I did not keep my word; somehow it hardly seems binding – after all, the fellow will not be born for 50 years yet.
You do not believe this? Doubters may call and inspect a little volume I pocketed with few qualms; it provides complete proof for my statements. It is published by Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 2052. It is called The Observer’s Book of Spaceships.
This must all be written down quickly while I have the chance. Let me see how it began … Yes, the gramophone record and the smoof. Only two days ago – don’t bother to check that word; I will repeat it: smoof. Only two days ago – my name’s Curly Kelledew, by the way, and I’d better try and think straight.
Are you fortunate enough to know Cambridge? One of my favourite haunts there is Curry Passage. It boasts three very similar, very satisfactory junk shops (over the three doors the word ‘junk’ is spelt A-N-T-I-Q-U-E-S). This particular afternoon, I made a find – quite accidentally. I had already bought a three-foot Chinese junk with a high prow and a real lateen sail that I thought would amuse a nephew of mine, and a little eighteenth-century milkmaid in china that was purely for my own gratification, and was just turning to go. Then I saw the pile of records behind a chest.
I put down the junk and the china maid, and began to shuffle through the pile. They were a mixed bunch, some 78s, some LPs, sold probably by hard-up undergraduates at the end of the Trinity term. Jazz – several Louis Armstrongs for those who liked him – dance, Stravinsky, a cracked ‘Prize Song’ and – I breathed faster! – Borodin’s Second Symphony, the Coates recording that is now out of the catalogue. It was in an album, neat and new. I scrutinised the first record, and it looked as if it had never been played. The shop had no player, but the price was low; I wanted that symphony, so I paid my money and carted the album off with the junk and the figurine.
That was how I got it! The next afternoon, Sunday, Harry Crossway came round as usual. That’s my definition of a friend, a man you work with all the week and are glad to see on Sundays. After a drink, after he had admired the little porcelain breasts swelling beneath the porcelain bodice, I pulled out the Borodin. We had the first movement on before I got the second record out of its envelope. I knew at once that it was odd, although it bore the correct red labels in the middle; when I touched them, they peeled off easily.
We were left with a chocolate-coloured freak twice as fat as the usual record, only one side grooved and those grooves highly extraordinary looking. Of course, I should have noticed it in the shop, but in my excitement I had only glanced at the labels and that had been sufficient. Clearly, I had been had!
I stated my irritation in very certain terms, and spent five minutes stamping round my room. Only when I had calmed a little did Harry say, in an interested voice: ‘Do you mind if I try this on the table, Curly?’
Harry and I work for Cambridge’s biggest radio firm, on the experimental side. Discs, tapes, short wave, TV – plain and coloured – we are paid to tackle them all, well paid. Next time you hear of a crease-innoculator on the new TV cameras, think of Harry and Curly, the proud parents. All of which I mention merely to explain why one wall of my lounge is covered with amplifiers and what-have-you and the bureau is full of electric tackle. All my equipment is home assembled, an improvement on the commercial variety. Even so, we did not get anything out of the mystery record. The turntable seemed unable to hold it; it slipped beneath the light pick-up. For one thing, the hole in the middle of the disc was not round but shaped like a star with sixteen points; for another, the groove seemed to be separated by a smooth groove of fair width on which the needle had no grip. We left it, and played ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ instead.
But when Harry had gone, I picked the thick disc up again and re-examined it. On the blank side was a small panel. It yielded to my exploratory fingernail and slid up. Underneath was a label which read:
POLICE VIDEOFILE B/l191214/AAA
– –
INTERPLANETARY
– –
Cat: Ganymede-Eros-Earth-Venus
Cr: Sabotage. Timesliding. Murder.
Type: Humanoid Venusian experiment: smoof.
Name: Above type use only generic name, smoof.
Filed –/viii/14/305
Rev. 2/xii/12/309
When I had read it, I re-read it. Then I re-read it. Catching sight of myself in a mirror, I saw my features were suffused with an expression of blank imbecility. ‘What’s a smoof?’ I asked the dolt.
‘A humanoid Venusian experiment,’ it replied.
Was the disc a joke of some sort? And what was a videofile? And what was a videofile doing in my room? I put it on the turntable again and started it up. But again came the trouble of dodging the smooth groove; that one being the wider, into that one the sapphire generally went. Finally I succeeded in hitting the other groove.
There was a high and rapid babble of sound, together with a rasping noise. I switched off smartly. There was no reason why it should have worked. Then it occurred to me that at 78 revs I might have played it too fast. I switched on at 33 1/3. Now the babble resolved itself into a high, fast voice; but still that horrible rasp. Again I switched off. Possibly the sapphire was overrunning the grooves; somewhere I had a finer one on a lighter pickup. After searching excitedly through three littered drawers, I found it and attached it. Breathless, setting the speed still slower, I tried again.
This time I had it! I had, to be accurate, a number of things. I soon gathered this disc was only the sound-track for a sort of film. And I knew the police report was no joke; it threw sidelights, tantalising and confusing, on a complex future world. It threw a searching light on to a smoof that made my hair stand on end …
Next day I smuggled the disc down to the works, carefully avoided Harry Crossway, and took a few plates of it under the X-ray apparatus they use for checking valves, etc.
The X-rays revealed an interior that looked at first about as complicated to me as a watch would have done to a primitive who had only just stumbled on to the use of a wheel. But the harder I looked, the more convinced I became that the disc was some sort of television receiver. There were, for instance, the normal horizontal and vertical deflecting systems employed in today’s circuits, although infinitely better packed and planned.
The thin spiral that we had called our ‘smooth groove’ proved to be a vast number of separate but linked rectangular plates. They were made of a glass that seemed infinitely strong and thin. And then I had an idea, and locked myself away from mortal men for a day. Oh, one thing I ought to mention. Foolishly – curiosity plays deadly tricks on a man! – I inserted an ad. in the local paper. It read: ‘Smoofs welcome here. No spoofs.’ And my address. Facetious to the last, that’s me.
When I had inserted that ad. I did not fully believe. But at the end of that day and night of figuring, swearing and tinkering, I emerged believing all too fully. I felt grey; I felt bald; I felt scared. With a shaking hand, I phoned Harry. He was still at the workshop, but at the sound of my voice he said he would be over at once. While I waited, I took a drink and composed myself.
Very shortly I heard Harry letting himself in. He climbed the stairs, entered, and said, handing me a note: ‘This was tucked in your letter flap.’ Then he exclaimed:
