The Silent Vulcan Read online

  Harding took another picture, this time steadying his forearm against the car battery that powered the echo-sounder. He stowed the camera for future down-loading of its images to his laptop computer, and used a pair of dividers to measure the fuzzy triangle against the echo-sounder's scale. "It's six point two metres along each side," he said to Malone. "A near perfect equilateral triangle. And it's at the precise centre of the Wall."

  Malone's wide set, brooding eyes continued to regard the echo-sounder's image of the strange mound. His quick mind applied the philosophy of Occam's Razor to the problem, quickly analyzing and discarding explanations of the phenomenon. Debris? Unlikely -- it was too big. A practical joke? Also unlikely because Pentworth Lake was on the patrol route of the Morris men police, now under his command. A Luftwaffe bomber had crashed in the lake during World War II and had never been recovered. But something as flimsy as aircraft wreckage nearly three quarters of century old could not account for such a large, regular structure. Several other possible causes failed at the fences of his remarkable reasoning powers. Bob Harding's conviction that the object at the bottom of Pentworth Lake was the so-called Silent Vulcan UFO was the only one that made sense.

  "It looks too small to be an inter-stellar spacecraft," said Harding.

  "How large should an inter-stellar spacecraft be, Mr Chairman?" queried Malone.

  "Well spotted, Mike. I'm reverse engineering from the size of the brain cell. That is, assuming our Visitors are a carbon-based, oxygen-dependent life form, which I'm pretty sure they are. They would have to have a brain of a certain size, which means lungs of a certain size, which means a heart and associated organs of a certain size. They could be smaller than us, but I doubt if they would be significantly so. In the intelligence league tables, size does matter." He switched off the echo-sounder.

  "Unless the Silent Vulcan is a robot vehicle -- unmanned, or rather, unaliened," Malone observed.

  "That's a real possibility."

  "And one that will make your ideas to communicate with them that much more difficult."

  "The real difficulty would be persuading the council to vote the resources to carry out any plan," Harding replied.

  A telling reply, thought Malone. It illustrated the difference in leadership style between the retired scientist and the recently usurped Asquith Prescott. If Prescott decided he wanted to do something, he went right ahead and did it. Democratic decision-making had gradually become an inconvenience as far as Asquith Prescott had been concerned.

  "Anyway," Harding continued. "If the Silent Vulcan is manned by machines, they must have an extremely high level of cognitive ability to control their UFO -- to respond to emergencies and so on. You can't use radio remote control if the time to exchange signals runs into years. The unmanned landers sent to Mars had to do a lot of their own decision-making. And that's where the radio delay is only a matter of minutes."

  Malone gazed across the lake to where David Weir's sheep were grazing the steep rise that led to the sandstone outcrop known as the Temple of the Winds. His mind went back to the night before the Wall had appeared in March when he had nearly caught a strange, crab-like device that had been following him as he jogged home. It had been about the size of a large dog. He had come within a metre of throwing himself on it when it had sprouted contra-rotating helicopter-like rotors and disappeared into the night sky. Several other locals had seen it. One had dubbed it the "spyder" and the name had stuck. There was no doubt that it was a machine -- and a highly intelligent and capable machine at that judging by the speed of its reactions when he had tried to catch it.

  "I'm not too keen on your breakdown theory and that they're waiting for some sort of on-site repair visit," said Malone at length. "Their spyder machine seemed to be bloody reliable to me, and I expect the rest of their systems are the same."

  Harding grinned at the police officer. "I'm not too keen on it myself, Mike. I only advanced it as a possibility."

  "So let's assume, Mr Chairman, that their arrival is deliberate. In which case the policeman in me demands a motive for their visit. It can't be primarily to gather information because they must know that their Wall has had a sufficiently profound affect on the environment and our behaviour to invalidate much, if not all, of their data. They've turned us into a 21st Century community of 6000 people, but isolated from the rest of the world, and having to come to terms with the farming and transport and day to day living of the early 19th Century. Our behaviour is hardly typical. So I ask myself why they're here."

  "Perhaps they want to find out how we manage under stress?" Harding suggested.

  The squelch on the police PMR radio clipped to Malone's belt opened. It was a report by a morris men police patrol to say that a search party had left Pentworth House. The groups sent out by Adrian Roscoe's Bodian Brethren from their Pentworth House headquarters were a daily occurrence. Malone's standing orders were that such search parties were to be monitored but not interfered with provided their behaviour stayed within the law. The duty operations officer at Pentworth police station acknowledged and the radio fell silent.

  Harding started packing the echo-sounder, neatly coiling its transducer lead. He commented, "The scenario much-loved by science-fiction writers of the past, starting with H.G. Wells and his War of the Worlds, was the take over of the earth."

  "By trapping a little town like Pentworth in the middle of a ten kilometre diameter spherical force wall?"

  "Maybe Pentworth's Wall is a prototype?" Harding ventured. "Maybe there will be, or already are for all we know, thousands of such force wall spheres all over the world? Millions, perhaps. Every community in the world isolated from its neighbours. Divide and conquer."

  Malone shook his head. "Too clumsy."

  "Why?"

  "Vikki Taylor. A 16-year-old girl who had a terrible accident as a toddler that resulted in her losing her left hand. She's visited in her sleep by the spyder and within 24-hours she's regrown a perfect left hand."

  "And gets condemned as a witch because of it," said Harding with quietly suppressed anger. "The reason I took on this job you've foisted on me is because of what happened to Vikki Taylor and Ellen Duncan."

  Malone regarded Harding steadily. "Any intelligence capable of growing a new hand on a human being isn't going to indulge in brute force tactics if they want to take over the world, Mr Chairman. They'd make the human race sterile and simply walk in one hundred years or so later when we're extinct."

  Chapter 2.

  VIKKI TAYLOR WAS NO LONGER SELF-CONSCIOUS about her miraculous new left hand and used its perfect forefinger to slide an "S" across the Scrabble board and add it to the front of Ellen Duncan's "HAG". Ellen glared at Vikki. The teenager's lovely green eyes, round and sparkling with sweetness and innocence, gazed mischievously back at the older woman while Vikki sucked pensively on the offending forefinger.

  "You can't have that," said Ellen shortly. "We agreed -- no rude words."

  "What’s wrong with me putting a ‘S’ on the front of hag?’ asked Vikki defiantly.

  “I think shag is a type of carpet,” said Claire Lake.

  "Now you listen to me, young lady. This is my cave and I make the rules. If I say that that's a rude word -- it's a rude word. No argument."

  "I think it's a type of water fowl," said Claire Lake, now looking up from a magazine she'd read at least ten times during the three weeks she'd spent incarcerated in the cave with Ellen and Vikki.

  “So it’s not a rude word.”

  “It is if I say it is,” declared Ellen. She turned to Claire. “And what do you mean by `type'? What other types are there?”

  "Duck," said Claire more succinctly, trying not to laugh. In the three weeks she had learned to love the older woman dearly, and also to respect her quick temper.

  "Duck?" Ellen queried, momentarily thrown.

  "Quack. Quack," murmured Vikki. She caught Claire's eye and struggled to keep a straight face.

  "Methinks my plonker is being pulled,
" said Ellen sourly.

  "Depends on how well you're getting ducked," said Claire.

  The illumination from the low-wattage 12 volt bulb hanging from the cave's roof was sufficient for Claire to receive the full benefit of Ellen's disapproving glare. They stared at other.

  Ellen was the first to break. Her mouth played catapults and she made an involuntary noise through her nose. Within seconds the cave was echoing with the laughter of the three fugitives. For a few precious moments the women forget their bizarre circumstances, their fear of discovery and certain death at the hands of Adrian Roscoe and his cult's growing band of fanatics temporarily forgotten.

  Claire pulled a grubby handkerchief from her bra and wiped her eyes, wondering if the baby growing in her womb could sense her laughter.

  Suddenly Ellen realised the danger that the noise posed and urgently shushed for quiet.

  The three women sat still, listening fearfully for the slightest sound indicating that the concealed entrance to their cave had been discovered. Like the figures in the amazing 40,000 year old palaeolithic hunting scenes that decorated the walls, they were virtually naked. The soul-sapping humidity in the cave made the wearing of anything other than minimal underwear intolerable.

  The most spectacular painting was a life-size woolly mammoth surrounded by diminutive human figures armed with spear throwers. The unknown prehistoric artists had cunningly exploited natural protuberances in the rockface to give the stricken beast a startling three-dimensional quality. The detail in the dazzling mural was remarkable. Long individual strands of the creature's hanging woolly coat seemed have been achieved by using the chewed end of a stick to create streaks in the red ochre pigment. Even the mammoth's mighty crossed ivories bore the chips and abrasions of a long life spent breaking up ice to get at the succulent grasses underneath.

  Despite the three weeks that Ellen had been cooped-up in the cave, she had never tired of sitting in a canvas camping chair, gazing at the woolly mammoth and speculating about the artists who had lived 400 centuries ago.

  400 centuries... 40,000 years...

  An unimaginable time span. The paintings were at least 35,000 years old when Abraham obeyed God's command and set out from Ur in Chaldea, and when the early pharaohs ordered the building of their pyramids.

  The cave was on Ellen's land, about halfway down the steep slopes that led from Pentworth where she had run her little herbal remedy shop in North Street. Pentworth Lake, where Mike Malone was sitting at that moment in an inflatable boat, discussing the Silent Vulcan with Bob Harding, was under a mile away. The strange lake was also on Ellen's land.

  Ellen had discovered the cave with David Weir, a local farmer and a fellow councillor on Pentworth Town Council, to whom she rented land for grazing his sheep. The steep slopes were unsuitable for any other type of agriculture.

  Their on-off relationship had developed as a result of their shared interest in palaeontology and the periods they had spent working together on the excavation of a local flint mine. They had discovered the remarkable cave and its unique paintings the previous March. They had concealed the opening in the side of the hill as best they could with turf and were about to announce their discovery when the Wall appeared. Realising that they stood little chance of protecting the cave during the emergency, they decided to keep the discovery a secret for the time being. It was as well they had done so because it was just the place to hide the three women after they'd been rescued from the clutches of Adrian Roscoe and his Bodian Brethren. Before the daring rescue, David Weir and Mike Malone had secretly prepared the cave for a long occupancy by the fugitives, packing it with supplies, providing battery lighting and a radio, some furniture, and even an Elsan chemical toilet behind a shower curtain.

  "So I'm entitled to my shag?" Vikki queried.

  "That's not the sort of question a nice, innocent fifteen-year-old Catholic girl should ask."

  "Sixteen now," Vikki replied, smiling sweetly. "And maybe not so innocent either."

  Ellen added the word's score to Vikki's running total and made her own move.

  "It's also a type of tobacco," said Vikki. "Being a herbalist, you ought to know that."

  "You know perfectly well that I never sell tobacco products in my shop. You're now nearly a hundred points behind."

  Vikki bent her head over the Scrabble board and concentrated on her letter tiles. Ellen experienced a little pang of jealousy at the way the young girl's golden hair kept its sheen. Ellen's long, dark hair needed frequently treatment with conditioner to maintain its lustre. It was lank and lifeless, sticking to the film of sweat that covered her shoulders and breasts.

  Ellen reflected that the horrific ordeal that she and Vikki had been through had changed the girl. She was no longer the shy schoolgirl that had worked Saturdays in her shop. Of course, suddenly acquiring a real hand after spending most of her life with a series of prosthetic hands would change anyone. But Vikki now accepted her miraculous new left hand although she still occasionally held her fingers half-clenched -- the default position of her old artificial hand.

  During their first few days in the cave, Vikki had acted the typical teenage girl -- sulky and obdurate. Ellen realised that she could pin-point exactly when the change had taken place and the cheerful, more adult Vikki had emerged. It had happened a week before, the morning after the coup when they had gathered around the radio and listened with the volume turned down to Bob Harding's conciliation broadcast. All three had been overjoyed at the time, thinking that their period of hiding in the cave was over. But the days had slipped by with no visit by Mike Malone or David Weir to tell them that their long ordeal was at an end. Ellen and Claire had been depressed but Vikki's spirit and general outward going demeanour had continued to rise.

  "I think I'm stuck," Vikki announced. "Come and help me, Claire. We can't let age triumph over youth."

  "Cheeky, madam," Ellen reprimanded. The old, respectful Vikki would never have talked like that.

  Claire smiled, pulled up a camping chair beside Vikki and studied the girl's letters and the board.

  A brave woman, thought Ellen.

  Claire Lake was 25. Her inclusion in the cave had surprised Ellen and Vikki because she was known to be one of Adrian Roscoe's principle organizers among his team of so-called solar sentinels.

  One night, when Vikki was asleep, Claire had given Ellen a detailed account of her life. Her background was fairly typical of the many young people that the cult leader had ensnared. Her story was one of an unhappy middle class upbringing, an unwise marriage, being abandoned by her husband, losing a baby that she had ached for, and a drift into homelessness, hopelessness, and alcohol before she saw the Bodian Brethren's recruiting Winnebago cum mobile canteen when it had visited Brighton. Like many before her, she had fallen under Roscoe's influence and joined his community in Pentworth House.

  The simplicity of the cult's belief had a certain appeal. In 1772, the German astronomer and mathematician, Johann Bode had published what became known as the Titius-Bode "law" -- a simple mathematical relationship between the planets and their distances from the sun. The later discovery of the planets Uranus and Neptune at the distances predicted by Bode's so-called "law" tended to give it much credence. The trouble was that there was no 4th planet between Mars and Jupiter which Bode's formula said there should be. Then, in 1801, the first of the asteroids were discovered. Astronomers soon found hundreds once they knew where to look for them, all dotted around the sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter with a collective mass that added up to what may have once been a modest-sized planet. The discovery confounded the scientific community of the 19th Century because the law suggested that the placing of the planets was due to divine intervention rather than the random nature of celestial mechanics.

  Adrian Roscoe took the theory one step further by claiming that God had revealed his law to Johann Bode as a terrible warning. The 4th planet had rejected God and had been destroyed as a consequence. Roscoe preached that the same
thing would happen to Earth unless man rid the planet of Satan and his abominations. To avert this calamity, he had leased Pentworth House, filled it with down and out young people recruited by himself and Nelson Faraday, and established a solar temple in Pentworth House containing representations of all the planets. Relays of his solar sentinels sat cross-legged 24/7 in the temple, praying for the salvation of the earth.

  He turned the appearance of the Wall to his advantage by claiming it was the work of God -- that Pentworth had been isolated because it harboured witchcraft and other abominations as a warning of the fate in store for the entire planet.

  Adrian Roscoe had discovered that Claire had a flair for organization and had given her a management job in his estate's dairy -- specialising in the production of top quality ice cream for the London hotel and restaurant trade. For the first time in her life, Claire felt fulfilled, useful. She was experiencing what she thought was real friendship. Everyone sharing their problems. At first she didn't even mind the sex -- sometimes three or more altogether. Sometimes just girls together; sometimes a mixture. To Claire everyone was giving and receiving. And then she had caught Nelson Faraday's eye. It was her youthful, schoolgirl looks that appealed to him and he claimed her for his own -- subjecting her to all manner of brutal sexual depravities that had her crying herself to sleep in pain and humiliation most nights.

  Claire had resolved to escape from the sect when she discovered that she was pregnant. That Nelson Faraday was most likely the father didn't matter; having lost one baby, she was fiercely determined not to lose this one.

  Then the Wall had appeared and wrecked her plans. Roscoe's imprisonment in Pentworth House and his condemning to death of Vikki Taylor and Ellen Duncan as witches convinced her that the sect leader was insane. In desperation she had had a secret meeting with Mike Malone and begged him to help her. He promised to do so and, in return, she had courageously returned to Pentworth House as a spy. She risked her life to provide Malone with information on Roscoe's public execution plans for Vikki and Ellen -- information that enabled the police officer to plan the daring rescue of Ellen and Vikki from the Temple of the Winds where Roscoe had planned to scourge them before having them burned alive.