At first it was just another hoax, another UFO story, but the sightings went on increasing. It couldn't be an alien, there had been so many false alarms, dramatic news-columnists had shouted 'wolf' so many times, that John Citizen shrugged his shoulders and said 'nuts' at the very mention of the word space-ship. Then one of them landed... The things they did were not exactly friendly. In fact by the time they'd finished, they had made an old-time Viking raid seem like a social call from the vicar... Many other attacks followed. Day after day and night after night the alien ships screamed in on their mission of death. The earth struck back. But no one could track the aliens to their lair. They seemed to come from Nowhere. They weren't Martians. They weren't Venusians, and they weren't from another system. That left only one place where they could have originated... yet the truth was so fantastic that none of the earth governments would take it seriously until it was almost too late. The enemy came from within! From the gigantic caverns at the earth's core.
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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GEORGE Turnbull was a red-faced septuagenarian. He had reached that advanced point of decrepitude at which even a mild exertion resulted in severe palpitation and grampus-like wheezings. He burst into the bar of the “Dog and Partridge” looking like a walking beetroot surrounded by cotton wool. There was a darts match in progress at one end. Three old yokels were playing dominoes at a beer-stained oak table. A blowsy barmaid with her hair in curlers was wiping up a few stains with a cloth that appeared to be imparting more dirt than it was picking up.
Two nondescript non-regulars, who might have been down-at-heel commercials, were discussing politics and elementary economics. A casual observer, listening to their conversation would have realised that neither had an adequate knowledge of their subject, although they had now arrived at that state of beery pleasantness at which one agrees with the other man’s remark, and goes on to augment what he has said with a similar inanity, with an air of great profoundness. The clock, ancient teleological masterpiece, bearing the name ‘Klopenhanger, Berlin 1884’, showed that in ten minutes the barmaid would reluctantly call ‘Time, gentlemen if you please’.
The darts match stopped; the domino experts ceased peering with rheumy eyes at the black and white oblongs before them. The amateur politician and his equally ignorant economist friend stopped in mid-sentence, and every eye in the room turned and stared in the direction of the newcomer.
“I see ’um!” panted old George, when he could finally recover enough breath to operate his vocal cords. “I see ’um! Maisie!”
The barmaid blinked at him in amazement.
“Yes, George,” her voice seemed inadequately faint and breathless to have emanated from so large a frame. “What did you see, George?”
“I see it!” repeated old Turnbull, his gnarled and ancient hand shook as he waved his walking stick around the bar, with a gesture that might have been indicative of almost anything …
“I’ll see if they’re still there, if you come outside.” Turnbull’s articulation was not enhanced by his absence of teeth and the ill-fit of his dentures.
“What’s outside, old chap?” said one of the beery, nondescript commercials.
“Aas up inersky!” gurgled George. “Up in er sky, that is, mister! Tha’s one o’ them there flyin’ saucer things!”
“What?” exclaimed the local darts champion, dropping an arrow to the floor in consternation almost impaling his toe-cap. There was a sudden surge for the door as the import of old Turnbull’s remark sunk home.
The darts team got there first, followed closely by a domino player and one of the commercials, Maisie, hampered by the wooden trap door of the bar, on which the other commercial was still leaning, was the last to get outside.
Like a tiny red and amber speck, something was wheeling across the sky.
Something that could have been a shooting star, or a plane with only one navigation light working. Something that could have been one of the new experimental rocket ships, or something that could have been mysterious, frightening, and not of this earth …
“Aas too far away to see now,” commented old Turnbull, puffing and panting for breath still, from the exertion of his rapid progress from the dark, mysterious outside, into the safety of the public bar. “I see ’um a lot clearer than that! An’ that weren’t one o’ ours! That worn’t an old aeroplane, it worn’t so old fashioned as that! At worn’t one o’ our rockets, that worn’t bright enough. Tha’ was the wrong shape, that was round as a bell. That was humpty in the middle. That cum across the sky a lot lower down than that, an’ a lot clusser! Then that went up again, I see ’um goin’ up like a sky rocket on November 5th, only a lot faster. Then he seem to twizzle, roun’ agin’ hisself, like a great ol’ top up there in the sky that were.” Now that his antique lungs had got functioning once more he was thoroughly enjoying his role of narrator of unusual and outstanding events.
“Thas a werry strange business, mister,” he said, turning to the nearest of the commercial travellers, “Werry strange indeed. You take it from me. I may be an old farm chap, I may not a had a lot of education—but I do know the difference between one o’ our rockets and sumthin’ strange—and that was sumthin’ strange. Do you think I’d a-come puffin’ up here, in danger o’ givin’ myself a heart attack, if that hadn’t been somethin’ strange. I seen dozens o’ rockets boy, they don’ excite me more than see an old chicken go across the road, but this here was different. Werry, werry different. I don’t like it …”
Closing time was forgotten. The little group made its way back into the bar. The darts match was forgotten. The dominoes were forgotten. Politics and economics were forgotten, and for the next half hour the sole topic of discussion, with diagrams drawn with a grubby finger on a beer soaked bar counter, was George Turnbull’s unidentified flying object.
Freddy Rogers and Elsie Green were the perfectly run-of-the-mill teenage couple. There was nothing even slightly out of the ordinary about them. They were, if anything, unusually quiet and well-behaved for the day and generation to which they belonged. It was the result, probably, of a rural upbringing. On the night in question, the night in which old George Turnbull had gone panting into the “Dog and Partridge”, Fred and Elsie were strolling through the mild warm air of the summer evening, hand-in-hand, casting shy little glances at each other. Their conversation even less inspiring than that of the two commercials in the “Dog and Partridge” …
They were muttering the sweet nothings that had been muttered for centuries by people of their age, feeling the same biological urges as they felt. Yet, not knowing exactly what was happening because it was happening in their minds and in their hearts for the very first time. Finding strange, exciting, breath-taking newness in the unknown of each other’s company.
“What sort of ’ouse would you like?” said Fred. Elsie gave a little shy half-smile.
“Don’t really mind, Fred,” she said, “anywhere with you ’ud be all right, I suppose.”
“Do you want a little ’ouse, a big ’ouse, a new ’ouse, or an old ’ouse?” Fred was already seeing himself in the role of provider. It gave him a new sense of maturity and responsibility. “O’ course,” he joked, “I may only be able to buy you something like a chicken’s house! I don’t get much money as a carpenter, especially on this ’ere apprentice lark … I think that’s a proper racket!” He went on to discuss the apprenticeship carpentry scheme, with as little knowledge of his subject as the two travellers had had of their economics and politics. Elsie was not awfully interested in apprenticeship carpentry schemes, but she listened to Fred, because in her immature teenage way she loved him—or she thought she did—at least she was infatuated with him, and the night, and the warm summer air belonged to them. She listened patiently for about ten minutes, then nestling closer, she whispered:
“O Fred, say something romantic! Don’t keep talkin’ about carpentry all night.”
Rogers laughed.
“No, it ain’t very romantic, is it? I suppose girls like romance! It’s all this pictures and television, and those tuppeny weekly papers you read, with photographs of these pop-singers. Look at them, they get ten times what a carpenter gets!”
“Fred, say something romantic,” persisted Elsie. “You’re only runnin’ them down because you can’t do it!”
“I can, you know,” said Rogers, and in a wavering baritone that cracked up and down the scale, because his voice had not completely broken, he gave a passable impersonation of one of the ear-splitting pop-singers of the day.
“That’s quite nice,” said Elsie, “I love to hear him sing that, he sings it ever so nice, but it sorta means more when you sing it, Fred!”
“You’re cute!” beamed Fred. He was about to say something else, when he suddenly looked up.
Why he should choose to look up at that precise moment he had no idea, but he did. And as he did so he saw exactly what George Turnbull had seen. An enormous disc like ship, for all the world like a saucer with a dome attached to its upper side. Beneath it were projections that could have been anything. It was going too fast to tell accurately. But of one thing he was certain, around the rim was a series of round, small lights. It was a fantastic sight. Like something out of a science fiction writer’s nightmare. These things, Fred had told himself, just didn’t exist. They had no right to exist. They were very nice in stories, and they made quite an interesting newspaper article, but they didn’t exist on warm summer nights, when a man was trying to do his courting. They had no right to exist in a world that was full of furniture and hire purchase, and deposits on houses. They didn’t exist in a world, the horizon of which was limi. . .
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