Doctor Who The Algebra of Ice Lloyd Rose

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.This pained Lethbridge-Stewart, who was responsible, intelligent and, as he would be the first to boast, almost entirely without imagination.Light was beginning to seep into the grey morning.The woman waved at them to come over.‘Why did they start work in the dark, sir?’ Ramsey asked as they crossed the field, the thin frost vanishing beneath their steps.‘Said parts of it would vanish when the sun comes up.’‘Vanish? That’s hardly the usual thing.’‘As I said, this one’s odd.The woman, by the way, is Jessica Tilbrook, from the local farm bureau.The man is Adrian Molecross and he really shouldn’t be here.’‘Why not, sir?’‘Because he’s a fool.’Chapter Three25The woman came forward to shake hands.She had short grey hair and a pink-cheeked, good-natured face.Molecross, plumpish and bearded, sported an incongruous safari hat.Lethbridge-Stewart looked around.As far as he could see, they were standing in the centre of the usual sort of crop circle, although it was odd to find one among stubble rather than mature wheat.‘Look here,’ said Tilbrook.Lethbridge-Stewart bent to examine what she was pointing at.‘Ice,’ he said in surprise.He crouched and put his hand on it.‘Thick, too.’‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Molecross solemnly.He held out a hand to Lethbridge-Stewart.‘I’m from Molecross’s Miscellany magazine.’‘Yes,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart, ignoring the hand.He stood up and walked around the site.‘It seems to be everywhere.’Tilbrook nodded.‘The whole pattern is laid over with ice about an inch thick.’ She handed Lethbridge-Stewart some desiccated material.‘And this is what was underneath.’The Brigadier realised that he was looking at brittle, shattered wheat stubble.‘Ice couldn’t do this.Only a temperature well below zero could cause this sort of damage.’‘Interesting, isn’t it? I must say, it makes a nice change from teaching people how to hack up thistles.They go organic, and then the first time they have to use a hoe instead of poison they fall apart.’Lethbridge-Stewart handed the stubble to Ramsey, who crumbled a bit of it in his fingers.‘It almost looks burned.’‘In the sense that intense cold is said to burn, it is,’ she said.‘The whole pattern was “burned” into the field.’‘This opens up a huge area of possibilities,’ said Molecross.‘It’s a totally new method of communication.’‘I assure you,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart, ‘aliens do not communicate by means of crop circles.Especially as there are no aliens,’ he added quickly.‘Why not? Why exactly not? The circles and spirals follow mathematical rules that are universal, at least in this galaxy.It’s a common language between us.’‘That’s the other anomaly,’ said Tilbrook.‘This isn’t a circle.’‘No?’ Lethbridge-Stewart surveyed the surrounding area.The pattern was too big for him to get a sense of its shape.‘No, it’s squares and rectangles and triangles.Much harder to make,’ Tilbrook said.‘You can do circles with a bit of string and a peg, but a flat-edged figure is 26The Algebra of Icesomething else.’‘No one “does” circles,’ Molecross snapped.‘Those two old farts whoclaimed –’‘Let’s not get into that.’ Lethbridge-Stewart paced out a few yards.The sun had come up, but the ice was still solid.Ramsey joined him.‘Don’t see how the ice could be done, sir,’ he said.‘I daresay an ingenious person could work out something.Still.’Lethbridge-Stewart surveyed the field a final time.It glistened now under the first rays of the sun.‘Still, I think some aerial photographs would be in order.’The photos were emailed to him later that afternoon.The Brigadier had Ramsey print them out – he had come late to computers, and looking at photographs on line gave him the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t quite seeing them – then pinned them to a large corkboard in his office over a set of Ordinance Survey maps.‘Reminds me a bit of that maze near Winchester,’ he said to Ramsey.‘What’s the name of it?’‘The one on St.Catherine’s Hill, sir?’‘That’s right.Squared off instead of curving.Only one in the country.This is rather more complex, of course.’Ramsey thought that was understating it.The photos showed at least ten straight-sided geometric shapes, including a dodecahedron, laid down almost haphazardly, some overlapping.‘Not very orderly,’ he observed.‘No.Bit of a mess, really.’‘Possibly the hoaxers were drunk, sir.’‘If that were the case, I don’t think the lines would be so straight: they look as if they were laid out with a ruler.’‘Hard to imagine anyone accomplishing this in one night.’‘We don’t know that they did.The press is always going on about how astonishing it is that crop circles appear over night, but in fact we have no idea how long they’ve been there when people discover them.They’re out in the middle of fields and not visible until you’re in one.’‘How was this one found?’‘Usual sort of UFO sighting.Fellow up late, looks out his window, claims to have seen the stars blacked out.Calls the police and says he’s going out to investigate.Damn foolish, if you ask me.Could have been anything.Police come, more to save him from himself really and discover what looks like vandalism.’‘Who contacted us?’Chapter Three27The Brigadier sighed.‘Molecross.He belongs to some Internet group that tracks crop-circle appearances.Ordinarily we’d ignore someone like that, but the presence of the ice was a new twist.I’m always on call for this sort of thing.’Ramsey wondered what other examples of this-sort-of-thing might be.Fairies at the bottom of the garden? ‘Yes sir,’ he said.‘Molecross has taken it as one up for him.He’s always pestering us, claiming we’re covering up things that the public has the right to know about.’‘What kinds of things?’‘Oh, Yetis in the Underground.That sort of rubbish.Anyway, it won’t be so easy to brush him off now [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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