Benny was about to reply with something apt, but then she saw a figure standing behind the trees in front of them and a surge of fear swept through her. ‘Alex, look!’

As Alexander swung his burden to see, the lithe figure broke from cover. It was a schoolboy, Benny was relieved to see, albeit a very messy one. He stood watching them for a moment.

Benny noticed that he was holding something. Was that a cricket ball? Then she realised. Just as Timothy turned and ran.

‘Wait, stop!’ Benny yelled. ‘He’s got the bloody Pod!’

She tried to run after him, but fell, halfway up the slope that Timothy had scrambled away up. Alexander hobbled over, and with much effort, got her back to her feet again.

‘We, loved one, are in no position to take part in a chase.’

‘I know, damn it,’ Benny sighed. ‘But unlike everybody else, we now know who’s got what we’re looking for.’

Nathan Bottomley was a blacksmith, farrier and metalworker. He was known to everybody in Farringham from those occasions when he’d come into a house and bash the boiler with a spanner, listen to the chime and then mutter: ‘No, that’s absolutely ridiculous. You were hoping for hot water at Christmas?’

He was currently attending to the first of a pair of new shoes for the old Lucas mare, hammering the red hot metal against his anvil, holding it in the clamp. An edition of Sons and Lovers was propped open by a metal doorstop beside him. He had opened up the big doors to his workshop by the stream to let the cool breezes in, but it wasn’t as satisfying a day as he had expected. It wanted to storm, but couldn’t. A bit of rain would be a relief.

‘Nathan!’ Bottomley looked up at the urgent call and saw a bizarre sight trudging into his yard. Alexander Shuttleworth and a girl in trousers, with dirty great sheets of metal on their backs. ‘Nathan…’ Alexander leaned heavily on the wheel of a threshing machine that was in for repair. ‘Help…’

Hoff looked up at the sky and shook his head. ‘That dome’s doing bad stuff with time.’

The aliens had taken up a place in a cluster of trees above the town and were training a variety of scanning devices on the valley below.

‘Oh?’ August looked up for a moment. ‘I thought you had the technology sorted out?’

‘I thought so too.’ Hoff shook his head again, and was silent.

‘This is a complete waste of time.’ Greeneye was pacing back and forth, twirling the dials on his particular scanning unit randomly. ‘The Pod isn’t showing up as a mutation agent or broadcasting on any electromagnetic wavelength. We’d need to be psychic.’

‘That,’ hissed Serif, grabbing the scanner off him, ‘is one of the things we shall be, if we can find the Pod!’