‘Thank you for agreeing to see me at such a late hour, Doctor,’ said Thomas Blackwood.
Dr Felix Cutter smiled at his visitor from the other side of his desk. Both men knew that he had little choice, since Blackwood was here on business of the Crown, but he appreciated the man’s courtesy nevertheless. ‘Not at all, Mr Blackwood. I was working late anyway, and I am more than happy to render to you any assistance you may require.’
‘I take it you have now had a chance to perform a more detailed examination of the body?’
‘Indeed: that was, in fact, the reason for my being here still.’
Dr Cutter was a small man whose face was almost invariably impassive, save for his quick, darting blue eyes whose constant movements were amplified by the lenses of his thick spectacles. Blackwood had to admit that he found this trait rather unnerving; this, combined with the man’s profession and curiously appropriate name, made him wish to conclude his business here as quickly as possible and be on his way.
His mood was not helped by the general mien of Dr Cutter’s office. The walls were painted a particularly unattractive shade of green, and were decorated (disagreeably, if appropriately) with unsettlingly accurate renderings of the human body and its various components in diverse stages of dismemberment. The fire burning fitfully in the small hearth did little to lighten the atmosphere of the place, nor did it produce sufficient heat to banish entirely the chill that hung insistently upon the air.
‘And what are your conclusions?’ asked Blackwood.
Dr Cutter leaned forward, placing his white-coated elbows on the blotter of his desk. ‘My conclusions, Mr Blackwood, are perplexing, to say the least. Ambassador R’ondd was killed by the presence of a large number of mites which had infested all four of his oesophageal tracts...’
Blackwood held up a hand. ‘Pardon me for interrupting, Doctor...
mites?
’
‘Yes. As far as I have been able to ascertain, these mites absorbed the gases from the Ambassador’s breathing apparatus before they could reach his lungs. Simply put, he died of hypoxia.’
‘He suffocated.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Have you ever encountered such a phenomenon before?’
Dr Cutter shook his head. ‘You must understand that my experience of conducting post-mortems on Martians is by no means extensive; however, I am well-versed in the physiology of the species, and I’m quite sure that this was not a natural occurrence.’
‘May I see the body?’ asked Blackwood.
Cutter rose from his desk. ‘Of course. We are storing it in the morgue until its return to Mars.’
*
Their footsteps echoed dully on the stone floor of the corridor as they walked towards the morgue. The gas lamps along the walls had been turned down for the night, and their anaemic glow lent a sepulchral aspect to their surroundings. Blackwood hated this place – or rather, he hated what it represented: it was the penultimate resting place of those who had died in mysterious (and usually violent) circumstances; a cold, impersonal way station on their journey to the grave. As much as he respected Dr Cutter and his colleagues, Blackwood felt a profound sadness that they were the only companions to the recently departed, that their only concern was to ascertain the manner of death with scalpel and bone-saw and microscope. It was a place where unpleasant questions were asked and horrible answers discovered amid the death-flower scent of formaldehyde.
‘These mites you discovered, Doctor,’ said Blackwood as they approached the door to the morgue. ‘Were you able to ascertain their type?’
Dr Cutter sighed. ‘That, too, is perplexing. As close as I can judge, they bear a resemblance to
Acarus siro
...’
‘
Acarus siro?
’
‘Flour mites.’
‘I see. But a resemblance only, by which I take it that you mean they are not
actually
flour mites.’
‘Indeed not: they behave in a way which is quite impossible for ordinary mites, regardless of phylum, class or order. No ordinary mite can do what
these
fellows appear to have done...’
‘Which is to feed directly on the gases of their environment.’
Dr Cutter nodded. ‘Directly... and ravenously. Here we are.’ He opened the door for Blackwood, who thanked him and stepped through into the morgue.
The air in here was even chillier, and Blackwood shivered involuntarily as his companion crossed the room to the row of stout metal doors which dominated the far wall. While Dr Cutter unlocked one of the doors and pulled it open, Blackwood glanced around the room, at the examination table sheathed in white porcelain, the workbenches with their sinks, microscopes and neat rows of chemical reagent bottles, the closed drawers which he knew contained the glinting tools of Cutter’s profession... and shivered again. As a Special Investigator for Her Majesty’s Bureau of Clandestine Affairs, he was well-acquainted with death in many of its forms, but he never got used to its presence and had long ago vowed to himself that he never would.
There was a sound like distant thunder as Cutter pulled out the tray on its well-oiled rollers. Blackwood turned and looked at the white sheet draped over the tray, took a deep breath and nodded to Cutter.
The pathologist pulled back the sheet to reveal the corpse of His Excellency Lunan R’ondd, Martian Ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s. Blackwood stepped forward and looked down at the body. It was a little over seven feet tall and skeletally thin; the muscles of its arms and legs, which looked like slender, ribbed pipes, clung to the underlying bones beneath the skin, which was a pale duck-egg-blue in colour. The metal leg and back braces which Martians habitually wore while on Earth to protect them from the gravity, which was significantly greater than that of their home world, had been removed prior to the post-mortem examination.
There was a Y-shaped incision across the Martian’s great barrel of a chest, where Cutter had performed the second stage of the post-mortem, following the external examination. Although the incision had now been stitched closed, its edges glinted with a pale-yellow mucilaginous substance, which had leaked out during the procedure. The chest cavity contained the Martian’s heart and the four pulmonary sacs, analogous to human lungs, but larger and more efficient: an evolutionary necessity, since Mars’s atmosphere was much thinner than Earth’s. His neck had also been opened to reveal the four oesophageal tracts connecting the pulmonary sacs to the gill-like openings beneath the narrow, protruding jaw.
Strangely, in the midst of this death, in the archetypal horror of an intelligent, living being’s reduction to the status of carrion, the thing which Blackwood found most disturbing was the eyes. Even in life, a Martian’s eyes were unsettling to look upon. Since Mars was so much farther away from the Sun than the Earth, and daylight therefore so much dimmer, the logical response of the forces of evolution had been to maximise the amount of light falling onto the Martian retina. A Martian’s eyes were therefore large, typically three inches across, with enormous black pupils. To look into such eyes was like looking into the depths of Space itself, and it was a sensation which many human beings, including Blackwood, found uncomfortable. It was ironic, he reflected, that one could read so much in a fellow human’s eyes, but so little in a Martian’s...
Lunan R’ondd’s eyes were half closed, and the thick, blue-veined nictitating membranes, which in life had kept them clean of the ubiquitous dust of his world, were drawn partway across the empty blackness of the pupils. The strangeness of his face had been transformed by death into hideousness, and Blackwood felt a great sadness closing upon his heart. This was a man from another world, of another order of being... but he was still a man, and quite apart from his obligation to the Crown, Blackwood felt an obligation that was perhaps greater still: to discover the reason why this being had died before his time.
Dr Cutter drew Blackwood’s attention away from the body and towards a workbench beside which he was standing. ‘Look here, Mr Blackwood,’ he said. ‘This is what we found in the Ambassador’s oesophageal tracts.’ He was holding a glass slide, which he proceeded to place carefully onto the stage of a compound microscope. After making several adjustments to the focus, he stepped aside and indicated the instrument. ‘See for yourself.’
Blackwood leaned over and peered through the brass eyepiece. What he saw made his skin crawl. There were perhaps a dozen mites on the slide, with bulbous, pearl-hued bodies, each with eight stubby legs bristling obscenely with long, thin hairs.
Dr Cutter noted the grimace which quickly spread across Blackwood’s face and chuckled quietly. Blackwood looked up, a trifle embarrassed, gave a wan smile and said, ‘I don’t like insects.’
‘They’re not insects, Mr Blackwood. Mites are of the class
Arachnida
: the same class as spiders.’
Blackwood sighed. ‘I like spiders even less, Dr Cutter.’
‘Really? But they’re fascinating creatures; quite magnificent, in their way...’
‘I’m sure they are, but I still find them repulsive. Now, to return to the matter at hand...’
‘Of course. Forgive me.’
‘You said that these creatures are akin to
Acarus siro
, but that they are not
actually
of that type.’
‘That’s correct. These fellows are of a type I’ve never seen before, and I’ll wager no one else has, either. In addition to our examination of the Ambassador, we also examined his breathing apparatus and discovered a large number of these creatures’ eggs inside the air tanks, the compressors and the connective piping. As far as we can determine, the eggs must have been intentionally introduced at some point and allowed to hatch.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The Martians’ methods of decontaminating their breathing apparatus prior to operation in the Earth’s atmosphere are quite rigorous. This infestation simply couldn’t have occurred by accident.’
‘I see. How long does it take for ordinary mites to hatch?’
‘It depends on the temperature and humidity of the environment. In optimal conditions, say at around eighty degrees Fahrenheit, with adequate humidity, they can reach the adult stage in about three weeks. The humidity must be at least sixty-five percent, however, otherwise the animals will desiccate and die.’
Blackwood indicated the microscope. ‘You said earlier that this particular type is not known on Earth
or
Mars. Are you quite sure of that?’
‘Oh yes, quite sure.’
‘How?’
‘I took some of the adult specimens and attempted to ascertain their resilience to different liquid and gaseous environments.’ Dr Cutter paused before continuing, ‘I quickly discovered that these creatures are virtually indestructible.’
Blackwood glanced at him sharply. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Precisely what I say. It seems that they can withstand almost any conditions, but they appear to be most comfortable in concentrated solutions of copper nitrate, copper sulphate and zinc sulphate. Quite astonishing, really. I then decided to apply an electrical current, to see if they were susceptible to that; however, instead of killing the specimens, I only succeeded in creating more...’
‘
More?
’ cried Blackwood. ‘What the devil are you talking about, man?’
Cutter reached across the workbench to a test tube stand and retrieved one of the glass tubes, which was sealed with a cork stopper. He held it up for Blackwood to see. Blackwood peered closely, and could just make out a tiny, pale yellow smudge on the inside of the glass.
‘These are more of the creatures – or at least their larvae,’ Cutter said. ‘But they are ones which
I
created, quite inadvertently, through the application of an electric current through a solution of zinc sulphate.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Blackwood whispered as he took the test tube from Cutter and held it up to the light. ‘Life cannot be spontaneously created that way.’
Dr Cutter shrugged. ‘Until a few hours ago, I would have agreed with you, Mr Blackwood, as would any man of science. Nevertheless, you hold the evidence in your hands.’ He took the test tube from Blackwood and returned it to the stand. ‘And my conclusions are supported by some additional research I conducted on the Æther, just before you arrived.’
‘Hmm,’ Blackwood muttered, recalling the frustration he had experienced earlier that day with his own cogitator.
‘If you would care to return to my office, I can show you,’ suggested Cutter.
‘What? Oh... very well, Doctor. Lead the way.’
*
Back in Dr Cutter’s office, Blackwood took a seat while the pathologist fired up the cogitator on his desk. There was a faint whirring from inside the unpolished hardwood casing, and after a few moments, a pale, milky mist began to form in the scrying glass. Cutter turned it on its pedestal so that Blackwood could see it. It might have been an inferior model to his own, the Special Investigator reflected, but at least the damned thing worked.