Starcross (2 page)

‘
That’s the way to do it!
’ crows Mr Punch.

From within her clothes Ulla whips out a slender, sickle
shaped throwing knife and sends it whirling towards the booth, neatly slicing off the puppet’s leering head before flying back into her waiting hand.

Yet still the devilish machine advances!

The Burtons start to run towards a ramp which will return them to the promenade. But already another of the sinister sideshows is descending to cut off their escape. They turn again, and strike out across the dry sand, where the sea rolled until so recently. A hundred yards away a knoll which was an island when the sea was there offers some hope of shelter, or at least a patch of high ground which they may defend against the automata!

The wheels of the two Punch & Judy shows squeak as they swing round and begin to trundle after the fugitives. Ghastly, mechanised voices demand, ‘
Who’s got the sausages?
’

The former island is steep sided; it is a scramble to get up
on to its crown, which is planted with ornamental clumps of Martian horsetails and tickler vines. A clump of ogleweed turns curiously to watch Sir Richard and his wife as they clamber on to the summit. Below them the first of the Punch & Judy booths extends steel arms and starts to drag itself up after them.

They stand, and turn, and find more enemies awaiting them. Six figures, not all of them human. The starlight spilling through the leaves lends an oily sheen to their tall, black silk hats and imparts a ghostly glow to their white gloves and starched white shirt fronts. In the shadows of their hat brims gleam the circular eye-pieces of hideous, wheezing, elephant-trunked masks: patent respirators of the
type worn by men who have business in the atmospheres of gas-moons like Spiv and Phizzgig.

‘Dick Burton!’ says one of these grim apparitions, stepping in front of the others. ‘And dear Mrs Burton, too. Surely you’re not leaving us already?’

Ulla draws her knife again, but the Punch & Judy show has scrambled up unnoticed behind her. Steel arms lunge out from beneath its canvas cowl and pinion her, twisting her arm until the blade falls uselessly in the gravel. ‘Richard!’ she gasps. ‘Run! Flee while you still can, and warn them …’

But it is already too late. Sir Richard is in the clutches of the second of these sinister booths. The infernal machines turn them to face their captors. The leader of the masked men advances warily, reaching into a pocket as he comes.

‘You unspeakable fiend!’ growls Sir Richard. ‘Unhand my wife, or –’

‘Or
what
, Burton?’ Laughter bubbles behind the respirator. ‘Don’t you understand? You have lost! I shall have my way here, and there is nothing your department can do to stop me!’

Out of his pocket comes a small brass atomiser, such as fashionable ladies use to spray on scent. He holds it near Sir Richard’s face and squeezes the rubber bulb, just once, quite
firmly. Sir Richard sneezes, engulfed for a moment in a cloud of silver particles, which fades almost instantly. Swiftly the masked man turns and does the same to Ulla.

Sir Richard stares at the atomiser. ‘What have you – done … ?’

Already his voice is growing slow and slurred. His eyes dull. His struggles cease. In the starlight, his skin is taking on a silvery look.

‘Release them,’ says the man in the silk hat.

The Punch & Judy booths back away. Ulla reaches out groggily to take Sir Richard’s hand. Together they stumble off the path, trying to make their escape through the shrubs which cluster in the flower bed there. After a few steps Sir Richard stops and stands still. He raises his arms.

‘Richard!’ cries Ulla weakly, clinging to him, but he cannot hear her. She, too, is changing, taking on that dazed, glazed silveryness. Their toes force a way out through the leather of their boots and curl down into the soil. Their fingers bud. Ulla lets out a last sigh, like the sighing of wind through leaves. She is a tree, wrapped about the trunk of the slightly larger tree that was her husband.

The men in silk hats carefully cut away the scraps of clothing which are snagged on the roots and branches of
the new trees, and walk away. For a while, all is silent, save for the uneasy muttering of a nearby bed of mumbleweed. Then, quite suddenly, the sounds of the sea return.

Chapter One

In Which We Deplore the Din of Decorators and Receive a Most Intriguing Invitation.

What a fuss! What storms of dust! What cannonades of hammering and what snarling of wood-saws! What quantities of sawdust and shavings heaping up upon the stairs and filling the very air, making the poor hoverhogs sneeze and cough! What endless, topsy-turvy rearrangements of the household furniture! What confusion!

In short, we had the decorators in. Larklight, our dear old house, which has hung in its lonely orbit north of the Moon for goodness knows how long, gathering space dust and barnacles and generally declining into a picturesque decay, was being renovated from top to bottom.
¹
Mother had come home from her long captivity among the First Ones’ webs quite determined to see the old place dragged into the Nineteenth Century at last, and Father, once he had overcome his surprise at learning that she was actually a four-and-a-half-thousand-million-year-old entity from another star, was only too happy to spend some of his income from the Royal Xenological Institute satisfying her feminine desire for new rugs and the latest wallpapers.

Yet I do not think that even Mother, with all her otherworldly knowledge and vast experience, had quite reckoned on how much disruption would be involved: workmen in the parlour, sawdust in the tea, the thud of hammers and the growl of drills drowning out my sister Myrtle’s piano practice …
²
And it had been going on for absolute ages. When Mother secured the services of Mr Chippy Spry, General Builder & Specialist in Orbital Property Maintenance, he had assured her that his work would be done by mid-July. But September came, and still there was no sign that his carpenters and paper-hangers would ever be done.

I well remember one morning in particular. We had all taken refuge in Mother’s conservatory, and were gathered
around a little table there among her pots of space flowers. Father was perusing a recent copy of the London
Times
, Myrtle was declining French verbs in her notebook with a wistful air, Mother was opening a pile of letters lately forwarded from the Lunar Post Office at Port George, and I was puzzling without much success over some problems in Long Division which she had set me. I believe that she had been rather startled to find that I had reached the grand old age of almost twelve without any sort of formal education, and had determined to Take Me In Hand. (Though what use Long Division might be to me in later life I could not then guess, and cannot now. My heart was set upon becoming an explorer, and I should much rather have spent my mornings learning Martian Ideograms or studying charts of the Trans-Jovian Aether.)
³

Yes, we made a pretty scene as we sat there, an English family united. Yet even there we could not quite escape Mr
Spry’s siege. For some of Mother’s flowers had picked up a popular music hall song from one of his carpenters, and kept singing it over and over in their ethereal little voices. It was called ‘My Flat Cat’, and it went:

Oh what a pity,
My poor Kitty,
Peg him on the washing line to dangle!
Pa’s new auto-maid,
Our clumsy clockwork laundry-aid,
Put poor Kitty through the mangle!

It was rather a jolly song, and I tapped my foot in time to the refrain as I struggled with the knotty problem of forty-four thousand and two divided by seventeen.

Now poor Kitty looks highly unconventional:
Six foot wide but only two-dimensional …

But my sister, Myrtle, has no time whatever for what she calls ‘vulgar music’. As the flowers began again at the beginning of the first verse she wailed, ‘Oh, Blast and Drat you!’ and hurled her notebook at them, scattering petals everywhere. The flowers turned away, humming softly in a wounded manner, and Mother, Father and I exchanged a Look.