Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure by David Hambling

Author:David Hambling [Hambling, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ryefield Press
Published: 2017-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve: The Gipsy

I was back at the library first thing on Monday morning, entering beneath the watchful gaze of Shakespeare and his peers. True to his word, Hoade had found the answer. Or at least, so he thought: the exact details lay somewhere in the books spread out before me. It should have been easier to find a clue in those volumes than in the hundreds of thousands of items in the Horniman Museum’s collection, but it was still no small undertaking.

At the same time, I had drawn some uncomfortable conclusions from my weekend conversation with Miss De Vere.

It was another lovely morning, and the rectangle of sunlight from the window had moved a good way round the office before Skinner arrived. He looked no better than usual for a Monday morning, peering at the world through a haze of hangover. His hair was combed tidily at the front, but the back bristled in all directions like an angry hedgehog. I had no sympathy for his sorry state.

“You talked to her,” I said.

Skinner hung his hat on the rack and slung his jacket over the back of his chair, buying time while he struggled to get his misfiring brain into gear. “So what if I did?”

“You didn’t mention it to me.”

Skinner spread his hands in a show of openness. “After what we saw in that garden, it seemed best to explore our options.”

He picked up the envelope on his desk and fed it back and forth through his fingers.

“She showed you the wasteland, did she?”

“Aha, so you’ve been talking to her too, have you? That’s downright hypocritical.”

“I didn’t talk to her,” I said. “She talked to me.”

“She’s not wrong, though, is she? Do you want to see this green and pleasant land”—he waved at the tree outside, whose leaves practically brushed the window—“turned into the ruddy Sahara Desert?”

“Bearing in mind the source, the credibility of that claim is open to question.”

Skinner pulled up his chair and leaned close. “It’s all science,” he said as if I had missed an obvious point. “If you leave a food out, like an apple or a piece of bread, it goes mouldy in no time. Always. And you know why that is?”

I shook my head.

“It gets covered in spores and microbes because there’s millions and millions of them floating in the air. The earth is the same—like an apple spinning in space. And there’s all these germs landing on it and infecting it. From those millions and billions of stars himself was going on about.”

“Microbes inside meteorites?” I said.

“Like a nutshell, to protect them from harmful radiations and so forth. All sorts of them, landing and infecting the earth all the time.” His fingers mimed the falling of snowflakes “They land here, and they start growing. Tiny little seeds or mushroom spores or maggot eggs. And if they’re not stamped out, they grow—sea monsters… and abominable snowmen… and other things.”

Liker tardigrades, I thought, remembering the little crawling creatures I had seen through Dr Evans’s microscope.

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