1944. Nigel Malcolm’s story is a suspenseful World War II vignette that brings together an aging Harry Dickson and Nigel Kneale’s famous Professor Bernard Quatermass. The title is a line from the hymn “Come Down O Love Devine” written by Bianco of Siena…

 

Nigel Malcolm: To Dust and Ashes, in its Heat Consuming

 

 

Another moonlit night. London was apprehensive. Blackout was observed. The only people who were out were those who really had to be. Everyone knew where the nearest shelters were.

Then, there was a bolt of sheet lightning. A flying saucer appeared. And another. And three more. Gliding and whirring. Making a sound like a firework noise played on a crackling record. It sounded unhealthy. The six discs started in an incomplete “V” formation, and began to spread out.

Below them, urgent police and Air Raid Warden whistles started blowing. Warnings were shouted. Soon after, the air raid siren groaned into life.

The saucers started firing missiles onto buildings. They looked like conventional missiles, but often the only sign of a hit was a pile of metallic dust. They caused hardly any damage at all. Sometimes missiles would explode just after they were fired, causing a dust cloud into which the saucer would literally disappear.

This happened to the first saucer. It fired, a dust bomb exploded, and the saucer flew into it, never emerging. Fine metal grains snowed over New Oxford Street.

Nearby, Royal Air Force spitfires were taxiing along airfields, gaining speed. There were five airplanes, one of which was flown by Group Captain Victor Carroon. And elsewhere, in mission control, the five leading members of the Flying Saucers Investigation Unit (FSIU) were arriving to see what was going on.

The saucers continued their swift progress over the London skyline. One severed its way through one of the ropes mooring a barrage balloon. It fired at buildings, causing big explosions. Then it seemed to wobble off course and crash into the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, vanishing in a puff of dust. It left not even a dent in the roof of the building.

Flight Lieutenant Carrington, known to the others as Tug, flew after another saucer.

“Right, here you are,” he said, as he aimed and fired.

He was a good shot. His missile flew over to the saucer and tapped it. The saucer exploded. It was strange, but these freak occurrences did occasionally happen.

“Sierra to Mission Control, target destroyed. Repeat: target destroyed. Over.”

In Mission Control, the five investigators exchanged baffled looks.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” said Captain Boothroyd. Air Commodore Beltham unconsciously clenched his fists.

Tug flew towards another saucer, whirring over Shoreditch. It was taking pot-shots at the streets below, seemingly at random.

“Sierra to Mission Control, another target sighted. Over.”

“Make sure you only clip this target. Over.”

“Will do.”

Tug fired at the saucer. It exploded.

“Now, that is peculiar. How can there be two lucky hits in one sortie?” he said.

Back at Mission Control, Beltham became agitated.

“Clip them I said! Not destroy them completely!”

“But the missiles are low in explosives. This makes no sense,” said Boothroyd.

“Well, the instructions went wrong somewhere,” growled Beltham, before being struck by a thought. “One of you is an enemy agent!”

“Oh, don’t be...” Quatermass stopped himself from saying something insubordinate. “Boothroyd’s right. We’re virtually firing wooden logs at those saucers.”

“It’s one of you!” Beltham glanced wildly at the two scientists. “You’re both German spies!”

The room froze. Everyone in the room was looking at Boothroyd and Quatermass.

Harry Dickson broke the tension.

“Steady on, Air Commodore. Remember that you selected these men yourself. Their references are impeccable,” he said, calmly but firmly. “Besides, if they were enemy agents, they’d sabotage the spitfires, not destroy the saucers.”

Beltham looked round at the rest of the room, realizing it was bad form to behave as he had done.

“Yes of course,” he conceded, before glancing at Boothroyd and Quatermass and murmuring, “I’m sorry.”

He was about to act on an impulse to leave the room, when the radio operator said:

“Group Captain Carroon reports one saucer left, sir.”

“Where?” Beltham said.

“It’s just over Vauxhall and heading towards Deptford. They’re both flying rather low, sir.”

Beltham looked at the others.

“Carroon’s a good shot. He should be able to bring it down in one piece.”

Over the rooftops of south east London, the last saucer raced along, nearly clipping the chimneys. Carroon, in his spitfire, was close behind, as low as he’d dare go.

“It’s going to crash into a railway station. Over.”

The saucer dipped downwards, and sliced into a Victorian School building.

“Target has crashed. Repeat, target has crashed. It is in one piece, over.”

Moments later, Carroon was returning to base.

 

 

 

July 1944.

 

To the Prime Minister’s office staff, reports of Unidentified Flying Objects appearing over Britain made for a sobering repost to the D-day landings.

There were Spitfire pilots encountering saucer-shaped flying craft over the English Channel. There were sightings over Aberdeen, Skegness, Hull, Cornwall and, increasingly, London.

One or two of these sightings could be dismissed as tricks of the light, or even as Battle Fatigue. But to senior staff in the British government, comprehensive sightings from reliable witnesses of flying disc-shaped machines could not be dismissed. In a top level meeting, the Prime Minister himself expressed concern at these possible visitations from aliens. He ordered the sightings to be classified as top secret. After all, public knowledge of aliens and their interest in Earth, and its war, could seriously undermine public morale and their Christian beliefs.

The others in the meeting quietly thought to themselves that this was quite a generous gesture from a one-time practicing Druid.

However, some eyewitnesses reported that these flying craft bore the mark of the German Iron Cross. This was what disturbed the military chiefs of staff most.

It was decided that a unit would be set up to investigate these “flying saucers.” Air Commodore Lord George Beltham, fresh from D-day maneuvers (where he had been more active than most, to the point where his superiors virtually had to restrain him), was put in charge of the unit. He set about recruiting for it.

At the FSIU’s top level, he recruited Captain Simpkins to act as his Chief of Staff, and Captain Boothroyd from the army’s engineering division, where he’d gained a reputation for being a technical genius. He also recruited Professor Quatermass, a physicist from Cambridge University and an expert in rocketry and explosives. Finally, he brought in the retired consulting detective Harry Dickson, who was an expert in strange crimes and incidents.

Dickson insisted on drafting in a young protégé of his; a sergeant seconded from the Marine Police called Stanley Bulman. He seemed to think he showed a lot of promise. As far as Beltham was concerned, Bulman was a young dreamer with little common sense, but he retained him to keep Dickson happy.

 

September 1944.

 

Half an hour after the crash, Beltham, Simpkins, Dickson, Bulman, Boothroyd and Quatermass were all driven to the site. The building was on Stanley Street. The saucer had just missed New Cross railway station and hit Mornington School, on the other side of the road.

The craft could not be seen from outside the building. The only sign of its presence was the short, wide hole in the front.

Simpkins talked to one of the firemen outside, who reluctantly allowed them to go in, providing it was for a short time, and they all wore their helmets. This concession met, and armed with torches, they all went in.

There, wedged into the floor at a forty-five degree angle, was a seemingly intact saucer. It was surprisingly small; about the size of two cars welded together.

“My nephew George would love one of these in his classroom,” murmured Bulman, but nobody took any notice of him.

Beltham clambered over the stray rubble, stone and miniature wooden animals scattered on the floor, past the children’s paintings pinned to the walls. He walked up to the side stabbed into the ground. He looked like he was squaring up to an opponent, even an arch-enemy.

He kicked it, savagely.

His foot went straight through the rim. It was as though the saucer were made of cardboard. If it weren’t for the quick reactions of Simpkins and Bulman, who were standing just behind him, Beltham would have fallen straight in.

As the Air Commodore wrestled their arms off his, Boothroyd and Quatermass both crouched down and shone their torches on the hole left by Beltham’s foot.

“This metal is so brittle, and yet it must be, what, aluminum?” said Quatermass, with a trace of excitement in his voice.

“It must be as light as aluminum, certainly. The hull of the craft is quite thick too,” said Boothroyd, equally fascinated.

Dickson walked round to the other side, shining his torch onto the ground. There was a beach of silver dust spread across the floor. It was difficult to tell where the saucer ended and the dust beach began. Then he realized what it was.

“The dust is the decomposed saucer. They don’t emit the dust, they are the dust,” he exclaimed.

“Well, they vanish into it,” said Bulman. “But what about the flash of light when they disappear?”

“Spark of light,” Quatermass corrected him. “It is the discharge of energy as it dissolves. However they appear, it clearly doesn’t do them any good.”

Dickson pointed his torch at the saucer’s body.

“There are burn marks all over. This craft has been through extraordinary heat,” he observed.

“It would have to be going implausibly fast to get those,” said Boothroyd.

“And yet, it wasn’t going so fast that a spitfire could not chase it,” murmured Dickson.

“It looks like it’s based on a whole new method of sp...” said Bulman, stopping himself from saying something that would have been too fanciful in front of this group of rationalists. But Dickson knew what Bulman had meant to say, and responded to that remark:

“Space travel, indeed.”

The pause that came after it gave Bulman the idea, or maybe the encouragement, to express it:

“Of course. If it were capable of space travel, it could be capable of space-warp. It would get here much quicker. That’s how they appear out of nowhere.”

“Space-warp travel... yes...” said Quatermass, thoughtfully.

“That’s preposterous,” said Boothroyd.

“No, no, I think Sergeant Bulman is on to something,” said Quatermass, as plaster began to crumble around them.

“Later—Run!” shouted Dickson, and everyone scrambled out of the Mornington School as its roof collapsed and the walls gave way.

Moments later, the building was just another bombsite.

 

Within an hour, the six men were sitting around the table in the FSIU’s makeshift meeting room, drinking mugs of tea and trying to stop shaking, either from nerves or the cold night.

“So, Professor, what were you saying earlier about ‘space-warp travel’?” Beltham asked.

“Space-warp travel. It wasn’t my suggestion, it was the Sergeant’s,” replied the professor, who then turned to Bulman. “Where did you get the idea from? Do you read science journals?”

“No, actually,” said Bulman, rather shyly, “I read it in a science fiction story by Isaac Asimov.”

There was an awkward silence, broken by Quatermass.

“It’s only a theory. At least, the scientific community knows of it only as a theory. Maybe the Nazis have made it a practical reality.”

“What exactly is it?” asked Beltham, more testily.

“Yes, how can I explain it?” replied Quatermass. “Imagine a spider crawling along a blanket. It would take that spider a long time to get from one side of the blanket to the other. Now, if someone were to come along and fold the blanket so that the end that the spider’s on met the opposite corner, then the spider could simply climb from one edge to the other. Then, when the blanket is unfolded again, the spider has traveled from one end to the other. It has only walked a small way itself, but it has traveled a vast distance.”

“But that’s not possible,” argued Boothroyd.

“Oh, it is, according to Einstein’s theories. Space is warped, you see. One could travel from one place, disappear from there, and reappear in another place entirely.”

“So,” said Dickson, “space does not ‘fold over’ exactly like a blanket, there are some... holes where the saucers go in, and then they come out of another hole in an entirely different place, many miles away?”

“Yes.”

“Or maybe the spider would just get squashed by the blanket,” said Boothroyd, drily.

But in the split-second pause, realization dawned on everyone in the room, including Boothroyd, whose eyes widened.

“Folding the blanket does squash the spider,” said Bulman, with wonder.

“Yes. The metal is so traumatized by space-warp travel that it turns metal to dust,” said Dickson. “And no doubt does the same thing to the unfortunate pilot. They leave their base, presumably somewhere in Germany. The craft passes through a threshold and ends up in London. That may also explain why saucers were sighted over other parts of Britain, but are now exclusively over London. The Germans are refining the process, learning how to aim it more accurately. However, it is sheer fluke that flying saucers have survived the journey at all, and they don’t survive for long. Hence the erratic flying and shooting. Hence also their total destruction when our pilots give them a glancing blow with a low-explosive content missile.”

“Yes, I see now,” said Boothroyd, reluctantly.

Quatermass’ mind was on other things.

“Imagine if the technology could be made successful. Why, a space craft could make impossibly long journeys within moments. It could reach the Moon, or any planet in the Solar System. It could even go beyond!”

Beltham, who had remained silent through all this, listening, struggling to keep up, finally spoke to rein in the professor.

“Now steady on, Quatermass. We’re still on planet Earth, and we need to study this technology for this war,” he said, sharply.

Quatermass fumed. “A stupid, idiotic war,” he growled.

“But it’s still a war and we’ve got to win it,” said Beltham. “From now on, we will develop our own version of space-warp aircraft. I’ll get on to the Air Ministry first thing tomorrow.”

“But sir, space-warp technology doesn’t work safely,” said Boothroyd.

“Then make it work safely, Captain Boothroyd. Then, when we’ve conquered space-warp travel, and Germany, then the professor and the sergeant can indulge their... science fiction fantasies. Dismissed,” said Beltham, getting up and leaving the meeting.

Quatermass managed to restrain himself until the Air Commodore was out of the room.

 

October 1944

 

Quatermass used his university contacts to find and talk to experts in space-warp technology. There weren’t that many in Britain. However, he drove up to Oxford to talk to a young man with a beard that had never been trimmed, who gave him one or two bits of useful advice.

The rest of Boothroyd’s team got to work putting this (mostly theoretical) information into practice. They assembled what Beltham decided should be three machines.

Supplies were scarce. Boothroyd acquired bits of equipment by calling in favors, bartering, and even cannibalizing other machines, including a couple of radars that he bought off a spiv in Shoreditch who told him that they were “army surplus.” The Captain wasn’t convinced, but he bought them anyway after a brief examination. “After all, Needs must when the Devil drives.” he later grumbled to his staff.

Quatermass developed a new respect for the captain. His practical skills, not to mention his talent for converting ordinary and—from a military point of view, mundane—objects into something that had an entirely different purpose. He even once joked that Boothroyd “could turn an ordinary wristwatch into a transistor radio.” Boothroyd, without any irony, just seemed to think that was a very good idea.

Meanwhile, Dickson and Bulman used army intelligence and police sources to pinpoint the precise timings of the appearances and disappearances of the flying saucers, in search of any discernible pattern. In the end, though, they concluded that there was no pattern, and the saucers came on moonlit nights when their development was right.

“Either they will develop a method of making the saucers space-warp-proofed, or they’ll abandon the project,” said Dickson, in a staff meeting.

“Then we must develop a way to make ‘space-warp-proofed’ saucers first,” replied Beltham.

Work progressed over the next few weeks. The Air Commodore pushed his team further and further, driving them all relentlessly.

 

November 1944

 

Dickson was making his way to the workshop having just returned from a meeting at Scotland Yard. He passed Beltham’s office.

“Dickson!”

Harry stopped. He retraced his steps to the office, where the door was open, and the Air Commodore was shouting down the phone.

“I don’t care about El Alemein. We won’t win the war with that sort of complacency. We’ve got to crush the enemy. Just get on with it!”

He slammed the phone down.

Dickson started filling his pipe, whilst looking at the phone. It got slammed down quite a lot.

“That Bulman of yours,” said Beltham to Dickson, “I heard him saying insubordinate things about me behind my back. I want him out of the FSIU. I’m informing you first.”

“What insubordinate things has he said, precisely?”

“Something about calling me Captain Ahab, or some such nonsense. I want him off the premises.”

Dickson lit his pipe, thoughtfully. “Captain Ahab, eh? Why do you think he called you that?”

“It doesn’t matter, Dickson. It’s insubordination. It’s a bad show.”

“Because...?”

Beltham paused for a moment. “Alright, I know I may push the team quite hard sometimes, but there is a war on.”

“And you want justice.”

“I want respect from my juniors.”

“You want justice,” repeated Dickson. “From what I have seen of you since I joined this unit, I deduce that your war with Jerry is personal. That’s what drives you, isn’t it?”

“Not wanting to live under a Nazi regime is what drives me.”

Dickson puffed on his pipe. “You have lost at least one person dear to you in this war. Maybe others in the last one too.?”

“Don’t use your observation and deduction nonsense on me!”

“But I am right though.”

This seemed to stop Beltham. He sat down. For a moment, his hard features softened and he looked tired.

“Yes. Yes you’re right. I lost a brother in the Somme. And my son, Alexander, died in the Battle of Britain.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have no other children. It’s just me now. I am the last of a long, noble line of Belthams going back to William the Conqueror.”

Dickson hoped that his sympathetic silence showed enough respect. However, he also quietly reflected that George’s father hadn’t been considered very noble amongst those who’d met him.

“All right. Bulman has one last chance,” Beltham conceded.

Dickson nodded, gratefully. “I’ll have a word with him, but he is an asset to this unit. I firmly believe that he’ll go on to greater things. And someone will need to pick up the pieces after the war.”

He made for the door.

“Where on Earth did you find him?”

“Read the Verner file at the Admiralty,” said Dickson at the door, “Bulman was very helpful during what Tom Wills likes to call The Incident of the London Bridge dynamite, the miniature submarine and the trained monkey.”

 

The three machines, christened “warp-closers” by Boothroyd, were assembled and stood side by side on the floor of the hangar. The team of engineers were clearing away the tools and preparing for the arrival of trucks to take the three warp closers to their respective destinations.

Boothroyd, meanwhile, stood by the middle machine, which looked like a radar dish mounted onto a bulky tripod and with what looked like a cumbersome aeroplane dashboard fixed to the opposite side to the dish, with knobs and switches on it. They had thick cables attaching them to motor generators. The three contraptions looked like a mad scientist had become a rogue RAF engineer and had tried to build some sort of “radar gun” or three. That wasn’t too far from the truth.

In front of him were the five principle members of FSIU, and a troupe of army soldiers.

Boothroyd began his crash course in how to actually work these contraptions: “Now pay attention, men. To activate the warp closer, press this switch here. The knob and dial next to it here controls the strength of the ray. Begin on minimum and work your way up gradually if you judge that more output is needed. This big dial here reverses the process. That may be extremely important. All the machines are pre-set to the same frequency. Any questions? Good, off you go!”

The three warp-closers were distributed to strategic parts of the city. These were north, south and east of central London, where flying saucers were most expected to come. Fortunately, Regent’s Park, Hyde Park and Greenwich Park were convenient open spaces in which to set up the machines

Beltham split the FSIU into three teams. Captain Boothroyd led a small team in Greenwich Park; Professor Quatermass lead another, similar team in Regent’s Park; Bulman led the team in Hyde Park, overseen by Dickson when he wasn’t busy with other work commitments.

Beltham and Simpkins generally oversaw the whole operation, shuttling between the three parks, the FSIU HQ, and the War Office.

All they had to do now was to wait for the next fleet of saucers.

 

January 1945

 

In more or less the middle of Hyde Park was the river Serpentine, part of which was a boating lake. On one of its banks stood the wooden clubhouse. A barrage balloon was tethered 50 yards away. About 150 yards further away, a large army tent was standing on higher ground.

On such a crisp day, the park was only populated by a small number of dog walkers and exercisers. Meanwhile, Bulman’s team; including the Sergeant himself, were pacing up and down. They were all stamping their feet and rubbing their hands in an effort to keep warm.

Suddenly, there was a crackle of lightening over the clubhouse. The cold was forgotten about.

The saucers came.

The team, including Bulman, hesitated for a moment, surprised. No one expected the invaders to appear quite this close. But then they sprang into action. Four men pulled back the covers of the tent to reveal the warp-closer machine. Bulman rushed to the controls and switched it on.

He pointed the machine in the direction of the sheet lightening. By this time, four saucers had appeared and were gliding over the Serpentine.

As the machine hummed into life and gradually powered up, Bulman took a moment to stare at these new saucers. They were different this time. The previous saucers had looked like they’d been built in this world. These new ones seemed to have been made out of an entirely new material with an unfamiliar bright red shiny texture. They were unearthly.

He realized that, whether these were Nazis or aliens, or even both, they had perfected space-warp travel, and would more dangerous than ever.

The ray from the warp-closer made the lightening in the sky rip open with a piercing scream of nature. A fifth saucer had just emerged. It seemed to stop in mid-air, wobble and then be dragged back into the white tear.

A sudden gust of wind seemed to blow all the trees and plants in the direction of the white tear. But then Bulman realized, as his colleagues staggered to stay standing, that the gust was sucking them towards the tear.

He realized he had to reverse the ray’s effects. He powered down the machine and twisted the reverse dial.

Starlings, sparrows, pigeons, ducks, geese, evergreen tree leaves, twigs and dead branches were getting sucked in. The river Serpentine stretched upwards into a reverse-waterfall.

Bulman switched on the machine again and continued to point it at the tear. He wondered why it wasn’t powering up. He glanced frantically at the motor generator, which was dead. A fuse had blown.

He knew all was lost. He admitted defeat as his feet left the ground. He was reminded of a boyhood dream of flying as he travelled towards the infinite white.

As the reverse waterfall turned into a stream, the clubhouse broke up and scattered upwards.

Four red saucers were enough. And their missiles, also shiny red, were far more effective. One saucer destroyed Victoria Railway Station in four shots.

Meanwhile, nearby, amid the air raid sirens and civilians running for cover, Beltham and Dickson were being driven to the War Office. They saw the red saucers up in the sky.

“Why hasn’t that blasted idiot fired at them?” murmured Beltham, pensively.

They watched the new saucers. Their movements in the sky were more assured than the previous steel ones. But he saw the answer to his question in the streaks of cloud and smog in the sky, centering on Hyde Park.

“We’ll have to leave the saucers to the RAF. We need Quatermass’ machine. Go straight to Regent’s Park, driver.”

“Yes sir.”

The driver immediately turned the car round in a single, swift movement and sped into the nearby road.

A saucer fired at a tall building in full sight of Beltham and Dickson. It blew up in a spectacular fireball reaching through its windows.

“These ones are clearly more effective,” said Dickson.

Meanwhile, the Air Force was mobilized. Spitfires approached the saucers and began firing at them. But the new red discs seemed almost impervious to ammunition. Captain Carroon and his men realized very quickly that they had a much more difficult fight on their hands than before. Especially when one of the planes was shot by a clean missile, causing it to crash into Harrod’s.

It was Dickson who spotted a truck with Quatermass’ warp-closer coming in the opposite direction. Evidently, it was on its way to Hyde Park on the professor’s orders.

With his own unique genius he’d mounted both the warp-closer and the motor generator onto the back of an army truck, bolted down to prevent them coming off. This way, the warp closer could work whilst moving. Boothroyd had reacted first with apoplectic dismay; then with horrified fascination and finally quiet enthusiasm as his mind seemed to be designing an improved version of a mobile warp-closer.

Unfortunately, Boothroyd, and his warp-closer, were too far away across London to be of any help now.

Beltham and Dickson flagged down the truck, and everyone got out to talk to each other. The white tear was about half a mile away. Everyone could feel its pull, like a strong gale. They were all just in time to see a spitfire and a red saucer, both wobbling around each other in a dogfight, get sucked in.

The professor gasped. “It’s appalling... and...”

“Concentrate man!” shouted Beltham, above the sound of the wind. “What’s happening? You’re the expert.”

“The threshold has become a void. It’s sucking everything into it... the air... everything is being sucked into oblivion.”

“Yes, well we can all see that,” said Beltham.

“Will it die down, Professor?” asked Dickson.

“There’s no way of knowing,” said Quatermass. “It could get bigger. It could suck in the whole planet,” he repeated, horrified.

“Don’t talk rubbish, that’s impossible,” said Beltham, trying to convince himself more than anything else.

This turned Quatermass from horror to anger.

“Look at it with your own eyes. Does that look impossible to you?” he roared “You see what your obsession with warfare has done? Nobody ever wins a war. Won’t you ever get that into your thick head? Nobody.”

Dickson interjected: “Save the recriminations until later, gentlemen. Now, Bulman used...” he was suddenly hit by the notion that Bulman was almost certainly dead now. “Bulman used the setting you and Boothroyd gave him, didn’t he. What if the process were reversed?”

“Yes. Yes I see,” said Quatermass. “Well there’s no other solution available. It’s our only hope.”

Beltham, on hearing this, left his two colleagues and struggled through the strong winds over to the truck.

“Once I’m on the back, start driving towards the void,” he ordered the bewildered NCO.

Dickson and Quatermass hurried over to follow him, but Beltham was on the back of the truck, banging on its roof. It sped off, past them and their protests.

Beltham stood astride on the back of the truck, balancing himself perfectly on the rattling vehicle. He reversed the dial, switched on and powered up the warp-closer. It hummed into life. At least the wind was behind him rather than against him.

Soon the truck went into Hyde Park itself, with little effort from the driver, who was just trying to keep it steady under these conditions. By now, the driver’s foot was mainly on the brake pedal.

Beltham continued to point the machine straight at the void. His peaked cap had been dislodged and gone on ahead of him, but he used all of his strength and physical dexterity to keep the warp-closer pointing directly at the tear.

The truck was now sliding over the grass. The white tear was shrinking. The stream stopped flowing upwards.

As both he and the machine were ripped off the truck and up into the air, Beltham felt peace. Oneness. This was the place where his troubles seemed to evaporate. He’d always known he would die in the air.

As Beltham and the warp-closer flew into the tear, it was about half the size of a car.

 

Of the three remaining saucers, Tugg Carrington managed to shoot one down over Buckinghamshire. It crashed, but it remained solid and the pilot survived. The other two evidently tried to fly back to Germany the conventional way. One saucer was shot down over Kent. That pilot also survived. The other saucer was discovered in Dieppe, where evidently its pilot had made a forced landing, before trying to sabotage the craft and disappearing into hiding somewhere in the local area.

Over the next few hours, the tear healed up completely. All the city smog and smoke was gone. The air in London had not been this clean since the first Roman settlers. And all that remained of Hyde Park was grass. Every tree, plant and living creature had gone. However, the river Serpentine was slowly refilling from its underground source. It was already a shallow pool.

And on the dip of earth where the clubhouse had once stood, Dickson, Quatermass and Boothroyd were now standing. Reflecting on what had happened, and that many members of the FSIU had perished, not just its leader. They’d all liked Bulman, and mourned him each in their own private thoughts. They’d also begun to see Beltham in a new light, now that he’d sacrificed himself.

“Of course it’s highly feasible that the void was sucking in objects from the other end to,” said Boothroyd, breaking the silence.

“Yes, it’s highly likely,” said Dickson. “Their equipment would have perished. We’ve probably seen the last of those saucers.”

“Good,” said Quatermass decisively. “When this war is over, and I develop rockets for space travel, they’ll go to the stars the long way—through space. No short cuts. Space-warp technology is far more trouble than it’s worth.”

With that, he walked briskly away. He was soon followed by his two weary colleagues.