The Seed of Evil

The Radius Riders

The last dive of the subterrene vessel Interstice began as a test mission to prove her worth. She had but recently been launched: half her galleries were empty shells, waiting to be fitted with munitions and crew quarters. Nevertheless, we carried a good load, a crew of two hundred, and our technical plant, including armaments, was complete. Two magazines, one fore, one aft, were stacked with torpedoes; and the whole mass lay sedately in the grip of the polariser fields, by means of which our newly-built ship travelled through solid matter.

The development of subterrene ships had only just begun, and the Interstice was the fifth of the species, the others being prototypes. We had built her large, and we had built her powerful, for she was a warship. As yet, our nation was not at war, but we had enemies, and underground travel was an advantage to be quickly grasped.

And so, with Captain Joule in command, and I, Ross, as technical officer, we undertook to journey across the American continent from east to west, at a depth of ten miles. We passed beneath mountain ranges, beneath deserts and lakes, and slipped through every kind of geological formation. We tested for speed, steering—a complicated process where atom-polarisers are concerned—and depth control. Throughout, the equipment did not falter. The polariser fields stayed solidly in balance, even when we turned the Interstice first hard to port, then hard to starboard. The first fully operational subterrene ship was a success.

We were jubilant. We had no suspicion, as we approached the west coast, that a grave misfortune was soon to befall us, provoking us into reckless folly and causing us to be caught helpless in the grip of the mighty terrestrial planet.

I was with Captain Joule in the control cabin when he gave the order to surface at our prearranged location. On an even keel, the ship rose steadily.

At seven miles, a high-pitched hum sounded in the metal of the ship, rising rapidly to an unnerving screech as we ascended. At the same time, an urgent call came from Polariser Section.

The white-faced image of the chief engineer stared from the communicator screen. “Captain! An outside force is distorting the field! We can’t hold it!”

“Dive!” ordered Captain Joule.

Down we plunged, and immediately the terrifying sound ceased. As the Interstice shuddered to a stop, Joule questioned the engineer.

“What sort of a force?” he demanded.

“It was magnetic, very powerful. The noise we heard was due to every metallic atom on board vibrating on its polarised alignment. Another half minute and the whole ship would have been unpolarised!”

“Just how powerful is it?” Joules asked, puzzled.

The engineer shrugged. “The meters went haywire. I don’t understand it! We never guessed there were such intense energies at only five miles.”

Joule paused. “Weapons Section! Fire a torpedo straight up; but don’t set the fuse.”

Moments later, the Interstice made the first use of her armament. The torpedo lanced upwards, traced by polarised-field detectors. Shortly after it passed the five-mile limit, the missile vanished from the screen, and we received a series of strong shock-waves.

The torpedo’s polarisers had failed.

Still Joule was not satisfied. He ordered us up once more. Cautiously, we approached the danger level, and the shrieking of vibrating atoms hummed through the ship. Following on the pleas of Polariser Section, we sank back to a safe depth.

Now our confidence was gone. Retracing our route, we tried again with the same result. Then we made periodic attempts all the way back to the east coast, and for two weeks wandered over the continent, probing. The unbelievably strong phenomenon lay like a blanket under the land.

Myself, I doubted that it was magnetic in origin. Most likely, I thought, it was a magnetic effect produced by a freak stream of particles which had begun to flow while we were submerged.

Captain Joule was gloomy when I expressed this idea to him. “In that case,” he commented, “it might be artificial. It certainly is an effective weapon against a subterrene ship.”

But whatever the origin, the practical fact remained: we were unable to break surface.

The mood of the Interstice changed as we realised this. The excitement of our successful new enterprise vanished. I noticed for the first time how hollow the inside of the ship was, how every sound produced echoes in its cavities, and how dully its arched walls reflected the yellow lighting. It was easy to imagine how far within the Earth we were. I looked at Captain Joule, and knew that he had the same feelings.

Suddenly, I roared with laughter. “Well, we are trapped,” I said lightly. “What of it? All the better. This is our chance to defy those faint-hearts of the Navy Department with impunity.”

“What do you mean?” Joule asked.

“They forbade us, in the interests of caution, to take any of our ships deeper than ten miles at this stage. But since we cannot ascend, we will return to the surface the long way—through the diameter of the planet.”

He smiled, considering the proposal with characteristic brevity. I remembered the previous conversations we had held over the years, when the polariser fields were undergoing their slow, painful development in the Navy laboratories. Many daring schemes such as this had suggested themselves to us, and we were only biding our time in order to carry them out.

“Let us put it to the others,” he said at length, and spoke into the communicator, calling an officers’ conference.

The control cabin was claustrophobic by the time six officers had crowded into it. The air inductors weren’t designed to accommodate this many, and after ten minutes I was gasping for breath.

In the pause before Joule spoke, I heard the steady hum of the now resting ship. “You will all know by now,” he began, “that we are unable to break surface. Ross has a proposal, which he will outline to you.” He gave me a nod.

“Ever since the subterrene ship became a possibility,” I said, “I have conceived the idea of journeying into the interior of the Earth, perhaps to the centre itself. During the building of the Interstice I took advantage of the polariser propulsor’s ability to move very large masses, and made tentative plans for such an expedition. The Interstice is considerably larger than her first design called for: she has a heavier power plant, more instrumentation and food and air recyclers to keep a full crew supplied for several years. I also installed a workshop, and refrigerating equipment to guard against overheating.”

There were some surprised expressions among the Navy men when I revealed this, but others, those officers from my own civilian team, already knew of it. I feared no recriminations. The civilised man never entirely ignores the pursuit of knowledge.

“The Interstice is still not fully fitted for the voyage I envisaged,” I told them, “but in my opinion she will suffice. Since we are cut off from America, I propose to emerge on another quadrant of the planet.”

Joule interrupted here. “One point to bear in mind, gentlemen. It is possible that the barrier we encountered is an artificial device. If this is so, then our nation is at war, and the enemy already knows about subterrene ships. In this case it is our duty to return as soon as possible, not to go wandering off following our own interests.”

“I confess,” I said, “that I am delighted to have this opportunity to fulfil my ambitions. But in any case, there is no other way to make the Interstice useful in battle, since the shortest route to any other land mass now lies in an approach to the world’s core.”

“May I ask a technical question?” an officer asked. “Already we are close to the level where the Earth’s crust gives way to the hotter mantle. Beyond that, the liquid core is even hotter. Can we stand up to these conditions?”

“The polariser field makes us impervious in theory to any degree of heat or density,” I answered, “but it gives no protection from gravity and magnetism. Gravity will first aid, then hinder us. But magnetism will also grow intense towards the centre, and we have already seen what that can do to the polarisers.”

There were shudders as I said this.

“To be honest,” I continued, “if we run into a phenomenon like the one we have just escaped, I don’t know what we shall do. But there is an ingenious device called a gauss shunt, which can control gradual increments of magnetism by means of meson currents. This will not take too long to build, and should be able to handle the steady rise of energy we may naturally expect.”

The officers thought about it in silence. Already the Interstice had gone deeper than any before, slipping through high-density rock by virtue of the fact that the respective atoms of ship, men and air were individually aligned in different directions in space. At that very moment the cabin, the walls, our very bodies, were filled with a solid mass of hot rock, made impalpable by a delicate balance.

It was nightmarish to the imagination. But these were sturdy men, the cream of our nation, and they were inspired by my enthusiasm and by Joule’s leadership. “Come on!” I urged. “Man has never been this way before. Let us make the adventure!”

“I favour Ross’s proposal,” Joule said. “Any further questions?”

There were none. And once Joule had announced his decision, there were no objections.

“Ross will instruct you concerning the preparations for the deep dive,” he continued briefly. “That is all.”

For three days the Interstice poised her giant bulk ten miles down, while we worked on the gauss shunt. With our resources it did not prove difficult. We constructed a meson charger next to the ship’s power plant, and laid a skeleton of iron-silver channels over the inner hull, converging on a bank at the stern where the external magnetic fields could be passed back to ground. But for this, the polariser would be twisted out of alignment, and every scrap of metal would be melted by induction.

I used a rheostat control to test the shunt’s power to vary the magnetic field strength within the ship; then we were ready to reactivate the propulsors and turn our sluggish gravitational settling into a true power-dive.

The interior of the Interstice looked a devil’s workshop. An image came to my mind of the old days before the world’s surface was fully mapped, and windships might spread sail before new oceans, and new lands. For us, there were no free winds, no light, no rolling waters. We had passed outside the bounds of ordinary existence, and must force our way into darkness, pressure, heat.

Obediently, the motors pushed us deeper into the Earth. In the harsh yellow light which was our only illumination, the technicians watched the changing rock formations as they showed on the screens, noting down readings from the instruments. The information for which geologists had longed for centuries was now being collected with ease.

Down we sank, with the ever-present thought of the world’s solidity and the audacity of the human intellect which had conceived the subterrene ship. There was a quiet murmur of activity in the large hall-like enclosure of the Interstice, when I next walked her length to inspect the various equipments. We had just clocked three hundred miles.

Then, without warning, there was a blamn, followed by a heavy grating noise, and a shivering in the air. I recognised it, with utter amazement. I had heard it before, in the Navy’s laboratories. It was nothing to do with the magnetic barrier we had encountered earlier.

It was the noise created by the collision of two polariser fields.

I ran through the long passageways to Command Section. In the ante-room to the control cabin, the detector crew was scanning the vicinity, and the obstruction was taking shape on the screens.

But there was more than just one field. I saw a whole panorama of them, an extended complex, full of shadowy delineations to north, south, east and west, piling up, forming groups and spacious areas. For a while, it was more than I could believe.

We had blundered into a subsurface city.

Though it sounds incredible, Nature also has learned how to make two material objects occupy the same space, and she has riddled the Earth with beings in this manner. The conurbation into which we had plunged was huge, stretching beyond detector range. The scanners tended to indicate a rather weak polarisation, and I would guess that the inhabitants, if their experience can be described in human terms, dwell in a medium like thick treacle. The Interstice must have fallen on them as a super-bright, supersolid monster of almost indestructible qualities.

I went into the control cabin, where Captain Joule was gaping at the same scene on his own monitor screens, and sat down. Joule did not bother to acknowledge me.

He flicked a communicator switch. “Power Section! Listen for my orders. And give me steerage.”

I heard the snick as the steerage of the Interstice was transferred from the propulsor room to the control console before Joule’s bucket seat. The Interstice had become lodged between the walls of a group of buildings, and his magnificent broad shoulders hunched in an attitude of fury over the steering wheel, sweat staring out from his skin, as he tried to extricate her and batter a way into deeper territory.

“Look!” I said. “Do you see?”

He paused, and gazed at the screen. Ships were approaching, a whole fleet of them, riding forward as if on a cumbersome breeze. They were odd-looking affairs, composed of long curved beams, and through the wide gaps these afforded we could vaguely distinguish crews and crude apparatus. There were also signs of flurried activity in the vicinity of the nearby buildings.

The inhabitants were clearly prepared to defend their city. I noticed that some of the ships, larger than the others, had something mounted on their prows which looked strangely familiar, and as I watched, the foremost vessel swung into action.

“It’s a catapult!” Joule shouted.

Clang! The Interstice’s galleries rang with the impact of the missile against her hull. Joule laughed. “Let them shoot away!” And he bent himself once again to the control console.

But it proved impossible to dislodge our ship, and eventually, with the subearthers’ missiles raining down on us, we resorted to our weapons. Though we used them sparingly, our torpedoes and seismo-beams caused terrible havoc before we had blown a pathway and could continue our journey. For fifty miles the fleet harried us, pounding the walls of the ship in an attempt at revenge.

“And this is at three hundred miles!” Captain Joule exclaimed. “What will we find further on?”

The possibilities were frightening. The Earth’s interior is much more spacious than its surface, and has room for a vaster variety of creatures. Here, we had come up against primitives. In the depths, might we find imposing civilisations of super-science, to whom the Interstice was a toy? Or there might be monsters in the Earth….

But discovery had become the prime object of the dive as far as I was concerned, and no danger could be allowed to stand in the way of scientific endeavour.

And the possibility of meeting enemies was not the only danger. By now, I knew that something else was seriously wrong.

I had been checking over the readings which the external instruments had given. By the laws of physics, it seemed inevitable that the figures for density and heat should have risen steadily as we descended. Inexplicably, they had remained the same since we began the dive at ten miles.

Captain Joule showed an engineer’s interest, but was unperturbed. “What about magnetism?” he asked.

“No change either,” I told him, “but then there wouldn’t be much at this depth: the gauss shunt is needed for later.”

Just the same, we both went along to inspect the shunt, starting at the meson charger in Power Section, and tracing one of the iron-silver channels along a narrow hull corridor to the stern. I studied the meters mounted on the insulated chamber which contained the bank. The needles should have moved slightly as a small increment of magnetic force was bled away to maintain surface normal. Instead, they were dead against the stops.

I picked up a phone and called Power Section. “Move the bleed bar two inches,” I ordered.

As the rheostat was manipulated, one dial stirred to show force being passed to ground, and another told of decreasing field strength in the ship.

Joule grunted. “Could anything be wrong with it?”

I ordered the rheostat to be returned to its original position. “No,” I said, “it’s in perfect order. Perhaps we just have to accept the fact that the interior of the Earth is different from what we have always assumed. Either that, or else we are in a pocket of low density. Anyway, our progress is good.”

But as the days passed, I kept constant check on the density, heat and magnetism readings, and always to find the same result. No change. I grew seriously worried.

I reminded myself that apart from the Interstice’s intrinsic instruments we had no way of checking her actual velocity. To rectify this I designed a mass-meter, which, I reasoned, could tell our rate of progress by measuring first the mass of the Earth ahead of us, and then that part of the Earth we had put behind us.

The result startled me. The two readings taken together disagreed with the known mass of the Earth.

“That’s ridiculous!” I told Joule. “The Earth would have to weigh more than it did when we set out. And we’ve put five hundred miles behind us, but the distance ahead is still the same.”

Were we moving, or weren’t we?

It was an enigma. Pointed one way, the mass-meter indicated that we were. Pointed the other way, it indicated that we were at a standstill.

I waited a further week, during which the puzzle enlarged itself. By this time we should have reached a depth of one thousand miles, and be learning the extent of our ability to survive under extreme pressure. In fact, we had clocked a thousand vertical miles; but our approach to the core had still not advanced. We seemed to be advancing along the line of a paradox, where no matter how fast we run, the finishing line never comes nearer.

The knowledge of it was both frustrating and depressing. It was now no longer possible to treat it as an intellectual puzzle.

We had found no more cities, and no further attacks had been made on us, but we took care not to repeat our previous mistake. The scanners operated continuously, and showed various dim flickers of polarisation in the distance. I spent hours gazing at the screen. Occasionally, a vast shape drifted by on the edge of scanner range, and transient forms whose nature we could not guess appeared.

After thirteen days of travel, Captain Joule called the officers to his cabin.

Impassively, he faced them in his bucket seat, and allowed them to fall quiet, cramped and sweating, before speaking.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I wish to review our position. Ross will tell you the situation.”

Briefly, I explained about the mass-meter readings, and the uniformity of pressure we had found at all depths of the mantle. We were driving the ship into a discrepancy between instrument readings. The further we went, the greater the discrepancy became.

“Apart from common sense,” I finished, “there is nothing to indicate that we have gone one inch towards fulfilling our aim of reaching the Earth’s core.”

“Then are we at a standstill?”

“From one angle, it looks like it,” I conceded, “but I don’t think so. We are still expending energy. The propulsors are working perfectly, and this can only result in motion. We must be going somewhere, and in fact you only have to look at the detector screens to see that we are actually in motion.”

“And getting nowhere,” Joule put in. “As far as the Navy is concerned, the purpose of this dive is to get back to base, which we do not seem to be achieving.”

“Are you suggesting that we turn back?”

“It has been in my mind. There may be no obstacle in our way now.”

My heart sank at the words. Our discoveries had intrigued me enough to want desperately to continue, and the danger, and the strangeness we had encountered, only gave me an overpowering urge to journey further.

I knew Captain Joule secretly agreed with my attitude, for he is one of the best of men, the finest of officers. There are some who find blame with our generation, saying that it has become ultraconservative and rigid; but I claim that this is no fault, only an inevitable era of civilisation. The spirit of our nation was never stronger than it is now. We are producing great men, fabulous engineers. Captain Joule knew the tacit dictum of our engineers—never to know fear, never to draw back—but he had a duty to his command, which I, though it saddens me now to confess it, did not feel.

“Why turn back?” I asked intensely. “We must carry on! The puzzle will resolve itself—and anything we encounter in the Earth, we will deal with!”

We had no opportunity to argue further, for the decision was taken out of our hands. As the communicator bleeped the alarm call, all monitor screens came to life.

The detector crews had found a second species of intra-Earth intelligence approaching from a distance of some miles, and we had several minutes in which to prepare.

Their fleet came up from below and arrayed itself about us, while we took to our battle stations. They were long, portly craft which swayed slightly due to some invisible phenomenon of the depths, and they gathered slowly, as if getting our measure, closing in with a menacing air.

Then, either on general principle, or because they considered us enemies, they attacked.

I was exultant. Now the Interstice, previously untried in full-scale combat, would use her full capacity, and the temper of our expedition would crystallise, one way or the other. For these adversaries of ours were not the primitives of the higher levels. Their ships moved under their own power, and their weapons could do us damage.

Yet still they were not our technological equals. They fired flashing arrow-like projectiles which could penetrate our armour, and they skilfully deployed their large numbers in an attempt to compensate for our superior armament. But the Interstice bulked huge above them, bristling with torpedo tubes and seismo-beam turrets; we were a match for them.

It was a running fight. Power Section strained the propulsors to their utmost, and we pressed down like a whale surrounded by a cloud of sharks. Captain Joule gave up trying to evade the enemy missiles, and left our defence to the wicked power of Weapons Section.

When I entered the main body of the ship to keep a watch on the performance of our equipment, the galleries were booming like bells from enemy strikes, and shuddering from the explosions of our own torpedoes as they flashed out of polarisation and caused titanic convulsions in the Earth—I’ll warrant the subearthers never heard of that trick! I could hear the surging rush of their launching, and from the alcoves set high in the walls came the buzzing of seismo-beams.

Just ahead of me, a twenty-foot lance lunged through the side of the wall and hurtled aslant the spacious central well. A gunner fell from the wall, his head cleft open. The seismo-beamer he had been operating was a ruined mess.

Thirty times their projectiles broke our hull, and we lost eight men. But what of it? We were an invincible dreadnought. The Interstice was truly a battleship.

Eventually they withdrew, with heavy losses. Perhaps we had passed outside their domain.

There was a drumming of power tools as the crewmen applied themselves to repairs amid the fumes of our own weapons. I returned to the control cabin, where Captain Joule was checking Polariser, Weapons and Power Sections. He turned to me as I entered.

“Steering’s gone,” he said gloomily. “There’s no choice about what we do now. I wouldn’t like to try to turn the ship on the main drive; the polarisers would blow, no doubt about that.”

I made no answer. The Interstice, unable to turn aside without the elaborate gear necessary to change the direction of a polarised field, could do nothing but journey on, and on.

We had gained a victory, but lost control over our destiny. It was in this helpless mood that the officers of the Interstice directed her even deeper into the solid Earth.

For a month we sank down under the force of the motors. Every day I anxiously studied the instrument readings. In all that time, the nature of the external rock showed no change.

Everything, with the exception of the second mass-meter reading and the plain fact that we were moving downwards, indicated that we were still at rest ten miles below the surface.

Joule and I gave all our thought to the problem. Sometimes, he shuddered. Was this the bottomless gulf of which poets speak in terror?

“It’s impossible!” he said in exasperation. “Rock is flowing past us! Living creatures appear from ahead, and drop behind. Yet we are unable to approach the centre!”

We drew a circle to represent the Earth, and resolved the mystery to the fact that the mass-meter gave two conflicting positions for the Interstice within that circle. Or was it some radically new geometry, where two quantities no longer add up to their sum? What do we know of the universe? We only have experience of the surface of our planet—perhaps, elsewhere, laws are different.

Experimentally, we drew in quadrant of the circle, and contemplated the figure. Joule drew in concentric rings, and we noticed that in the quadrant, the arc shortened in proportion to the radius.

It was a subtle thought.

Apart from the philosophical considerations, I also wondered whether the gauss shunt, by draining surplus energy back to ground, was somehow the source of an illusion affecting all the external instruments and the mass-meter. I could think of only one way to find out.

Captain Joule regarded me with horror when I requested permission to turn off the shunt.

“If the conjecture is correct,” he said in a hushed tone, “we’ll be blown to kingdom come.”

“What of it?” I cried, gesturing wildly. “We can’t carry on like this. We could as well be journeying in Limbo. We might get away with it if the shunt is out of action for only a few milliseconds.”

We did the thing secretly. With my own hands I assembled the timing mechanism and connected it to the bank. For twenty milliseconds the shunt was inoperative.

The meters did not even flicker.

“Try again!” Joule ordered.

Three times I repeated the experiment. Then I turned off the shunt permanently. Never having encountered the conditions for which it was designed, it need never have been built at all.

“That leaves the other explanation,” Joule said, “The philosophical one. But it entails a relativity more staggering than any our physicists have thought of—”

I should have known that his calm, inexorable mind would have produced the answer eventually, But as he was about to explain, the third subsurface attack began.

They were a small, swift raiding force which swooped down on us from the north. We never knew where they came from: there were no signs of the habitations we had seen on higher levels. Most likely they were pirates, or warrior nomads, for they were professional, ferocious—and more deadly than anything we had yet encountered.

What was more, they had learned how to crack a polarised field.

Perhaps our own equipment was too strong for them, or perhaps they simply wished to frighten us into surrendering, but for only two brief intervals did we hear the ear-splitting shriek of their appliance, the groan of the polarisers and experience the suffocating heat of a wavering field. Then again, the depleted resources of Weapons Section were brought to bear.

This was the fight that broke us.

The raiders’ main aim was to board us. We had expended what remained of our torpedoes, and were resorting to the less effective seismo-beams, when they expertly blew a hole in the hull. In Command Section, Joule and myself heard alarmed cries and strange clattering sounds. A few minutes later came the explosion, deafening in the confined space. A crewman had heroically blasted the section through which the subearthers were pouring.

Thereafter, the fight inside the ship was brief; yet it lost us our leader.

Three raiders who had escaped the explosion came swimming along the central well, hurling destruction in every direction from powerful hand weapons, and within minutes they had arrived at Command Section. Never will I forget the look on Captain Joule’s face as he reached for his handgun. Nor can I describe it, for I saw every emotion there, each distinct, yet none dominant.

Our adversaries were short, shadowy figures in bulky armour; humanoid, but with an odd serpentine slant to their bodies. Without pause, they fired, and Joule fell with a ruined right side, bringing down the foremost raider as he did so.

From the corner of the cabin, I disposed of the other two.

That was the last we saw of the sub-surface raiders. We never knew why they discontinued the attack, for our detectors were a mass of ruined equipment, and from that time we have never seen outside.

As the other officers came into the control cabin I moved Joule to a couch. His breathing was quick and shallow, and his face was hardened against pain.

“I’m done,” he whispered.

I put an arm beneath his shoulders and propped him up gently. He was weak, but his eyes were full of intelligence. “Joule,” I pleaded, “what’s happening to us down here?”

“This is my theory,” he said, speaking with difficulty. “Matter is a distortion of space. As matter becomes more concentrated… so the space it occupies becomes more concentrated.”

He stopped, and for a moment I thought he had spoken his last. Then he seemed to revive somewhat, and continued.

“Within the Earth, space itself is compressed in proportion to density. What from the surface looks like an inch, might really be a thousand miles. The Earth’s radius is the same at all levels—we shrink as we enter denser matter, so it always looks the same. There’s always the same distance to go.”

His eyes grew dull, then glazed. As he died, I laid him down.

And I am in command of the Interstice. I lost no time in taking what little action was necessary. The hull is sealed, all internal hatches have been closed and the lights dimmed to conserve power. The propulsors are set for greatest economy and speed: our prime concern is to maintain the polariser field for a long, steady drop towards the centre. Our power plant is theoretically inexhaustible—but the space within the Earth may be as great as the entire solar system for all we know.

I do not think, now, that there is any mode of travel more sinister than that of a ship moving through solid matter. The deeper we sink, the greater is my awareness of the thousands of miles of rock over our heads, the more intense is the feeling of oppression. My conscience burdens me. It was I who persuaded Captain Joule to embark on the dive, and as I sit in the semi-darkness of this steel hull, I cannot help but think that I have persuaded my companions into Hell itself.

The ship is a shambles. Men lie in utter silence throughout her length, the seismo-beams no longer manned. We have all accepted the idea that we will not survive this voyage.

This is the story. Now I sit down to write it, so that those who find our ship when she finally emerges on the other side of the world—the polarisers will automatically be inactivated at that moment—may know of the nature of the Earth’s interior….

According to the farmer who claimed to have witnessed the event, the ship had come out of the hillside, then slithered twenty feet before coming to rest against an outcropping of rock.

Bain could readily see the truth of the latter part of the story from the broken saplings which marked the vessel’s path, but the first part strained his imagination, specially as there was no sign of a break in the turf. He was a specialist in ancient civilisations, and since he could find not one familiar detail in the vessel whose five-hundred-foot bulk loomed over him, he inclined to the view that it came from a different direction altogether.

“It must be a spaceship,” he said to the metallurgist who had come with the team from Sydney. “It couldn’t be anything else. That farmer was lying, or mistaken.”

The metallurgist nodded. “I would think so too,” he replied, “but I can’t imagine why it should be so old. Look at the way it sags all over the place! Know what that is? Metal fatigue. Yet some of the alloys I don’t recognise!”

Bain flicked through the metal-leaved book they had taken from the control room. For him, it provided almost irrefutable proof that the ship was from the stars: it appeared to be some sort of log, but its weird script bore absolutely no resemblance to any Earthly language, ancient or modern.

“We’ll never find a Rosetta Stone for this,” he thought. It saddened him to think that the account would never be translated.

At that moment Professor Wilson levered himself out of a hatch from inside the vessel and came over to them excitedly. “It’s a spaceship all right,” he said. “There’s an instrument in there that measures distance in terms of electromagnetic frequencies. Any physicist could read it from here to Andromeda.

“Do you know what distance that meter clocked before it ran out? Nearly eleven light-years!”