Free Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts Page A

top-secret reports that it wasn’t anything of the sort . I have seen the reports! The craft was hit by a beam of concentrated radiation energy in flight!’
    ‘I find that hard to believe.’
    Frenkel was positively bouncing in his seat now, like an excited child. ‘Everything is about to change,’ he said. ‘Our government is talking to the Americans at the highest level, with a degree of openness never seen before. D’tente is the watchword. It will be the end of Communism - Gorbachev is planning it, I’m certain. He’s planning an alliance with America to fight the space threat together!’
    I looked over at Trofim by the door. ‘Jan, it’s—’
    ‘Ivan!’ he snapped.
    ‘Ivan, of course. Ivan: it’s been a pleasure meeting you again, but . . .’
    ‘Think through what we planned. The aliens would attack power stations, remember? Long Island, do you remember that? The Long Island disaster we planned? That power station that went into meltdown?’
    ‘I think we got the wrong name for the New York island.’
    ‘We planned they would explode an American rocket on launch, remember? They would—’
    ‘Coincidence,’ I interrupted, ‘Launching rockets is an inherently risky business.’
    ‘But the aliens ?’ he hissed. ‘The aliens themselves? You think they’re not here ? Right now - in this place?’
    This made an unpleasantly insectile sensation scutter along my spine. It chimed with my sense of there being something wrong in that place. Ghosts in the room. Goosepimples on my forearms. But of course - nonsense. I said so, and speaking the word solidified the fact of it: ‘Nonsense.’
    ‘I have met them!’ said Frenkel, with disconcerting intensity.
    ‘You have?’
    ‘I was driving,’ he said. I can’t express how little I wanted to hear this particular confession, but he was in spate. ‘My engine died. I saw a light - and it came right down to earth. It landed in a field beside the road I was on.’
    ‘Right next to the stable containing the baby Jesus?’
    ‘I’m serious! It was a sphere, a metal sphere, the size of a cottage. It came right down.’
    ‘Like H. G. Wells predicted. Did it make a crater?’
    ‘No! It descended in silvery light, and hovered a metre or so above the earth. I got out of my car and I walked through the mud - it was muddy, you know. The mud clung to my boots like cold treacle. When I got within twenty feet the thing came to life. It was so smooth and silvery I could see my reflection in it! A silver sphere five metres across. The whole field was reflected in it, distorted after the manner of convex mirrors. And then it grew legs.’
    ‘It grew legs?’
    ‘They sprouted from its belly. There was something insectoid about it. It was like a robot-insect. Great tail legs.’
    ‘Three legs? Like H. G. Wells’s tripods.’
    ‘Two legs.’
    ‘So more like Baba Yaga’s house?’
    ‘They were nothing,’ he said, in a serious voice, ‘like chicken legs.’
    ‘I’ll tell you one thing I do remember from that time in the dacha,’ I said. ‘I remember we called Wells Shit-Shit-Wells. I remember that. It wasn’t very respectful to our great ancestor, really.’
    ‘It came after me. Great loping strides. I was terrified. I tried to make it back to my car, but . . .’ Frenkel slapped both palms onto the table. ‘It got me!’
    ‘Got you where?’
    ‘Got me inside its sphere - a metal tentacle came out, and yes, before you say it, that’s like Shit-Shit-Wells too. Except that these were disembodied, radiation creatures; they weren’t the octopoid aliens Wells predicted.’
    ‘Did the aliens in Wells’s War of the Worlds have eight legs?’ I pondered. ‘I don’t believe they did.’
    ‘I wish you’d take me seriously!’ said Frenkel.
    And he evidently did wish that.
    He told me the whole incident. The details piled up. The silver globe wasn’t real. Or it was real, but only the obtrusion into our material dimension of something far greater, a massy