Slow Decay

some kind of short-range empathic sense. As they developed technologically, they might invent things that enabled them to communicate at longer ranges; let their friends know what they were feeling across the other side of the valley, or whatever. It’s like an emotional mobile phone.’

‘It’s a theory,’ Jack said. ‘Tosh, what do we know about the construction of the device?’

‘It’s small, and built with a lot of artistry and care. More a piece of craftsmanship than a mass-produced item. I would deduce from this that the civilisation that built it puts great store by art and artisans. The internal circuitry serves two purposes: not only does it produce the emotional amplification effect, but it also contains a picture within its structure. An image. I believe it might be a portrait of the device’s owner, or its designer.’

‘What’s the purpose of that?’ Gwen asked. ‘Bill Gates doesn’t put his picture inside every computer he sells.’

‘Doesn’t he?’ Owen asked, darkly. ‘Has anybody looked hard enough?’

‘I’m still trying to work out the purpose of the image,’ Toshiko replied. ‘But I will keep trying.’

‘Do we know when the device arrived in Cardiff?’ Jack asked. ‘Or on Earth, if that’s different.’

Toshiko shook her head. ‘The external design of the device matches several others we have in the Archive,’ she said. ‘I am assuming they all arrived at more or less the same time, but I haven’t tied it down any further than that.’

‘Which raises the question: do we have all of the devices, or are there missing ones?’ said Jack.

‘There are symbols, incised into the circuitry,’ Toshiko answered. ‘They could be serial numbers. I’m attempting to determine whether they allow us to tell how many different devices there are, or whether they’re just the alien equivalent of bar codes, scanned at the point of purchase. A price, perhaps.’

‘OK,’ Jack continued, ‘we have the device, and we know what it does. Do we know how its last owner, its late owner, got hold of it?’

‘My turn,’ Gwen said. ‘We identified who had it from the video footage in the nightclub. It was the kid named Craig Sutherland. He was a student at Cardiff University. I talked to some of his friends. He used to spend a lot of time in the junk shops, picking up old electrical devices and scavenging them for valves, transistors and other stuff. Apparently he had a thing for electronic music, and believed he couldn’t get the right sounds out of digital instruments — synthesizers, computers and so on. He built his own analogue keyboards using old components-’

‘Fascinating though this is,’ Jack interjected, ‘time flies. And if you’ve ever seen time flies, you’ll know you don’t want to mess with them. Big things, all covered in hair, wings the size of tennis rackets.’

‘Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana,’ Owen said quietly.

Gwen scowled, and looked away. Don’t encourage him, she thought. ‘I found a receipt in his room for something he bought at one of these junk shops,’ she said quickly, before Jack could snap at Owen. ‘Judging by the description, it’s probably the alien device. It was part of a job lot of stuff. Tosh and I will go back to the shop and see if there’s anything else there, but I think we can just put this one down to coincidence, rather than anything more sinister.’

Jack nodded. ‘Agreed. Good work. But remember, the device caused five deaths. It’s dangerous. Do we know what happened at the nightclub yet?’

‘Me again,’ Gwen said. ‘Checking the video footage from the nightclub, I reckon young Craig was demonstrating the device to his friends. If you ask me — which you did — my best guess is that he’d worked out what it did, and was using it to chat up girls: finding out which ones were lonely, which ones were vulnerable, which ones were up for a shag — that kind of thing. They may even have been trying to project their own randy feelings across the room in the hope that it might influence some girl they were targeting.’

‘Like a tuning fork inducing sympathetic vibrations in a wine glass,’ Toshiko said, nodding.

Owen suddenly perked up. ‘I could do with one of those.’

‘You already have one of those,’ Jack said. ‘It’s called “common sense”. You ask yourself the question “Does she want a shag?” And your common sense chips in with the answer: “No, of course she doesn’t. I’m unshaven and seedy. She would rather stick knitting needles in her eyes.”’

‘Moving on, before there’s blood on the floor,’ Gwen continued, ‘the video footage is ambiguous, but my best guess is that someone walked across the beam: some local kids looking for a fight. The experiments Tosh did suggest that the device has quite a wide beam. Their aggression got amplified locally. Craig and his mate, Rick Dennis, suddenly got wound up. The emotions might even have got fed back to the local youths, who found themselves getting angrier and angrier. The whole thing just spiralled out of control. Someone made a comment, someone else threw a punch, and within moments there were knives out and beer bottles being smashed. They probably didn’t even realise what they were doing.’

‘Positive feedback,’ Toshiko said. ‘The device probably has some kind of safety cut-out to prevent that kind of unstable situation, but they just didn’t know enough about the device to activate it.’

‘All in all,’ Jack concluded, ‘raging hormones compounded by a badly understood alien device. If I had a nickel for every time that’s happened around here…’ He sighed. ‘OK. Once Toshiko’s finished her investigations, and once Toshiko and Gwen have visited that junk shop to check for other tech, we write it all up and file it all away. Case closed. Good work everyone. Now, what about the other thing — the dead Weevil? Owen?’

‘I’ve concluded my remote autopsy, based on a close examination of the photos,’ Owen said, straightening up. ‘The creature exsanguinated — it bled to death. The wounds on its face and neck were almost certainly responsible. Someone or something had been chewing chunks of flesh from it, both before and after it died. Something quick and strong.’

‘Another alien life form?’ Gwen asked. ‘Some kind of super-predator?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Owen said. ‘I’ve done some sculptures of the tooth-marks, based on an extrapolation of what’s in the photographs. You’d expect a super-predator, especially an alien one, to have large, sharp teeth, for ripping and tearing. What I’ve got looks remarkably like human teeth. Small incisors.’

‘Human teeth?’ Toshiko was shocked. ‘You mean, a human being took down a Weevil with its bare hands?’

‘Bare teeth,’ Owen corrected. ‘That’s the way it looks.’

‘I doubt that any of us could take a Weevil by ourselves,’ Gwen said. ‘Are we looking for a gang who hold it down while one of them has a feast? Or was it wounded, or sick?’

‘I don’t think Weevils get sick,’ Owen said. ‘They have an amazing physiology. They can digest almost anything, and their immune system is in some strange way an expansion of their digestive system into the rest of the body. Anything that gets inside their tough skin — bacteria, viruses, bullets, knives, stakes, whatever — gets digested. Rapidly.’

‘Which doesn’t answer the question,’ Jack said grimly. ‘What killed and ate this particular Weevil? If there’s something out there that’s rougher and tougher, even if it’s human — especially if it’s human — we need to know about it.’ He turned to Toshiko. ‘When we found the body, you said that the Weevil we have in captivity here in the Hub somehow knew that one of its compatriots had died. D’you really think that’s possible?’

Toshiko shrugged. ‘Owen and I were here last night, and the Weevil down in the cells started whistling. That’s all we know.’

‘They’ve never whistled before,’ Jack said. ‘Not that I’ve heard, anyway.’

‘It was weird,’ Owen said, shivering. ‘Mournful.’

‘Beware of ascribing human feelings to aliens,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a classic mistake. They don’t think like us, they don’t feel like us, they don’t react like us. It’s hard enough working out what a cat is thinking, let alone something from another planet. Anthropomorphise at your peril.’

‘That should be our motto,’ Owen said. ‘I’ll get some T-shirts made up.’

‘It’s been a hectic twenty-four hours,’ Jack continued as if Owen had said nothing. ‘The alien tech thing is over, as far as I can see, so we can concentrate on the dead Weevil. With the autopsy over, there’s no obvious plan of action apart from keep an eye on the situation, and intervene if we think there’s something developing. The worry is that whatever ate the Weevil doesn’t stop there. I doubt that the taste of Weevil is enough to keep a gourmet coming back for more. The nightmare scenario is that whatever this predator is gets a taste for human flesh and decides to move upmarket, preying on people in the city — and don’t forget, there are an awful lot of those. So — I suggest everyone gets some rest until we have more to go on. Go home, get your heads down, and get ready for the next big bout of action.’