Trouble with the Natives, Page 2

  “Thank you very much,” said Danstor, full of gratitude. They walked trustingly beside P.C. Hinks, despite his slight tendency to keep behind them, until they reached the village police station.

  “This way, gents,” said P.C. Hinks, politely ushering them into a room which was really rather poorly lit and not at all well furnished, even by the somewhat primitive standards they had expected. Before they could fully take in their surroundings, there was a “click” and they found themselves separated from their guide by a large door composed entirely of iron bars.

  “Now don’t worry,” said P.C. Hinks. “Everything will be quite all right. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Crysteel and Danstor gazed at each other with a surmise that rapidly deepened to a dreadful certainty.

  “We’re locked in!”

  “This is a prison!”

  “Now what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know if you chaps understand English,” said a languid voice from the gloom, “but you might let a fellow sleep in peace.”

  For the first time, the two prisoners saw that they were not alone. Lying on a bed in the corner of the cell was a somewhat dilapidated young man, who gazed at them wearily out of one resentful eye.

  “My goodness!” said Danstor nervously. “Do you suppose he’s a dangerous criminal?”

  “He doesn’t look very dangerous at the moment,” said Crysteel, with more accuracy than he guessed.

  “What are you in for, anyway?” asked the stranger, sitting up unsteadily. “You look as if you’ve been to a fancy-dress party. Oh, my poor head!” He collapsed again into the prone position.

  “Fancy locking up anyone as ill as this!” said Danstor, who was a kind-hearted individual. Then he continued, in English, “I don’t know why we’re here. We just told the policeman who we were and where we came from, and this is what happened.”

  “Well, who are you?”

  “We’ve just landed—”

  “Oh, there’s no point in going through all that again,” interrupted Crysteel. “We’ll never get anyone to believe us.”

  “Hey!” said the stranger, sitting up once more. “What language is that you’re speaking? I know a few, but I’ve never heard anything like that.”

  “Oh, all right,” Crysteel said to Danstor. “You might as well tell him. There’s nothing else to do until that policeman comes back anyway.”

  At this moment, P.C. Hinks was engaged in earnest conversation with the superintendent of the local mental home, who insisted stoutly that all his patients were present. However, a careful check was promised and he’d call back later.

  Wondering if the whole thing was a practical joke, P.C. Hinks put the receiver down and quietly made his way to the cells. The three prisoners seemed to be engaged in friendly conversation, so he tiptoed away again. It would do them all good to have a chance to cool down. He rubbed his eye tenderly as he remembered what a battle it had been to get Mr Graham into the cell during the small hours of the morning.

  That young man was now reasonably sober after the night’s celebrations, which he did not in the least regret. (It was, after all, quite an occasion when your degree came through and you found you’d got Honours when you’d barely expected a Pass.) But he began to fear that he was still under the influence as Danstor unfolded his tale and waited, not expecting to be believed.

  In these circumstances, thought Graham, the best thing to do was to behave as matter-of-factly as possible until the hallucinations got fed up and went away.

  “If you really have a spaceship in the hills,” he remarked, “surely you can get in touch with it and ask someone to come and rescue you?”

  “We want to handle this ourselves,” said Crysteel with dignity. “Besides, you don’t know our captain.”

  They sounded very convincing, thought Graham. The whole story hung together remarkably well. And yet…

  “It’s a bit hard for me to believe that you can build interstellar spaceships, but can’t get out of a miserable village police station.”

  Danstor looked at Crysteel, who shuffled uncomfortably.

  “We could get out easily enough,” said the anthropologist. “But we don’t want to use violent means unless it’s absolutely essential. You’ve no idea of the trouble it causes, and the reports we might have to fill in. Besides, if we do get out, I suppose your Flying Squad would catch us before we got back to the ship.”

  “Not in Little Milton,” grinned Graham. “Especially if we could get across to the ‘White Hart’ without being stopped. My car is over there.”

  “Oh,” said Danstor, his spirits suddenly reviving. He turned to his companion and a lively discussion followed. Then, very gingerly, he produced a small black cylinder from an inner pocket, handling it with much the same confidence as a nervous spinster holding a loaded gun for the first time. Simultaneously, Crysteel retired with some speed to the far corner of the cell.

  It was at this precise moment that Graham knew, with a sudden icy certainty, that he was stone-sober and that the story he had been listening to was nothing less than the truth.

  There was no fuss or bother, no flurry of electric sparks or coloured rays—but a section of the wall three feet across dissolved quietly and collapsed into a little pyramid of sand. The sunlight came streaming into the cell as, with a great sigh of relief, Danstor put his mysterious weapon away.

  “Well, come on,” he urged Graham. “We’re waiting for you.”

  There were no signs of pursuit, for P.C. Hinks was still arguing on the phone, and it would be some minutes yet before that bright young man returned to the cells and received the biggest shock of his official career. No one at the “White Hart” was particularly surprised to see Graham again; they all knew where and how he had spent the night, and expressed hope that the local Bench would deal leniently with him when his case came up.

  With grave misgivings, Crysteel and Danstor climbed into the back of the incredibly ramshackle Bentley which Graham affectionately addressed as “Rose”. But there was nothing wrong with the engine under the rusty bonnet, and soon they were roaring out of Little Milton at fifty miles an hour. It was a striking demonstration of the relativity of speed, for Crysteel and Danstor, who had spent the last few years travelling tranquilly through space at several million miles a second, had never been so scared in their lives. When Crysteel had recovered his breath he pulled out his little portable transmitter and called the ship.

  “We’re on the way back,” he shouted above the roar of the wind. “We’ve got a fairly intelligent human being with us. Expect us in—whoops!—I’m sorry—we just went over a bridge—about ten minutes. What was that? No, of course not. We didn’t have the slightest trouble. Everything went perfectly smoothly. Good-bye.”

  Graham looked back only once to see how his passengers were faring. The sight was rather unsettling, for their ears and hair (which had not been glued on very firmly) had blown away and their real selves were beginning to emerge. Graham began to suspect with some discomfort, that his new acquaintances also lacked noses. Oh well, one could grow used to anything with practice. He was going to have plenty of that in the years ahead.

  The rest, of course, you all know; but for the full story of the first landing on Earth, and of the peculiar circumstances under which Ambassador Graham became humanity’s representative to the universe at large, has never before been recounted. We extracted the main details, with a good deal of persuasion, from Crysteel and Danstor themselves, while we were working in the Department of Extraterrestrial affairs.

  It was understandable, in view of their success on Earth, that they should have been selected by their superiors to make the first contact with our mysterious and secretive neighbours, the Martians. It is also understandable, in the light of the above evidence, that Crysteel and Danstor were so reluctant to embark on this later mission, and we are not really very surprised that nothing has ever been heard of them since.

  FB2 document info

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bsp; Document ID: d16b1efa-3f42-447f-bc16-71de5b4446db

  Document version: 1.1

  Document creation date: 26.04.2011

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  v.1.1 (Verdi1 2011-04-29) — some errors fixed.

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