Free The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham Page B

horrible appearance. Many of these were a great deal larger than themselves, armed with fearful jaws and claws, and filled with a vicious ferocity which made them attack on sight. Terrifying though they looked, it soon became clear, however, that they were only really dangerous when they made unexpected attacks for they were non-sentient and the fire-rods made short work of them once they had been seen.
    After a number of such encounters Iss had succeeded in reaching open country beyond the tunnels without the loss of a man. It had been when they were on the way back to fetch us that catastrophe had overtaken them. They had been attacked by fierce grey creatures about half the size of our first monster, which they guessed to be the builders of the tunnels. It was a terrible fight in which almost all the party perished before the monsters were overcome. Iss himself had fallen, and of all his men only these two had been left in a fit condition to make the journey back to the rest of us.
    This new, ghastly tragedy is starting to sap our spirits, and our courage …
    We have chosen Muin as our new leader. He has decided that we must go forward, through the tunnels. The plain behind us is quite barren, our Globe is gone, if we stay here we shall starve; so we must try to get through to the open country beyond, trusting that Iss’s sacrifice has not been in vain, and that there are no more grey monsters to attack us …
    God grant that beyond the tunnels this nightmare world gives place to sanity …
    Is it so much that we ask – simply to live, to work, to build, in peace … ?
    Graham
looked in to see Sally and her father a couple of days later.
    ‘Thought you might like an interim report on your “meteor”,’ he said to Mr Fontain.
    ‘What was it, actually?’ asked the older man.
    ‘Oh, I don’t say they’ve got that far. They’ve established that it was no meteor; but just what it really was still has them absolutely guessing. I’d got pretty curious by the time they decided to take it away, and after I’d talked big and waved my wartime status at them a bit, they consented to stretch a point and take me along, too. So you’d better grade this as confidential.
    ‘When we went over the thing carefully at the research place it appeared to be simply a solid ball of some metal on which there’s been no report issued as yet. But in one place there was a hole, quite smooth, about half an inch in diameter, which went straight in, roughly to the middle. Well, they scratched their heads about the best way to tackle it, and decided in the end to cut it in half and see what. So they rigged up an automatic sawing device in a pit and set it going, and we all retreated to a reasonable distance, just in case. Now they’re all a bit more puzzled than they were before.’
    ‘Why, what happened?’ Sally asked.
    ‘Well, nothing actually
happened
. When the saw ran free we switched off and went back, and there was the ball lying in neat halves. But they weren’t solid halves as we had expected. There
was
a solid metal rind about six inches thick, but then there was an inch or so of soft, fine dust, which has insulating qualities that seem to be interesting them quite a bit. Then inside a thinner metal wall was an odd formation of cells; more like a section of honeycomb than anything, only made of some flexible, rubbery material, and every one empty. Next a belt about two inches wide, divided into metal compartments this time, all considerably larger than the cells in the outer part, and crammed with all sorts of things – packs of minute tubes, things that look like tiny seeds, different sorts of powders that have spilled about when the
thing came apart, and which nobody’s got around to examining properly yet, and finally a four-inch space in the middle separated into layers by dozens of paper-thin fins, and absolutely empty otherwise.
    ‘So there is the secret weapon – and if you can make anything of that lot, I’m