Read Online The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham - Free Book Online Page B

round the shed door, but he had not bothered about it. Half an hour later, when he had finished his meal and cigarette, he had gone across to take another look. He had discovered the cat lying close to the ‘meteor’. When he brought it out, he had found it was dead.
    ‘Gassed?’ asked the Inspector.
    The sergeant shook his head. ‘No, sir. That’s what’s funny about it.’
    He laid the cat’s body on top of a convenient wall, and turned the head to expose the under side of the jaw. A small circle of the black fur had been burnt away, and in the centre of the burn was a minute hole.
    ‘H’m,’ said the Inspector. He touched the wound, and then
sniffed at his forefinger. ‘Fur’s burnt, all right, but no smell of explosive fumes,’ he said.
    ‘That’s not all, sir.’
    The sergeant turned the head over to reveal an exactly similar blemish on the crown. He took a thin, straight wire from his pocket, and probed into the hole beneath the jaw. It emerged from the other hole at the top of the head.
    ‘Can you make anything of that, sir?’ he asked.
    The Inspector frowned. A weapon of minute bore, at point-blank range might have made one of the wounds. But the two appeared to be entrance and exit holes of the same missile. But a bullet did not come out leaving a neat hole like that, nor did it singe the hair about its exit. To all appearances, two of these microscopic bullets must have been fired in exactly the same line from above and below the head – which made no kind of sense.
    ‘Have you any theories?’ he asked the sergeant.
    ‘Beats me, sir,’ the other told him.
    ‘What’s happened to the thing now? Is it still buzzing?’ the Inspector inquired.
    ‘No, sir. There wasn’t a sound from it when I went in and found the cat.’
    ‘H’m,’ said the Inspector. ‘Isn’t it about time that W.O. man showed up?’
Extract from Onns’s Journal:
    This is a terrible place! As though we were condemned to some fantastic hell. Can this be our beautiful blue planet that beckoned us so bravely? We cannot understand, we are utterly bewildered, our minds reel with the horror of this place. We, the flower of civilization, now cower before the hideous monstrosities that face us. How can we ever hope to bring order into such a world as this?
    We are hiding now in a dark cavern while Iss, our leader, consults to decide our best course. None of us envies him his responsibility. What provisions can a man make against not only the unknown, but the
incredible? Nine hundred and sixty-four of us depend on him. There were a thousand: this is the way it happened.
    I heard the drill stop, then there was a clanking as it was dismantled and drawn from the long shaft it had bored. Soon after that came the call for assembly. We crawled out of our compartments, collected our personal belongings, and met in the centre hall. Sunss, our leader then, himself called the roll. Everyone answered except four poor fellows who had not stood the strain of the journey. Then Sunss made a brief speech.
    He reminded us that what had been done was irrevocable. No one yet knew what awaited us outside the Globe. If it should somehow happen that our party was divided, each group must elect its leader and act independently until contact with the rest was re-established.
    ‘We need long courage, not brief bravery,’ he said. ‘Not heroics. We have to think of ourselves always as the seed of the future; and every grain of that seed is precious.’
    He hammered home the responsibility to all of us.
    ‘We do not know, and we shall never know, how the other globes may have fared. So, not knowing, we must act as though we alone had survived, and as if all that Forta has ever stood for is in our hands alone.’
    It was he who led the way down the newly-bored passage, and he who first set foot in the new land. I followed with the rest, filled with such a conflict of feelings as I have never known before.
    And this world into which we have emerged: how