George Mallory was out for a quiet day's shooting. A typical country-man, in typical English country. His day's sport was interrupted by the beginning of the greatest catastrophe in man's history - an alien space ship was crashing as his feet. The ghastly monstrosity that emerged was so hideously repulsive that no one would have guessed at the degree of intelligence and potential friendliness in its strange mind. Mallory shot first and asked questions afterwards. With its dying strength, the alien cursed the earth with a scientific horror beyond the comprehension of man, a horror that turned the beasts against us. The only escape seemed to lie out in space... but the devastating effect of the cosmic rays wrought havoc in the minds of the space men and the lunar expedition turned on itself in deadly carnage. What would be the outcome of the terrible conflict between man and beast?
Release date:
November 28, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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The alien was a strange looking beast. Even by the broad standards of the Galactic recognition code, it was very definitely none-U. Weird green and yellow pseudopods branched at peculiar angles from its shimmering green body. Its eyes protruded on phosphorescent stalks and its twitching horns were never completely motionless.
The alien’s name was Khgnjsdag, which didn’t really matter, except to the alien, because it was phonetically incapable of utterance. But Khgnjsdag was a satisfactory mental recognition unit, and that was all that bothered the culture to which the alien belonged. Correction; had belonged, thought the alien. There was no more Urghajh to belong to. Come to that there was no more Tugharian Galaxy to contain Urghajh. The alien’s train of lightning fast thought was interrupted by a sudden spasm of acute sadness. If it hadn’t been for the outworlders… But then, what was the use of vain regrets. The outworlders had existed, had existed with devastating reality, and in consequence there was no more Inworld. There was no more Urghajh, and worst of all there was no Tugharian Galaxy. There were no more Urghajhies, with whom Khgnjsdag could share his sorrows, and that made them proportionately more unbearable.
The philosophical side of the Alien’s mind bisected the concept slowly, logically and objectively. The clash between outworlders and inworlders had been inescapable. A perfect defence had met a perfect attack. There had been long, wearisome deadlock, and then some fool of a scientist in the Weapon Shops had perfected the Ultimate Weapon. He had been hailed at the time as the saviour of the Galaxy. Two planet revolutions later there had been no galaxy. He had certainly been its saviour insofar as he had provided a perfect solution to its problems. The ultimate weapon had been perfect in theory. In practice it had one small bug. It could not be controlled. From an estimated population of several sextillions there had been about thirty survivors. They had escaped in the last space-worthy craft. Of thirty original survivors the long term effects of the Ultimate Weapon had accounted for twenty-nine. Among those twenty-nine had been the last of the female Urghajhies so it didn’t really matter any more, as far as Khgnjsdag was concerned.
His disc flier was held together by luck, providence, and thin metal bindings that would part company at any minute. His one hope of survival, lay in finding a safe, friendly habitable planet, and finding it quickly.
He cast a last despairing look at the battered control panel and slipped the lever forward into hyperdrive position. A curious grey blackness enveloped the disc ship. They were in Deep Space. Khgnjsdag consulted the computor manual. There was supposed to be something habitable towards the rim of the 17th galaxy. The observation ships had paid it a few visits, and some of the braver spirits had even attempted a landing. He wished the manual were more explicit. He checked the course carefully and stabbed the computor keys with one of his flapping pseudopods. Somewhere amidst the hopelessly battered complexity of the patched up electronic circuits, straining wires parted company, and the grey darkness took on a purple tinge. The alien felt a slight twinge of something akin to fear, which was not really terror, but a kind of apathetic resignation. He was living on borrowed time anyway, so what the hell.
The computor clicked and chuckled away to itself in a disconcerting undertone which told him that all was by no means well, and then the disc ship was clear of Deep Space and coasting in towards its objective at a steady 50,000 ligs per ras. The alien throttled back with a pseudopod that dripped green viscous fluid. It was his sweat equivalent. The computor grunted savagely and packed up. The alien clapped its pseudopods together in a last final gesture of despair. Things were going to hell in a bucket, he decided.
The ship lurched and swayed through a clear blue sky, below were oceans, mountains, shining silver snakes that had to be rivers, because they couldn’t be anything else. This was it, decided the alien. This is my Moment of Truth. The spinning landscape grew gradually closer. The ship was behaving in the most disconcerting manner imaginable. It bucked and kicked like a living thing in agony. The controls threw themselves at him as though sentient and antagonistic. He felt that even the ship was against him, he was more alone than any other creature in the whole of God’s Universe. It was a sickening soul destroying thought even for an alien, with multi-coloured pseudopods, phosphorescent eye stalks and twitching horns. Far, far below, George Mallory looked up and rubbed his eyes in disbelief. That was one o’ them thar flyin’ saucer things. Arr, and he han’t been drinking neither. That was really thar. He could see the bloomin’ thing as plain as he could see the true blue steel of the twelve-bore in his hand. He’d hard strange tales o’ them thar things. How they might be filled wi’ Ruskies, or pop-eyed monsters outa space. He’d show ’em. That han’t better land agin ’im. No sor! That that han’t. He checked the loading of the big shotgun and waited grimly for the spinning thing to land. Tha’s a goin’ to crash, he decided. The thought had no sooner crystallised in his mind than it became reality. The thing had crashed. Not twenty feet away from him lay a heap of twisted smoking fragments and remains. The last of the disc ships was grounded forever. George Mallory edged his way cautiously closer. His grip on the big twelve-bore tightened, his fingers curled around the trigger. Dazed, battered and terribly injured, the remains of a sentient being that had once been Khgnjsdag, dragged themselves out on to the stubble field in front of the indignant Mallory. George was a simple, practical man, with simple practical ideas. He had never in his very limited sphere of existence met anything, except a bucket of cow’s cleanings, that even remotely resembled the Frankensteinian horror that was now emerging. He believed in asking questions after he had fired. It made life safer, and George had a burning desire to draw his old age pension. The thing waved one of its last undamaged pseudopods at him feebly. The alien was desperately pleading for help. Khgnjsdag wondered why this strange primitive looking creature with the prehistoric firearm in its hand couldn’t understand his telepathic call. It never occurred to him until it was too late that one of his transmission horns had been smashed in the crash.
George Mallory raised the twelve-bore and gestured angrily to the alien to get back. In Tugharian sign language that particular motion with a pseudopod meant “Come I am a friend. I will help.” The injured monster began crawling slowly towards Mallory. The approach of that bug-eyed, multi-coloured monstrosity, oozing viscous green fluid, meant only one thing to George. That you on’t ol’ partner. He thought to himself. I’ll gi’ you suffin you un’t fergit. The twelve-bore barked twice and the fusillade of high-powdered shot tore and ripped into the alien’s soft unprotected body. The world seemed to collapse around Khgnjsdag as his guts were blasted in a fatal sanguinary holocaust around the wreckage of his ship. But there was power in the Urghajhie yet. Strange power, power beyond the comprehension of prehistoric humanoids with antique firearms. Power of transmutation, something weirdly akin to the lycanthropy of mythology. The dying mind of the alien focussed its remaining energy on the task it had set itself. The one good hornlet on the shining green head twitched in a frantic flurry of assessment, weighing up the physical structure of the humanoid that had destroyed it. Thought probes, directed with the energy of despair, darted out into Mallory’s mind, searching for the primitive conception of space men, that had to lurk there somewhere, and at the same time the alien’s mind was busy with thoughts of revenge. In his utter, abject loneliness and despair he had appealed to this creature for help. It had made the sign, and then betrayed him. Under the Galactic War Convention such base treachery put the perpetrator beyond the pale. Something had to be done to avenge the honour of Tugharian Chivalry. Something was being done. Something the humanoid failed to comprehend, even remotely. The alien had picked up his thought pattern of a typical spaceman. The last film George Mallory had seen had been entitled “Destination Moon.” Such are the vagaries of biweekly village cinemas that it always took an average of three years for a new release to reach them. “Destination Moon” had taken five. The copy that had finally arrived had been somewhat the worse for wear, but none the less gripping. George knew that space creatures, human or otherwise dressed themselves in suits that resembled the Michelin tyre adverts and breathed through goldfish bowls.
The alien began to change. The pseudopods seemed to melt into a huge amorphous ball of green, yellow and purple. The atoms went into vague liquo-gaseous cloud. The alien looked like a blurred film of a technicolour garbage heap, in poor quality 3-D. And then something began to emerge. Slowly, and with great difficulty the last of the Urghajhies changed his molecular structure pattern. The tearing impact of the shot gun had slowed him down to a snail’s pace, but he had managed to accomplish his objective. To Khgnjsdag that was all that mattered. That, and revenge on this treacherous thing, and its world. The alien stood erect now, a green and yellow man-thing with a globe around its head. Arms and legs replaced the flapping pseudopods, and it looked at the humanoid, with sad troubled eyes that mirrored his own. Perhaps the thing was not really treacherous, perhaps it was simply so primitive that it had failed to understand the signals, perhaps it was just coincidence. Perhaps… Khgnjsdag remembered the agonising pain inside. The pain that was drawing his vital force in to the shadow land beyond life. And then he was angry again. It was his final emotion, before the curtains of endless sleep fell around his brain. He staggered to the wreck of his disc ship and groped for an Activator Rod. That would put this dangerous world into its place. He’d teach them to betray him.
The limb simulations into which he had transposed his pseudopods seized the Activator Rod and pressed the controls. The rod began to glow as its radio-active power evanesced into the atmosphere. A weird ultrasonic frequency vibrated soundlessly through the ether, spreading its deadly influence outwards and onwards. The alien died. The limb simulations dissolved into an amorphous mass of multi-coloured gaseous liquid, a liquid which drained into the stubble field, leaving a curious stain, not unlike oil on water. The last of the Urghajhies had joined his extinct race in the great Beyond.
George Mallory began hastening from the field, his mind bent on seeking help. Officialdom had to be notified. His simple rustic mind was not entirely sure which branch of the authorities dealt with aliens that crashed in flying saucers and then dissolved into the ground.
He hardly noticed the flock of rooks wheeling in the sky above the old elm grove. He didn’t really pay much attention to them until they began to swoop towards him … odd, that, he thought, as he looked up into the sky. Rooks usually had too much sense to approach a man with a gun. This lot needed scaring off. Casually he broke open the gun and felt in his voluminous pockets for a brace of cartridges. His hand was still enmeshed in the thick tweed when. . .
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