the space vehicle gestures on his tired wife.
The mob — not one of whom was carrying a hayfork, to St. Ives’ immense relief — was full of an undefined fear. The spacecraft, apparently, played second fiddle to a more nefarious threat. An alien had been sighted. It bore, insisted Mr. Stooton, the rag headgear of Islam, and was taken to be a member of that tribe by Mrs. Stooton, who hadn’t, as yet, been apprised of the spacecraft that had just pulverized Lord Kelvin’s barn and smokehouse.
More sightings had occurred, always the same. A man wound with rags was abroad, a creature, surely, from a distant sun. Wasn’t the thing in Lord Kelvin’s barn a spacecraft? Could there be any doubt that this wrapped man had driven it? Mightn’t he be a very dangerous alien?
No doubt whatsoever, assented St. Ives. He was surely a dangerous villain, this rag man from a far-off galaxy. Beat him into submission first, suggested St. Ives; question him afterward — when he was malleable. The man had been sighted, went the rumor, on the road into Harrogate, fleeing the general area of Lord Kelvin’s manor. Two farmers had given chase, one of them managing to hit him in the back of the head with a hastily thrown rock, but the alien made away into the fields and disappeared.
“Toward Harrogate, did you say?” asked St. Ives.
“Right you are, sir,” said McNally. “Hoofing it into town like the devil was after him. And he was a bad ’un, too, I can tell you. He beat a dog, he did, on the road. Chased him with a stick long as your arm. A vicious thing, your space man. That was when old Dyke hit him with the rock — slam on the noodle, and away he went. And they’d have had him too, if it weren’t for the dog, poor beast. It’s thought this alien was going to eat it, raw, right there on the road.”
“I wouldn’t at all doubt it,” said St. Ives grimly, trudging up to the manor with Hasbro beside him and the crowd of men behind. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d set out after him with dogs. Run him down. I’m a man of science, you know. What we face here is a threat, and there’s no gainsaying it. Dogs are your man for tracking aliens of this sort. They have a distinct smell. Comes from travel through space. And they’re prodigious liars. I’ve studied it out. The first thing he’ll do is deny the whole business. But there’s his craft, isn’t it? And there he is wound up in lord knows what sort of filthy rags. Don’t let the creature deny his rotten origins; that’s the word from the scientific end. Loosen his tongue for him.”
St. Ives’ speech worked the mob up thoroughly. Along the road two hundred yards off came another dozen men, and St. Ives could see, in the direction of Kirk Hammerton, a procession of torchlights. By God, he thought, they’d have Pule yet! And if the populace made it warm for the scoundrel, fine. There was, apparently, no end to the man’s villainy. Beating a dog on the road! St. Ives fumed. He was suddenly anxious, however, to diminish his role in the night’s proceedings. He wondered if there were any identifying marks about the ruinous spacecraft that would give him away before he had a chance to think of something to do. He looked at Hasbro, who stood silently holding both rifles. Hasbro raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the house. This was, he seemed to indicate, no time to be chatting with local vigilantes.
“I’d like to know,” St. Ives said to McNally, “if you run this man down. Don’t kill him, mind you. Science will need to have a go at him — to study him. This sort of thing doesn’t happen every day, you know.”
The growing crowd of men agreed that it didn’t. They seemed to be waiting for some further word from St. Ives. He could sense that they looked to him for advice, he being the one among them who most understood such strange transpirings. “Keep at it, then!” he said in a stout voice. And he turned on his heel and clumped up the stairs.
“Look there!” cried someone directly behind him. It was a familiar voice — Hasbro’s voice. St. Ives spun round, expecting to see some revelation — perhaps Pule being dragged across the meadow by his heels. What he saw was Hasbro pointing in theatrical horror at the blasted silo, clearly visible now in the thin moonlight. A simultaneous murmur of surprise issued from the crowd.
St. Ives flinched. Had Hasbro gone mad? Had he been bought off by Narbondo? He squinted at his otherwise capable gentleman’s gentleman with a face which he hoped betrayed nothing to the several dozen onlookers, but which would be an open book to Hasbro.
“The spacecraft, sir, appears to have shorn off the silo roof — blew it to bits, if I’m any judge.”
“So it has!” cried McNally.
“The scoundrel!” shouted Brinsing the baker, shaking a fist over his head to illustrate the enormity of the act.
“The filthy dog!” cried St. Ives, echoing the general sentiment and relieved that Hasbro hadn’t, after all, gone mad. They’d eventually have seen the silo, after all. It was far safer to explain it away so simply and logically. The ship had destroyed
“Binger!” shouted St. Ives suddenly, descending the stairs and collaring the old man. “There’s that business of the half pound I owe you. Step along with me now, and I’ll pay up. Mrs. Langley has a pie, too, unless I’m mistaken, and we’ve bottles of ale to wash it down with. Come along, then.” And he stepped across the threshold, dragging Binger with him, Hasbro closing in behind.
“Half a pound, sir?” asked the innocent Binger, thoroughly befuddled.
“That’s right,” said St. Ives. “Step along here now.” He turned to the crowd on the meadow, tipping his hat. “Keep at it, lads,” he cried, shutting the door behind him and precipitating the old man down the hallway toward the kitchen. “We’ll just have a go at that pie now.” He smiled and drew a half pound from his pocket. “It’ll be in the pantry, I should think. Cool as a cellar in here.” The pantry door swung back to reveal two prone corpses on the stone floor — the remains of Narbondo’s ghouls. “No pies here,” rattled St. Ives, slamming the door shut. “Take care of this, will you?” he whispered to Hasbro.
“Certainly, sir. And I’ll just take the wagon along to Lord Kelvin’s afterward, don’t you think? If I can… collect the spacecraft, sir, we could study it at our leisure.”
St. Ives nodded hugely. Hasbro’s talk of “studying” the spacecraft was lost on Binger, though, for the man stared openmouthed at the shut pantry door.
“A five-pound note was it?” asked St. Ives evenly.
“Beg pardon, sir, but…”
“No buts, Mr. Binger,” cried St. Ives. “You’ve rendered us a service, man. And I intend to reward you. Disregard the dead men in the pantry; they’re not what you suppose. Sent along by the undertaker, they were. Victims of a wasting disease. Quite conceivably virulent. Here’s the note, eh? And here, by heaven, is a bottle of ale. Join me? Of course you will!” He hauled Mr. Binger along toward the parlor. “I was just set to have a go at one of these when that damned alien appeared. Tore the roof right off the silo. You saw that, did you?”
“Aye, sir. What was he doing inside it, sir? I’d swear he come out through the roof.”
“Optical illusion, I should think. Difficult scientific matter. These men from the stars aren’t like you and me. Not a bit. Liable to do anything, aren’t they?”
“But wasn’t he down on the river…”
“I don’t at all wonder that he was,” said St. Ives. “He’s been high and low tonight, hasn’t he? Smashing my silo, beating dogs up and down the highroad, tearing into Lord Kelvin’s barn — you witnessed that, didn’t you, Mr. Binger. Quite a sight, I don’t doubt. From the attic window, you say, after it beat the devil out of my silo?”
“Yes, sir,” said Binger, livening up. He balled his hand into a fist and sailed it along from one side of his chair to the other, burying it between the arm and the cushion.
St. Ives sat transfixed. “Just like that, was it? Remarkable narrative powers you have, Mr. Binger. Really remarkable. Quite an explosion when it struck, was there?” St. Ives opened two more bottles of ale. He needed them every bit as much as he needed to pour them down the confused Binger.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Hasbro dragging a body down the hallway toward the rear door — the second ghoul, from the look of the checked trousers. Mr. Binger’s back was to the hall. St. Ives blinked and grimaced at him, hoping that his evident satisfaction with the man’s brief but gesture-ridden tale would encourage him to generate some really colorful, time-consuming detail. The next corpse followed the first out the back door, which slammed after it. And in a moment St. Ives heard the wagon rattle away out of the carriage house. He looked out through the window to see Hasbro driving along toward the river through moonlit dust, the two corpses flung into the wagon behind him.
