The Silent Vulcan Read online

  That was as much arguing with Roscoe that Malone was prepared to tolerate. He moved forward. Faraday seized a pitchfork from a supporter and pressed the tines against Malone's jacket. His eyes were wary having had previous and painful experience of Malone's lightning reactions and formidable martial arts skills.

  "You're also under arrest, Faraday. Threatening a police officer with a deadly weapon." Malone started forward but Faraday pressed the pitchfork even harder against his chest. There was an angry response from Malone's men, some took a threatening pace forward but generally they held their ground and would not do anything until their senior officer gave the signal.

  "Lesson One," said Malone affably, "is never to allow your opponent nearer your weapon than you are."

  Despite being braced for a fast reaction, Faraday was not prepared for what happened next. Malone seized the pitchfork's tines and twisted them to one side with such force and speed that the implement's haft was jerked from his grasp. Malone spun the pitchfork through an arc like a skilled drum majorette and drove the butt end of the haft into Faraday's groin. He gave a scream of anguish and brought his hands down in a belated gesture of protection. The pitchfork whirled again and struck Faraday on the right forearm with enough force to ensure that everyone heard his radius and alna bones snap. Roscoe's motley army surged forward. Some of them went sprawling over Faraday who was writhing on the ground, howling.

  "Go! Go! Go!" Malone snapped.

  Those morris police without shields held their staffs in the horizontal position and charged, adding to Faraday's problems as he was trampled. A girl sentinel brandishing a pitchfork screamed as she was impaled through the leg by her own weapon. A morris man went down, clutching his head, blood streaming through his fingers. Six morris men darted forward and dragged Adrian Roscoe clear of the melee while another four provided a shield. The police pinned Roscoe down, ignoring his yells of pain as they doubled his arms behind his back and secured his wrists with a cable tie.

  "Save the father!" Faraday managed to scream as he was dragged to his feet. Ten heavies threw themselves on the group of morris men that were dragging Roscoe towards the van. The scrum collapsed -- a seething mass of humanity, waving arms and legs, crash helmets rolling across the cobbles. Despite the odds Malone's men managed to retain their grip on Roscoe but they were singled out for a determined assault by a second wave of some 20 sentinels. They had dispensed with their weapons and relied on brute strength and sheer weight of numbers to haul their leader away from the morris men. With several of his men having sustained injuries and two lying alarmingly still on the cobbles, Malone realised that the situation was fast getting out of control. His force, although better trained and disciplined, was no match for the sheer numbers of the opposition. He ran to the van, raised the microphone to his lips and pressed the PTT button. Just as he was about to speak, a women screamed out behind him. She was out of breathe but her voice was loud enough to be picked up by the microphone and relayed across the battleground above the uproar:

  "The Wall has gone! The Wall has gone!"

  Chapter 13.

  IT WAS A CLICHE. ELLEN Duncan knew it was a cliche yet the marking off on the calendar of the days that the three women had been imprisoned in the cave was a daily task that brought the day of their freedom, or otherwise, was one day nearer.

  Or otherwise?

  Think positive, she told herself.

  "Twenty four days now," said Claire Lake listlessly, reading Ellen's thoughts as the older woman stared at the calendar.

  Ellen didn't reply. It was her own business calendar -- emblazoned with "Earthforce" in letters that matched those on her shop sign. How she missed her little herbal shop -- the pervasive smell of mixed herbs, the rows of neat little rosewood drawers, the jangle of the Victorian bell whenever a customer entered, the nightly updating of her website so that her loyal mail order customers across the country knew exactly what she had in stock. And what of her customers in the town? How was Dawn Linegar's mother coping with her daughter's epilepsy without the regular supply of a decoction that Ellen prepared from heartsease?

  "Only twenty litres of water left," said Claire.

  "What?"

  Claire repeated her daily stocktaking finding.

  "Shit," Elaine muttered. "Well -- nothing for it but to stop washing."

  "Jesus Christ!" Vikki wailed. "As if we don't pong enough as it is!"

  "Dried beans -- about a kilo," Claire continued. "Dried eggs -- half a tin. Still two big tins of corned beef and ten tins of baked beans. All long out of date. Charcoal's nearly gone. Enough for about four more hot meals and that's it."

  "They've forgotten us," Vikki declared.

  "Don't be so stupid, young lady."

  "For fuck's sake will you stop calling me that!"

  Ellen checked an impulse to let fly at Vikki. God -- how the girl had changed. "David and Mike haven't forgotten us," she said calmly, and hoped she sounded convincing.

  "They're they only two people who know we're here," Vikki retorted. "Supposing something's happened to them?"

  "Don't be ridiculous. What could possibly have happened to them?"

  "The same thing that nearly happened to us!"

  "Sanitary towels," said Claire, who had learned to ignore the bickering between Vikki and Ellen. "They're the one thing we've hardly touched. We've only used six. Not that I need them, of course."

  "Okay. We'll have them on toast tonight," said Ellen drily.

  Vikki fell back on her camp bed, holding her hand to her mouth to prevent herself laughing out loud.

  "We're out of toast," said Claire, and joined in with Vikki's silent mirth.

  Ellen couldn't contain herself and was hardly able to suppress her fit of the giggles. Laughter -- the best medicine so it was claimed in the Readers' Digests she'd now read a dozen times. But something was nagging at the back of her mind.

  Not that she ever counted them, but she was fairly certain that the six sanitary towels were ones that she had used.

  Chapter 14.

  SISTER MARY THOMAS WAS quite flustered by the visit by no less than the chairman of Pentworth Council and the deputy chairman. What should she call Bob Harding? Mister Harding or Mr Chairman? Well, it had always when been Bob in the days when he used to repair her toaster and other appliances but that seemed inappropriate now. She settled for Mr Chairman. She knew David Weir slightly as the owner of Temple Farm who had upset local sensibilities when he had turned it into a working rural museum, and tourists and schoolchildren started arriving by the coach load. She decided that she would never have become a nun had she met such a good-looking man 70 years before.

  "Through here. Just through here," she said, ushering her guests into her tiny cottage. "I'm sorry about the mess, only I didn't have time to tidy up."

  Harding assured her not worry. Sister Mary paused at the door to her little front room and fretted about being shown up as an utter fool if she had been mistaken. But she knew that she wasn't mistaken. She had looked into the room at least a dozen times since phoning Government House. A dreadful thought occurred to her. Supposing it had only been temporary and the Wall was back?

  She pushed the door open and felt a wave of relief. The room was complete. She stood aside for Harding and Weir. They paused on the threshold, staring into a perfectly normal, low-beamed room, cluttered with the memorabilia of her long life.

  "And the Wall was where?" asked Harding, entering the tiny room and looking around.

  Sister Mary pointed along the floor. "About there, Mr Chairman. That bookcase and the fireplace and the dresser all vanished last March when the Wall appeared."

  "I believed you were offered to be re-housed at the time?" David queried.

  "Oh yes, but I refused. I mean, what would've been the point? The Wall didn't seem to be doing any physical harm and it didn't hurt to touch it. Just a tingling and that strange black patch would appear when you tried to push against it."

  Bob Harding took two pho
tographs of the room with his digital camera. He examined the very fine layer of dust on the bookcase and ran the tip of his finger through it. Sister Mary was suddenly embarrassed. "I wanted to dust before you came but they said at Government House not to touch anything until you'd been."

  "Shouldn't there be more dust than this after six months?" David enquired.

  Bob Harding shook his head. "Household dust is mostly particles of dead human skin. We're shedding it all the time. Where there's been no human contact, there's never that much dust. All those movies showing rooms or vaults that have been abandoned for years with everything covered with a thick layer of dust have always got it wrong." He paused to study the clock on the mantlepiece. "Had it stopped, Sister Mary?"

  "Yes. I wound it up. Oh dear. Did I do wrong?"

  Bob Harding gave the elderly nun a warm smile. "No -- of course not. A perfectly natural thing to do. Can you remember the time it had stopped at?"

  "No. I'm sorry."

  "No matter. Can we take a look at your garden please?" Sister Mary showed her guests into the garden. Bob Harding unrolled some large scale survey maps of the Wall's perimeter that had been prepared when it had appeared. He weighted them down on her garden table. He and David studied the expanse of lawn. The sudden change from neatly mown grass to unkempt lawn marked the original line of the Wall. But further down the lawn and away from the house, was the usual bleak vista of a wind-desiccated Farside, sedge grasses yellowing in the harsh summer sun.

  "Well, Sister Mary," said Harding. "It would seem that the Wall is still there but in a different position."

  "I'm so dreadfully sorry -- ringing you like that. But I saw that it had gone from my front room and my first thought was to call Government House. I was so excited, I didn't think to check the garden."

  "You did exactly the right thing," Bob Harding assured her. "This is an extraordinary event."

  Sister Mary smiled her pleasure. "Can I make you some nettle tea? I've plenty of hot water in my thermos."

  "That would be very welcome, sister."

  The nun looked embarrassed. "I'm terribly sorry, but I'm out of biscuits. I always seem to get through my week's ration by Wednesday."

  Harding and David assured her that just tea would be fine. Sister Mary bustled off to her kitchen. The two men took the map that covered the sector where Sister Mary's cottage was located and walked warily towards Farside. Harding stooped to examine the boundary between the mown and unmown grass.

  "Looks like normal six months growth," David observed.

  "That's what I thought," said Harding. "Curious." He stooped and plucked a handful of the long blades of grass which he examined closely. "This is modern grass. Cultivated. Sister Mary's original lawn." He paused and stared at the enigma of the Farside landscape of pre-history. "It means, David, that the real world of the 21st Century is still there. Maybe the Farside world we're seeing is an illusion afterall."

  They walked on a few paces, hands outstretched. They crossed a twin-rutted farm track and walked on for about twenty paces. The sudden resistance and blackening where their palms made contact told them that had found the Wall's new position. They spent the next 30 minutes plotting the Wall's altered line with a series of Xs pencilled on one of the maps. They returned to the table where Bob Harding joined up the Xs by lightly sketching in a neat, freehand curve. The result was that the smooth curve of the Wall's 5-kilometre radius, hardly noticeable as a curve on the large scale map, now bulged out around Sister Mary Joseph's cottage to form a blister that was decidedly noticeable.

  "So we now have a bulge in the Wall," said David slowly. "But I'm damned if I can make anything of it."

  "Mike Malone's surmise about the spyder's little sortie the other night being a survey of the Wall was probably right," Harding commented. "It looks like..." His voice trailed away. He thumped the table suddenly and jumped up. "We're a couple of blind fools," he said, heading rapidly towards the bulge. His tall, stooping frame and long legs obliged David to break into a near-jog to keep up. Harding reached the farm vehicle track and, unmindful of the damp grass, knelt to study it closely. "Fools that we are," he said angrily. "It looks like such an ordinary track that we didn't notice it." David followed the two deep ruts of the track in each direction and saw that it was only about 100-metres long from where it emerged through the blister in the Wall. It ran for a distance, and disappeared again into the opposite side of the blister.

  "Tyre marks," said Harding triumphantly. "Recent, too, I'll be bound. You're a farmer, David. What sort of agricultural vehicle cut these ruts?"

  David looked closely at the tyre marks, particularly where they where clearest at the grassy edges of the ruts. "Well, they've certainly not been made by tractors unless it was one of those giant French jobbies. And I don't know of any farmer around Pentworth who had one. None of our fields are big enough. West Sussex isn't Lincolnshire."

  "Definite proof that the outside world still exists, wouldn't you say?" Harding aimed his camera at the ruts. "I'd say that those tyre marks are recent. Very recent."

  "Well, if it is proof, this track must've been damn close to what had been the outside perimeter of the Wall," said David.

  Harding nodded and stood. "Let's take a look at that Ordnance Survey map."

  The two men returned to garden table and unfolded an OS map of the area. They studied it closely. The scale was large enough to show Sister Mary's cottage as a tiny block. There was no sign of a track on the map.

  "My guess," said Harding, "is that it's a new track made by military vehicles and that it goes right around the outside perimeter of the wall."

  "Mr Chairman!" It was Sister Mary, standing by her kitchen door. "A phone call for you from Government House."

  Harding took the call, listening intently to what Diana Sheldon had to say while making notes. He finished the call and said to David: "We've got another hole in the wall. Blackwoods Farm, near the A283."

  45 minutes later the two men were standing in small valley while talking to Eddie Blackwood whose family had worked his farm for several generations. He was a big, no-nonsense man who relished the return to farming that emphasised crop-growing. In his case the Wall now bulged outwards to avoid a cluster of low, clinker block pigsties which hitherto the Wall had sliced through.

  "Them Silent Vulcan folk, whatever they are, ain't done me no favours by shifting their Wall," he said. "Them pigsties ain't bin used for twenty year. I was gonna knock 'em down and use the breeze blocks on my side to build a composting tower." He paused and grinned. "If the supplies depot don't want all that chain-link, I can make use of it."

  He was referring to an extraordinary feature that had been revealed by the re-positioning of the Wall -- at the foot of the slope stood a 200 metre length of chain-link fencing that was like no fencing that the three men had ever seen before. It stood four metres high, secured to massive columns that gleamed with the whiteness of new concrete. They were spaced at four-metre intervals, set in concrete. The galvanized chain-link was of a heavy gauge, secured to stout horizontal wires that were held taunt with bottle screws at frequent intervals. The bright sunlight caught the gleaming edges of the coils of razor wire that decorated the top of the fence. As if that wasn't enough, there were more horizontal wires mounted on ceramic stand-off insulators. A rotting copse of an adult deer at the foot of the fence spoke of the electrification's effectiveness. Beyond the fence was a three metre gap and then another fence that consisted of coiled razor wire, as high as a man, supported on sturdy timber cruciforms. A few metres further on was a twin-rutted track similar to that which they had seen at Sister Mary's cottage.

  "I think we'd like to take a closer look please, Mr Blackwood," said Harding quietly.

  "Sure thing."

  The two men followed the farmer single file along a narrow path between large plots in which rows of peas were catch-cropped between furrows of earthed-up main crop potatoes.

  "Didn't see it right away," Blackwood said over his
shoulder. "Early morning mist that were slow to burn off."

  Mindful of the size of ceramic insulators which indicated the voltage they were designed to carry, Harding and Weir kept a respectful distance from the massive fence.

  Blackwood laughed. He grasped the chain-link and shook it. "Don't worry. It's as dead as that deer. I chucked a wire over it. Nothing. The Wall chopped off it's power when it spilled over it, I reckon."

  The three men walked to the western end of the fence where it was cut-off abruptly to give way to Farside. Harding took a photograph of David Weir creating a black patch on the Wall where it appeared to touch the fence.

  "I detect the efficient hand of the Royal Engineers in all this," said Harding. "This fence is built to last, and that worries me."

  "Why isn't there a length of matching fencing at Sister Mary's place?"

  Harding shrugged. "Who knows? Building 30 kilometres of fence of this quality is a big order, even for the army. They're probably concentrating first on spots where the public have easy access."

  "Or maybe they've left Sister Mary's part clear for experiments in breaking through the Wall?"

  "Your guess is as good as mine," Harding replied.

  "Must've cost a fortune. The outside world doesn't seem to have our more laid back attitude to the Wall."

  "You can't blame them for not taking chances. Don't forget that they don't have our experience of the Visitors -- little as that is."

  They walked towards the fence section's eastern extremity where it passed through the Wall.

  "What do you suppose the outside world sees of our world?" David wondered.

  "Who knows?" Harding replied. "My guess is that they see what we see -- Farside -- a world of 40,000 years ago."

  They drew level with the back of a large sign.