Fantastic Stories Part Two

   “Quatermass, Impact with the meteorite in ten second..9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.”
 “I see it on the monitor Leo, atomic motor reaching critical.”
    A few hundred miles from Earth there is a blinding white light, the meteor has been blown to pieces and incinerated in the heat of the explosion……

   A small piece of the meteorite actually entered Earth’s atmosphere. Surviving the enormous heat, the meteorite plummeted downwards, but at an angled trajectory.  Through the upper stratosphere, through dense cloud, travelling across the sky at tremendous speed, giving off bright light. Suddenly the ground below loomed up towards it, and then the sudden impact!
   The meteorite came to ground at Barwell in Leicestershire. Quatermass immediately despatched a search in order to retrieve the meteorite. But a second agency was there hours before the Professor’s team, two men in black, who had already extracted the still hot meteorite from the large crater.

  In The Village, two laboratory technicians worked on the meteorite. At first it seemed to be just what it was, and then a small piece of membrane tissue was discovered in a small cavity.

  “What do you think that is?”
  “It appears to be some form of membrane, but it can’t be!”

  “Shall we put it to the test?”
  “We’ll have to. My god…..”
  “What is it?”
  “It’s alive!”

    The membrane was transferred to a Petri dish, and subjected to ultra violet light, gamma radiation, and sub-atomic transmutation for weeks. Until one day the membrane began to expand and take on a circular form, about the size of a table tennis ball.
   “How did you do that?” asked Number 242.
   His colleague was bemused, baffled, and completely dumbfounded. “I’ve have absolutely no idea.”
   “We had better inform Number Two.”
   “No, not yet, we must run more tests. We don’t know if it’s intelligent or not.”
   “But if it should get out of the laboratory and into The Village……”
   “What harm can a little thing like that cause?”
   “That’s just it, I don’t know. And neither do you!”
    That night, all alone in its Petri dish, the white membranic being began to glow. It rolled itself out of the dish and onto the bench, across the bench dropping down to the floor. It had stopped glowing. Large parts of the sphere took on a pinkish hue, veins stretched out across it, linking the large pinkish areas. It rolled about the floor, as though it was looking for something. A small mouse suddenly appeared. It gave out a squeak, and in an instant the sphere was on the mouse covering its face with its membrane, suffocating it until the mouse fell dead.

    The next morning the two laboratory technicians upon discovering the empty Petri dish, sealed the laboratory, but having made a complete search, discovered that they were too late. The membrane had escaped! Number 2 was alerted, and the whole Village placed on Yellow Alert. Yet it was not long before the membranic sphere was discovered, in the Piazza, and it had grown massively in size! Not only could it roll and bound along the ground, but it had the ability to lighten its mass and float through the air. What’s more it had a voice. Well it could make a noise, a cross between a roar, a man breathing through an aqua lung, a bicycle pump, and Gregorian Chant! Because of possible impending danger to citizens, the electronic defence system called “The Beam” was activated, and stunned the alien creature. Quickly laboratory technicians created an electrical containment area for the membranic “thing.” Eventually neurosurgeons worked on the heavily sedated membrane, and implanted neuroreceptors which when activated by neurotransmitters release a protein making it possible to control the membranic sphere.

   Eventually the sphere was integrated into the alarm system of The Village, and given the name Rover, but became generally known as the Guardian. For reasons of safety a containment area was created for the Guardian some distance away out at sea on the seabed. The Guardian was massively increased in size, but only a segment was to be released when an Orange Alert was ordered, or Rover sent out to patrol The Village. Such is Rover’s balloon like quality that it is able to reduce itself in size, but any single segment is unable to exceed a 6 feet circumference. Thus its growth is restricted.

Be seeing you