There may be others there. There may even be... men."

We piled into cars and drove straight back to the Zoo, entering by the gates of which I now had the key. There in the dust and gravel were the marks of our footsteps and those of the cattle. The latter wove a pattern over every path in the Gardens, and it was some long time before we tracked them down to their source.

The animals, we found, had been living in an underground shelter, and their footmarks up and down the long ramp leading to it had beaten a regular path. We went down the ramp, wondering what we should find.

At the bottom we passed through two great wooden doors, swinging in the breeze. In the darkness beyond, when we had turned on our torches, we saw another pair of doors, also opening out towards us. We found no fewer than six pairs of doors in the short space of twenty yards, and then the shelter opened out into a large enclosure, where supplies of fodder hung in hoppers. Here, obviously, the cattle had lived in bad weather. The arrangements for feeding them and watering them were complete in every detail. A runnel of water flowed from an open tap in the wall, running through a trough, out at an overflow, and down a drain. The hoppers were of the type that only delivered certain quantities of feeding stuff — worked by clockwork, we thought, but later we discovered an ingenious mechanism operated by water-power.

A door in a side wall next came in for investigation, and on passing through it we learnt the secret of the beasts' survival.

Hanging from a chain on one wall was a canvas case, coloured white to catch the eye. We opened it, and took out a batch of typescript, which told the story.

It was a short story, and told of the effort to provide safety for animals in the event of atomic war. Appended at the bottom of the document were the words:

"The Director, believing that the results of the premature explosion of the Vogel bomb may be akin to those of atomic explosion, has instructed that animals and birds selected for experiment, and for which accommodation is prepared, shall be sequestered in the shelters provided. A map of these shelters is enclosed herewith, the sections devoted to dangerous animals being marked in red. If anyone survives the Vogel catastrophe, and finds these words, he is to understand that the animals concerned have been selected previously for orthodox experiment in defence. It is feared that few of them will be of any use to surviving humanity, save those marked on the map with a cross. Time has been too short to allow of a more judicious selection at this stage. September 5th, 1973."

Then followed a pencilled note, apparently inserted by the official depositing the document in its case on the wall:

"Shelters were designed for a maximum of six months' occupation — not anticipated that they will provide sustenance for occupants after that period."

Here was a blow to the sudden hopes we had built. A further blow came when we explored the other shelters marked on the map.

Inside the first we found the bodies of eight chimpanzees and six men. They were well preserved, and might have lived for a month or so after the catastrophe. We took away the bodies of the men, and buried them out in the open. Over their grave we placed a pencilled notice, to be replaced later with a permanent memorial, to the effect that here lay the last men to breathe on Earth before the Return.

In other shelters we had equally bad luck — except in one, where we found a dozen poor gamefowls all but prostrate. I am sure that if another day had passed the birds would have died.

However, we looked on our finds philosophically, and were deeply thankful to find the birds alive. Their food hoppers had jammed, and they had been on the point of starving when we arrived. They were too weak to peck at the grain we held before them, but within an hour Karinga Varga, a Virian, had persuaded them to eat.

Eight of the birds survived, I am glad to say, and within a week were as healthy as they had ever been.

Our three cattle, Honey, the bull, and Ginger and Snowey, the two cows, had forced their way out of the shelter by main strength, we saw. The doors of their enclosure had been installed later than those of other shelters, and had been designed to be opened from within.

We were at first encouraged to believe that if animals and birds could survive the catastrophe, we might yet find men who had outlived it, but our discovery of the six human bodies in the chimpanzees' shelter had robbed us of that hope.

However, we never lost the feeling that some day, somewhere, we might meet with one of our kind, although we realised the vanity of the ambition.

We made the conducting of our three cattle and eight birds to Primswood a major ceremony. The birds were taken in large cages found at the Zoo, and we drove slowly down so that the three beasts, carefully coaxed into padded lorries — one to each lorry in case of accident — should not be hurt.

At Primswood they were installed in the most carefully tended luxury any animal ever enjoyed. A couple of Virians elected themselves their keepers, and these two promised us calves in at least — how long is the gestation period of Highland cattle? Nobody knew, but anyway, the calves should be there on time, they promised.

Now, of course, the cattle are firmly established and the care devoted to them has become a privileged task for experts. The birds, too, have accommodated themselves better than we ever hoped, and are the best substitute for the old domestic fowl that is likely to be found, although they are a little small and wiry as table birds, and their eggs are something smaller than the old type. However, finding them was the most important incident in our lives since the Return, and we were more than satisfied with our luck.

After our find, much time was spent in research at my information bureau, and we listed every useful animal, bird, reptile and insect, and black-listed the others. Useful, I say, using the word as applied to our standards at the time. We did not set ourselves up as contradicting the original Decree — if such there had been — that had first ordered life on this world. We simply sought out information to guide us as to the helpful and the dangerous creatures.

Then we returned to the Zoo and conducted a minute search. The results were many, but of little apparent value to mankind. We found many insects. The poisonous ones we destroyed quickly, and the others — including a swarm of bees — we preserved. These, however, came to nothing and died off before we had any honey. The queen was lacking, I believe.

There were several reptiles, but with the exception of frogs and lizards we had to destroy them. We did not intend to loose upon the world even a handful of the smallest poisonous snakes, who would no doubt thrive in a world offering them no combat.

However, we had our lists, and these were kept permanently, in the faint hope of some day finding more living creatures.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Placing events in sequence, and allotting them their individual measure of importance, has meant a difficult choice for me. So far, the chapters dealing with our resumed life on Earth have given a sketchy picture of our activities, I fear, and many phases of our life which I regard now as being of prime importance may in after years lose much of their significance. But I write with incidents fresh in mind, and if I have failed to produce the perspective adopted by those who come after me, I ask to be forgiven.

There is no doubt in my mind, though, that later generations will want to know more about the enduring factors of our work in these first few years of the Return.

How were we all so busily occupied each day?  —  as I have intimated that we were busily occupied. What did we do? And to what end?

Life was not all pleasure outings and picnics, finds and thrills. There was long and arduous work to be done in those first months.

It was Arabin's design that we should first find for ourselves a pleasant place in which to live. I have described something of the finding of that place and of the farm, too. After we had settled ourselves in, Arabin planned to spend the rest of the year in contemplation — active, not idle — of our prospects for the future.  Each person was allotted his part, and some of us received a number of tasks to do. By the following summer, it was our hope that we should have gathered enough information about our condition and our hopes to enable us to plan a way of life for the coming years.

One of the heaviest tasks was the centralising of essential stores — not only for our own use, but possibly for the use of many future generations. This was done on a really big scale. While there might be less than a hundred people on Earth as we worked, we had to provide for thousands in the years to come. We had no doubt now that there would be following generations, and neither had we any doubt that for many, many years those following generations would be unable to build civilisation up to its previous state.

Therefore it was our immediate aim to store away safely everything — everything — that we thought might be of use to us and our descendants.

It was a colossal work. Not only food and clothing, but vehicles, tools, equipment, such raw materials as we could transport, and metals, fabrics and the like had to be sorted and stored.

We explored London for three weeks before finding the ideal centre for our store. After inspecting vast warehouses in the City, manufacturing plants on the by-pass roads, and hangars on the rural fringe of London, we abandoned each in turn. The warehouses were disqualified because most of them already housed enormous stocks, which would have to be moved. The factories and workshops were little better, because they were designed for working in, rather than for storage, and what storage space they had was already overloaded, in most instances. There was plenty of space in the hangars and aircraft depots, but these could not be sealed against atmospheric action.

Then we came across the great empty dumps and sheds built by the Government at the time of the threatened war with Russia. They spread across many acres of downland in Surrey, and the nearer ones were less than fifteen miles outside London. When they were built, the threat of the hydrogen bomb had hung heavy over Britain, and these great go-downs had been constructed partly underground. It was possible for two men to seal each building almost hermetically within two hours, and it had been the Government's boast that non-perishable goods would keep for five hundred years there.

They were empty, as they always had been, when we found them, but the equipment necessary for maintaining them was all neatly laid in place, with full printed instructions.

Arabin and Jesse Armitage surveyed them and returned with detailed maps of the buildings we proposed to use. Armitage, who had been the power behind the throne in Cosmopolis Stores, was especially suitable for having charge of the installations. He was also able to save us many months of fruitless exploration by putting us on to the warehouses where we could find the things we sought.

There was a sound reason for siting our stores outside London. Although we lived in Town comfortably enough then, we knew well enough that we could not remain there for long. It might be months, or it might even be ten years, but the time would come when we should have to move to a more compact home. Corruption would in time overtake the great sprawling city of London with only a handful of people to keep going a few of the necessary works of maintenance and preservation. I have already told of our complete inability to keep even the streets in our own neighbourhood clean. In time, dust and corrosion would overwhelm the city.

As it was, the absence of mankind from the Earth for a few short months had wrought ruinous consequences. Windows were broken by debris blown along the streets, rain and wind had destroyed woodwork, sunshine and weather had already conspired to peel off paint nearly everywhere.

When we first went on our foraging expeditions, we had not scrupled to break into any building that was locked against us. Then, after a few days of this reckless destruction, we made it a rule never to break in anywhere unless we could secure the premises again when we had left. It was a truly sad sight to see the smashed plate-glass windows and swinging, broken doors along the streets that had once been great thriving shopping thoroughfares, but it was beyond our powers to patch up the damage. We accordingly resolved to do as little further damage as we could.

At one time we had been terrified by a great fire that broke out, and which destroyed half of Regent Street. Our terror was caused because at first we did not know what had caused the blaze, and by the thought that it might spread until we ourselves were burned out of our home. However, the fire burned for three days and then died as quickly as it had started, after having gutted a block of property running from the east side of Regent Street to Wardour Street.

To settle our own fears, an investigation was set afoot to establish the cause of the fire, and we concluded that it had been originated by the sun shining through a lens in an optician's window. We knew the shop, for we had taken Thomas Ludlam there and tried to fit him with spectacles for his failing sight.

So we determined to place our stores at a distance from the city.

We were detailed by teams for the work of moving the vast quantities of goods we planned to make safe. First of all came the long convoys of vehicles that we moved. David Cohen had scouted round London to find them for us, and we took what was best. The temptation to drive away in some handsome sleek car found at the roadside was always great, and we often did it, but the vehicles we were going to keep for the future were in every case new.

One whole warehouse was set aside for these, and a team of Virians set about the task of protecting each vehicle against corrosion and decay. For weeks on end they were kept busy, and each vehicle was laid safely aside in its proper bay, coated with the air-tight "cobweb" protection the Navy had found so useful in days gone by.

The Virians were at first highly amused at our mechanical principles, and not least so at our internal combustion engines, which they regarded as complex nonsense. But we had no Nagani to devise simpler, more efficient devices, as they had on Vulcan.

Food was our next object. We moved thousands of tons of canned food, carefully selecting according to a calorific schedule worked out by Dr. Axel. The tins were packed into two-piece crates of Adamantine plastic — a one-piece body, with a flush-fitting lid — and these too were sealed in cobweb skin. Week by week, well into the winter, we worked on this until we saw another great warehouse filling up. The stocks of food we laid up will, Langer has estimated, last us and our descendants for at least ten years, even assuming that no more are added to them. But of course, there has been a steady stream of additions daily since we started the work, and this will continue until natural sources of supply are again regularly available.

The question of clothing was another that exercised our minds. There were some who were for learning the old crafts of spinning and weaving all over again, but they were over-ruled by the others who foresaw that the time for that would come in the future. Now, they reasoned, we had ample sources of clothes and fabrics to last for many years. But we must first preserve them against perishing. So we laid up great stocks of fabrics as well as clothing of every description.

Timber, too, we stored, although we wondered at the time whether it might not be better to establish our own supplies and encourage the crafts of working by hand. That again we agreed to do — later — and in the meantime accumulated many hundred cubic feet of raw timber and thousands of superficial yards of the tough plexiboard, which had been new in my day, but which, we found, had come into wide use since.

One warehouse was allotted to machinery — such as we could transport with our small resources — and tools. Lathes, stamping presses, cutting tools and every variety that was portable were stocked away there, and cobwebbed for the future.

Even aircraft were salted away, although we were, of course, only able to store a few of the smaller, more manageable planes and helicopters. The trend had been, in mankind's last days, to build bigger and bigger aircraft. Arabin declared that the changes wrought in flying since he was taken to Vulcan were even greater than the changes between the crazy kites of the early 1900's and the jet-propelled craft of his own time. He personally set greater store by the simpler petrol-driven aircraft than by the mammoth turbine planes of later years.

One man, he used to say, could, at a pinch, service and maintain a small helicopter, but it would need a whole squadron to tend the newer giants, and that without taking into consideration the elaborate plant needed for their upkeep.

It may be wondered why we made no use of the eight Discs that had landed in Primswood Place. The simple answer is that the Virians refused most flatly to operate them. Once inside them again, they feared, they would fall under the Vulcanids' influence.

Arabin, most foolishly, determined to convey the Discs himself to our stores, for one warehouse had a great wide entrance that would admit them.

He succeeded in flying six of the Discs over from Primswood, and then nearly struck tragedy with the seventh. We were watching his progress from the ground, when we saw the Disc suddenly shoot upwards. The Virians standing by rushed straight into the underground hangar where we had stowed the first six, and manned the Discs. We expected them to emerge from the wide ramp of the hangar, but none came out. They had another idea. As we watched the sky, where a tiny bright spot was fast disappearing, we saw the results of their work.

First the spot seemed to stagger, then it stood still, and in a few moments it came hurtling down.

Krill Hvensor stood beside me watching Arabin's Disc, and his lips moved in a whisper all the time. He was using his own tongue, so I had no idea of his motives.

He was, in actual fact, talking Arabin down. The crews of the Discs in the hangar, by the use of their Nagani radio equipment, were able to pick up Krill Hvensor's voice — although he used no microphone — and were operating their crafts' selective attractors. By sheer combined force of these instruments they were literally able to pull Arabin's Disc back to us.

The terrible risk of having the flying Disc destroyed in mid-air was present in all our minds, but at last, with a sweep, we saw it land on the ramps.

Krill Hvensor and two others rushed towards it and within seconds they had Arabin out, fighting madly.

To quell his struggles, Krill Hvensor cracked him on the back of the head with his clenched fist, knocking poor Arabin flat out.

We rushed him over to Primswood, where Dr. Axel Bjornstrom was visiting a patient, and Krill Hvensor stayed by him. The two of them, we learned, had a long, painful struggle bringing Arabin, not back to consciousness, but to his own mind.

For it had happened as the Virians had predicted. The Vulcanid Intelligences had retained control of part of the Disc's ultra-sensitive radio equipment, and had planted their devilish seed once again in Arabin's brain.

It was two days before Arabin recovered, and during that time Axel had despaired of pulling him round. However, he returned to us, a weak man, but himself, three days later.

We decided to leave the eighth Disc on the grass at Primswood.

We had, though, seven of the Discs, and Arabin persuaded the Virians to dismantle a couple of them as completely as they could. It was not only a difficult task, it was an eerie one. For there were devices there that defied description. Tools had to be made to dismantle the more regular equipment, but there were instruments that baffled even the Virians.

The Discs had been built by the Nagani, and much of their internal structure was of a type completely unknown to man, and little more familiar to the Virians.

The selective attractors, for instance, were instruments built in more than three dimensions. To Terrestrial minds even that bare announcement is incomprehensible without the instrument before one to demonstrate the fact.

I can best outline the basic principle of the four-dimensional construction by a reference to stroboscopic movement. The instruments appeared to shimmer, and possessed no definable outline. If one touched the nebulous edge with anything, there was a loud detonation and the article touching the edge was shattered. A similar effect is obtained by regulating the speed of — say — an electric fan to the speed of the oscillations of an alternating current lighting the fan, whose blades then seem to stand still.

In the case of these Nagani instruments, though, no artificial light was needed to procure the effect. The oscillations of the material in space were phased to the oscillations in time. More than that I cannot make plain. Even those facts were conveyed to me by Krill Hvensor, who assured me that he had no means of translating his own physical theories into Terrestrial speech.

And it must be mentioned that the Virians, while the servants of the Vulcanids, had never been taught even one fraction of the esoteric mechanical and physical principles used by the Nagani in their work. They had therefore little that they could teach us of Nagani methods. The Nagani were completely alien beings, with no common ground to share either with Virians or Terrestrial humans.

It was as if a dog were to try to explain to a spider the theory of rounding up sheep. Both are living organisms, both function highly  efficiently in their own spheres, but neither can communicate with the other. The Nagani had been able to communicate fairly freely with the Virians, but had been quite unable, even if willing, to communicate their sciences and arts.

However, to return to our great work of storing away the world's goods. We found that some of the Disc's equipment was intelligible to us, but we could think of no use to which we might put it. We realised, too, that the Vulcanids could retain control of material objects, to a certain extent, as well as of our mental processes.

By the end of the year we had sealed four great stores. One held vehicles and spares; another held fabrics and clothing; two more held food; and we continued to work on a further two — one for raw materials and machinery and tools, and another for the continuing supply of foodstuffs that we intended to maintain.

As this work began to cease — save for the food stores — we opened up another store chamber as an issuing depot. At first there was little work to be done there in the way of issuing; that would come later; but Arabin intended it to be set in motion at the beginning.

At first, when we began to fill our stores, there were many working on the task who complained loudly and continuously, but when the great sheds began to be filled, they became enthusiastic. They saw that the work they were doing would make life possible for other generations, and began to take a pride in the work. That is speaking generally, of course. There were always some who objected to work of any sort. These, after a few weeks, were given the opportunity of leaving us and setting up their own colony elsewhere, but after talking among themselves, they decided to fall in line — for the present, at least.

They were wise, for we had with us among the more devoted workers the pick of the brains. We had, too, the only doctor, and the Virians. These latter never seemed to tire. They were pathetically grateful to us, for some reason, and the various peculiarities of their make-up, both physical and mental, added greatly to the intelligence of our group. They were quicker in grasping the elements of a problem, and infinitely quicker in solving it, and we counted ourselves extremely lucky to number them among us.

Alatto Skirr and Hani Skirr, the two Virian brothers charged with creating hydraulic power for our use, had worked ceaselessly on the problem. They installed themselves in a small waterside workshop that had once belonged to the Thames River Police, in the shadow of Waterloo Bridge. There they worked night and day. Before the month was out they had illuminated their little workshop with electric light, using the almost imperceptible ebb and flow of the tide to drive a dynamo of their own design. Using orthodox Terrestrial methods, they could no doubt have provided a weak current much more quickly, but they insisted on building their own equipment.

Then came the night when they hailed us down to Waterloo Bridge ceremoniously just after dark. We stood on the Embankment while they went down into their mysterious little shed, and we wondered what triumph they would have to offer us. If they had brought an electric bulb, lighted, on the end of a cable, we would have been dumb with admiration, for we did not then know how far their experiments had taken them.

But what they did offer us was a staggering gift, enormous in its implications.

As we stood there on the curve of the Embankment, we were suddenly dazzled by a host of lights that temporarily blinded us.

Every light on the riverward side of the Embankment, and every light on the Bridge blazed out suddenly — and stayed alight.

They had succeeded in getting enough power out of their weird dynamo to light several hundred lamps, and had coupled up their plant to the series of lights we now saw.

When the excitement had died down, several of us were invited to see the apparatus. There inside the shed they had built up a great bank of delicately curved glass tubing. A system of syphons carried a thin thread-like stream of water through the apparatus, at each stage operating a small dynamo. The dynamos increased in size at each step, until the final one measured perhaps eight inches along its armature.

These, however, were no normal dynamos, obviously. The Virian knowledge of physics and electro-dynamics was, we realised, far ahead of ours. If Terrestrial mechanics had possessed the secret of this stepping-up process, most of the world's commercial problems would have been solved years before Vogel's unhappy experiment with the thorium bomb. There might even have been no need for such a weapon, for it was apparent that with such a source of power the world need never trouble about coal or other fuel for static power.

The lights themselves offered something of a problem. We were at first disposed to leave them switched on and enjoy the glorious spectacle every night, but we changed our minds. There was the remote possibility that there might be other humans left alive in other parts of the world, and how could we know whether they would some day see our lights? Any aircraft flying within many miles of the Thames could not fail to see the solitary string of lights ablaze there in the darkness. If we could be sure that there were other men alive, and that they would be friendly, we would have lit every lamp for miles to try to show our whereabouts. But — and it was an incalculably big "but" — we knew nothing of the sort.

So it was decided that we would make fuller preparations, both for our future and for our defence, before we sought out any others who might remain alive.

Not that we had the slightest hopes of any having survived the catastrophe. My researches through the files of the world's newspapers in Fleet Street had assured me as much as anything could that when Vogel's bomb exploded, it took with it all humanity on Earth. I was convinced, but for elementary psychological reasons, the others were not. All the time, at the back of each mind except mine, there hovered the dim thought that Vogel could not have wrought destruction everywhere. . But we rarely spoke of it.

In those early days, besides the great stores on the Downs, we did much work on the river, too. Moored to the piers at Westminster and Blackfriars we had a veritable fleet of easily manageable craft. The larger shipping down river, too, we had searched, and had endeavoured to secure what vessels we could against wreckage. There was not much we could do, but we did manage to ensure that there would be a clear path down the river if ever we required to use it.

One phase of our hoarding activities I have not mentioned. It was obvious that if we were to continue to use internal combustion as motive power we should need fuel oil. We dare not, however, store more than a small quantity on the Downs for fear of fire. Although the great warehouses had been built to withstand atomic bombardment, we were so desperately fearful of losing what we had accumulated — and so desperately lonely — that we would not risk fire.

And so we examined the storage tanks of the refineries down the river, and concluded that the spirit contained therein would, with luck, last for several years. And we had the promise of the Virians that before many years were out they would have adapted our vehicles to use other motive power, for which they would be responsible.

In our homes — at Parkside and the Primswood farm — we had used Calor gas in its improved form for heating and cooking. In the eleven years since I left the world enormous improvements had been made in the direction of household fuelling, and one of my greatest surprises had been to find domestic equipment now powered by portable cylinders of the gas. Here and there we had found a home where the occupants had preferred the old-fashioned electricity supply, or even coal gas, in their kitchen. But for the most part, London seemed to have become devoted to "fluid gas" as it was called.

We had generous supplies of this available — after all, we had all there was — so why should we have sought any other means of providing ourselves with heat? Lighting was a different matter. Eventually, though, and after much experiment, we installed the new battery type lamps, and found them satisfactory. It was in the matter of industrial power that we could find no substitute for mains electricity, but now that Alatto Skirr and Hani Skirr had shown that this was not beyond their scope we had few fears for the future.

There may be some who read this who have not lived among Virians enough to know why I should refer to each of them by two names every time.

The rest will know, of course, that no Virian can bear to be deprived of his family name or his calling name. To their race, there is no more profound disgrace than to be called by a single name. The reason goes back many thousands of years to their racial hero, Han Dralmi, who, tradition says, was cut in half by the Beast Men of Varang Varang, and whose mutilated body was distributed between the two worlds. Now, to call a Virian by a single name amounts almost to blasphemy, and is taken as a symbolical insult indicative of the wish to slaughter him as Han Dralmi was slaughtered.

For the same reason, while we lived among them on Vulcan, we became accustomed to calling each other by two names.

Before I conclude this short description of our attempts at providing for the future, I must make some mention of Thomas Ludlam's farm colony.

In the time which I have covered in this chapter there was little opportunity to progress greatly at the farm. Nature, even after a great catastrophe, works slowly, and we did not expect to see many visible results from the farm people for some years.

So, contemporary with our great storing operations, the people of the farm had done little. Little that would be visible for some time, that is. But they had shown that they were prepared to adapt themselves to their new life, and had worked as hard as we had. Much of their work had been to clear choked fields and to prepare for the sowing season, but this had gone forward well.

They had even managed to reap a crop of wheat, and had set going an old water mill in the effort to grind it.  But their attempts as millers had been unfruitful, and all they had gained with their first crop had been the experience to deal more adequately with the next.

However, they were optimistic and more than willing. They could see their future clearly, which is more than the rest of us could, often. Dwelling out there by themselves, they had little to fear, for example, from fire. If by some diabolical coincidence fire came to them as it nearly came to us, they could always move over to another farm. There would be little to menace them personally, as there would have been in our case, had the great Regent Street fire been nearer to us.

So they grew into the thought that there they would stay, without any doubt, and perhaps found other farming colonies in the years to come.

It was a happy and philosophical existence for them, and, as they were mainly highly intelligent people, they appreciated it as such. The time might come for them and their descendants, as it had for rural communities in the days before, when they would become discontented with their lot. But that time was far ahead in the future.

And so we all made good headway in our new life during those first few months. I have tried to fill in some of the necessary details to show that we were concerned above all with the preservation of our race for the future, but the full account will never be read. There is an exhaustive record of it in the daily logs kept by Parkside and the farm, and that record will go down to posterity as an example of how mankind brought life for the future to a dead world. Still, there was much that was never written, and more than can ever be told.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The day may come when men find London again, as we did, after a great calamity. We found it, though, after but a few months had passed over its deserted stone wilderness. In the future, men may find it after many years have passed over it in that state.

As well as carrying out our task of securing provisions and valuable goods in store, we contrived to explore the wilderness that had been the world's finest city. In this, David Cohen, whose knowledge of London was as encyclopedic as a taxi driver's always was, became our valued guide.

There was more to do than tour empty, dust-piled streets. There was more to do than ravage shops and warehouses for what we needed.

We had to know what had happened to our London — for several of us were Londoners born and bred — and how mankind had accepted his destruction.

We spent days in our search, and found many strange things.

Perhaps the most unnerving was the sight that met us in the House of Commons.

Arabin and David and myself were out on this particular exploration. We had just left the riverside, after Alatto Skirr and Hani Skirr had been installed in their small workshop, and had driven along the Embankment, It was a drizzling wet day, and our open car — an old-fashioned, vintage Jeep of the 1960's  —  gave us little or no shelter from the steady rain.

When we came to Westminster Bridge, we turned off into Parliament Square and looked up, automatically, at the great clock on the tower of the Houses of Parliament. It was the same sort of unconscious, unnecessary action that made us toot our horn at corners, and sometimes to look both ways before crossing roads. We always laughed nervously when we did this sort of thing, and made a joke of it between ourselves.

David swung the car into the Palace Yard, and to get out of the wet we alighted and hurried under the cover of the stone archway. The big doors were swinging open in the sharp cold breeze that was blowing off the river, and we went inside.

By the light of our powerful lamps we saw on the floor a policeman's helmet surmounting the usual pile of clothing and dust that told of a life snuffed out. We were accustomed to the sight, but it always chilled us momentarily.

We made our way through the corridors until we came to the Commons Chamber. It was the size of the place that told us what it was, and we entered hesitantly.

Now I have always had — as most journalists had in my day  — something of contempt for professional politicians. But the sight that met us in that place made me forget all the little-minded, opportunist politicians I had known in the days gone by.

There, in the beam of our lamps, was a session of Parliament. There, on the benches, were the Members — some of them even yet bearing human form, though we knew they would crumble to dust when we touched them. There, by the despatch box, was the Prime Minister himself.

The cynic might cite this dead assembly as typical of the stupidity of politics. Here, he might say, are the men who had urged every living person to seek safety elsewhere — and look how they took their own advice!

But I am convinced that it had not been like that. These men and women had known what dreadful menace hung over them, and had been caught here even in the act of trying to find a way of safety for others. It was an appalling sight, but one that made us proud.

Even as we walked quietly down the carpet that bordered the opposing lines of benches, many of the figures, disturbed by our steps, crumbled into dust, with a ghastly whisper of collapse.

This enormous building, and the enormous system that had been built up within it over the centuries, now stood derelict and useless. But for how long? The thought and the question could be taken as the whole theme of our own existence. When, we might have asked ourselves, would mankind rise to the level of those who had died there? And when would he have need again of such a building, or such a tribunal?

Across Parliament Square, at the Abbey, was a similar harrowing sight. Inside the Abbey a great congregation had been gathered when the blast — if blast it had been — had struck London. Here, though, there was little to remind one so sharply of humanity as there had been in the House of Commons. Heaps of clothes on the floor, stuffed with piles of the hideous grey dust, told their sad tale.

Between us, we spent an hour trying to close all the doors of the Abbey so that the winds and rains might not disturb those patient worshippers in their great shrine.

The railway termini, in contrast, were almost deserted. Humanity had sought out the swiftest escape from the overtaking plague, and trains — already in their decline in 1963 —  had been abandoned on account of their slowness.

But even here there had been men and women going about their everyday life. Possibly they had been sceptics, who had been caught and struck down in their doubt even as they waited for the loop line train to Dartford, or the fast express to Edinburgh. The very sight of such trains, waiting at the platforms, was pathetic. Never again would they steam northward or glide out along the electrified lines to the suburbs and the South Coast.

At Euston we found a particularly distressing sight. The catastrophe must have struck as an express was drawing in, and the engine's crew had been destroyed before they could stop the train. It lay, piled up in an ugly mass of twisted, rusty steel, with piles of fallen masonry on top of it.

The titanic shock had wrecked the two great pillars opposite the entrance to the station, and they leaned against each other drunkenly. Walls and steel columns inside the station had toppled as the express had sheered through the buffers and crashed into the street beyond.

Everywhere in the streets we saw London's red buses, mostly drawn up neatly to the kerb, as though the drivers had at least received a few seconds' warning. Few of the drivers' cabins. held an occupant, which lent support to the theory we had formed, that some seconds must have elapsed between awareness of approaching, death and the calamity itself.

Here and there, though, as at Euston, death had struck too swiftly. Where this had happened, we found vehicles massed together, and sometimes an overturned car or bus told of the sudden death that had overtaken the drivers. But on the whole, London's streets were comparatively sparsely populated. The world had migrated swiftly — and vainly — to the Poles when the warning came, leaving behind only a few who could not, or would not, go.

We did not doubt that, had no warning of any kind been received, the streets themselves would have been veritable charnel pits. As it was, although there were plenty of vehicles to be seen in the streets, there must have been a vastly greater number that headed North when the exodus started.

One fact that impressed us all deeply was the loyal attachment so many victims had shown to their work. Wherever there was a machine, there beside it was the man whose duty it had been to tend it. Staffs may have been depleted, but nearly always someone had stayed behind to mind the machines.

In the odd instances where people had left their machines and fled, they had carefully made everything safe first. But sometimes we found machines with their minders lying beside them amid a scene of indescribable confusion. Sometimes, the man had died before he could turn off the machine, which had gone on running. Here and there, where the power had been taken from the mains, the machines had run down of their own accord as the power failed. But in places where power had been generated on the premises some of them had raced madly on, until at last their bearings had burnt out, or until the grossly accelerated speed had flung off the connecting drive.

More than one fire had been started by these means, and it was rare to find a workshop or industrial plant that had been left perfect by the sudden catastrophe.

Our hurried tours of investigation took us, too, to such places as the B.B.C., where we found almost a full staff lying dead in the offices and studios. Beside one microphone lay the body of an announcer, whose hand still held the script of the warning he was to have delivered to the country. On the table before him was a tea cup, long dried up, and now filled with the unpleasant fungoid growth that seemed to have attacked all inanimate organic substances.

The wide spread of this fungus seemed to indicate that there was a form of life that had been determined to blossom to the full now that higher life was no longer there to menace it. Where-ever we found a dairy, there sprouted great forests of greenish fungus. All unprotected food had given harbour to the uncouth growth, and we early made it a rule to leave such premises alone.

Had the catastrophe come ten or twenty years earlier, the fungus would no doubt have gained a far greater hold. But by the time the blow struck, England, at least, had gone far towards protection of food. Only such items as milk, bread, meat and vegetables were sometimes sold unprotected, and the bottles of milk — once thought the safest and best protected of all food — had burst as the fungus impatiently spread within them.

It was a frightful sight, and had we not had the knowledge that the fungus had only seized hold of these comparatively few substances we should have been disheartened in all our work.

Our weak position, as a handful of men and women battling against fungoid growths, would have been intolerable, and we should in all likelihood have given up all effort and settled down to live out our own lives and then leave the world to the fungus. We had expected to find such substances as paper attacked, too, but here the fungus had held off. True, in the great domed reading room of the British Museum we found slight coatings of it, but the air purification system there seemed to have held the growths at bay.

We spent some days conducting the Virians round the museums, expecting them to be awed at our civilisation's progress. The opposite was the case, however, as we should have known if we had thought about it beforehand. Their own civilisation, even before their captivity by the Vulcanids, had been inexpressibly longer than ours. They saw in the museum exhibits, however, evidence of our rapid progress in reaching the civilisation that had produced Professor Vogel and his bungling assistants.

We did not confine ourselves to London. Small parties, who knew the districts, were sent out to other cities. Birmingham was the farthest exploration point. Everywhere our scouts found the same story told by the poor heaps of dust that had once been men and women. Seaports on the south coast were investigated, but we could not do this anything like efficiently in the time we had to spare.

The cars we sent out on these trips were, of course, fitted with two-way radio communication. We could not afford the risk of even one member of our small party being lost or injured, and anyone who travelled beyond walking distance of his home always carried two-way radio.

At Parkside and at the farm, radio receivers had been installed, tuned to the wave-lengths of any travellers who might be out, and to the main party's wave-length, besides that of the opposite station. Thus, Parkside always had a receiver tuned to the farm, to the main party, and to the travellers. The farm receiver was similarly tuned, except, of course, that its first tuning was to Parkside.

Loudspeakers in various rooms and outside both premises ensured that someone always heard the message being transmitted. There was, though, an operator always supposed to be on duty at each station. These precautions were necessary, we believed, because we dare not lose touch with one of our small band. Our numbers were so small that, for instance, a severe outbreak of influenza might have reduced us to nothing.

On health grounds, though, we had little to complain of. Axel carried out weekly checks on every one of us, Virians included, and it was rare for him to prescribe any treatment. Our initial timidity and innate fear of losing each other made us especially careful of accidents, too.

During the first winter, Axel pronounced three more of the women pregnant, one of them being Elinor House, the coloured girl. She had taken Eddie Springer, her brother's friend, as her "husband," although — to her disquiet — there had been no wedding ceremony possible.

There had been several "marriages," each ceremony being confined to the official announcement that So-and-So was now the wife of This-or-That. With such a small number of women among us, it might be thought that there would be trouble between the men, or that polyandry would spring up. But here again, our plight seemed to have changed the nature of such matters. We just could not afford trouble between ourselves, though I have no doubt that, under more populous conditions in the world, such a proportion of women to men would have precipitated disaster.

This, then, was our system of living at the end of the first winter. We had come through the cold weather well, and were now able to look around us and assess the long hours of work we had put in. We had plentiful supplies of everything we needed for our immediate use; we had stored away everything we could imagine as being wanted by other generations; and we had become acclimatised to our position.

In April came a sickening shock.

A frenzied radio message from the farm announced that Vulcanids had been seen in some force.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Harry Crow Eyes, the Indian, had been on radio watch all day, and as we all returned in the dusk of the evening, he turned the switch to the loudspeaker positions as he sauntered out to meet us.

He stood on the steps as we got out of our cars, and lazily stretched.  He hated radio duty.

"Shouldn't mind it," he used to say, "if only I could bring in the Groucho Marx Half Hour now'n again. And what wouldn't I give, brother, to hear a ball game again!"

He stood yawning on the top step, when a breathless voice came over the loudspeaker over his head.

"Parkside!   Parkside!  There are Vulcanids at Primswood!"

We missed the next few words as we all scrambled to the microphone.

"All right, farm!" Leo called back. "Steady... we're with you... Are you in any danger?"

"Not yet," the voice came back, "but we don't know much about 'em. Couple of the Virians saw them first and just got back with the news."

"O.K. — put 'em on the mike if they're with you now," Leo ordered.

A second later came a Virian voice. "Yes. We saw them round the Disc we left there. How many? I think thirty —  perhaps forty.  Full grown."

"How did they get there? Any Discs been sighted?"

"No. No Discs sighted. We think they were in the Disc that was already there..."

Arabin caught his breath sharply. It was a startling thought that we might have had Vulcanids among us all this time.

He turned to Krill Hvensor. "How can we destroy them?" he asked. "Can they be shot?"

Krill Hvensor shook his head. "We never knew that," he replied. "That's not the sort of thing they'd allow us to know."

"All right, farm." Arabin turned to the microphone again. "We'll send a party down now. Be with you in twenty minutes. Meanwhile... if there's danger keep out of their way. They can't move about much, thank God! Keep 'em in sight if you can — and keep tuned to this and the traveller wave-length."

A score of us took eight cars. We had a stock of arms at Parkside — as they had at the farm, too — and each of us took a sub-machine gun and an automatic pistol. We also flung a dozen rifles in the back of one of the cars, in case we could not get close enough for the smaller weapons.

It had grown dark before we reached Lewisham, but our powerful lights, and the absence of any other traffic, enabled us to keep up speed, and we swung into the farm gates less than half an hour after the call had come through.

We found the Virians at the farm panic-stricken — almost the first time we had seen them show any emotion. They had reason, of course, for they knew the Vulcanids and we did not. Their fear was based on the belief that they would once more come under the mental control of the creatures from Vulcan, rather than that they would suffer physically.

However, we succeeded in quietening them to some extent, but left them at the farm — except for Krill Hvensor, who wished to accompany us — when we set out for Primswood Place.

The Virians who had first sighted the monsters had told us where to find them, and Krill Hvensor believed that we should still see them in the same place. They could move, he had told us, but only slowly.

We drew up our cars outside the rails of the park, and turned them to face the spot where we knew the Disc to be. The headlights of the cars picked it up after a little manoeuvring, and we saw, for the first time, true Vulcanids.

Thomas Ludlam had been right.

They were sea anemones.

And yet — they could not be; they just could not be. A sea anemone withdraws into itself and folds into a flabby mass when taken out of water, but these...

They stood, in a bunch to one side of the Disc. Each one must have been eight feet tall. Semi-transparent, they moved slightly, seeming to bow and bend flexibly. A great mass of willowy tentacles spread from the top of each of the monsters, and as our lights picked them up, they all seemed to lower these fringe-crowned heads and bend them in our direction.

"I'm going to try a shot," whispered Arabin, reaching over for a rifle. He stood in the driving seat of the big open tourer, and flexed his knees as he lowered the rifle on to the top of the windscreen.   Then he withdrew his eye from the sights.

"Keep them covered, everyone. Take 'em five to a car, in order from the end as they stand. I'll try the pinkish one on this side first," he called.

He set his sights and took aim.

All ten shots he fired, but with no effect.

"I'll swear they all went home on this pink chap," he muttered.

I grabbed my binoculars from the side pocket of the car. 'Try again, and I'll mark the shots," I told him.

I focused on the pink creature. "All right. Let him have it," I breathed.

The car windscreen jerked violently from the recoil of the rifle, and I hurriedly slipped out and stood on the ground, where I could watch without my binoculars being jarred off my target.

I saw nine shots crunch into the body of the Vulcanid, but the creature showed not the slightest awareness of being hit. It flexed and bowed towards the others, just as if it was carrying on a polite conversation with them.

Arabin picked up his microphone. The channel had been open throughout our journey and during our halt by the park rails.

"Hello, farm!" he called. "You heard that? Twenty shots at the bastards — and no effect.   Got any clues?"

Back came the voice of our good old Thomas.

"I don't think they even know you're trying to destroy them, Leo," he answered. "They've no bone structure, and their tissues most probably heal at once. I've been trying to get the Virians here to talk. They might have seen a Vulcanid injured, or dying, at some time. That would help us. But, rot them! They say they can't ever remember seeing one injured."

The Vulcanids made no move, and seemed rooted to the ground.

"Krill Hvensor!" Leo called. "Do these damn things take root! Will they move if I go over there?"

"They stand still in darkness, Leo Arabin — but keep away from them. These do not seem like the ones on Hafna. These are different... I am afraid.   Leave them until daylight."

But Leo was out of the car, carrying his sub-machine gun, and through the gates of the park. He walked slowly towards the monsters, keeping to the dark fringe outside our headlights' beams.

The creatures apparently took no notice of his approaching presence, and continued to bow slowly towards each other, their swaying tentacles questing round in the air about their heads.

Three more figures stalked Leo, one of them Isidore Lopez, carrying a woodman's axe picked up at the farm.

As Arabin came within a dozen feet of the nearest Vulcanid he halted and levelled his gun. There was a sudden prolonged burst, and we saw that his drum was loaded with tracer ammunition. Every flaming bullet pierced the gelatinous body of the creature, and emerged. The streaming streaks of fire continued on their glowing arcs, many of them piercing other Vulcanids.

And yet no harm was done. He might have been tossing feathers at an elephant, for all the damage the heavy slugs caused.

Then a shocking thing happened.

Like a whip lash, the Vulcanid shot out a tentacle, and the long pseudopod struck Arabin on his gun arm. He screamed, and dropped his gun, clutching his right arm where the monster had lashed him.

The tentacle lifted again, and then hesitated. Instead of striking, it fell gently towards Leo's neck. He was too badly hurt to look up and see what was happening, though we shouted desperately to him.

Slowly, to our horror, the tentacle drew itself across his neck, and Leo fell as though dead. The semi-transparent arm wound round his shoulders and started to draw him towards the monster, when  —  Isidore struck with his axe.

As the gleaming blade sliced through the Vulcanid's boneless arm, Isidore, too, screamed, dropping his axe and wringing his hands.

The two others with Isidore were swift to act. Taking a man apiece they dragged the two injured men a few yards out of the Vulcanid's range. By then the rest of us were hurrying across the lank grass, and in a matter of seconds we had Leo and Isidore outside the railings and into a car.

Meanwhile, Krill Hvensor had called up the farm and warned Axel to stand by. The car containing the two wounded men left at once, and in Leo's absence, I took control of the battle with the monsters.

It seemed to me that the Vulcanids could not be harmed by gunfire or the like, but we had seen that amputation of their tentacles was effective. The Vulcanid who had lost an arm, though, seemed but little harmed.

Just where were we with them? It was a desperate question that I asked myself, and I could see no answer to it.

What about fire? Could we fire the grass around them and burn them? That prospect was not too hopeful, for the grass was soaked with the April rains. I did not like to risk spraying them with burning petrol, even if we had the equipment to do that. We had seen that the Vulcanids moved only slightly and slowly, but we could not guess what effect the shock of burns would have upon them. They might be galvanised into swift action — we knew that those tentacles could strike like a cobra, and that they were extensible.

In the circumstances, I decided upon watching them for a time, to see if we could learn anything of use to us.

After two hours of close observation, during which the Vulcanids had only moved their positions very slightly, an urgent voice came over my loudspeaker. It was Arabin.

"Denis! Denis!" he called. "You getting me clearly? Good! Listen! There's a Virian here beside me who says the Vulcanids have got his mind — no, they've not got control of him, but he knows something they want to tell us. I'm going to put him on now — here he is."

There was a brief pause as the Virian came on the circuit.

"Denis Grafton, I am Nura Ludhor," the voice said, and I recognised it as that of a Virian who had elected to stay on the farm.

"I have to tell you that the Vulcanids wish you to know something. I am to say that they know you are thinking of fire, and that if you attempt to burn them they will destroy you and every man with you."

I was appalled. I called Leo to the microphone at once.

"Leo! You hear that?" I asked. "Are you sure this Virian isn't a stooge for them? Sure he's not under their control?"

It was the Virian who answered.

"No, Denis Grafton, I am not under their control. They can never take control of a mind they have lost. That is why the Nagani are their own masters now. They threw off the control, and now the Vulcanids can never resume it. But I can hear in my mind something the Vulcanids wish me to hear. It is true! How else would I have known of your thoughts of fire?"

That seemed fair enough evidence, and 1 told Nura Ludhor to continue.

"The Vulcanids wish you to know," he went on, "that they have the means of exploding the Disc. They want you to look —  I cannot understand... wait... Yes! They want you to look on the grass between them now. They say you will see proof of what I tell you."

I told the Virian to wait, and I focused my binoculars on the group of Vulcanids. There between them on the grass was a fiat rectangular shape.

I called for more lights on the spot, and then looked again. There was some piece of mechanism there in their midst, and one Vulcanid standing beside it waved a tentacle up and down as if to draw attention to it.

They undoubtedly appeared to have the upper hand, unless they were bluffing. But dare we risk calling their bluff? The danger was there, I was sure. Although our Virians had dismantled, as far as they were able, the Discs in our possession, there had been much of the mechanism that was incomprehensible to us.

I knew, too, that they were able, apparently by control from a distance, to explode the Discs in mid-air. Might this apparatus be a kind of switch? If the Disc went up, we should perish, for the blast area, as we had seen when we first landed and the following Discs were wrecked, was extremely wide.

I called into the microphone again.

"What do they want us to do?" I asked.

There was a longer pause, as though Nura Ludhor was waiting for some answer from the Vulcanids. Then he came in again.

"You are to leave them, they say. You are to leave them in darkness. They promise they will not move from this spot. You will find them here when daylight comes."

It had never occurred to me to ask myself the question: could one take a Vulcanid's word? The question was patently absurd.

But we had no alternative that I could see.

One fact stood out a mile — unless we were wrong in our assessment of the monster's mobility, we should certainly find them there in the morning. I talked with Arabin over the microphone for some minutes. He was of the same opinion.

"If we all get away to some distance," he said cautiously, "we might be able to make a plan without them tuning in to our minds. It's all we can do, Denis. Leave 'em, and come over here and we'll talk it over."

I called off our men reluctantly, but the situation was so unexpected, so completely new, and so abominably loaded with potential horror, that I realised we must plan carefully. And we could not do that while the Vulcanids could read our minds.

There was the faint, remote hope that distance might give us the mental advantage over them. We had no knowledge of the conditions under which their telepathy worked, and little hope of acquiring that knowledge.

But we retired, as the only possible alternative to fairly certain annihilation. Back at the farm we found Arabin and Lopez pretty well recovered. Axel had treated them for electric shock, and the great red weals across Arabin's shoulders and along Isidore's arm had the appearance of typical electrical burns. They had been in considerable pain for some time, but Axel had coated their burns with acriflavine-plus and had given them much relief.

"But we can't count on them always using a mild current," remarked Leo ruefully. "As it was, another second or so of that shock and I'd have been finished. I was burning up — literally burning up, I tell you." He wriggled his shoulders painfully. "But for good old Isidore and his chopper, they'd have had me."

Isidore Lopez had been a stevedore at Barcelona. He was a giant of a man just settling into that fatness that so often overtakes the strong man, but had lost none of his strength, for all that.

"That arm 1 chop," he said. "Was sdrong, dhick, sdrong like bone. Is no jellyfish, dhe Vulcanids, is sdrong, vairy sdrong..."

We embarked a party in cars, and drove northwards, taking Nura Ludhor with us. We kept a constant check upon him to find whether the Vulcanid control wore off as the distance increased between us and them. At last, as we reached the clock tower at Lewisham, he shook his head.

"No message now," he said. "But perhaps the Vulcanids can still tell what we think. Cannot tell yet..."

To make sure, we drove another five miles and pulled up at a pub.

I have not mentioned the fact that we had found the world's stocks of wine and beer — bottled beer — greatly improved by nearly a year's settling and maturing. This was one of the very few comforts remaining to us after the destruction of our fellows.

We sat round a table, a bottle of wine between us, and talked over our plans. Krill Hvensor, who probably knew more about Vulcanid psychology than anybody, gave us all the information he could, but it was little enough, alas!

He assured us that, as far as his experience went, the anemone-like creatures were almost static. They were able to move slowly, and it might be that these, which were unlike the ones he had seen on Vulcan, had additional powers. He had never seen, for instance, a Vulcanid use an extensible tentacle.

On Vulcan, those monsters who wished to move about had special small vehicles for the purpose, but their movements were conducted in what almost amounted to secrecy. Humans and Virians had only very rarely seen the Vulcanids in motion.

Could they have concealed their vehicles in the disc, we asked? He did not think so.

We assumed that these Vulcanids had secreted themselves in the Disc when it first left the Lunar base, for Krill Hvensor told us that the young Vulcanids were small enough to be hidden in a small compartment. Their growth was rapid, though, and when they started to increase in size, they did so almost overnight.

We agreed that their movement must be confined to. an area we could keep under observation. We must also find a means to destroy them, for it was obvious that we could not allow them to survive and control the minds of the future generations of humans and Virians.

We talked over possible weapons. Fire? If necessary, we could use flame throwers on them, but would they be destroyed? Their physical composition seemed quite different from any organisms we knew. Isidore vouched for the tough quality of their tentacles, whereas our nearest parallel — sea anemones —  were fragile in the extreme.

It could be that, if they were not constructed of carboniferous matter, fire would not destroy them.

Acid? There again, we had no means of knowing their vulnerability.

Until we could (a) get the Vulcanids away from the Disc and so avert the threat of explosion, or (b) capture one of them for experiment, little would be possible in the way of exterminating them. For we could not guess the extent of the blast area if the Disc were to be exploded.. And if we were to capture one, it would doubtless raise the alarm with those who guarded the Disc.

However, we decided that our only plan was to try to segregate one or two of the monsters, and run the risk of their causing the others to explode the Disc. We accordingly worked out the possibility of erecting an electrified compound into which we might lure one or two of the Vulcanids.

By dawn we had so far proceeded with this plan as to have Alatto Skirr and his brother erecting insulated costs a mile away from the Disc landing ground. We left them there, with a petrol-driven generator to provide the current and several thousand yards of copper cable for the fencing.

Then we returned to Primswood Place.

Our first sight of the Vulcanids by daylight brought a horrifying shock.

Where we had left thirty or forty of the creatures we now saw three times that number.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dr. Axel was benevolently enthusiastic as he stood with us on the low hill that overlooked the park. "Of course!" he beamed. "They reproduce by fission! But creatures of a largeness so —  that they should reproduce offspring of the same largeness! Is wonderful!  Yes?"

He could not have been more pleased if they had been his own patients. We had to remind him that these creatures were not simple, harmless mammals such as he was accustomed to, but a completely alien form of life that menaced our own existence and that of every living creature — and those were few enough — on the face of our world.

The Vulcanids did, undoubtedly, reproduce by fission, which added an unexpected threat to our plans. A fully-grown Vulcanid could, it appeared, simply tear itself in two, and there you had two Vulcanids. The raw edges, such as we could see, took on a roundness visibly, and within an hour there was nothing to show that two Vulcanids had so recently been one.

Axel attempted to reassure us by explaining that only the lowest forms of life were able to reproduce in this manner, but again, we had to remind him that what he was watching was not Terrestrial life, but life from another world. We had no standards by which to judge its degrees in the cosmic scale of life. For all we know, Terrestrial unicellular creatures and the lower worms, which divide and reproduce by fission, might have reached superiority on Earth, as the Vulcanids had on Hafna, if only some slight factor in the balance of creation had been upset.

But theorising would get us nowhere. We now had about one hundred Vulcanids to cope with. Thirty we might have beaten, but one hundred! And they might multiply still further within the next few hours.

One thing we did discover: during daylight there seemed practically no communion between the Vulcanids and our Virians. We later formed the theory that light waves interfered with their system of transmitting their thoughts. It seemed logical enough; a similar phenomenon with regard to radio waves had been noticed for half a century, and there seemed to be a parallel here.

We saw, too, that many of the creatures had moved about during the night. Long, slimy trails on the grass, which was also crushed to the ground, showed their tracks. And Krill Hvensor was not comforted by the realisation that these Vulcanids could move much faster and further than those he had known on Vulcan. They were, he was sure, a species that was unknown to him.

Where they had been bunched round the Disc during the night, they were now spread over more than an acre of ground, but they were still contained by the railings of the park on two sides and the fencing of neighbouring tennis courts on the other two.

We had sited our electrified compound in the direction they would most easily take if they decided to leave the park. Only in that direction was there a clear way, unobstructed by walls, hedges, or railings. We had also closed every gate and built barriers by the lower walls so that we might the better channel specimens into our compound.

We relied on their strangeness in our world, and on the fact that every material object would be new to them, to force them to take the path we wished them to take. And as we watched them through the morning hours, we saw that our plan was working.

Slowly, so slowly as to be only just perceptible, there was a general move in the direction of the open track we had left for the hideous creatures. They ignored — or seemed to ignore —  their watchers completely, but continued their waving and bowing between themselves. There was no doubt in our minds that their flexions and flutterings signified some sort of communion between themselves.

By noon, the two Virians had finished electrifying the wire compound down the hill, and we posted guards alongside the track to it, with others to observe the Vulcanids remaining in the park and those slowly approaching the funelled entrance to the electrical corral.

They possessed no sight, these semi-translucent monsters from Vulcan, but seemed gifted with an extraordinary sense of proximity to objects in their path. Clearly, some seventh sense  — perhaps even more than one extra sense — enabled them to exist in a material, solid world. We checked on this by dropping a curtain made of canvas from the farm before those who were foremost in the downhill march. They seemed unaware of the obstacle until they were six or seven feet from it, and then they halted, their wide-spreading filaments waving towards it.

We were encouraged to note that the foremost Vulcanids seemed to make no effort  —  by bending or turning back  —  to advise others of the obstruction. This might mean that it was a case of each for himself.

It might also mean — and it was a chilling thought — that they possessed a mass mind, and that the thoughts of one were the thoughts of all.

When we raised the canvas curtain, the leading Vulcanids crept on at their former speed.

As we had expected, over the distance of nearly a mile, some outdistanced the others, and by dusk the leaders were down to three, with the followers two hundred yards behind them. Nightfall brought qualms to us. Would this unknown type of Vulcanid, unlike the normal species, move in the dark?

We could only leave them to their movement, and could not control it.

However, we brought our car lights to bear on those who remained by the disc. There were eighteen of these. All the rest had started their straggling, oozing march along the track we had prepared for them. But the eighteen who stayed behind were clearly there for the purpose of guarding the Disc, and the apparatus we had seen on the grass between them the night before still lay in the same place.

All night we kept them under close observation, changing our guards at two-hour intervals all along the route they were slowly taking. We saw no movement among them, save the constant waving of their thin tentacles. If any of them had changed their position during the night, it was so slightly that it was imperceptible.

With dawn they livened up slowly, and by ten o'clock in the morning, the three leaders were heading straight into our compound. We allowed them to get well inside before we closed the improvised gate behind them, and then looked up the hill towards the main body of the Vulcanids. The nearest were still two hundred yards or so in the rear.

Alatto Skirr, wearing insulated clothing, stood near to the electrified fence, while his brother remained twenty yards away ready to start up the generators.

Then Arabin dropped his hand as a signal to Hani Skirr, who pressed the starter on first one and then the other of the mobile generators.

There was a low hum from the motors. The compound was now totally enclosed by bare cables carrying eight thousand volts.

For an hour, the three Vulcanids crept slowly, slowly around the compound, which measured ten yards across in each direction.  They were obviously aware of the obstructing wires, but would they divine that they were anything more than wires?

A dozen times one of the creatures slowly approached the fence, and its waving filaments hovered — suspiciously, it seemed  — over the gleaming copper cables.

Then one of them struck.

One of its tentacles shot out like a whiplash made of rubber, and grabbed the top wire.

There was a vivid flash and sharp sizzling, but the Vulcanid held on.

Would the current destroy it? Arabin waved his hand to Hani Skirr, and signalled by an urgent lifting motion to the Virian to step up the current.

Hani Skirr slowly turned the resistance.

"Twelve thousand," he called out to Arabin.

And then the Vulcanid crumpled.

The translucent limb grasping the cable slowly became opaque, and the greenish opalescent hue gradually ascended to the crown of the thing's head as the creature curled over and released its hold.

The remaining two cruised round, apparently heedless of their fellow's death — if it had died.

Again, we felt a glowing encouragement. The dead Vulcanid had not, it seemed, communicated its sensations to the others. And as we looked up the hill we saw no wavering by those approaching the compound.

But we were congratulating ourselves too soon. A moment later the other two Vulcanids struck, as if by a preconcerted plan. Both at the same instant shot out a long, stretching limb, and both grasped the cable at the same spot.

Again Hani Skirr increased the power as the two creatures tugged at the cable. This time they seemed to have increased their resistance to it, but that very resistance ended them more quickly.

Both of them collapsed at the same time, and the limbs holding the cable changed colour even more rapidly than had that of the first of our victims.

At that moment, Arabin, who was watching the other Vulcanids, gave a shout.

"My God!" he called. "They're breaking out!"

As if by a signal commonly understood, the Vulcanids that had been heading our way now turned slowly away, and they quickened their slow pace as they started to move off in other directions.

The hedges and other light obstructions that had stood in their way were ploughed aside as they forced their great bulk through them, and now they had started to take to the country. Instead of following each other in a more or less orderly procession, they were fanning out in every direction.

Arabin switched on his walkie-talkie microphone and called the guards at the park.

"We've killed three," he whispered into the microphone. "What's happening at your end?"

The answer came back in the slow Mid-Western tones of Harry Crow Eyes.

"Kinda wondered what you'd been doing to 'em," he said. "Down here my eighteen babies got into one hell of a sweat a few minutes back. Reg'lar square-dance they made of it, but they're quiet now."

"Any sign of them leaving their box of tricks?"

"Not a sign."

Arabin knocked his forehead with the back of his clenched fist. "Oh what a bloody fool I was not to have 'em surrounded with that fence!" he groaned. "We know now that they don't suspect us of electrocuting them — otherwise they'd have pressed the plunger on that damn switch, or whatever it is. We could have done in the lot, and they'd have thought they were meeting some natural hazard!"

It is always easy to realise just what one has overlooked, but the omission was pardonable in this case. We had run a tremendous risk in destroying three of the creatures. Our interference with them might well have been appreciated — to use a tactical term — by the Vulcanids, who could have avenged themselves by exploding the Disc.

Meanwhile, the rest of them, save those guarding the Disc, were spreading across the country at a steady walking pace. It was a turn of speed we had not expected, and had not suspected they possessed.

The warning delivered by the two to die last had been strong enough to warn all of the monsters that they must separate. One death had not made enough impression on the mass minds of the hundred or more, but three had been sufficient to stir up awareness of the danger to them.

And the terrible thing was that we could do nothing — nothing we knew about — to stop them. One hundred Vulcanids were now at large around us. Tomorrow there might be two hundred  — the next day four hundred; who could tell where their diabolical multiplication would end?

Axel was with us by the compound when the three had been killed. As the remainder deployed right and left, crushing obstacles or dragging themselves over them, the little doctor was agog to get into the compound and examine the dead specimens. There was little danger of the others approaching anywhere near the compound, so Arabin signalled Hani Skirr to cut the current.

As the hum of the motor died away, Alatto Skirr opened a gate on our side of the fence, and we all three — Arabin, Axel and myself — went through.

Leo and I were fearful of approaching the dead monsters. That they were dead seemed certain enough, in view of their ghastly change of colour, but we had thoughts of poison, of static current that might shock the first to touch them, of nameless horrors and fears that there might still be some legacy of death lingering about the creatures.

Axel, though, had no such fears.

If it had not been for the awful significance of the moment, his anticipatory eagerness would have been highly comical. In one hand he carried a large black leather bag with his instruments in, and in the other he had a canvas satchel containing tools. From one end of it protruded a fine-toothed hacksaw of large sire. "Is better for cotting op," he had explained, patting the saw as he packed it that morning. That saw, it appeared later, had been a butcher's, and he had cannily taken it from a shop next to the inn where we had made our plans.

There was no fear about Axel as he boldly walked over and slapped one of the dead Vulcanids. The three bodies lay stretched on the grass, each one curved gracefully, and with the once-active head filaments now spread around in disorder.

Axel explained that his first object must be to ascertain whether the reproduction of the monsters could go on indefinitely. He expected to learn that when he could analyse the cell structure under his microscope — which had been brought from Parkside by Cohen the night before.

Having taken samples of the flesh of each creature, he hurried over to the shooting brake in which he had installed his microscope.

Twenty minutes later — and a long, long twenty minutes they seemed to us! — he returned. One of the creatures, he informed us, had apparently been recently produced, for the scar of the fission was still visible upon it. The others had been complete, and he believed they had neither been "born" nor divided for reproduction.

The cells of the first were of a simpler nature, while those of the "prime" Vulcanids, as he called them, were more complex. There was much more that he tried to explain to us, but although most of was incomprehensible — thanks to his execrable English and his plentiful use of Nordic technical terms — we gathered that he had formed a conclusion. He was convinced, he said, that the "secondary" Vulcanid could not reproduce its kind until its cells had acquired the complexity he had found in the others. That might mean that there would be no further multiplication for some time — or it might only give us a few hours' respite.

Axel worked industriously upon the prone, jelly-like figures in an effort to trace their source of nourishment. There was no stomach and no trace of digestive organs. These, it seemed, were creatures drawing their sustenance from solar rays. If that were true, it would explain their urgent need to leave their own world, where, even at midday, the sun appeared like a tiny red ball in the sky, and the surface temperature seldom rose more than a few degrees above zero.

Although their digestive system offered nothing that Axel had ever experienced before, their brain structure he found more familiar.

The upper portion of the Vulcanid he dissected seemed to be almost wholly brain, and the organ was protected by a horny, flexible shield of green composition. The convolutions of the brain were incredibly complex, as might have been expected, and Axel expressed a ghoulish pleasure at the prospect of examining a Vulcanid brain at his leisure and in his London laboratory — or rather the laboratory he had annexed as his own from the Ministry of Health.

We learned that the Vulcanids achieved movement by extension and retraction of their under-surface, much as a snail used to creep along before the catastrophe that ended snails as well as man.

There was a vague tripod formation incipient on the under-surface, as though Vulcanid nature had at some time intended these creatures to posses three legs.

The muscular structure, too, intrigued Axel. There was nothing resembling bone in the carcass he worked on, unless it was the cranial carapace, but the muscles! Ah, the muscles! He was filled with objective admiration for the powerful tensile muscles he laid bare with his scalpel.

As for us, though, we were filled with nausea during the whole operation. It was more than curiosity that kept us there, however; it was the vital need to understand these monsters as fully as possible.

For three hours we watched as Axel worked. Throughout that time Leo kept in touch with our scouts who were keeping the Vulcanids in sight as best they could, and we plotted their general course on the mica cover of his map.

It was difficult to form a complete picture so early, but as the time progressed, we saw the lines on our map beginning to converge. Those Vulcanids that had headed northwards had kept up their pace and direction, and those who turned south had accelerated their speed and were now turning back north, after moving westward to circumvent the compound in a wide arc.

By nightfall, we had assembled at the farm, leaving Axel to pursue his gruesome investigations in the one-time dairy, to which he had conveyed two of the monsters complete, except for the strip he had sliced off for cellular examination.

I must not convey the impression that Axel was careless in his examination of them. Although he had tackled the sickening job lightheartedly enough, he had worked with meticulous care, wearing sterile "spider-web" gloves, and having his face covered with a Norbett respirator and goggles. He had insisted upon Leo and me keeping at a distance of seven or eight feet, and we had been more than glad to comply. When it came to the task of moving the carcasses, he carefully supervised the dressing of his helpers in insulated garments of plastic, complete with respirators and goggles.

In the glistening white dairy he was in his element as he had the two monsters laid on the marble slabs. And there we left him, as I say, while we discussed the day's activities and the prospect of what the next day might bring.

As the reports continued to come in from the observers tracking the Vulcanids, we found the lines on our map slowly growing together until by midnight the monsters were making a steady and single-minded march towards the Thames.

They had reached Croydon by half-past twelve, and still kept going through the darkness, keeping to the main roads as though they knew where they were going, and how to get there.

The eighteen Vulcanid guards at the park had not increased their numbers, we were thankful to note. The fact brought us hope, because having only eighteen to contend with, we might be able, with the greatest of good luck, to wrest the switch-box from them. However, they showed no signs of relaxing their watch, and never for a moment left the apparatus on the grass.

Axel had kept Leo and myself and Krill Hvensor going by regular dosing with benzedrine, but the others had taken turn and turn about, getting sleep when they could. Now we began to feel the need of rest, despite the stimulation of the drugs.

So the three of us, aided by a sleeping draught from Axel's store, took eight hours off to sleep.

We felt that we deserved a rest, and were safe to take one for a few hours. Had the monsters headed towards our Downland stores I cannot imagine what we should have done. That danger, though, had passed as they turned their course northwards.

During the evening we had talked of aggressive action. Tanks? We could no doubt get one or two rolling. There was a Territorial Drill Hall at Bromley, where the covered yard held a squadron of heavy Eden tanks. We numbered three former R.T.R. members among us, and these were strongly in favour of an attack with armoured vehicles.

The menace of the electrical discharge the Vulcanids were able to bring to bear on their attackers halted us in that plan.

Attacking with flame-throwers was also considered, but here we were thwarted by the simple fact that we had no flame-throwers. It might be possible to improvise something, using high-grade petrol, but ever-present in our minds was the terror of burning London.

Acid, too, received some consideration, but until Axel had more information for us as to the Vulcanids' vulnerability to acid, we could formulate no plan.

It was the news that the Vulcanids had halted — and stayed halted for an hour — that sent Leo and Krill Hvensor and myself to our beds.

For myself, I slept soundly, thanks to Axel's sleeping draught, and when I awakened eight hours later, I could hardly believe that I had slept at all, or that so long a time had passed since my head touched the pillow.

We awoke to a dull morning of pouring rain — and news that almost electrified us.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Thomas Ludlam, who woke me, gave me the news, which was truly unnerving.

A giant black Disc had been sighted, coasting high over North London.

We were entitled to fear such a craft, for it was in the large black Discs that the Vulcanids were accustomed to be flown on their space journeys. These were usually conducted with Nagani crews, although on special occasions — such as that when I was picked up in 1963 — Virians were carried as well.

The warning had come from the small detachment we had left behind at Parkside. The man on the dawn watch had sighted the craft, and had alerted the hotel and the farm. He had kept the Disc in sight for ten minutes, after which it had shot upwards at high speed and had vanished behind the heavy cloud formation that was blowing up at that time.

They had thought it unwise to wake us at the farm, after our long and exhausting hours battling with Vulcanids. A constant watch was being kept, and the Virians had slid three of the Discs out of our Downland hangars. On the scanning screens of these they were maintaining a watch on the sky from horizon to horizon, and so far, by nine in the morning, no further warning had been received.

The Virians were willing to man the Discs on the ground, but positively refused to fly them. They had little fear of coming under the mind control of the Vulcanids again, but they were concerned most seriously with the possibility of their Discs being exploded by some Vulcanid or Nagani device while in the air.

The necessity of dividing our forces, already small enough, between combating the Vulcanids and keeping a look-out for black Discs added greatly to our worries. It may, in the future, when this account is read, seem that we were unduly fearful at this time, and that we snowed little spirit in our adversities. If that is the case, I must remind the reader that we were a small handful of people miraculously restored to our own world, and terrified of being pushed off it again.

After we had eaten, Arabin took Krill Hvensor and myself out with a dozen others to follow up the Vulcanids. By now, their trail had extended through Streatham and Lambeth to Westminster Bridge Road, where they had halted again at the end of Kennington Road.

There we found them, huddled in the middle of the cross-roads, apparently distressed by the heavy rain.    There was little doubt that they had all assembled there, for the best count we could make showed that there were more than eighty • of the monsters.

We kept at a discreet distance, and wondered whether they knew of our presence. Then the rain stopped, and they moved on once more. Still maintaining their speed of a brisk walking pace, they pushed on until they reached Westminster Bridge. They progressed in a steady glide, and we were near enough to note that they moved by thrusting forward and extending the front edge of their stem, and then withdrawing the rear portion in an almost continuous movement.

At Westminster Bridge they paused again and divided, half of the party going to each side of the road. There was a very long halt of two hours here, and we concluded that they feared the proximity of the water beneath the bridge. Then a curious thing happened. One of their number flung a tentacle over the parapet of the bridge.

The limb — if I can call it that, was as thick as a man's arm, but as it stretched downwards, it became thinner and thinner until by the time it had reached the water it was no stouter than a finger.

The creature appeared satisfied with its experiment, and swiftly withdrew the tentacle. If the Vulcanids had feared that the water might harm them, they were now reassured, for after what was obviously a parley, they moved forward again.

Arabin watched the water-testing with a frown.

"Wonder if they're afraid of liquids?" he murmured. "Might have something there! They were plainly worried by the rain..."

We followed them as they crossed the bridge, and again there was a long pause in Parliament Square, with considerable weaving back and forth of the fringe-crowned heads. At last they seemed to be satisfied with the direction they wished to take, and half an hour later saw them in St. James's Park.

Here they hastened towards the lake — and slid straight into the water.

For an hour or more they moved around in the shallow water at considerably increased speed, and then assembled at the westward end of the lake and emerged.

"Now what can they want in the water?" Arabin asked.

"They seemed fearful of the river, and yet here they slither in like seals."

Krill Hvensor had the answer.

"The river has salt in its water, Leo Arabin," he said. "This water is pure, with no salt. I think that perhaps the Vulcanids (he called them 'Hafnarigi') fear the salt and not the water."

"Yes, but they're come out of the water again," Leo pointed out, rather needlessly. "What were they doing? Having a jolly bathe? I just can't understand this."

Again the monsters moved on, and this time we were perturbed to find that they were making for the Serpentine, in Hyde Park.

Again they slid into the water, and their tall, massive bulks cruised around exploring every yard of the lake, finally emerging as before. We were considerably relieved when they turned eastward. Had they continued in the direction they had first taken in Hyde Park they would have finished up outside Parkside.

By now dusk was beginning to fall, and we had added to our small following party three lorries carrying salt, taken from the London County Council highways depot.

"It'll be too easy if we can catch 'em by putting salt on their tails," Arabin chuckled.   "But it's worth trying."

In the Edgware Road — for the Vulcanids were now making a fast northward trek — we sent two lorries forward and had their crews shovel salt round three sides of the Marylebone Road crossing. They left a deep pocket of salt extending a hundred feet or so up the road, and had just finished spreading it smoothly by the time the leading Vulcanids approached. The third lorry drove as near as it dare behind the last Vulcanids, and as they entered the great loop of salt, the crew' of the third lorry got to work shovelling salt madly out on to the road.

The creatures were now surrounded by salt on all sides. As their leaders came upon the salt that barred their path, they halted and there was another frenzied parley as they all collected together in the middle of the crossing. We had them ringed in our headlights, for it had now grown quite dark.

After three hours of watching, we decided that they were going to stay there all night, but we waited until two in the morning before posting guards and returning to Parkside for a few hours' rest.

By seven they had not moved, and we were beginning to be hopeful that we had found the means to quell them.

Then, at half-past seven, one of the creatures oozed delicately towards the five-foot stretch of salt, stretched out a long tentacle and flipped it slowly across the salt.

At once, the others approached, and four of them slid slowly across the salt barrier, effectively sweeping the way clear for those who followed.

They hated the salt, it was easy to see, but it was by no means fatal to them. Still, the knowledge was useful. We could now channel them into the path we chose for them, to some extent.

All that day we crawled behind them. We found it necessary to use relays of cars, for the constant driving in bottom gear was overheating our engines. However, we kept them in sight up to Hampstead Heath, and there the performance of dipping into the ponds was repeated.

That night we mounted guard again while some of us slept, and in the morning took up the slow chase again. Then followed a three-day pursuit back and forth across North London. The Vulcanids seemed to be searching for something, but for what we could not guess.

On the third day after their exploration of the Highgate Ponds on Hampstead Heath, our quarry reached Finsbury Park. Once more there was the tiresome business of slithering about in the park's lake, and once more there was the conference on the banks when they emerged.

Now they left the park by the main gates on the corner, of Green Lanes and Seven Sisters Road, and this time they turned with a positive decision down Green Lanes.

By the high banking of the reservoir they stopped again, but only for a few minutes. Then one of the creatures wrapped seven or eight tentacles round the cast iron railings, and with the Vulcanid equivalent of a grunt, heaved them out of the ground.

The whole party turned resolutely up the banking, and with considerable effort reached the top. We had rushed round to the bridge across the reservoir in Lordship Road, and through binoculars — although the distance was no more than three or four hundred yards — we watched the next amazing development.

One by one, the Vulcanids slithered into the water — and sank.

"By God! We've got them now!" Leo breathed. "All we need do is tip a few dozen carboys of acid into the water, and..."

"Oh! But no!" Axel was with us now, and his disapproval came as a shock.

"Why not?" asked Arabin. "Don't you want to see them exterminated?"

"Yes, please! Very much so!" Axel replied. "But please to think. Here are many million kilos of water. How many bottles of acid — and what sort of acid, please?  —  are you going to put into the water? You have been thinking about this? No! Well, I am tellink you. Now please to listen.

"I have experimented with my two Vulcanids at the farm, and I fear too much that acid will not kill them."

We had to take Axel's word for it.

And on using cold reason, it was plain that we should need many, many gallons of even the most concentrated acid to make more than a weak solution.

Axel explained his experiments with acid. He had found —  and he told it with a sort of proud relish — that the substance of which the Vulcanids were constructed reacted only very slightly to acid tests. Salt, yes. That brought a shrinking reaction, a measurable decrease in volume, but it would not destroy.

There was one consolation. We now had the Vulcanids effectively concentrated — except for the eighteen at Primswood  — under our eyes, and could ring the reservoir with electrified cable. If we could not destroy them in the water, we could destroy them when they came out... unless...

Leo hurriedly drew out his large-scale map, on which we had plotted every move of the monsters.

The map showed two exists from the reservoir: one to the north-east, into the New River Canal, and the other to the south-west into the New River reservoirs and water-beds.

The latter was a blind alley, but if the creatures should make their way out and into the canal they had an open thoroughfare before them.

There was some hurried phoning over the radio, and in response we received four more loads of salt, which we set to work spreading round the path surrounding the sheet of water. We had a double task, for the reservoir is duplicated on the other side of the Lordship Road Bridge.

We worked madly all night and through the next day, until our combined efforts had piled up a two-foot layer of salt, six feet wide, all round the reservoir. Lorries came in relays and the salt piled up in the road for six-wheeled jeeps to bring up the banking.

We had kept a careful watch on the water gates leading into the canal, and had reinforced these with electrified cable stretched tightly above the surface of the water.

The salt, of course, was a temporary deterrent to the Vulcanids, and was laid down in the hopes that it would keep them in the water while we set about the considerable task of wiring up the electrified barrier round the path.

One factor disturbed us: in water the Vulcanids were almost invisible, being semi-transparent to start with. Now and then we would catch a glimpse of one of them near the edge, when it would appear as a vague, nebulous shape, hard to discern unless one knew it was there.

The electrified fence, while it seemed a sure shield at first glance, was — and we realised it — not the certain defence a layman might have imagined. One monster short-circuiting the current could enable the rest to cross in safety. But we had, by this time, posted axe-men at ten or twenty-yard intervals all round. These, protected by insulated clothing and gloves, were to chop the dead Vulcanids free as quickly as they could, should the monsters attempt to escape by shorting the current.

The plan had one serious defect: it left us with no reserves of manpower. The most we could spare for off-duty spells were a dozen at a time.

And all the time there was the fear of the black Disc that had been sighted ten days earlier.

There had been no further news of it, but we still kept the Virians on watch in the Discs that now lay before our hangars on the Downs. We had not forgotten, of course, that the scanning screens they were using could only cover a small fraction of the earth's surface and the sky — simply from horizon to horizon. The black Disc — there might even be more than one — could land anywhere else and we should not know.

But, as the Virians reminded us, their scanners covered a vast funnel of space that converged on our own little spot. To avoid flying through the funnel, the black Disc would have to make an enormous detour. As it was almost certainly working from its Lunar base, one scanner concentrated upon the Moon whenever she was visible over the horizon. Once or twice there had been a tiny blip on the screen, but it had vanished immediately, and we attributed it to atmospherics or lack of maintenance on the equipment.

The scanners were not at all like our old-fashioned radar screens. They resembled more the ground glass screen of a reflex camera, for the actual image of the object registering was seen upon them. And by an intricate focusing device the image could be magnified to enormous dimensions. So we did not expect a radar blip on the screens, but a true image of the object.

Many times we planted Virians close to the Vulcanids in the park at Primswood, and around the edge of the reservoir in North London, but never once did we succeed in receiving a mental communication from them. We began to believe that they had secured their object, whatever it was, and wished to have nothing more to do with us. Our first thought was that they had sought fresh water deep enough to submerge themselves — but then we wondered whether that was all they wanted.

For the eighteen who had stayed with the Disc at Primswood showed no signs of leaving, and remained huddled together round their mechanism that lay on the grass there.

As the days passed we began to lose our fear of them. They had been aggressive at first, true, but so had we. In fact we had struck the first blow, and they had done no more than try to defend themselves. We took to joking about them, and walked much nearer to them than we had previously dared.

They showed no sign that they knew of our presence, and we began to take heart. There were even some of us who began to pity them in the way that one feels a remote sort of sympathy for a rat caught in a trap. They could have been a menace, we reasoned, but here they were, and they seemed pretty tame.

But the Virians would share none of this feeling with us. They insisted that the Vulcanids were evil, and that their very existence depended upon subjugation of a more active and mobile species of creature.

A month after our first battle with them we had settled back into our old life, only conceding their danger by posting guards round the reservoir and round the group at Primswood. We saw nothing whatsoever to alarm us.

The feeling was growing among us that we might even share our world with them, and this nearly caused a breach with the Virians. They promised solemnly that they would one and all leave us and betake themselves to the furthest attainable parts of the world if we ceased for a moment to regard the Vulcanids as our mortal enemies.

Heaven knows where the controversy would have ended if we had not one day received evidence that the Vulcanids were as much to be feared as ever they had been.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

If one of the scanning screens had not suddenly broken down, we might never have learned that the Vulcanids had multiplied still more, and, what was far more serious, had managed to leave the reservoir without our knowledge.

The screen of one of the Discs — the one that had shown radar blips some days earlier — ceased to function one morning. It was a Friday, I remember, because the Virians worked on it for the best part of two days. Then on the Sunday they announced that it was in working order again. But, to make sure, they would like to test it for range and accuracy.

Arabin went up in an auto-gyro so that the Virian technicians might check their instruments. He cruised round at varying heights until the Virians were satisfied that for extremely short range their screens were all working in concert. Then they called for long-distance checking.

Leo was not anxious to take his aircraft to any great height, as it was constructed more for horizontal progress, and too much vertical flying would exhaust his fuel supply. He accordingly took a westward course, and then turned north, and after various checks at pre-arranged distances began to return.

We were in constant radio communication with him, and he was chatting idly over his microphone when he suddenly stopped talking, and we heard what we thought was a cough.

Then he came in again.

"Sorry for that hiccup," he said. "Matter of fact, I had a bit of a shock then — thought I saw something moving. I'll go back.   Plot me carefully, please."

We fixed him as being over Richmond Park, and he checked the position. Then he moved off north, calling out his position every few moments.

"Crossing railway by Richmond station," he called. "Making for Kew Gardens. Over a football stadium or something now. Can't think what it was that caught my eye. There just seemed to be a flicker of something moving round here, and it caught me in an unprepared moment. Cricket ground to my right now, and I'm flying due north towards that pagoda thing in Kew Gardens... No. Must have been mistaken. Can't see anything."

He muttered worriedly for a minute or so as he circled.

"Poor old greenhouses down here seem to have suffered from the weather," he called.  "Scores of broken panes."

David Cohen checked him in sorrowful reproach. "Now, Mr. Arabin, please! Those are conservatories dahn at Kew. Greenhouses, he says! At Kew!" David was a keen gardener.

I was pencilling a red track on the mica of the large-scale map when Arabin spoke again.

"There is something down there!" he called. "There's something, or somebody, in the greenhouses. Something's just poked out four or five more glass panes from the inside!"

By this time I had already called up everybody on the radio, and every one of us was accounted for. I switched Arabin's circuit to that of each of us, so that everybody could hear him who was near enough to a loudspeaker.

"I'm dropping down closer," Leo called. "With luck, I might see through all that glass, though it's pretty murky. Closer, now — down to fifty feet. Going down again — twenty feet over the roofs of the greenhouses..."

David Cohen groaned inwardly at the heresy of calling the enormous winter garden a greenhouse.

"There it is again! Something's inside there!" called Leo. "Something's moving about... below, there!" His call through the radio loud hailer on his auto-gyro nearly blasted our eardrums.

"No response," he went on. "I'm hovering now where the thing shoved the windows out. There's another one gone! Oh, my God! It's a Vulcanid!"

I suppose we'd almost expected it. Better a Vulcanid — we knew them — than some new, unknown horror.

"I'm coming back straight away — will land at Parkside," called Leo.

A few minutes later his auto-gyro dropped down in the middle of the Bayswater Road as we ran to meet him.

"How many?" was the question everyone called. There had been thirty or more of us at Parkside when Leo's call came through, and we were every one in the road before he had dropped from the cabin steps.

"Don't know — I only saw the one, and he was a monster!"

We looked at each other in dismay.

"We'd better get a party out there at once," someone decided.

"I can take five in here," said Arabin. "The rest can come on in cars. No — leave a dozen here. No sense in leaving the place empty. Better bring some weapons, too, though I can't see that they'll be a lot of use."

While we went indoors for Bren guns and pistols, Alatto Skirr made sure that the car radios were tuned to the auto-gyro wavelength. He and Cohen and myself piled into the cabin, followed by Isidore — swinging not one, but two axes — and the enterprising Lucille.

During the past two months, I should mention, Lucille had considered herself engaged to me, and had even started to talk of raiding a West End couturier's for a wedding gown, for, she insisted, she was going to be a June bride. I have not brought these facts into the latter part of this narrative, because I really do not think that my own small private affairs have any place in it at this stage. I now refer to the fact on Lucille's insistence, for as I write she supervises me with her usual energy and now informs me that I must acknowledge her share of our adventures.

Leo brought us low over the winter garden and hovered over the spot where the glass was broken.

The under surface of the glass was thickly coated with green, and we could see that the tropical growths inside had flourished and run wild without their accustomed attention. But where the glass was broken we could see down into the interior and there, immediately below the shattered panes, was an undoubted Vulcanid.

The fringe of his tentacles towered at least twelve feet above the ground.

Here was a blow, indeed. When we thought that we had secured nearly all the Vulcanids in the Stamford Hill Reservoir, we had been fooling ourselves. Somehow, one or more had escaped without crossing our electrified fence. We had already checked that eighteen remained at Primswood, so the one at Kew must be one of the Stamford Hill creatures.

But must it?

Could it be possible that others had made their way here without our knowledge?

The size of this creature made us think that here was yet another colony of them — yet more Vulcanids of which we had known nothing so far.

"I'm going lower," Leo growled. "Got to see how many of the beasts there are in there."

A voice came over the speaker. It was Krill Hvensor.

"Better wait until we get there," he called. "There is no hurry, Leo Arabin. We shall be with you inside ten minutes —  wait."

But Leo dropped the auto-gyro down to roof top level, and we peered down through the green glass. There was some movement inside, but whether it was the one Vulcanid we had seen, or whether there was a whole tribe of them we could not guess.

Then came a series of rocket-like blasts, and Leo flung himself at the controls. One of our engines had petered out, and as the other one raced, we were thrown sideways.

We were too low to correct our loss of balance, and a second later the auto-gyro crashed on to the round roof.

The iron stays of the roof held, fortunately, and our aircraft slid, rattling and scraping, down the curve of the structure. Leo had time to drop the shock landing gear, and the great stilt-like legs took much of the shock of our fall as the machine hit the ground.

Before the racing engine could be switched off, the rotors had ripped through the side of the conservatory, and as they buckled the iron stays and crashed through the panes of glass we toppled over.

At that moment we blessed the foresight of Victor, the Swiss designer of the auto-gyro, for having placed release panels on every facet of the transparent cabin. Lucille pulled, the red handle of the panel at her side, and we shot out like squeezed orange pips. The perspiring Isidore leapt back again and began to fling our weapons out to us. We snatched them up and dragged him out violently, more from fear of the unknown than for any practical reason.

It was well we did, for as we backed away from the great glass house, there was a shattering of glass, and — the giant Vulcanid slid out through the hole the rotors had torn in the side of the building.

We ran towards the pagoda, down the long vista of trees, and as we ran we looked back from time to time.

Despite the size of the Vulcanid, its movement seemed but little faster than those we knew. But what horrified us was not the fact that he was after us — we could outdistance him, we knew — but the dreadful knowledge that dozens more of the great slithering creatures were pouring out through the gap behind him.

As we passed the Temperate House, we had a sudden fear that here, too, the giant Vulcanids might have set up a colony. We need not have feared, though, for through the comparatively clear glass we saw no sign of any moving creature.

We reached the pagoda before the Vulcanids had got more than half way there, and Isidore at once attacked the door with an axe. We paused a moment to get our breath back, and then Leo suddenly realised something we had overlooked.

"What the devil do we want to go in here for?" he asked, panting. "Once in there and we're trapped. We should have gone the other way — towards the main gates. That's where the road party would have met us."

But we had no time to change our plan. The Vulcanids had loomed dangerously near, and we piled into the pagoda, slamming the door behind us and wedging it with a Bren gun.

"Better get right to the top, seeing we're in," urged Leo, as he pushed Lucille at the steeply-set iron staircase. It was more a ladder with broad treads than a staircase, and Lucille had to help herself along with her hands. We followed her as quickly as we could go, turning nervously for a last look at the wedged door as a bend in the ladder took it out of our sight.

We came to the platform at the top badly winded, and peered out through the tiny decorative windows.

"Perhaps was not a bad idea to come here," panted Isidore. "From here can see all around — maybe see others when they shall come."

We looked out towards the entrance by Kew Palace, a mile distant, and damned our incaution for failing to bring a walkie-talkie with us. There was as yet no sign of the road party. The trees, too, obstructed our view, both to the north, where we expected to catch our first glimpse of the cars, and to the east, where Kew Road runs alongside, and fairly near to, the pagoda.

Then David held his hand up. "Ssh! Listen!" he whispered. We held our breath for half a minute and strained our ears into the vast silence.

The silence that hung over the world had been one of our most eerie experiences, and we had never quite accustomed ourselves to it. Ever since the day we landed, now nearly a year ago, we had found ourselves suddenly stopping whatever we were doing, and listening. Without the sound of a movement anywhere, without birds and animals in the country, and without man-made sounds in the streets, the silence was truly awful. At first we had thought that our powers of hearing had been tremendously developed, for it was quite possible, on a windless day, to hear the sound of footsteps on a road four miles away.

So now we stood in the topmost chamber of the tall pagoda and listened for the cars. The wind was blowing softly in the right direction, but the sound of the branches creaking against each other all around us hid the sound we wanted to hear. It is hard to believe that trees can make such noise in a breeze, but the sound of them, in the absence of any other sound, was enough to cover the noise the cars would make.

David turned to a window facing east, and we looked out over his shoulder. Then, by straining, we could just hear the cars.

"They've come round to this side of the garden," David nodded. "Probably couldn't find a gate open at the other end."

We had no doubt that the car party would have put on all speed to reach us, for the break in our radio calls must have alarmed them considerably.

As we listened, above the sound of the wind in the trees, we heard a crash, followed by shouts.

"They've either crashed a gate open, or else there's been a smash," muttered Arabin.

While we were guessing which was right, we saw the first car racing along the path behind the pagoda. Isidore leaped for the window on that side, and bawled out to the little procession of cars, but they did not hear him. Unless they stopped, the sound of their engines would cover our shouts, especially as we were in an enclosed space, with only small windows to shout through.

Leo shoved the barrel of a Bren through the window, and, aiming high, loosed off a burst. By standing on tiptoe we could just see the cars pull up, and Leo fired another burst. This time they found the direction, and we saw a dozen faces peering up at us as the cars stopped and their occupants got out.

"Get back! Keep moving!" Leo bawled. "There are dozens of the bloody creatures down there!"

Then he turned back to us.

"Odd, isn't it, that they didn't see any of 'em? Wonder if they've gone back to the greenhouse?"

Cohen moaned with anguish, and blasphemed under his breath at this continued heresy.

Axel waved his arms reassuringly around him, as he walked towards the pagoda. We lost sight of him, and then heard his voice from the bottom of the ladder.

"Is nothing down here now. Coming down safely, please," he cooed through the crack of the door.

We swarmed down the ladder so fast that our palms were scorched, and dragged away the obstruction to the door.

As we threw the door open, we saw Axel, surrounded by a dozen or more familiar faces.

We were a little shamefaced as we climbed into a station wagon, but there was not time for much explaining, as Leo impressed on Krill Hvensor and Axel. He hurriedly related the facts, and we drove cautiously down the pagoda vista, our tyres making no sound on the thick grass.

When we came to an intersection of paths, we saw before us the reason why the Vulcanids had turned back. They were clustered in a mass around the crashed auto-gyro, which lay on its side near the palm house.

Their filaments were waving — it almost seemed excitedly —  as they fussed round the wrecked machine.

Krill Hvensor stood up on the front seat and thrust his head and shoulders through the roof trap. "But these are monsters such as I have never seen!" he breathed. "These are not —  these cannot be — from Hafna!"

And truly the creatures looked fearsome giants. Nearly twice as tall as the Vulcanids we had seen before, they were also quicker in their movements. How else would they differ? Would their strange mental powers be even more terrible? Would they — could they — exert their telepathic influence upon us?

But we did not stop to ask ourselves many more questions, for the monsters sensed our presence and turned towards us. As they started to glide towards us, Axel swung the car round and we sped off back along the path. The other cars, by then turned towards the gate, waited for us and we drove away as quickly as we could.

Our station wagon brought up the rear, Leo instructing the others through his microphone as we made for the gate.

Just as we approached the gate, which hung on its hinges where it had been crashed open, Krill Hvensor called out from his position in the roof trap. We missed hearing what he said, for Axel suddenly turned his head, and before we could brace our muscles for the shock, the car had turned on its side. Axel had driven straight up the sloping gate as it hung in his path.

He had hurt his leg in the smash, for he clamped his foot down firmly on the accelerator as he shouted with pain.

The engine raced madly in that fraction of a second, and an instant later there was a streak of flame from beneath the bonnet.

Somehow — I cannot begin to think how — we squirmed out of the blazing wreck, dragging Axel out without heeding his cries of pain. The preceding car stopped and backed swiftly, and its occupants — Lucille was one, as she never tires of reminding me — helped us to our feet.

As we staggered away, there was a sudden "Whoosh!" and a great cloud of flame shot up into the sky as the petrol tank caught.

We were near enough for the flash to singe our eyebrows and for a moment the intense heat stopped our breathing. We crammed ourselves into the other car, and drove away at speed, and it was not until we nearly reached Kew Green that Arabin had a sudden thought.

"Look, David," he commanded, "we must go back! If that blaze reaches the trees it might start all London burning! Turn round, quick!"

David took the car round a block of houses — quiet little suburban dwellings that surely stood for a peaceful security instead of the two-fold threat we now faced.

There by the gate the blaze was dying down, although great flaming jets still shot out now and then. David took the car round another block so that we could drive down facing the fire.

Arabin had now taken Krill Hvensor's place in the roof trap, and he was balancing before him on the roof a fire-gun. We had not realised the potentialities of these magnificent pieces of fire-fighting equipment until the Regent Street blaze, and then we had given them a good try-out. Once we found their value, we had installed them all around us in our daily life, and each car carried a couple.

As Cohen slowly brought us nearer to the blaze, Leo sighted along the barrel of his extinguisher and pressed the trigger.

A thin jet of colourless liquid shot out into the heart of the flames, and as the heat evaporated it, the chemical started to do its work. Where the jet had struck, a black patch of twisted steel showed up against the red background.

Leo sighted the gun again, and then whipped his head up.

"See that?" he shouted.   "There's a Vulcanid in that fire!"

We could hardly believe what we saw. There, amid the flames, towered one of the monsters, unharmed, and his great fringe of filaments quested round touching the red hot metal.

As we watched, the creature stepped — literally stepped —  through the fire and started towards us.

Leo, in an automatic action, turned the fire-gun on the giant.

What happened then drew a shout of joy from all of us.

As the thin stream of liquid sprayed upon the Vulcanid's translucent body, the vast bulk crumpled and blackened. Another few seconds and it was stretched out across the road  —  dead.              I

CHAPTER NINETEEN

By evening, we reckoned that we had exterminated the pocket of Vulcanids in Kew Gardens. We hardly needed to go looking for them; they came out and went for us, but from the start they had no chance. From moving cars we were able to mow them down with no risk to ourselves.

But although we now held the key to the Vulcanids' weakness, and although in our first enthusiasm we pictured ourselves ridding the world of the creatures, it was a horrible business. However, we kept at it until we had slaughtered no fewer than sixty of the monsters. We went through every building in the Gardens, but the only traces of their occupation were in the Palm House.

How they had got there we did not discover for some time, and then we learned that they had formed a small detachment of those that had escaped from the Stamford Hill Reservoir. The enormous size of the Kew Vulcanids at first led' us to suppose that they were of another species, but examinations carried out under Axel's directions showed that they were of the same stock.

Axel himself was laid up for a week with a dislocated ankle and burns, for which he himself prescribed the treatment.

After rounding up the Kew Vulcanids, Arabin called a counsel of war to discuss dealing with the rest. We then decided that, as well as destroying the Vulcanids we knew about, we should have an even greater job on our hands: the location of those that had slipped through our net at Stamford Hill. The first step was obviously an aerial survey, with which we could combine a positive attack on Vulcanids caught in the open.

The first expedition launched on these lines found a single small pocket of the creatures, this time right out in the open near Leighton Buzzard. When we had accounted for them, we realised that we must now spread our net much more widely. It had been our hope that the Vulcanids would confine themselves to an area sufficiently small for us to comb thoroughly, but the discovery of them so far from London shocked us. There could be two possible reasons for their being found so far out: either they could move much more quickly and secretly than we had thought, or else — and here was an appalling prospect —  or else, as I say, there had been more nuclei of them than we had been aware of. Thus arose the possibility of the Vulcanids being able to operate from one or more unknown centres.

However, after mopping up the Kew Gardens colony and the few at Leighton Buzzard, we looked in vain for more of them. We could hardly expect to have annihilated the monsters, for we had already had evidence of their cunning and adaptability. The Kew colony had been half as big again as the first-comers, in the matter of physical size. And the Leighton Buzzard Vulcanids had varied yet again by being much smaller — no more than thirty inches tall. We had Axel's word for it that they all came of the same stock, and the inference was that they had adopted what they believed to be protective guise. After the destruction of three by electrocution at Primswood, the Vulcanids had taken to the water at Stamford Hill, and, being translucent, were almost invisible therein.

But our electrical barrier — which they must have discovered without our knowing it — had driven them to seek another way out of the reservoir. They had found it. And, what is more, they had undoubtedly multiplied, producing what I can only describe as bigger or better Vulcanids.

The Kew creatures had been bigger and faster, and had somehow acquired the property of being able to withstand fire. When they were destroyed, another brood had been produced, small enough, it may have been thought, to avoid detection so easily.

This reasoning, by Dr. Axel, led us to the conclusion that the .Vulcanids were able to procure mutation of species to protect themselves. And their rapid growth to full size "could mean that other changes, which in Terrestrial creatures might take many generations for full achievement, could be condensed into a single generation.

Taking the argument a step further, it could also mean that second, or third, generation Vulcanids might even present an outer casing that could withstand our fire-guns. That being so  — and we assumed it as a factor to be considered — we would have to destroy every Vulcanid before they became invulnerable to whatever weapon we produced.

We were unlucky in our experiments at destroying them in the water at Stamford Hill, although we poured gallons of Para-Pyrotheine — the charge in the fire-guns — into the water. The considerable dilution of the fluid rendered it harmless, and we called off that operation when Axel pointed out that the Vulcanids might even become immune to the liquid by living in close contact with a solution of it. It seemed as though the nauseating monsters had the upper hand when we found that they would not come out into the open, and after three weeks of searching for them, we began to fear aggressive action from them, instead of defensive passivity.

And I think that all of us, at some time or another, began to feel pity for them. After all, was my own reasoning, they were struggling for a foothold on our world, and in their way they were as tenacious to life as were we ourselves. But whenever the subject was discussed, the Virians stoutly maintained that the Vulcanids were the scourge of the Solar System. In their own long history, the Virians had experienced the potency of the Vulcanid's mastery, and they insisted that the creature would never take second place to any form of life.

The next phase of the Vulcanid attack took us unawares. The first indication came when a Virian became "entranced" one morning. He displayed the usual symptoms of Vulcanid control in a mild degree, and the message he conveyed to us was sufficiently short and commanding for me to reproduce it here.

He was "directed" by the controlling intelligence to ensure that the message was recorded in more or less permanent form, and it was accordingly written out at his dictation. It took the form of an ultimatum:

"This is the last time you will hear the voice of Hafna. We do not come to make terms with you. As Masters of the Solar System, we demand of you complete submission. You have experienced our guidance and control in the world of Hafna, and you know that you have nothing to fear under it. You know that you will be enabled to live your lives under complete protection and in complete peace. Place yourselves once more under our control. We offer no middle course. If a single one of you refuses this opportunity, we shall strike you down within a day — every one of you."

The command was delivered to an audience of four: Arabin, Axel, Krill Hvensor and myself. We had thought it best to keep the nature of the entranced Virian's communication secret from the others until we had considered it.

Now we sat round a table in Axel's surgery.

"Read it again," said Leo.

I read it through again, and then deposited the sheet of paper on the table before him. He stared at it as though he did not comprehend its meaning, and twiddled irritatingly with a gold pencil.  We left the first comment to him.

After a minute or so, he looked up.

"Seems to me," he said, "that although these bloody jellyfish say they don't come to make terms, they are trying to do that very thing. Otherwise — why this order? And I must say, in all my born days 1 don't think 1 ever came across a hammier piece of nonsense.   'Masters of the Solar System,' indeed!"

Axel coughed nervously. Leo looked over to him.

"Well, Paracelus? What do you make of it? Think they can strike us down within a day — every one of us? Go on! We're the patients. Tell us the worst."

Axel smiled apologetically.

"Is oil right making joke," he said, "but is here something more serious."

"Course it's serious," Leo replied. "But what I want you to tell me is whether they can possibly do us all in, like this big ham says."

"Leo," said Axel, leaning across the table, "they can do strange things, without doubt. How much they can do is more than I can tell. The brain structure of the Vulcanids is something beyond my comprehension. We know that they can control other minds. We know that they are able to make different each new generation of their kind. We do not know how they will make different their next generation — and maybe that unknown generation is already born and waiting to start work upon us now."

"Well, Krill Hvensor?" asked Leo, turning to the Virians' leader. "What about you? You want to go back to the Vulcanids?"

"I speak for all my people," replied the Virian. "We will never submit to them again. If we die now, it is only in this world. There is another world waiting for us Virians, as no doubt there is waiting for you and your kind. What does it mean? Stepping out of one room into another, that is all."

Leo turned to me. "Denis?"

There was nothing I could say. If the Vulcanids intended to keep to their threat, just one dissenter would result in our destruction. There were at least two such before me now. So I nodded. "I'm with you," I said. It was not as statesmanlike a decision as I would like to have uttered, but then, we always think of a better answer when it's too late.

Meanwhile, Krill Hvensor shook the entranced Virian impatiently and muttered to him in the language the Virians used among themselves. Then he shook again, more smartly.

The Virian rolled from his chair and collapsed on the floor.

We were silent for a second or two, and then Axel leaped across the room to the Virian.   He felt his pulse and turned back his eyelid.

"Yes," he whispered.  "Is dead."

Leo ran from the room to the hall of the house, where the call-up microphone hung. I heard him through the open door calling all out-stations into the circuit.

"Check all bodies at once," he called. "There's been a death here. See that nobody — Virian or Terrestrial — accepts control from the Vulcanids. Anyone seeming to show any lassitude anywhere: shake him up. Don't let the Vulcanids get into anyone's mind — repeat: don't let Vulcanids get into anyone's mind.  I'll stand by here while check counts come over."

One by one we heard the counts come in.

All correct at the store hangars.

All correct at Parkside.

All correct at the reservoir — where we still maintained a guard.

Then came the call from the farm.

There was a sob in the voice of the man at the microphone as he told us his news.

"Two Virians already dead here," he whispered. "They ran amok and — I think... they've killed... Mr. Ludlam."

Axel and I were out of the house and into a fast car before he finished the rest of his message. Leo called from the steps: "Keep tuned in here; I'll hang on until I hear from you — or from... anyone else."

As we drove madly along the dust-coated roads towards the river, Leo's voice came in over the speaker. He was calling in all out-stations.

"Universal call — universal call," he commanded. "Everyone indoors, please. Everyone. Denis and Axel — calling Denis and Axel on way to farm. Denis and Axel — stay at farm until next orders. Denis and Axel — please repeat and signal message understood."

We repeated the message back to him, and then there was a pause before he spoke again. This time his voice came over the individual speaker, and we realised that he was now tuned to our solo wavelength. Other listeners, on the universal wave, would not hear him.

"Denis and Axel — can you hear me on this wave?" he asked.

I signalled confirmation.

"Listen carefully. Switch off your universal mike. Done that? Now pull in to the side of the road. Near any tall buildings? Right, well get right up against them. Now pay attention.

"A call's just come through from the hangars. Alatto Skirr, scanning down there, has seen a black Disc at six o'clock, coasting low and hovering. Stay in this circuit till I call him for more news, and stay where you are. Back in a minute."

There was a pause while he spoke on the hangar wavelength, and we heard nothing from him, as he had switched out of our wavelength. Six o'clock referred not to the time of day, but to the position of the sighted Disc, which would be directly south, if one read the horizon as a clock dial.

Axel popped his head out of the roof trap to look round, but the road we were in ran east and west, and high buildings shut off our view to the south. In a few minutes, Leo's voice came back to us.

"No mistake, though I hoped it might have been," he said solemnly. "It's a sure enough black Disc, and is circling low somewhere over the South Downs. Get moving again fast, and perhaps you'll make the farm before the Disc comes within sight range. Keep in this circuit and I'll keep you posted. Back in a minute." And he switched out again.

We pulled out into the middle of the road again — with only our own few vehicles using the roads we had forgotten the rule of the road long ago — and pressed on at top speed. We were entering Lewisham as Leo came back into our circuit.

"It's gone now," he said, with some relief. "Shot off due south and Alatto Skirr lost it over the horizon. I can't believe that this is part of the Vulcanids' attack, and Krill Hvensor here seems to think it might not even be piloted by Nagani. In which case, it seems that some other bloody menace has popped out of the universe at us. Anyway, get down to the farm quickly. I had a message from them down there to say that poor old Ludlam's in a bad way. We must save him. Got all the kit you want down there, Axel?"

"Yes, I think so. But what happened to Ludlam? Must be knowing what to treat him for, to save time, please."

"They knifed him, the devils," replied Leo. "Seems to be a clean wound, the man says on the radio, but he's lost a lot of blood."

Axel sighed with relief. Anything physical he could cope with, he felt, but he dreaded any metaphysical complications. At the farm he had equipped for himself a surgery and operating theatre the like of which he used to dream about in his most ambitious moments when he dwelt in Stockholm. He called Leo back.

"Let us switch over to the farm, Leo," he pleaded. "Can be starting treatment right now. Is down there Otto Langer, who is able to help while I am talking to him."

"O.K. Switch back to universal. If there's any news about our new visitor, I'll call you back and give you the dope. Over to universal." As we turned the switch, Leo's voice came through the universal speaker again.

Axel had Langer to the microphone in a few seconds and gave him hurried instructions. Thomas had already been carried into Axel's improvised operating theatre, I gathered from the hurried conversation in German between Axel and Langer. There was a series of urgent "Jawohl's" from Langer, and Axel put down his microphone with a big sigh.

"When is settled down peaceful again here, another doctor we must start to train," he breathed. "Is too much for one, and too, what should happen if the Vulcanids get me?"

I knew what was on his mind. Rachelle Karim's confinement was due, and now Ludlam's danger looked like coinciding with the Karim's rejoicing.

We reached the farm in five more minutes, and I hurriedly parked the car while Axel rushed into the theatre he had installed in the dairy — where, incidentally, the two Vulcanid carcasses had been his first subjects.

I tried to look unconcerned as I peered round the buildings at the southern horizon. There was no sign of the recently sighted Disc.

An hour later, Axel came out to give us his news. He was still wearing his theatre gown, but had discarded his gloves and mask. His face was serious. In his hand was a kitchen knife, with an eight-inch pointed blade.

He told us how he and Langer had extracted the knife from poor Thomas's back. Luckily, Langer had been on the spot when the Virians made their attack, and had prevented eager helpers from withdrawing the knife, otherwise Thomas would have died from loss of blood. As it was, the damage was deadly serious. The ribs had jammed the knife, which had been thrust in edgeways, but even so the lung was damaged, and Axel was doubtful whether Ludlam, at his great age, would survive.

He made his report to Arabin over the microphone, and then flopped into a chair. "Is too hard, operation like this, for two men," he swore. "Should be theatre sisters for helping, should be also a doctor for the anaesthetic, should be boiling water, should be this, that. With these things, Thomas would live for sure.  Now — I do not know."

As he sighed in despair, the speaker crackled and a voice came through to him. It was Karim.

"Doctor Axel! Doctor Axel! Come quickly. Rachelle says the baby is nearly here! Quickly, please! Senora Lopez, she thinks there are two babies!   Quickly, el hamdolillah!"

CHAPTER TWENTY

Those of us who knew of the Vulcanids' ultimatum passed a sleepless night, as may be imagined. We knew enough about the Vulcanids to realise that there must be much more we could never know about them. The full uncanny range of the creatures' powers would quite probably be incomprehensible to human minds, even if disclosed to them.

So we waited for the unknown throughout that night. The monsters had struck from a distance twice, and we awaited their next attack. I cannot say we waited with composure, for despite our apparent unconcern when we heard the creatures' terms, we were all terrified inwardly. I see nothing to be ashamed of in fearing the unknown, especially when the unknown adopts such a horrifying form as that of the Intelligences of Hafna.

But morning came with no report of any further catastrophe. During the night we had added another soul to the slender register of humanity, for Rachelle had given birth to a fine boy. Karim, unaware of the knowledge we held, planned a party on the Oriental scale. We felt that we could not pass on to him the warning we had received, although he was usually in our inner counsels. It was a considerable effort for us to appear to fall in with his plans for a party, but we did our best.

As the dawn came, Leo and Krill Hvensor and myself left the house, intending to walk in the park. The Bayswater Road was a long alley of sunlight, and the complete stillness and silence everywhere were soothing to us. On such occasions we often felt that we would have given much to have been able to preserve some wild bird life. When one is alone in utter silence, the absence of the sounds that Nature used to produce is unnerving.

As we entered the park, the dense trees cast heavy shadows in the almost horizontal rays of the sun. It was some minutes before we noticed that one great black shadow did not move as the sun rose.  We looked idly at it as we walked.

And then we recognised it.

In the middle of the lawn there stood a great, squat black Vulcanid Disc.

We looked at each other in horror. Was this how the Vulcanids intended to strike? Had they brought the rest of their evil brood to edge us off the planet?

We were hurrying back to Parkside to warn the rest, when a voice stopped us. I do not know what the voice uttered, but Krill Hvensor knew, for it was a call in his own language. He turned at once, and there, standing outside an open hatchway on the upper surface of the Disc was a Virian.

He called back to the figure, which was dressed in the black one-piece overall costume we had worn when we landed. There was some exchange of words, and Krill Hvensor turned to us in some excitement.

"That is Adda Manganna, one of my people," he said. "The Disc is a Nagani ship, and has brought envoys of the little-people-with-the-big-eyes." This was the poetical term by which the Virians referred to the Nagani among themselves.

The Virian on the Disc called again, and there was a long interchange between him and Krill Hvensor, accompanied by much gesticulation. At last Krill Hvensor turned to us again.

"There are ten more of my people aboard that ship," he panted — for the waving of arms and shouting had left him breathless. "Adda Manganna has told me that they are the last survivors of our race, and have come from the Lunar base. There are also two hundred and more Nagani, and their leaders wish to speak with our leaders."

By now, Adda Manganna had sprung lightly to the turf, and had joined us. He bowed to us, and murmured a greeting in his own language, accompanying it with the curious spiral motion of the left foot and crossing of arms on the chest as he turned towards the sun. Krill Hvensor repeated the motions, somewhat perfunctorily, I thought, for since living alongside Terrestrials he had abandoned much of his ritual.

"The Nagani are not wishful to alarm our people here," Krill Hvensor said, after further conversation. "And so they have undertaken to remain in their Disc until we are prepared to see them. What is your word, Leo Arabin?"

"I must consult with my people," Leo replied slowly. "In the meantime, Krill Hvensor, take Adda Manganna" — the Virian bowed again as he heard his name pronounced — "take Adda Manganna to the house and entertain him. Show him —  show him a little of how we live on this world. And tell him that until the sun is fully risen, my thoughts are not for any man. We will speak to him in an hour."

The two Virians drew apart and walked towards the house.

Leo gripped my arm. "Denis, in God's name, what are we to do?" he breathed. "I feel certain that this is a Vulcanid plant. They promised to strike within twenty-four hours, and I feel that this is it."

"But couldn't this be a genuine Nagani move?" I asked.

He shook his head abruptly. "Too much of a coincidence, Denis," he said. "If the frog-men wanted to come here, why have they waited until this particular moment? Damn! They've had nearly a year, and then they pop in on us just when we're waiting for the Vulcanids to polish us off. I only wish it could be an authentic Nagani visit. The Nagani might know how to handle the Vulcanids."

We entered the house a little behind the two Virians.

Leo had the whole household roused, except for Rachelle. It was useless trying to keep this thing from the others. The first person to look out of a front window would see the great black Disc sitting out there in the park. He put it to them that the Disc was announced as a Nagani mission, but, he impressed on them without disclosing the Vulcanid ultimatum, there were some doubts. A Virian had stepped out of the Disc, but even so, he might be a Virian remaining under the old evil control.

The household took the news philosophically. I think many of them had a suspicion that the Vulcanids might have threatened to annihilate us, and the general opinion was that, even if this was a trap, there was little we could do about it. On the suggestion of Cohen, a man was sent quietly to the microphone to warn the farm, and within half an hour every person — except Rachelle — had been advised of the new development.

After a long discussion, it was decided that the farm people should lay their hands on every fire-gun they could, and should stand by ready to attack any Vulcanids who came their way. We at Parkside also saw that we were as fully armed with the Vulcanid-destroying fire-guns as possible.

Leo also warned them that if this were a genuine move by the Nagani, those who were unfamiliar with them might get a serious psychological shock when they first saw one of the frog-like creatures. He described the Nagani as best he could from his exceedingly short experience of them, and tried to persuade his hearers to accept the creatures amicably — if it were Nagani that the Disc contained. I could see that he was still doubtful as we left for our talk with Adda Manganna.

First, though, he called Krill Hvensor, and asked him whether this newly arrived Virian was an independent being, or whether he was likely to be still under the control of the Vulcanid monsters.

"He is a true Virian, Leo Arabin," replied Krill Hvensor solemnly. "Of that I am sure. He is of the same family as myself some generations back and I can see his mind and think with his mind at some times."

He referred to the remarkable ability of members of the same family to practise telepathy. We should have to accept the fact, Leo whispered to me. Adda Manganna, Krill Hvensor explained, was not one of the Receptor class of Virians, but had been solely occupied in working with the Nagani. Consequently, although he had seen many Terrestrial humans, he had never had the opportunity of learning their languages.

When he was called in, Krill Hvensor translated for him. There were many gaps in the translation, for, Krill Hvensor insisted, many Virian thought concepts were that and nothing more, and could not be put into Terrestrial language. The conversation was remarkable, too, for its long silences, during which, I gathered, the two Virians were communing silently on a telepathic plane.

The gist of Adda Manganna's message was that the Nagani envoys were here for the purpose of discussing the sharing of our world with us. They came in peace — although, Krill Hvensor whispered, they were well able to destroy us even more effectively than the comparatively clumsy Vulcanids. If the word was "No," they would retire, but, if they did, they would destroy their own race. Their numbers had never been great, and now there were something under half a million of them, divided between Vulcan and the Lunar base. There were a few other very small outposts, including one on Jupiter's second satellite, one on Mars, and one, consisting of an allied species, on Venus.

Leo interrupted Krill Hvensor's discourse. "Ask him what happened to the Vulcanids on Hafna," he urged. "How many are left? Why are these specimens of them here now? What is to happen to the Vulcanids now on Earth?"

Krill Hvensor bowed, and turned towards Adda Manganna. There was little talk but much gesticulation.

"There are no Vulcanids remaining on Hafna, Leo Arabin," the Virian said slowly. "The Nagani, who have always hated them as alien beings akin to a plague, have destroyed all' of them on that world, and at the Lunar base."

"Then how many are left, besides those here now?" Leo persisted. "Go on, Krill Hvensor.  See that he answers truly."

Krill Hvensor winced, and Leo at once apologised, for the Virians were proud of the fact that, now that they were freed of Vulcanid control, they were unable to lie.

There were no further Vulcanids in the Solar System — at least, none that the Nagani had been able to locate, we learnt.

Leo leaned across to me. "If this is true," he declared, "it explains why the Vulcanids have been so eager to come to this world. If they're on the run from the Nagani, it seems that this world would be the only place left for them. They must have smuggled some of their number aboard that Disc at Primswood in the hope of preserving their race."

Krill Hvensor was impatient to proceed with the information he had received from Adda Manganna. Leo motioned him to continue.

"Adda Manganna wishes you to know," he went on, "that the Nagani are willing to offer proof of their good will. They will leave a dozen of their number here, to be at the disposal of Axel Bjornstrom. The doctor may examine them, dissect them, do anything he wishes with them to assure you that they are not an evil race. Indeed, I myself know that the Nagani are an industrious, decent race. Their need of a new world, is even more urgent than is the Vulcanids. They are not of a corrupt substance, as are the Vulcanids... What is your word, Leo Arabin?"

But Adda Manganna waved him to silence, and spoke a few words to Krill Hvensor. Then the newcomer repeated some sounds pronounced by Krill Hvensor, and leaned across the table to us, smiling.  In halting English, he spoke to us.

"Words from Krill Hvensor, I learn, so that I can say this," he beamed. "As more proof the Nagani peaceful, they bring gift." He nodded swiftly, and then hurried from the room and out of the house. As we watched him cross the park to the Disc, Leo shook his head. "This'll be it!" he murmured. "Now he'll turn a regiment of bloody jellyfish loose on us."

I tried to reason with him, for I had been deeply impressed by the new Virian.

A few minutes later, as we watched through binoculars, we caught our breath. Four Virians had emerged from the lower hatch of the Disc. They dragged four immense but lightly built crates behind them. They were followed by five other Virians — females, this time — driving — sheep!

It was like a miniature procession from Noah's Ark, for with the sheep were several dogs, wagging their tails furiously, and four horses!

Adda Manganna strode proudly to the door and called us out. He drew us towards the four great crates lying on the grass, and as we approached them, the Virians tending them flung back the lids, and released flight after flight of birds!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

From the windows of our home facing the park went up a shout that could have been heard across the river, as, with a rush of wings, birds seemed to be all around us. Even Leo was halted in his doubts, and as for me, well, I am not ashamed to admit that I was laughing and crying at the same time. It was some moments before I realised that somebody was clutching my arm with both hands and sobbing silently. I looked down and saw Lucille, tears running down her face as she smiled rapturously.

"La vie se rendre chez nous" she whispered. "Tout ira bien, maintenant..."

"Grace a Dieu! Lucille," I murmured.

If the Nagani had spent a lifetime in finding a means of ensuring a friendly reception from us, they could not have done better. They had brought back to us some of our own creatures — few enough, alas! but nevertheless an adequate start towards restocking the world with life.

We saw no Nagani. The little creatures had the good sense  — perhaps intuition is the better word — to allow our people to accustom themselves to the arrival of the animals and birds. Then, after half an hour or so, Adda Manganna came and spoke in a low voice to Leo. I did not hear what he said, nor did I hear Krill Hvensor's translation, but I understood in a moment, for Leo called me over.

"Do we want to talk with the Nagani in our own surroundings?" he asked me. "Or shall we meet them inside the Disc?"

I looked around at the crowd of our people, busy rounding up the drove of animals that had suddenly appeared among them. It would be possible, I supposed, to have them return to the house and then have the Nagani spokesmen conducted there in more or less of secrecy. It would be possible, but it would be unkind, under the present circumstances.

So I nodded in the direction of the Disc.

As we walked through the thick grass to the great black shape before us, Leo grasped my arm. "I'm still not entirely satisfied," he whispered.

Before we could talk further, we were at the lower hatch, and Adda Manganna was ushering us inside. Close behind us came Krill Hvensor and Axel, who had attached himself to us. Leo tried to wave him back, but he insisted on coming in with us.   And before the hatchway slid back into place behind us, Lucille had wriggled through.

"I shall stay wit' you," she insisted. There was nothing I could do about it, as the sliding door was now closed. In any case, as I had come to realise, there was rarely anything I could ever do about it once she had made up her mind. Not that she often made a wrong decision... but I am wandering from the point.

Inside the Disc, instead of gloom and darkness, we found a soft light everywhere Its source was puzzling until I noticed that the illumination came from the walls of the narrow winding passage we were in. Fluorescent wallpaper had been a novelty in London twelve or fifteen years before, but now we were used to it This light, though, was much stronger, and, as we later had proof, could be regulated by adjusting a small wheel sunk in the wall every few yards.

The passage wound upwards, and we passed a number of doors leading from it. Most of them were no more than three feet high, and were obviously for use by the Nagani.

Adda Manganna (Leo would refer to him as "Anna Magnana"  — an Italian film star of the old days of flat moving pictures —  but he acknowledged this name as well as his own) opened a door for us and we found ourselves in a hexagonal room, with a thickly carpeted floor and upholstered low benches running round three sides of a table. Even though the ceiling of the room was high enough for us — and I stand an inch over six feet tall — the rest of the furnishings were on a small scale, and the table was about eighteen inches high.

As we sat down, Krill Hvensor, interpreting, asked us whether we were ready to see the Nagani.

I may have given the impression that we entertained fear of seeing these creatures. If so, the reader must forgive me. Our solicitation was all for the rest of our people who had never seen one of this race before. This was necessary, as we often found later, before our people got thoroughly accustomed to the remarkable fact that a race of beings with even more intelligence than ourselves should look so animal. And, to make matters more difficult still, they had the look of the sort of animal one only sees in nightmares. The Nagani are well known among us now, but at that time, the first sight of one was a shock to the senses..

The fact that they were unable to converse by sounds produced by any sort of larynx, too, was disturbing to us. Their reactions are, of course, totally alien to humanity. I know they have a sense of humour, but they never laugh. On the other hand, their mobile faces portray a host of emotions which they probably never feel. They claim that this mobility of countenance is as much a useless relic of their prehistoric past as are toenails in the case of humans, and they are very likely right, at that.

One factor partly reassured us at first, and partly shocked us. That was the clothing they wore. We were encouraged to think of them as civilised beings because they wore clothing, and yet at the same time we were shocked as one would be shocked by seeing a dog in a tailor-made suit. We realised that the clothing served a protective purpose rather than a fashionable end, and that their highly sensitive outer surface must be covered to avoid dangerous shock to their systems.

But all this will seem very strange to the reader, who is as familiar with the Nagani as he is with his own race by now. However, I mention it to give some idea of our first reactions to proximity with these creatures. And so I return to my narrative.

Arabin nodded, and Adda Manganna left us. A few minutes later he returned, and he was not alone.

We tried our best to avoid any display of shock as the tremendously dignified little figure of a Nagani took its place on a low stool at the vacant end of the table.

A few seconds later, two more of the small figures entered, bearing a flat case, with a handle at each end. They placed this on the table and opened it before leaving.

The Nagani reached inside and drew out a long transparent flexible cord, with a flat disc at the end. Guided by Adda Manganna, we accepted similar cords, and under his instruction placed them to our foreheads. At first, the impression each of us received — as I checked later — was of a whirling blaze of colours, which became brighter and more visible as we closed our eyes. The nearest comparable sensation I had experienced before was the sudden and crazy flow of incomprehensible figures and colours one sees during the early stages of anaesthetisation.

I watched the others, and suddenly saw that the transparent cord held by Axel had changed from a pale green texture to an opaque white. The face of Axel changed comparably, from blank amazement to sudden comprehension.

He looked round at us quickly. "The pineal eye!" he shot out. "Is the pineal eye — 'here, top of nose, like I show you —  that sees these things!"

I shifted my disc to a spot above my nose, and at once saw not only Axel's thoughts, but those of the Nagani and those of the rest of us. It seemed as though two clear pictures moved against a vivid, confused background. Then, as the others finally adjusted their apparatus, the pictures merged into one and the background became neutral.

We know now, of course, that it is impossible to reproduce the vision seen by means of the Nagani tele-mentor. And it is almost as impracticable to reduce it to the written word. The instrument conveys pure thought, and each person, while accepting and appreciating that thought, sees and construes it in a different manner. However, in the case of constructive thought, there is a strong resemblance between the vision "seen" by one person and that comprehended by another. That was so in this case.

For my part, in the course of a few minutes — although it seemed like hours — I learnt that the Nagani had reached our world as the last possible stage in their search for a home that could support their form of life.

It is difficult, but I will try to translate the thoughts I received. Sometimes I saw events happening before me as I closed my eyes, sometimes I heard a sonorous voice in my mind, sometimes I actually felt sensations — sensations of heat, cold, tension, hope, dismay — and sometimes I simply knew, without knowing how I knew.

For what seemed like a long, long period of time, I was back on Vulcan, though it was a Vulcan I had never seen before. This was Hafna, and not the world named after the old Roman god that we had known. It was an alien world, and yet I seemed familiar with it, thanks to the mind of the Nagani exercising the tele-mentor for me.

I saw bleak, gloomy landscapes in the semi-darkness of a dying world, the sun a mere tiny spot low over the rocky horizon. The sturdy pyramidical buildings were inhabited, I knew, and I found myself inside one of them. Around me were Nagani  — a family of them, I knew. And over the family hung a dreadful fear of something in another part of the building. The fear became crystallised as I saw, in another room, one of the obscene creatures we now knew as Vulcanids. But I knew in my mind that they were Hafnarigi, for "Vulcan" and its distinguishing proper name had no place here.

With the Nagani I worked through what seemed long years, building, excavating, providing the underground world in which we ourselves had later lived.

And although the Hafnarigi had closed their minds to the Nagani, I was aware of the incredible depths of their knowledge. From time to time, new awareness came into my mind, as though the intelligences of the Hafnarigi had planted it there for their own purpose. Thus, with the Nagani, I learnt that we must find a means of leaving the fated planet Hafna to search the Solar System for a more kindly world — but a more kindly world for the Hafnarigi.

As ages seemed to pass, I went with the Nagani in their Disc ships, from world to world. I died a thousand times as catastrophe struck again and again and the experimental Discs were either destroyed in space or shot off in an irrecoverable orbit into the farthest depths of the universe.

I shared the triumphs and the terrors of the little people, and joined in their sorrow when at last the men and women of Ama-Viri fell captive to the Hafnarigi. And, most wonderful of all, I saw dimly the past of the Virian world, and realised that its peoples were of the same stock as are Terrestrial humanity.

I experienced the consuming devotion to craftsmanship of all kinds that is the one guiding feature of Nagani life — the one feature that saved them as a race and consoled them while they remained under the Hafnarigi spell.

Sometimes I seemed to be a Virian slave of the Hafnarigi, sometimes a Nagani, either enslaved or freed, for I went through the oddly unemotional period of freedom that the Hafnarigi at last gave to the Nagani once the Virians were subjugated to their will.

And I understood, or seemed to understand for a fleeting second, the reason why the powerful little Nagani had not exterminated the Hafnarigi ages ago. In their minds was an odd sense of pity that the great uncouth, barely mobile monsters should be condemned to the life they led.

Then there flared up in me a sudden resolution to be quit of the Hafnarigi, to leave them on their dying planet. With this came the knowledge that no other planet would receive me, for I was utterly alien to all other forms of life in the Solar System. There was a deep flow of patient reasoning running through all these thoughts and sensations, and I knew that the Nagani must await their time for departure. I also knew that such a time would inevitably come in the course of the ages.

As time went on, there were sudden leaps, it seemed, from one age to another. Progress and knowledge would advance, and then there would be an age of darkness when life appeared to stand still or even retrogress. But slowly, slowly, I came nearer to a present time that I seemed to have always lived in, and I found myself with the Nagani at their Lunar base. With them, I kept long observation on their system of warning devices tuned in to Earth.  Suddenly, there was alarm and fear.

Somewhere on Earth a gigantic cataclysm had taken place. Then the reactions died down, and the Nagani regained some of their confidence. But in a short time, a quick chain of reactions on their instruments showed that the cataclysm had struck again and again on Earth.

I construed this as the series of atomic explosions that took place after 1945. Axel, however, saw it in quite a different light, as he told me afterwards. He was convinced that the reactions referred to the steadily increasing decay of human intellect.

However that may be — and I am positive that my supposition was the right one — I continued to share in the experiences of the Nagani until they became terrified by the new aggressive spirit shown by the Hafnarigi. The mass mind in which I shared realised that the time must come soon when the two races must separate.

Then came another disaster on Earth — this time there was no doubt as to its nature. It was the premature explosion of Professor Vogel's thorium bomb. The stereo-link pictures showed me that the planet Earth — I had been thinking of it as Fahan — had rid itself of the tiny parasites I recognised as mankind.

The pictures became confused, as the recipients each injected something of his or her own thoughts into the apparatus. Lucille was quietly weeping, and she gently dropped the hand in which she had held the receiver of the tele-mentor.

The pattern changed swiftly and often. At one moment I was surrounded by hurrying small figures in the partially sunken air-locked buildings on the Moon's remote surface; at another I was on Hafna, working in the vast dark breeding grounds of the Hafharigi. Then for a fleeting second I was staring into a stereo-link cavity at a group of Terrestrials, and as the three-dimensional picture flashed off, I recognised Arabin, Ludlam and Karim.

I heard in my mind the silent telepathic orders of the Hafnarigi to my kind: orders not instilled automatically as was the case of the Virians, but passed to me urgently. I knew that as one of the Nagani I did not have to obey them, but the habit of generations led us to comply. The orders shrilled more and more loudly as the urgency of the moment approached, and I was caught up in a great hastening campaign directed at leaving the planet.

Suddenly the orders of the Hafnarigi were pushed into the background of my mind as another pattern of thought overlaid them. The time of freedom had come — the time for leaving the monsters of Hafna, the time our race had awaited for thousands of patient years, was at hand. We would leave the planet Hafna, but the Hafnarigi would stay, entombed in a dead world.

And entombed they were, for I now knew that the Nagani, in building that underground world, had so built it that it could be hermetically sealed by a series of simple operations.

Over a period of I do not know how long, I watched the Nagani remove every one of their race to their Lunar base. I shared in their hopes that the world Fahan — our own Earth  — would support them, and I shared in their fears that the rightful owners — ourselves — might defend the planet against the alien race.

In the great black Disc in which we now sat — I was sure it was the same — I cruised with the Nagani over Fahan, scanning continents that were dead, wondering at the life that remained in the oceans, fervently hoping for a foothold for my race. I even saw our own work going ahead bravely in the tiny circle of activity that was London.

Then the Nagani, I was shown, saw the emergence of the foul Hafnarigi from the Disc in which they had stowed away. From what seemed immeasureable distance, for the images before me now shimmered as a telescopic image shimmers in hot weather, I watched the battle between ourselves and the Vulcanids. And I learnt with considerable horror that the great creatures had spread themselves far more widely than we had supposed. I saw them not in scores, but in hundreds, slowly creeping their way across England.

I learnt how they had cunningly fooled us by drawing our attention to one small colony of themselves, while other branches of their family multiplied unseen in other districts.

The pictures finished.

We sat back in what seemed darkness, so bright and lasting had been the impressions conveyed into our minds by the tele-mentor. And we were left with one last great mind-filling thought — the question: Was the world to be owned by the Vulcanids, or by humanity and the Nagani?

The story had been put to us factually, with no emotional overtones. Now, we knew, it was left to us to decide.

If the tele-mentor had conveyed a true image, we were doomed without the help of the Nagani, for, we knew, they alone held the secret of annihilating the Hafnarigi.

My chain of thought was disturbed by Leo. His voice came as something of a shock, after the purely internal mental images that had occupied us for what seemed so long.

"I want to ask a lot of questions," he whispered, and his voice sounded strangely cracked. "We must know more than this."

Adda Manganna whispered something to Krill Hvensor, who motioned to Arabin to replace his tele-mentor receiver. "We must ask our questions singly," he said.

"First: where did the Vulcanids originate?" asked Leo, when we had all replaced our receivers.

Again came the confusing patterns of thoughts, until each of us had come into the circuit, as it were.

Slowly there formed a vague shining blur in our minds, which crystallised into pinpoints of light that circled slowly before us. Axel murmured in recognition, and his thought was instantly conveyed to us. We were looking at the constellation Orion.

The grouping of the stars suddenly widened, and the pinpoints of light became infinitely brighter, as the mind of the directing Nagani took us swirling towards the constellation. In a few seconds it lost its shape completely and we were through it — or we had approached so closely as to throw it out of perspective. On and on we seemed to spin, until a great whirling mass floated before us.

Again, as we came nearer to it, the diffused light of the nebula separated and hardened into individual specks, which in turn, grew and blazed in our minds.

Then our thoughts centred upon one bright star round which circled a score or more of planets. We gazed at this for some minutes, and then realised that the Nagani knowledge went no further than this.

"From a satellite planet of some star in the nebula in Orion," murmured Axel. "We should be no wiser if we saw it more closely."

Leo breathed a sigh that sounded like relief. "It's curious," he said, "but I feel comforted to know that they were not from our own System."

"Another question," said Leo. "What... what happened to the humans we knew on Hafna?"

There was a pause, and then we had the impression of a curtain falling, followed by — nothing. This impression I find that I cannot translate into words. But somehow we experienced a feeling of inevitability, and a freeing of troubles — an impression of merging into the whole unguessable scheme of the Universe. There were no regrets, there was no anguish. One moment there was consciousness, and the next — nothing.

Lucille dropped her receiver. "I would ask something," she said. Leo nodded to her, and she replaced her receiver.

"The animals," she whispered. "Where are they from? Are there more?"

We saw ourselves in one of the giant black Discs again, spinning idly over a patch of Terrestrial countryside in twilight. It was either dusk or dawn — we could not tell. Below us we saw animals grazing, and, through the mind of the Nagani, we suddenly felt a great kinship with the living creatures below us. They did not stand to us in the relation, say, that a household pet stands to a human family. They were more to us than that. They were creatures isolated from their masters through lack of any common point of understanding. Yet we knew that we could understand them, and they us. We felt something of the spirit of a schoolboy who steals an apple from a tree, a combination of mischief and of the knowledge that what we were taking would be of more immediate use to us than to the owner. We saw the amazed creatures swept up into our craft; we saw them housed in strange new quarters at the Lunar base. We knew that they were not there as, in days gone by, animals had been kept in zoological collections, but more as participants of a way of life we could not understand. More than pets, more than objects of curiosity, but how much more, our inability to fathom the recesses of the Nagani mind kept from us.

That last factor also resulted in only a blurred picture being received when I asked how and where the Nagani would live if they shared our world with us. There was a bold upsurge of hope in our spirits — for we were thinking with the Nagani mind — and then a feeling of fulfilment, of gigantic industry, of incomparable craftsmanship bestowed on articles of incredible beauty. But concrete images — no. We did, however, agree later, that we had each had an impression of work.

I could continue for many pages with the attempt to describe our reactions to the images we saw and experienced. But it would only be a poor attempt at best, for we were left with impressions rather than knowledge. As we pooled our experiences later, we found that we were of a common mind to accept the Nagani.

The hours of conference with the rest of our colony, too, I will omit. There were some who distrusted the Nagani, but they had not yet gone through our experiences of revelation. A few were openly rebellious, but the final count of hands showed that the overwhelming majority were for admitting the strange little creatures to our world.

But first, we agreed, only one hundred would come. They would live alongside us, and if, after a month, they had become accepted, others should follow until the whole of their race — or what remained of it — should participate in a common life with us.

The Nagani themselves accepted these terms, although they could easily and swiftly have taken the whole of our world for themselves. They planned to set up their colonies in some of the great industrial cities, which they would adapt for their needs.

The whole history of the Nagani migration to Earth is now known to every child, of course, and there is little point in my describing the vast movement.

I must, however, give some consideration to an incident that distressed us greatly. In time to come, its repercussions may have incalculable effect upon the people of Earth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Some ten or twelve days after our first understanding with the Nagani envoys, Thomas Ludlam began to recover somewhat from the shocking wound inflicted upon him by the renegade Virian. Axel had treated him with every care, but had been unable to apply the anti-biotic treatments that had flourished towards the end of my time on Earth. He had been unable to make satisfactory cultures of penicillin or of any of its associated moulds and derivatives, and had preferred to treat Thomas by older and slower methods.

The old man's wonderful constitution helped to bring him to the point of convalescence much more quickly than we had hoped, but he was still unable to move the upper part of his body, and lay in a plaster cast. The least movement caused him agony as his breathing was accelerated, and he took this immobility very hardly.

Within a fortnight of his wound, he expressed a mild desire to see his own village again, and Leo and I reproached ourselves bitterly for having failed to give him a glimpse of his ancient home before this, and at once set about arranging his transport to Oxted, where he had spent his boyhood. Thomas had been almost a year back on Earth, and had been sojourning not more than thirty miles from his village, and we had never even told him that he was so near his home. Truth to tell, we had forgotten that he was a Surrey man, and Thomas himself had patiently and unselfishly bided the time when he could, in his own words, ask for a few days' leave.

We drove out, an ambulance to the farm, and tore the roof off the vehicle so that Thomas, in his bed, could look round at the country we passed through. He lay there, his bed canted so that he could see without moving, and whispered to me, sitting beside him, of the joy he would have in going home again after so many, many years.

David Cohen, who was now our driver and conductor on all journeys of importance, had drawn me aside and warned me to prepare Thomas for the Oxted he would find. "He'll never know it," David whispered. "Since 1945 they've made it into one of them satellite towns."

We were, indeed, through the town before he recognised it. He gave a feeble gesture and pointed at an old building. "I went to school there," he whispered with difficulty. I thought he was rambling, for the building he pointed at now housed a bank, and the front had been done over in what looked like sham Tudor beams.

However, having got his bearings, Thomas had us turn off down a narrow lane running downhill, with "Brook Street" oni the sign at the top.   We trundled slowly down the hill, now lined on each side by twentieth century houses with sadly over-grown gardens, and as we turned a bend at the bottom, Thomas gave a husky moan.   There, flush with the lane, stood an old thatched cottage to our right.   David pulled up and got out, motioning to me that he would have a look round the cottage first.

While he was away, Thomas pointed to a great arch of bushes that had overgrown the unused lane. "There's the brook," he whispered. "I always hoped to catch a fish there, but never did. Not deep enough." He shook his head, and his lined old face, tough though it was, seemed to crumple for a moment.

David had got back by now, and he ran us down to the brook. Old Thomas turned his head and peered into the mass of foliage, long untrimmed and uncared for, that sheltered the tiny stream at the little bridge.

"Nobody in the house," David mouthed silently to me. "Take him in, if you like, eh?"

We took Thomas in, four of us carrying his bed through the wide old door, and laid him down in room after room. He was so regretful at returning to Primswood, that I resolved to have him brought down here for a time, with someone to look after him.

The upshot was that next day, Thomas returned to his old home. "I'll get better in no time at all here," he assured us with a wan smile.

With him we left a handful of people, but no Virians. We could not calculate the psychological effect members of that race might have on Thomas, so we sent with him half a dozen people who could be spared for a time. There were a couple of women — they were mother and daughter — and four Europeans. Two of these latter were British, and two Belgian, but each was a friend of Thomas's. Although Thomas himself got on well with the two Britons, I cannot say that the rest of us felt much affection for them. They had been looked on for some time as potential trouble-makers, being greatly given to argument, especially along political lines.

This fact was not surprising, I suppose, for both had bees active in party politics at one time.

For the sake of the record, I must detail more about these two individuals. There was, firstly, Lawrence Baggot, a powerfully built Yorkshireman who had been fanatically devoted to a certain political — or pseudo-political — party. There can be no point in my naming the party, for such matters will have no place in the coming Terrestrial civilisation, we hope. Baggot, then, had been something of a figurehead in his own small world, and it was one of his idiosyncracies that he should be called not Lawrence, but Lal. Such abbreviations of one's Christian name, it seems, had been one of the hallmarks of his associates. It was his practice, too, to abbreviate the names of others in this manner, but when he started to refer to Dr. Axel Bjornstrom as "Ax" we persuaded him to use more discretion.

The other Englishman was Cartwright Vincent, who, I must admit, was a considerable loafer. We had been able to persuade him to do little in the way of useful work, and had used great efforts to find some occupation that would at once, keep him occupied and keep the rest of our community amiably disposed towards him. His Terrestrial occupation, he told us when we recorded such information for our own use, had been that of "philanthropic worker." More than that we could never elicit from him.

With these two we left the Belgians as some sort of occupational compensation. Both of these were devoted to old Thomas, and one of them, Marcel Vlamertinghe, enjoyed the distinction of being enamoured of one of the women we left.

It was the mother at whom he set his cap; the daughter, I fear, was a feckless and half-witted creature, poor girl.

That, then, is an outline of the household we established for Thomas at his cottage in Oxted. We left them happily setting about the task of making the place habitable and returned to London as it grew dusk.

During this time we had not yet received the advance party of the Nagani who were to come. We expected them to arrive in possibly another week's time, so had some opportunity of planning their reception in the meantime.

Two nights after we had left Thomas at Oxted, a curious thing happened.

We had constantly kept watch on the eighteen Vulcanids at Primswood Place, and there had been no sign of activity among them, except for the occasional flutter of their sensitive head fringes. The Nagani had warned us to leave them unmolested until they returned in force, bringing the means of dealing with the great creatures.

The event I am about to record shocked us with its significance when we realised its full import.

The first news we had of anything unusual was a call on the radio from the guard at Primswood Place.

The Vulcanids were moving swiftly away from the stationary Disc they had stood by for so long, he called breathlessly.

At first we welcomed the news. During the time when we might have been idly watching these monsters, we had built an electrified fence round them, and they could not escape, we were sure. But we had overlooked the obvious way of escape for them — the Disc.

However, as all eighteen of the creatures were now heading for the corner of the large compound we had erected round them, we gave little thought to the Disc itself, until...

There was a hiss, a flash and a roar, and the Disc had spun across the compound and shot off in a vertical trajectory out into the darkness.

By this time, a large party had turned out to watch the Vulcanids cornered by the electrified fence, and we stood in shocked amazement as the glowing slots round the edge of the Disc rapidly became smaller as it shot upwards.

Axel had the answer to the question we were all asking ourselves. "They have multiplied again!" he shouted excitedly. "Eighteen they have always kept in sight, but how many more are in the Disc by now? They have fooled us yet!"

The spotters who always remained on duty at a scanner in the Downland grounded Discs soon came in with their report, and we learnt that the escaped Disc had continued in a vertical direction until they had lost it on their screens.

Soon another report came in. They had picked up the Disc again, this time many miles to the south, still rising. By daylight, they had lost and found it a dozen times, until at last they acknowledged that it had disappeared, probably rounding the horizon so that it would no longer register on our apparatus.

The day went without the Disc appearing on our screens again. Ten of the Vulcanids were destroyed by our fence, but the remaining eight steadfastly refused to approach the fence.

That night, the watching Virians announced that they had caught a faint reaction on their equipment — not on their scanning screens, but on sensitive radio-sonic receivers. There was a Disc, and almost certainly a Vulcanid Disc rather than one of the giant Nagani craft, somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood, they were sure. But wherever it was, it had placed itself out of reach of the scanners.

This could mean that it was coasting low, out of range of the scanners. We were anxious for many hours, for the receivers constantly showed a reaction.   Somewhere near us, we knew, was a Disc containing the monstrous Vulcanids.

Then we received a clue.

Our hourly radio call to Thomas at Oxted received no answer.

Within minutes we had set our for Oxted by auto-gyro. And inside half an hour from our first alarm we had set the machine down in a field two or three hundred yards from the cottage.

As we landed and stepped out, we heard the familiar hiss of a Disc taking off, and as the roar of its acceleration came to our ears it had hurtled upwards.

At the same moment we got the call from our scanners ten miles away that they had caught the Disc on their screens again. We watched the Disc shoot skywards, in despair. Its nearness to this little outpost could only mean that the Vulcanids had been trying to tamper with our people here.

There were four of us, Leo, myself, and two others, and we took a last look as the Disc became a small glowing circle miles above our heads. Then we rushed through the rank grass to the cottage, dreading what we expected to find.

The seven people at the cottage had been unarmed against Vulcanids, save for three or four fire-guns, which could not be of much use' if the monsters used their normal guile.

The cottage door was open, and as we ran inside we caught a glimpse of Thomas lying in his cast by the window. I reached him first, but it was too late.

The good old man was dead, and he lay there with a smile on his wrinkled face, his eyes still gazing through the window at the brook. He had not been attacked, we felt sure, and he bore no signs of any struggle.

I cannot describe our feelings at this tragedy. Thomas was the sole cause for our Return to Earth, and we could bear his loss less than the loss of each one of us as an individual. We had one consolation: we were sure he had died naturally.

We had proof of this belief a few moments later. On the table in the room lay a sheet of paper, covered with the bold handwriting of Baggot. His message to us planted a new fear in the hearts of the human race. I reproduce it here.

"This is to Leo Arabin, from Lawrence Baggot," it started. "I am to tell you and your brutal kind that you are to lose the opportunity of harbouring the entire Vulcanid race. You will be left with those who choose to stay here on this planet. The rest have left you for ever. I am chosen for the glorious task of aiding them in their new life, and I am taking with me five of your people from this place. Together, we and the Intelligences will found a new world. With the knowledge given to me by my comrades, the Hafnarigi, I shall take their ship to that new world, and I shall build a new race of humans, to live and work side by side with the Intelligences. I am to tell you, also, that some day we of my race may return, for you will surely be punished for your massacre of the Intelligences."

Leo looked dumbly at the message. Then he snatched the microphone of his transmitter from the pocket on his shoulder, and called savagely into it.

"Scanners! Scanners!" he snapped. "Plot me that Disc —  quickly — at once!"

In a few seconds, back came the call from the scanners on the Downs.

"Disc now approximately eight hundred miles at nine o'clock," the Virian whispered. "We have coupled our scanners for remote plotting. Disc is proceeding on a course now. There has been no variation in its direction or speed for seven minutes. We will keep its course recorded."

Leo snapped the switch off.

"Looks as though they've beaten us on that move," he groaned. "Now our main worry is — where are they heading for?"

I picked up the message he had dropped. It was obvious from its context that the Vulcanids, by some means, had regained control of one human mind, at least. What would that mean for those who were left behind? Our only hope was the speedy arrival of the Nagani. We must trust to their superior intelligence to rid us of the remainder of the Vulcanids.

I appreciated Leo's problem, nevertheless. Even assuming that the Nagani could destroy the remaining Vulcanids on this planet, there was now the nucleus of another colony of them somewhere in the Universe;

We turned our minds, with some difficulty, to the question of what had happened to the other captives of the Vulcanids. A search of the cottage showed that they had left with little or no preparation.

"That's a good sign, at least," sighed Leo. "It may mean that they won't survive in that Disc. They must have food. Oh, I know the Vulcanids can live on fresh air or some such bloody nonsense, but I'm thinking of those poor souls they've kidnapped now. They'll have to eat. Let's see if they've taken any food."

They had. Everything in the little larder had gone.

Baggott, it now appeared, had made his own arrangements for the exodus, before compelling — for we liked to think that he must have used compulsion — the others to accompany him on his evil mission.

By now, we feared, the other five would have fallen back into the mental control of the Vulcanids.

The rest of that day seemed like a nightmare. We buried poor Thomas in the garden of his cottage, and returned sadly to London.

By nightfall, when a conference had been called, we learnt of the escaped Disc's destination. The scanners had plotted its course, and Krill Hvensor presented us with the charts they had prepared.

Straight ahead on the Disc's course, a small point was marked in red. Our ten known planets were marked in blue on an elliptical orbit. As we compared the charts before us, we saw that on each one the disc was heading for the red spot.

"The red mark," said Krill Hvensor heavily, "shows the position at which the Disc, moving at its present speed, will coincide with the orbital position of the planet Varang-Varang."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Nagani Disc, with its first alien settlers, had arrived seven days before our scanners finally lost the renegade Disc. "It has entered the invisibility belt of Varang-Varang," announced Krill Hvensor. "No more shall we see it."

It was the Nagani, aided by the vocal chords of the Virians, who elucidated the theory of Varang-Varang's invisibility, had long been known on Hafna, and on Ama-Viri, that the planet Varang-Varang had assembled a cloak of invisibility around itself, but only within the last few centuries had the Nagani astronomers on Hafna learnt how and why. Even then, their knowledge was largely surmise. They had known Varang-Varang through many thousands of years, and then, in a comparatively short period of time, it had withdrawn itself from their view.

Their instruments had continued to detect its presence, but not by visual means. Then, as the centuries progressed, they had perfected a device which, at distances within the Solar System, was able to detect the presence of intellect. Thus they had confirmed their belief that Varang-Varang still existed, and that life continued thereon. Later still, they had observed spectroscopically an unknown belt of radiation from the direction of the invisible planet. Years of investigation showed that this was produced by a hitherto unknown element in the atmosphere of the blacked-out planet — an element, they were sure, that had been introduced by the inhabitants of Varang-Varang for the purpose of concealing their world.

So gradually as to be almost imperceptible, the cloak of invisibility had expanded, due to the dissemination of the new element beyond the planet's atmosphere, and by the present day this obscuring element had reached out many thousands of miles into space.

Thousands of years before, the Nagani and the Ama-Virians had attempted commerce with the inhabitants of Varang-Varang, but their envoys had been butchered, and only rarely had a space-ship returned to its base. Consequently, no new attempts at direct communication had been made. The planet had been kept under observation, and as much as possible had been learnt about it, but that was little enough.

Baggott's flight in that direction with the Terrestrials and an unknown number of newly-bred Vulcanids aroused the suspicion that the Vulcanids themselves must have maintained some sort of contact with the minds of Varang-Varang throughout the centuries.

The Nagani, though, were confident that the inhabitants of the invisible world had as yet no means of space travel, so their presence in the Solar System aroused no immediate fear. Later, though — and the time might be close at hand — there would always be the risk that the Vulcanids might hand on to them the secret of their Discs. Even now, as I write this with an interval of three years between the settling of the Nagani on Earth and "today," men are wondering how long they have to wait before the beast-men of Varang-Varang launch their attack.

The Nagani's first care, after considering the flight of the Baggott party, was to eliminate the surviving Vulcanids from Earth. Methodically they set about the task, the nature of which was at first obscure to humanity. For nearly a month they surveyed Europe, flying low in their great black Discs, of which they had brought some eighty from the Lunar base.

Then the whole fleet departed suddenly in a southerly direction. Two months later they returned, and simultaneous with the return we had an inkling of their purpose. At first the results of their work went unnoticed, and then it became plain that something was happening to the weather.

The skies, which had been heavily overcast for some days, took on an orange glow, and the air carried a distinct trace of sulphur fumes. Day by day the phenomenon increased, until at the end of a fortnight it was difficult to see more than a few hundred yards at midday.

Our first inquiries of the Nagani had met with courteous refusal of an explanation, and then at the end of three weeks the secret was out. During their absence they had tampered with every active volcano in Europe. With the aid of their tele-mentor equipment they showed us Etna, Stromboli, Vesuvius, and half a dozen other long-forgotten mountain menaces in full eruption. Whole countrysides were devastated, and their scanning screens — much larger than those of the smaller Discs to which we were accustomed — relayed to us from the Lunar base a picture of the northern hemisphere veiled in thick orange cloud.

They showed us mentally the reaction of Vulcanid life to this heavily charged atmosphere. The subtle change in the composition of the atmosphere carried poison for the cells constituting Vulcanid life, according to the tele-mentor evidence. We could only hope that this was completely true of every Vulcanid, for of course the tele-mentor could only show us thoughts and not actual incidents. And we had ourselves seen that the Vulcanids could achieve astounding mutations within their own species. Who knew, we reasoned, whether they might not even find a means of combating the poisoned atmosphere?

But the Nagani were confident, superbly confident. Had they possessed active volcanoes on Hafna, they insisted, they would long centuries ago have' exterminated the Vulcanids.

We had to be content with their promise, and awaited the clearing of the atmosphere. For weeks the orange cloud hung heavy over the face of the Earth, and then six months later we saw the first break in the clouds. It came none too soon, for the weeks of heavy, depressing, sulphur-laden atmosphere were telling on our colony. The Nagani withstood it easily, but the poison and the psychological misery were affecting the humans and Virians badly.

Day by day, though, after that first rift in the dull cloud, the sun shone for increased periods. At last, some eight months after the Nagani experiment, the last traces of sulphur seemed to have left England, at least.

Then came the hunt for the Vulcanids. In Nagani piloted Discs we scoured the face of Britain, and our find was staggering. In the high places we sighted not a few dozen, but thousand upon thousand of the evil monsters from Hafna.

Every one, though, was dead.

There seemed to have been a variation in their reactions to the sulphur-charged air, for we found many who had been dead no more than a few weeks. They lay stiff and starkly green where they had fallen. Others, though, were black with the corruption of months.

But we found not one living Vulcanid.

They had made for the high, open places when the plague of sulphur overtook them, and there they lay, strewn across mountain tops, straggling along the Pennines and the Pilgrim's Way, and dotted here and there wherever there was any considerable rise in the land.

The clearing of them would have taken years, but the Nagani assured us that within one year, their elements would have combined with the soil.  This, happily, we found to be correct.

Although there seemed little doubt that any of the monsters could have survived, from that day forward Vulcanid hunting patrols were instituted. So far, I am relieved to be able to state, the patrols have brought nothing but negative reports.

There is little need for me to report on our co-operation with the Nagani. As the years have passed, we have seen that there is room for both races — Nagani and human — on Earth. Their first settlements were in the vicinity of large industrial centres. Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham and Northampton were picked out by them, in consultation with Leo Arabin, and it was agreed that they should operate their peculiar alien industry there as a beginning.

Now, of course, they are established alongside us, and humanity owes an infinite debt to their skill and craftsmanship.

I should have ended my report to the future at that stage, but Lucille has insisted that I add more information about our own little colony. She believes that humanity of the future will want to know more. I disagree. My record is written as a factual, objective report on an incident of tremendous import to humanity  — the Return of Man to his own planet. Romance, I maintain, has no place in it.

Lucille, however, thinks differently, and, moreover, is so insistent that I must comply with her wishes. She is — need I explain? — my wife now, and so claims some responsibility for my work. Her theory is that my years with the Mercury, writing cold fact in the most unemotional prose, have dimmed my view of what the public wants.

She insists that I inform the future that we have three sons now. The oldest, Thomas Ludlam, is now a fluent linguist, speaking a mixture of English, French, Spanish, Swedish — and Virian. His third birthday, which falls this week, is to be marked by a party of almost cosmic proportions. For the first time in the world's history, every human inhabitant of the planet will be assembled at one small boy's birthday party.

The Nagani have made a festival of the occasion, too, and plan to present him with the most fantastic present a boy ever had — a miniature Disc, which flies perfectly and is controlled by the human voice.

Leo refused to allow us to name one of our boys after him. One Leo Arabin in the Universe at a time was enough, he wrily suggested. But I suspect there is more behind his refusal than that. For some time, now, we have had reason to believe that Leo Arabin is an assumed name, although we can only guess at his true identity. However that may be, he gladly acted as godfather to each of our children.

The other two? Jonathan Tracey is the second, and Pierre is the most recent, and is at this moment scrabbling round my feet as I type this.

In the three years since the Nagani saved us from the Vulcanids, our human colony has prospered. The farm thrives, and the stock thereon — the most widely travelled animals the world has ever seen, I have no doubt — have multiplied prolifically. It looks as though mankind has established his footing again in his old home, and we thank God for it.

We now have eighteen more human inhabitants of the world, and much thought is being given to plans for their education, for of course it will be some years before they arrive at what used to be school age.

Our next great undertaking is to be a removal of the whole colony into Kent. London, as I indicated earlier, would be an impossible home for such a small group as ours. We must first build up our numbers until we can cope with a small town, and we have sorrowfully come to the conclusion that London may be an abandoned city for many centuries before mankind has flourished sufficiently to be able to live in such a vast home.

As time goes on, the record of our small achievements and of our continued progress will be continued by many hands, for we have seen to it that the future shall not only know about the Return itself, but shall learn something of our early struggles here.

For the present, it is enough to know that Man's foot is set firmly on his native heath. What the future holds none of us may know, but now — the Now that soon will be history — we are deeply and unashamedly grateful to whatever Powers we acknowledge, for we live again. And we shall try to justify our Second Chance.

EPILOGUE

It is I, Lucille Grafton, who add these words — words which I pray may be read in the future. Indeed, if we can pray that there may be a future for this world, we must do so with all our might.

For a new chapter has opened, and Denis is not here to write it.

A month after he wrote the last words of his narrative, a terrifying thing happened. The planet Varang-Varang not only became visible for the first time in countless centuries, but its visibility showed that it had drawn nearer to us by many millions of miles. The Nagani have told us that somehow, the inhabitants of that world, no doubt aided by the Vulcanid Intelligences, have come upon the ultimate secret of the Universe — the power to shift the orbit of their world.

We have seen distinctly on the scanning screens that vessels are leaving Varang-Varang and can travel as far as the more distant of its two moons. This means that the closed book of space travel is at last an open page to whatever creatures dwell there, and we now await the time when they shall attack us.

I wrote that we await the time: we have done more than that. We have sent out the whole Nagani fleet to meet the menace. First, they will try to learn what is in the mind of the people —  if they be people — of Varang-Varang. Then they will try to establish a peaceful alliance with them. But we greatly fear that unless the nature of those beings on the one-time dark star has changed, there will be no peace to be made with them.

It is their race or ours, we feel, and so in the desperate attempt either to befriend or quell Varang-Varang, all our men have joined with the Nagani in the dreadful voyage.

We plot their course on the screens hourly. Within twenty days they should have entered the orbit of Varang-Varang. Even now their radio signals are fading.

Here on what was our newly-won world, we wait in fear, tempered with hope. If the Nagani fleet does not return, we have now, once again, the nucleus of a human population, in our children. But — what civilisation can there be for them if a whole world is pitted against them?

We can only wait — and hope. I cannot believe that this is the end.