The circle of men tightened around the little group, and gradually they were herded towards the brow of the hill.
As they saw the shuttle a fresh wave of panic set in, and the crew only just managed to keep control as they darted about, seeking a large enough gap between the encircling crew members to run through.
One of the crew, seeing a large basket of fruits and pods, had picked it up, and this somehow had a calming effect on the small people, so several others of the crew did likewise, one of them waving the basket about as he went up the ramp into the shuttle.
Once the first two or three had been coerced to enter the ship, the others followed quickly, the ramp was withdrawn, the hatch closed, and they lifted clear.
The shuttle returned to the Great Ship in what can only be described as indecent haste, and began disgorging it’s cargo of trembling visitors as the Great Ship moved out to a safer orbit, such that it wouldn’t be affected by the coming events planet side, and the asteroid would pass harmlessly by.
As the asteroid approached the planet, smaller fragments which had been held close to it by gravitational forces suddenly responded to the greater pull of earth, and began their curving descent to the surface. The main body, as predicted, just grazed the atmosphere and proceeded on its way, stripping off some of the atmosphere in the process, to no doubt return one day and wreak further havoc once again on the luckless planet. It was the smaller fragments which were to cause so much damage.
Those which hit the sea caused vast tidal waves to course around the planet for days, sending up huge volumes of water high into the upper air and increasing the cloud cover on a large scale.
The land’s surface was ripped open by a torrent of white hot fragments travelling at colossal speed, their energy expended in one frightening microsecond of impact.
Shockwaves travelled through the planet’s crust, upsetting the delicate balance which had been on the edge of de-stressing itself for a long time, and now had been given the impetus to do so.
Volcanoes spewed forth from their fiery bellies great quantities of molten rock, and pyroplastic flows of fine particles cascaded down their sides to smother all before them. Steam, ash, and scalding hot corrosive gases escaped from their deep imprisonment to join the already billowing clouds of water vapour from the riven seas, the released aerosols would stay airborne for a very long time indeed.
All along the fault zones the earth split open to disgorge its molten interior, and where these splits occurred beneath the boiling sea, and the initial pressure had spent itself, the great weight of the ocean forced itself into the fissures to hit the molten rocks below.
The ensuing explosions must have deafened any remaining life forms, so thunderous where they, and the seas boiled afresh at this new assault.
The Great Ship got underway to vacate the solar system, leaving behind not the beautiful blue white planet of yesterday, with it’s patchwork quilt of golden brown and green lands, but a seething mass of dirty grey clouds, boiling up into the stratosphere to race along in the jet stream, later to deposit it’s deadly load of detritus over the tortured surface.
‘I very much doubt anything except the lowest forms of life could survive that.’ commented the Captain to no one in particular, and several officers on the bridge nodded in sombre agreement.
With the solar system fast receding behind them, the Great Ship ploughed on through space, gaining momentum as the Inter System Drive was cut in, accelerating almost up to light speed before using the Star Drive.
A team was set up to investigate the people rescued from the third planet, and this duly reported their findings, such as they were, to the Captain.
‘They are a very simple race, and I mean very simple.’ the team leader said. ‘They are basically humanoid in form, especially internally, but there the resemblance ends. They have a very simple language with few words or sounds compared to us, and although we have tried to decipher some of these sounds, they are of a very much higher frequency to ours, and so far we haven’t been able to make much sense of them.’
The team leader returned a little later, producing a thin information file which he presented to the Captain and said,
‘In here is all the data we have managed to extract from them to date, but I don’t think it will be of much use to anyone, except perhaps to enable a decision to be made as to what we will do with them. There is one interesting point, however, and that can’t be confirmed fully at the moment, but it would seem that they are on a degenerative downward spiral, becoming less mature with each new generation.’
The Captain somewhat surprised, raised an eyebrow saying,
‘That’s most unusual, can you account for that?’
‘Not really.’ replied the team leader. ‘The most likely reason for this would be inbreeding, and the conclusion we have come to is that they are somehow the leftovers from the race which built the device which sent the signals to us in the first place. What happened to them we don’t know, but perhaps there was a great catastrophe, involving copious amounts of radiation and this caused a new mutation to appear. It is only speculation at this time, and we can’t confirm it now due to what’s happened to the planet.’
The Captain looked saddened and pensive for a while, mulling over the alternatives open to him, and finally said,
‘I’ll send the data on to Home Base, and they can make the final decision, but from what you say, there is little point in taking them to Base, so we had better look for a planet on which we can set them down and give them a chance, the poor
