Seahorse in the Sky

CHAPTER THREE

THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON—for they were able to determine that it was indeed afternoon by the position and movement of the sun—was a chiaroscuro of dramatic tension and sheer absurdity. The sun itself, though no one could look at it directly, seemed no different from the sun they had been accustomed to all their lives. Except that it appeared to move a little more rapidly down the sky.

Everyone had started their watches going again—apart from the electric one, which needed a new battery—and rough calculations indicated that this alien day would be about twenty earth hours long.

Before Grahame organized his groups and tried to create some semblance of order out of chaos, he took a roll-call of what he described with grim humour as his foreign legion. For the time being, he simply wrote down their names, ages, nationalities and occupations so that he would have some rough idea of who to assign to do what. Later, he could get more details and perhaps discover any useful aptitudes.

But for the present, he realized, he simply needed to get them all doing something quickly—if only to generate the illusion, however brief it might be, that they were not entirely helpless in this utterly bizarre situation.

No one could remember how many people had been on the jet from Stockholm to London, but the entire complement would certainly have been much more than sixteen. There would be time later to wonder what had happened to the pilots, the stewards and the rest. For the moment, it was wiser to concentrate on endeavouring to assess their present position and to make it as secure as possible under such abnormal circumstances.

The British contingent amounted to exactly half of Grahame’s foreign legion. This, he reflected, would not be an unusual ratio on a flight from Stockholm to London towards the end of the tourist season.

He had meticulously recorded his own name at the head of his list and had followed it with the rest of the British displaced persons. After them came two Americans, two Swedes, an Indian, a Russian, a Frenchwoman and a West Indian girl.

He studied the list carefully before forming his groups. It read:

The teaching profession was well represented, Grahame noted as he scanned the list, but that was not unusual. These days teachers seemed to do quite a bit of travelling, one way or another.

He sighed. It would have been more useful to have a doctor, a scientist of some kind and perhaps one or two beefy general labourers than such people as the television actor, the literary agent, the public relations officer and the sprinkling of career girls. One thing was clear: whoever or whatever had staged the abduction, transference, capture—no single word would ever adequately describe it—he, she, it or they had no thought of making a balanced party. Apart from the sex ratio. And that, in itself, was very intriguing…

However, the implications could be contemplated later. For the moment, there were far more important matters to deal with.

He split his party up into four groups of four, according to his original suggestion. The General Staff, which he also unsmilingly defined as a reserve task force, consisted of himself, Gunnar Rudefors and Paul and Marion Redman. Two of the remaining groups were composed of two men and two women—they were the exploration groups—and the fourth group, whose primary duty was to secure a food supply consisted of the Swedish radio officer and the three British girl students.

The General Staff established itself in the cocktail bar. The others went about their business.

Presently, interesting reports began to trickle back.

First and most important was that there was no sign of any living creatures within a radius of about one kilometre. The town consisted of nothing but the hotel, the supermarket, a strip of road, and a few small buildings that were equipped as simple workshops. The road itself began in wild grassland that might adequately be described as savannah and it simply ended in savannah also. The taxi that was parked outside the hotel was, apparently, a Mercedes. It did not have a battery or an engine. The car that was parked outside the supermarket was a Saab. That, too, had neither a battery nor an engine.

The supermarket was well stocked with food. But no fresh food. Everything was in cans or packages. Tore Norstedt and his three by now adoring girl assistants loaded large quantities of canned and packaged goods into the trolleys that had been thoughtfully provided and wheeled them across the road to the hotel.

Meanwhile, two of the reserve task force—Gunnar Rudefors and Paul Redman—had removed the green plastic coffins and stacked them neatly behind one of the sheds. They had inspected the coffins thoroughly. The plastic, though light, was very hard and could not be scratched with a tough steel penknife.

The interiors were lined with a spongy material which could be cut with a knife. Beyond these two facts, they discovered little.

The hotel itself had twenty bedrooms, ten double and ten single. It also had a fully equipped kitchen, complete with fridge and dishwashing machine. And it had running hot and cold water in all rooms. And electric lighting that worked. It was, in fact, typical of a small but comfortable hotel that might have been found anywhere in Europe.

The electric lighting and running water provided Grahame with ideas to be followed up later.

Eventually, he decided—if there were no distractions, visitations or interruptions—it would be interesting to trace the plumbing and wiring back to source. Somebody or something was evidently taking a lot of trouble to ensure that sixteen displaced terrestrials should have a home from home.

Sunset came abruptly and dramatically—as it does-on earth in tropical and equatorial regions—and everyone gathered in the cocktail bar to make their reports.

As it seemed pretty obvious that they had no choice but to spend the night—and quite possibly a long succession of nights—in the hotel, Grahame asked Anna Markova, who seemed a very capable woman, to allocate rooms. The three domestic science students were despatched to the kitchen to put their theory into practice. And presently the entire complement sat down in the hotel dining room to a meal that would not have disgraced the Savoy—apart from the fact that all the food was processed.

At the coffee and brandy stage, Grahame decided to hold an inquest on the entire sequence of events, and threw the sixty-four thousand dollar/kroner/pound/rupee/franc/rouble question down for discussion.

The most immediate and popular theory—born, no doubt, of cheap television and film productions and a multitude of cosmic strips—was that the group had been captured by Martians, Venusians or some such solar race who had somehow descended from their flying saucers on the jet from Arlanda to Heathrow and had taken their hostages before destroying the aircraft.

John Howard, the British teacher, was the first to hit this notion on the head. He went to the dining room’s french window, opened it and stepped on to the balcony. It was a clear, cool night. He invited the rest of the company to join him.

The stars they saw in the sky were not of the constellations with which they had been familiar at home. Nor were they even of the constellations of the southern hemisphere. They were just alien stars in an alien sky. Bright, icy, remote. And terrible in their strangeness.

Acutely aware of the mood of anxiety, loneliness and despair among his companions, Grahame hurriedly shepherded them back indoors. They sat gloomily at the dining tables and sipped their coffee.

Conversation became frozen. Nobody was eager to discuss the awesome and awful possibilities that now presented themselves.

There was, as yet, no way of accurately defining time or the length of the night. But it was fairly obvious that everyone was tired out—two of the girl students actually fell asleep where they sat—with effort, with fear, with despair, and with thinking.

Too much had happened. Too many nightmarish possibilities had presented themselves for the human brain to cope with them. Everyone needed to rest.

But Grahame was determined that not everyone should rest—at least, not all at once. From the eight men, he appointed night patrols, each consisting of two men who would be on duty for one hour. It would be their task to watch for intruders and to see that no one was harmed. As a further precaution, all bedroom doors were to be left wide open.

There were no strange incidents during the night—apart from occasional fits of weeping and subdued hysterics, indulged in almost as much—but much more discreetly—by the men as by the women.

But when morning came, and a small exploration party went out of the hotel to check that things were still normal, they made a very interesting discovery.

The stack of coffins had disappeared.