The crowd grew nearer, one or two of its members a little uncertain as to whether they’d done the right thing, now they came to think about it.
Thirty seconds later an explosion took out the village green, scythed the valley clean of every living thing, and was seen as far away as Halifax.
There was much subsequent debate as to whether this had been sent by God or by Satan, but a note later found in Agnes Nutter’s cottage indicated that any divine or devilish intervention had been materially helped by the contents of Agnes’s petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails.
What Agnes also left behind, on the kitchen table beside a note canceling the milk, was a box and a book. There were specific instructions as to what should be done with the box, and equally specific instructions about what should be done with the book; it was to be sent to Agnes’s son, John Device.
The people who found it—who were from the next village, and had been woken up by the explosion—considered ignoring the instructions and just burning the cottage, and then looked around at the twinkling fires and nail-studded wreckage and decided not to. Besides, Agnes’s note included painfully precise predictions about what would happen to people who did not carry out her orders.
The man who put the torch to Agnes Nutter was a Witchfinder Major. They found his hat in a tree two miles away.
His name, stitched inside on a fairly large piece of tape, was Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer, one of England’s most assiduous witchfinders, and it might have afforded him some satisfaction to know that his last surviving descendant was now, even if unawares, heading toward Agnes Nutter’s last surviving descendant. He might have felt that some ancient revenge was at last going to be discharged.
If he’d known what was actually going to happen when that descendant met her he would have turned in his grave, except that he had never got one.
FIRSTLY, HOWEVER, Newt had to do something about the flying saucer.
It landed in the road ahead of him just as he was trying to find the Lower Tadfield turning and had the map spread over the steering wheel. He had to brake hard.
It looked like every cartoon of a flying saucer Newt had ever seen.
As he stared over the top of his map, a door in the saucer slid aside with a satisfying whoosh, revealing a gleaming walkway which extended automatically down to the road. Brilliant blue light shone out, outlining three alien shapes. They walked down the ramp. At least, two of them walked. The one that looked like a pepper pot just skidded down it, and fell over at the bottom.
The other two ignored its frantic beeping and walked over to the car quite slowly, in the worldwide approved manner of policemen already compiling the charge sheet in their heads. The tallest one, a yellow toad dressed in kitchen fo
il, rapped on Newt’s window. He wound it down. The thing was wearing the kind of mirror-finished sunglasses that Newt always thought of as Cool Hand Luke shades.
“Morning, sir or madam or neuter,” the thing said. “This your planet, is it?”
The other alien, which was stubby and green, had wandered off into the woods by the side of the road. Out of the corner of his eye Newt saw it kick a tree, and then run a leaf through some complicated gadget on its belt. It didn’t look very pleased.
“Well, yes. I suppose so,” he said.
The toad stared thoughtfully at the skyline.
“Had it long, have we, sir?” it said.
“Er. Not personally. I mean, as a species, about half a million years. I think.”
The alien exchanged glances with its colleague. “Been letting the old acid rain build up, haven’t we, sir?” it said. “Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Could you tell me your planet’s albedo, sir?” said the toad, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting.
“Er. No.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir.”
“Oh, dear,” said Newt. He was wondering who he could tell about this, and realizing that there was absolutely no one who would believe him.
The toad bent closer. It seemed to be worried about something, insofar as Newt was any judge of the expressions of an alien race he’d never encountered before.
“We’ll overlook it on this occasion, sir.”
Newt gabbled. “Oh. Er. I’ll see to it—well, when I say I, I mean, I think Antarctica or something belongs to every country, or something, and—”
“The fact is, sir, that we have been asked to give you a message.”