Screaming Science Fiction (Brian Lumley) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

Foreword

Snarker's Son

The Man Who Felt Pain

The Strange Years

No Way Home

The Man Who Saw No Spiders

Deja Viewer

Feasibility Study

Gaddy's Gloves

Big "C"

Electronic Edition

Electronic ISBN

978-1-59606-663-2

Far Territories

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.SubterraneanPress.com

Foreword

I have been asked on several occasions why I cross genres. In fact on one occasion I was asked why I “stagger” between them. (Oh you, you! I remember you and know where you live!) But you know, that’s how it was when I was coming up. I was seeing the movies, reading the comics, and I was into the pulp magazines; so that even before I knew what a “genre” was, it seemed to me that everyone was crossing them. Take a gander at those old EC Comics, you’ll soon see what I’m getting at. The Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt were “horror” horror, but a good many of the tales in Weird Fantasy were “fantasy” horror, and many of those in Weird Science were horror “SF.”

Even H. P. Lovecraft—the Old Gent of Providence himself, known primarily for his superb horror stories—had mixed his genres: The Shadow Out of Time and At the Mountains of Madness in Astounding Science Fiction, for example. (Hey, and HPL took a kicking for it, too!) And then there was Ray Bradbury’s wonderful Martian Chronicles: whimsical, yes, and written as only Bradbury can write them, but the horror undertones were there. In fact those stories were quite literally literary miscegenation, hybrids of all three species of our favorite fictions: Horror, Fantasy, and SF. And, I might add, classics at that.

But if you’ll step back from the printed page for a moment and take a look at the big screen, you’ll perhaps see far more clearly what I’m getting at. Predator was SF/Horror—in fact you could as easily and probably more properly call it Horror/SF! And the same goes for the Alien movies—with knobs on—and likewise the Terminator films, and The Fly, and The Thing, etc, etc, ad infinitum. And weren’t they all blockbusters, and didn’t we enjoy them? Well I did, that’s for sure.

And so—with the exception of supernatural horror and so-called splatterpunk, where the science in the horror is mainly absent—it appears to my mind that a large percentage of speculative and fantastic fiction benefits hugely from this miscegenation, the incorporation of horror motifs, and I’m not at all unhappy to admit that most of my weird fiction has at least an element of SF in it, and often a lot more than just an element. “Hard Science Fiction” it most certainly isn’t; “weird science” it may well be—but so what? I’ve always believed that it’s my job to entertain, not to edify, though I would like to believe that every so often along the way I may even have been “guilty” of a little of that, too.

Anyway, here it is: a sampler of my Screaming Science Fiction from across the years, a large handful of my Horrors Out of Space. Because hey, if it was good enough for HPL, Ray Bradbury and EC Comics—and since it has remained good enough for generation after generation of marvelous Tinseltown movie-makers—it’s certainly good enough for me….

Brian Lumley, Devon, UK

January 2005

Snarker’s Son

This one harks back to my early days. Written in 1970, when I still had another ten years to go finishing off my Army career, it was scheduled to appear variously in this, that or the other professional and semipro magazine or anthology that all folded, which used to happen somewhat frequently in those days. Finally editor Hugh Lamb bought it for his

New Tales of Terror

anthology, Magnum Books, 1980. A parallel universe story, it’s about a small boy who… but no, you really don’t want to go there. In case you do, however, I suggest you read on….

“All right, all right!” Sergeant Scott noisily submitted. “So you’re lost. You’re staying with your dad here in the city at a hotel—you went sightseeing and you got separated—I accept all that. But look, son, we’ve had lost kids in here before, often, and they didn’t try on all this silly stuff about names and spellings and all!”

Sergeant Scott had known—had been instinctively “aware” all day—that this was going to be one of those shifts. Right up until ten minutes ago his intuition had seemed for once to have let him down. But now….

“It’s true,” the pallid, red-eyed nine-year-old insisted, hysteria in his voice. “It’s all true, everything I’ve said. This town looks like Mondon—but it’s not! And…and before I came in here I passed a store called Woolworths—but it should have been ‘Wolwords’!”

“All right, let’s not start that again.” The policeman put up quieting hands. “Now: you say you came down with your father from…from Sunderpool? That’s in England?”

“No, I’ve told you,” the kid started to cry again. “It’s ‘Eenland’!” We came down on holiday from Sunderpool by longcar, and—”

“Longcar?” Sergeant Scott cut in, frowning. “Is that some place on the north-east coast?”

“No, it’s not a place! A longcar is…well, a longcar! Like a buzz but longer, and it goes on the longcar lanes. You know…?” The boy looked as puzzled as Sergeant Scott, to say nothing of accusing.

“No, I don’t know!” The policeman shook his head, trying to control his frown. “A ‘buzz’?” Scott could feel the first twinges of one of his bilious headaches coming on, and so decided to change the subject.

“What does your father do, son? He’s a science-fiction writer, eh?—And you’re next in a long line?”

“Dad’s a snarker,” the answer came quite spontaneously, without any visible attempt at deceit or even flippancy. In any case, the boy was obviously far too worried to be flippant. A “nut,” Scott decided—but nevertheless a nut in trouble.

Now the kid had an inquisitive look on his face. “What’s science fiction?” he asked.

“Science fiction,” the big sergeant answered with feeling, “is that part of a policeman’s lot called ‘desk-duty’—when crazy lost kids walk into the station in tears to mess up said policeman’s life!”

His answer set the youngster off worse than before.

Sighing, Scott passed his handkerchief across the desk and stood up. He called out to a constable in an adjacent room:

“Hey, Bob, come and look after the desk until Sergeant Healey gets in, will you? He’s due on duty in the next ten minutes or so. I’ll take the kid and see if I can find his father. If I can’t—well, I’ll bring the boy back here and the job can go through the usual channels.”

“All right, Sergeant, I’ll watch the shop,” the constable agreed as he came into the duty-room and took his place at the desk. “I’ve been listening to your conversation! Right rum ’un that,” he grinned, nodding towards the tearful boy. “What an imagination!”

Imagination, yes. And yet Scott was not quite sure. There was “something in the air,” a feeling of impending—strangeness—hard to define.

“Come on, son,” he said, shaking off his mood. “Let’s go.”

He took the boy’s hand. “Let’s see if we can find your dad. He’s probably rushing about right now wondering what’s become of you.” He shook his head in feigned defeat and said: “I don’t know—ten o’clock at night, just going off duty—and you have to walk in on me!”

“Ten o’clock—already?” The boy looked up into Scott’s face with eyes wider and more frightened than ever. “Then we only have half an hour!

“Eh?” the policeman frowned again as they passed out into the Lon-don street (or was it “Mondon,” Scott wondered with a mental grin). “Half an hour? What happens at half past ten, son? Do you turn into a pumpkin or something?” His humor was lost on his small charge.

“I mean the lights!” the boy answered, in what Scott took to be exasperation. “That’s when the lights go out. At half past ten they put the lights out.”

“They do?” the sergeant had given up trying to penetrate the boy’s fertile but decidedly warped imagination. “Why’s that, I wonder?” (Let the kid ramble on; it was better than tears at any rate.)

“Don’t you know anything? the youngster seemed half-astonished, half-unbelieving, almost as if he thought Scott was pulling his leg.

“No,” the sergeant returned, “I’m just a stupid copper! But come on—where did you give your father the slip? You said you passed Woolworths getting to the police station. Well, Woolworths is down this way, near the tube.” He looked at the boy sharply in mistaken understanding. “You didn’t get lost on the tube, did you? Lots of kids do when it’s busy.”

“The Tube?” Scott sensed that the youngster spoke the words in capitals—and yet it was only a whisper. He had to hold on tight as the boy strained away from him in something akin to horror. “No one goes down in the Tube anymore, except—” He shuddered.

“Yes?” Scott pressed, interested in this particular part of the boy’s fantasy despite himself and the need, now, to have done with what would normally be a routine job. “Except who?”

“Not who,” the boy told him, clutching his hand tighter. “Not who, but—”

“But?” again, patiently, Scott prompted him.

“Not who but what.”

“Well, go on,” said the sergeant, sighing, leading the way down the quiet, half-deserted street towards Woolworths. “What, er, goes down in the tube?”

“Why, Tubers, of course!” Again there was astonishment in the youngster’s voice, amazement at Scott’s obvious deficiency in general knowledge. “Aren’t you Mondoners thick!” It was a statement of fact, not a question.

“Right,” said Scott, not bothering to pursue the matter further, seeing the pointlessness of questioning an idiot. “We’ve passed Woolworths—now where?”

“Over there, I think, down that street. Yes!—that’s where I lost my father—down there!”

“Come on,” Scott said, leading the boy across the road, empty now of all but the occasional car, down into the entrance of the indicated street. In fact it was little more than an alley, dirty and unlighted. “What on earth were you doing down here in the first place?”

“We weren’t down here,” the youngster answered with a logic that made the sergeant’s head spin. “We were in a bright street, with lots of lights. Then I felt a funny buzzing feeling, and…and then I was here! I got frightened and ran.”

At that moment, their footsteps echoing hollowly on the cobbles of the alley, the sergeant felt a weird vibration that began in his feet and traveled up his body to his head, causing a burst of bright, painfully bilious stars to flash across his vision—and simultaneous with this peculiar sensation the two turned a corner to emerge with startling abruptness into a much brighter side street.

“That was the buzzing I told you about,” the boy stated unnecessarily.

Scott was not listening. He was looking behind him for the broken electric cable he felt sure must be lying there just inside the alley (the sensation must surely have been caused by a mild electric shock), but he couldn’t see one. Nor could he see anything else that might have explained that tingling, nerve-rasping sensation he had known. For that matter, where was the entrance (or exit) from which he and the boy had just this second emerged?

Where was the alley?

“Dad!” the kid yelled, suddenly tugging himself free to go racing off down the street.

Scott stood and watched, his head starting to throb and the street lights flaring garishly before his eyes. At the boy’s cry a lone man had turned, started to run, and now Scott saw him sweep the lad up in his arms and wildly hug him, intense and obvious relief showing in his face.

The policeman forgot the problem of the vanishing alley and walked up to them, hands behind his back in the approved fashion, smiling benignly. “Cute lad you’ve got there, sir—but I should curb his imagi-nation if I were you. Why, he’s been telling me a story fit to—”

Then the benign smile slid from his face. “Here!” he cried, his jaw dropping in astonishment.

But despite his exclamation, Scott was nevertheless left standing on his own. For without a word of thanks both man and boy had made off down the street, hands linked, running as if the devil himself was after them!

“Here!” the policeman called again, louder. “Hold on a bit—”

For a moment the pair stopped and turned, then the man glanced at his watch (reminding Scott curiously of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland) before picking up the boy again and holding him close. “Get off the street!” he yelled back at Scott as he once more started to run. “Get off the streets, man.” His white face glanced back and up at the street lights as he ran, and Scott saw absolute fear shining in his eyes. “It’ll soon be half past ten!”

The policeman was still in the same position, his jaw hanging slack, some seconds later when the figure of the unknown man, again hugging the boy to him, vanished round a distant corner. Then he shrugged his shoulders and tried to pull himself together, setting his helmet more firmly on his aching head.

“Well I’ll be—” He grinned nervously through the throb of his head-ache. “Snarker’s son, indeed!”

Alone, now, Scott’s feeling of impending—something—returned, and he noticed suddenly just how deserted the street was. He had never known London so quiet before. Why, there wasn’t a single soul in sight!

And a funny thing, but here he was, only a stone’s throw from his station, where he’d worked for the last fifteen years of his life, and yet—damned if he could recognize the street! Well, he knew he’d brought the boy down a dark, cobbled alley from the right, and so….

He took the first street on the right, walking quickly down it until he hit another street he knew somewhat better—

—Or did he?

Yes, yes, of course he did. The street was deserted now, quite empty, but just over there was good old….

Good old Wolwords!

Lights blazed and burst into multicolored sparks before Scott’s bilious eyes. His mind spun wildly. He grabbed hold of a lamppost to steady himself and tried to think the thing out properly.

It must be a new building, that place—yes, that had to be the answer. He’d been doing a lot of desk-duties lately, after all. It was quite possible, what with new techniques and the speed of modern building, that the store had been put up in just a few weeks.

The place didn’t look any too new, though….

Scott’s condition rapidly grew worse—understandably in the circumstances, he believed—but there was a tube station nearby. He decided to take a train home. He usually walked the mile or so to his flat, the exercise did him good; but tonight he would take a train, give himself a rest.

He went dizzily down one flight of steps, barely noticing the absence of posters and the unkempt, dirty condition of the underground. Then, as he turned a corner, he came face-to-face with a strange legend, dripping in red paint on the tiled wall:

ROT THE TUBERS!

Deep creases furrowed the sergeant’s forehead as he walked on, his footsteps ringing hollowly in the grimy, empty corridors, but his head-ache just wouldn’t let him think clearly.

Tubers, indeed! What the hell—Tubers…?

Down another flight of steps he went, to the deserted ticket booths, where he paused to stare in disbelief at the naked walls of the place and the dirt- and refuse-littered floor. For the first time he really saw the condition of the place. What had happened here? Where was everyone?

From beyond the turnstiles he heard the rumble of a distant train and the spell lifted a little. He hurried forward then, past the empty booths and through the unguarded turnstiles, dizzily down one more flight of concrete steps, under an arch and out onto an empty platform. Not even a drunk or a tramp shared the place with him. The neons flared hideously, and he put out a hand against the naked wall for support.

Again, through the blinding flashes of light in his head, he noticed the absence of posters: the employment agencies, the pretty girls in lingerie, the film and play adverts, spectacular films and avant-garde productions—where in hell were they all?

Then, as for the first time he truly felt upon his spine the chill fingers of a slithering horror, there came the rumble and blast of air that an-nounced the imminent arrival of a train—and he smelled the rushing reek of that which most certainly was not a train!

Even as he staggered to and fro on the unkempt platform, reeling under the fetid blast that engulfed him, the Tuber rushed from out its black hole—a Thing of crimson viscosity and rhythmically flickering cilia.

Sergeant Scott gave a wild shriek as a rushing feeler swept him from the platform and into the soft, hurtling plasticity of the thing—another shriek as he was whisked away into the deep tunnel and down into the bowels of the earth. And seconds later the minute hand of the clock above the empty, shuddering platform clicked down into the vertical position.

Ten-thirty—and all over Mondon, indeed throughout the length and breadth of Eenland, the lights went out.

The Man Who Felt Pain

First published in the excellent

Fantasy Tales

magazine in the Spring 1989 issue, readers voted this next one the best of the batch. “The Man Who Felt Pain” was written as a direct result of my reading somewhere of the many seriously unpleasant diseases that space-travel could bring about in astronauts. Well naturally, being a writer of horror fiction, I at once recognized a sick but exciting little possibility that I felt I just had to explore, and—

—But hey, that doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?

But, you would ask, don’t we all?

Yes, I would answer, we all feel pain—our own, and perhaps a little of those who are closest to us—but rarely anyone else’s. We don’t physically feel everyone else’s pain. My twin brother, Andrew, felt everyone’s pain, or would have if he’d been able to bear it, but of course he couldn’t and in the end it killed him. Yes, and now it would kill me, too, except I intend to put myself way, way beyond it.

So what do I mean, he could feel everyone’s pain? Do I mean he was a man of God, who felt for people? A man who agonized over all the world’s strife and turmoil, who felt the folly and frustration of men maiming and killing each other in their petty squabbles and wars? Well, it’s true he did, to a certain extent, but no, that isn’t what I mean.

I mean that he was the next leap forward in the evolution of the human race. I mean that he was a member of time’s tiny fraternity of genuine geniuses, sui generis in fact, until the day he died. If he had happened on the shores of some primal ocean, then he could have been the Missing Link; or five million years ago he might have been the first ape-man to use a branch to lever rocks down in an avalanche upon his next meal; or a million years later employed fire to cook that meal; or just two million years ago used the first log ‘wheels’ to roll a megalith boulder to and fro across the entrance to his cave. They were all steps forward, and so was Andrew, except he was a leap.

For if we all felt everyone’s pain, why, then there’d be no more wars or cruelties or hurtfulness of any sort and we could get on with the real business of our being here—which is to question why we’re here, and to care for each other, and to go on…wherever.

I’ve thought about it a lot up here, where there’s plenty of space and time to think, and my thoughts have been diverse.

There are these green bushes (I forget their name) which have oval leaves in tight, mathematically precise rows down their stems, and if you hold a burning match under one of them they all close up! And not only on that bush but on every other bush of that species in the vicinity! An intricate trigger mechanism created by Nature—or God, if you’re a believer—and transmitted through sap and fiber, branch, twig, root and perhaps even soil; intricate and yet simple, if you know how. A card up the sleeve of…of a bush?

In the ocean there are polyps—organisms, occasionally huge, made up of tiny individual units each with lives of their own—which, when the predator fish bites one, the entire colony retracts into the safety of its alveolate rock or anchorage. Nature has allowed each to feel the agony of the others—for self-preservation. But to give such a gift to…a coral? A jellyfish? A polyp? If it could be done for such lowly creatures as these, why then create Man and simply leave him to his own devices? Surely that was to ask for trouble!

And so Andrew was the next step forward, for when he was born Nature also gave the gift to him. Except that I saw it in action and know that in fact it was a curse.

Now from up here I look down on the world revolving far below—at the beautiful green and blue planet Earth, which is slowly but surely destroying me—and while I remember almost exactly how it began, I daren’t even think how it will end….

Our mother was American, our father English, and we were born in August 2027 at Lyon, France, where at that time could be found the Headquarters of ESP, the European Space Program. Our parents worked on the Program: she was and still is a computer technician, and he a PTI and instructor astronaut. He had journeyed into space many times during that decade in which we were born, but was forced to give it up when the technology got beyond him. A pity he never had Mother’s mental wizardry, her computer-oriented brain. Anyway he has a desk job now, from which he’ll retire, but reluctantly, in another five or six years’ time.

I suppose it was only natural that Andrew and I should want to be astronauts; by the time Dad was finishing up we were already cramming maths and computer studies, aviation and astronautics, space flight subjects across the board. And, like the twins we were—like peas in a pod—we paralleled each other in performance. If I was top of the class one term, Andrew would pip me the next, and vice versa. At nineteen we flew the ESP shuttles (pilot and/or co-pilot, whichever task suited us at the time, or simply as crew-members) and at twenty-one we’d been to Moonbase and back. Always together.

The trouble started at Cannes, South of France, in the summer of 2049, when we were resting up after a month-long series of shuttle runs to destroy a lot of outdated space debris: sputs and sats and bits of old rockets lodged in their many, often dangerous orbits up there far outside Earth’s envelope. I won’t go into details, for any ten-year-old kid knows them: it was just a matter of giving these odd piles of freewheeling, obsolete junk a little shove in the right direction at the right time, to send them tumbling sadly and yet somehow grandly out and away and down into the hot heart of Sol.

But we were very young men and space is a lonely place, and so when we had our feet on the ground we liked to look for company. Nothing permanent, for we didn’t lead the sort of life that makes for lasting relation-ships, but if you’re an astronaut and can’t find a little female company on a beach in Cannes…then it has to be time to see a plastic surgeon! On this occasion, however, we were on our own, just lying there on our towels on the beach and absorbing the heat of that especially hot summer, when it happened. I say ‘it,’ for at first we didn’t know what it was. Not for quite some little time, in fact.

“Aaaah-ow!” said Andrew, abruptly sitting up and rapidly blinking his eyes, staring out across an entirely placid ocean. And though there was a twinge of pain in his voice he wasn’t holding himself; he’d simply gone a little pale and shuddery, as if he had stomach cramp or something.

“Ow?” I repeated after him, but not quite, because the sound he’d made hadn’t really been repeatable: more an animal cry than a word proper. “You were stung?” He frowned, looked at the sand all about, shook his head. “I…I don’t think so,” he finally, uncertainly, said.

I looked at him—at the physical fact and presence of my brother—in admiration, which was nice because I was looking at a better-than-mirror image of myself! Andrew, with his mass of gleaming black hair, blue eyes and clean, strong features, and his athlete’s body. How many times had I wondered: do I really look as good as this?

But…a few minutes later and his stab of unknown pain was forgotten, and a spear-fisherman came out of the sea with a silver-glistening fish, shot through the head, stone dead on his spear. He took off his swimfins and marched proudly off up the beach with his catch. And Andrew’s eyes followed him, still frowning. That was all there was to it, that first time.

After that the pains came thick and fast: big hurts and small ones, pains that made him burn or ache or sometimes simply cramped him, but occasionally agonies that doubled him over and caused him to throw up on the floor. None of them coming for any good reason that we could think of, and not a one from any visible cause or having any viable cure.

The Program medics all agreed that there was nothing wrong with Andrew, at least not with his body, and they were the best in the world and should know. But he and I, we knew that there was something desperately wrong with him. He was feeling pain, and feeling it when in fact he was in the peak of condition and nothing, absolutely nothing, should hurt.

I remember a fight in a night club in Paris; though we weren’t involved personally, still I had to carry Andrew to our car and drive him to a friend’s house. It was as though he was the one who took the hammering—and not a mark on him, and anyway the scrap had taken place on the other side of the room. But he’d certainly jerked upright out of his seat, grunting and yelling and slamming this way and that as the shouting and sounds of fists striking flesh reached us! And he’d just as surely crashed over on to his back on the floor, groggy as a punch-drunk ex-boxer, as the fight came to a close.

I remember the night in Lyon when he woke up hoarsely screaming his agony and clawing at his face. We were sleeping on the base at the time and there’d been some party or other we hadn’t attended. But I’d heard the crash outside at the same time Andrew started yelling, and when I looked out of the window there was this accident down there, where a once-pretty girl had been tossed through a windscreen on to the hood of a second car, her face shattered and bloody. Andrew sat on his bed and moaned and shuddered and held his face together (which was together, you understand) until an ambulance came and took the injured girl away….

And that was when it finally began to dawn on us just what was wrong, and what was rapidly getting worse; so that it’s hardly surprising he had his breakdown. He had it because he’d begun to realize that nothing and no one could ever put his problem right, and that from now on he was subject to anyone else’s, everyone else’s, pain.

For that was the simple fact of it: that he felt pain. From the pinprick stings of small, damaged or dying creatures to the screaming agonies of hideous human death. But once we knew what it was, at least we could tell the doctors.

It didn’t take them long to check it out, and after they did…I’ve never seen so many intelligent down-to-earth men looking so downright shocked and disbelieving and lost for answers. And lost is the only word for it, for how can you treat someone for the aches and pains and bumps and cuts and bruises of someone else? How can you treat—or begin treating—the agony of a broken leg when the leg plainly isn’t broken?

Non-addictive painkillers, obviously….

Oh, really?

For in fact it did no good to give painkillers to Andrew. The pain wasn’t actually in him: its source or sources were beyond his mind and body; coming from outside of him, there was nothing they could put inside of him that would help. Worse, it didn’t even bring relief when they gave the pills to the ones actually suffering from the pain! They only thought the pain had gone away, because it had been blocked. But the cause of the hurting was still there and Andrew could feel it….

The thing’s progress was rapid; it precisely paralleled Andrew’s deterioration. Obviously, he wasn’t going out into space any more….

Or was he?

Once they’d accepted this new thing—Andrew’s…disease?—the ESP medics were amenable to an idea of mine. And they backed me on it. For seven years we’d been using one-man weather sats for accurate forecast-ing. The robot sats had been fine in their day, but nothing was as clear-sighted as human eyes and nothing so observant as an alert human brain. And what with the extensive damage to the ozone layer—the constant fluctuation of its tears and holes—computer probability was at best mechanical guesswork anyway.

So—my idea was simple and I don’t think I need to restate it. It would mean Andrew would be completely isolated for two months at a stretch, which isn’t good for anyone, but at least it would give him time to get himself back together again before they brought him down for his periodic visits in hell. And it would also give the medics time to try to find a new angle of approach. Because if this was a disease connected with, or perhaps even springing from, space, then it was something they were going to have to take a crack at.

It took some haggling (the Program Chiefs like to have one hundred percent fit men up there), but between the medics, myself and my parents we convinced the upper echelon that Andrew should become WWO & A, a World Weather Observer & Adviser. And he and I spent another three months getting him back on his feet again, mentally and physically. Which wasn’t easy.

It meant spending a lot of time in the loneliest places in the world: in deserts, on frozen ocean strands, in the wilds of Canada and blustery Scottish highlands, finally on the uninhabited beaches of Cyprus, which the deteriorating ozone layer had put paid to as far back as 2006. There weren’t a hell of a lot of Venuses on half-shells floating ashore at Paphos this time around.

We talked and trained, and Andrew got himself together and faced up to it, and away from all the pains of men he gradually improved and became fit again. But at the same time he’d been growing ever more aware of a very worrying thing: the PE was wearing down. PE was our jargon for the ratio between a person in pain and his distance from Andrew, the receiver. The Proximity Effect. Previously, the source had needed to be pretty close. But now…all the world’s pain, however muted, was getting there, was getting through to him. He felt it like you might hear the sea in a shell: as a distant tumult. A roaring which was gradually creeping up on him.

Nor was that the whole thing; for he’d also become more sensitive to the agonies of the smaller creatures, whose myriad ravages had grown that much more sharp to him. A huge cloud of desiccated, exhausted migratory butterflies spiraled down out of the aching Mediterranean sky to drown in the tideless sea, and Andrew gaped and gasped and began to turn blue before the last of them had expired. He felt the dull shuddering of the tiny clam devoured by the starfish, and the intolerable burning of the stranded man-o’-war evaporating on the sand. And now he couldn’t get back into space fast enough.

Except…he never made it.

It was on every vidscreen in the world and dominated every newscast for a month: the blow-up at Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas.

There were two launches scheduled for that day. The first was a French relief team going up to Luna Orbital Station, and the second was supposed to be Andrew shuttling up to W-Sat III. But the French team never got off the pad, which meant that Andrew never got on it. We were only a mile away from that mess, waiting out the countdown when it fireballed—and my twin brother felt every poor sod of them frying! If they’d all gone up at once in the bang it would have been bad enough—but three of them, blazing, managed to eject. And Andrew blazed with them.

The medics took him back then, and called in the shrinks too, and I found myself excluded. Now it had to be up to the specialists, because I couldn’t reach him any more. He’d gone “inside” and wasn’t coming out for a while.

We were twins and I loved him; I might easily have gone to pieces myself, if the Old Folks had let me. But they didn’t. “You’ve earned a lot of money, son, you and Andrew,” my father told me. “Which is just as well because your brother is going to need it. Oh, I know, there are a lot of good people working on him for free—but there are other specialists who haven’t even seen him yet, and they cost money. Money doesn’t last for ever, Ray—it comes and it goes. If you want to do something for Andrew, want to take care of his future, then the best thing would be to get yourself back into space. Let me and your mother look after this end a while.”

Andrew’s future! It hadn’t even got through to the Old Folks that he didn’t have one. It was something they couldn’t allow themselves to believe, and so they didn’t. But at least their advice was good and kept me together. I went back into space, and up there where I could look down and see everything clearly (so clearly that I used to believe it allowed me to think more clearly, too) I’d sometimes wonder: why him and not me? We’re twins, so how come it skipped me? But even in space there was no answer to that. Not then….

I did two months on W-Sat HI standing in for Andrew, and almost without pause a further three months on the vast, incredible wheel which was Luna Orbital, watching the EV engineers laboriously putting together the miracle that would one day become Titan Station. And finally it was back to Earth.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t been out of touch: I got coded radio mail which my personal receiver unscrambled on to disks for me. The Old Folks kept me in the picture regarding Andrew.

“We found a specializing chemist who designed a drug for him,” my mother told me, her languid American drawl still very much in evidence for all that she’d been expatriate for thirty years. “It has side-effects—makes his whole skin itch and upsets his balance a little—but it does cut down on the pain. And it’s non-addictive!” Fine for anyone else; but my brother, my double, the athlete who was my twin? In private I cried about it.

“He’s out of dock,” the Old Man’s gravelly English tones cheerfully informed me towards the end of one message, “house-hunting off Land’s End!”

That last had me stumped. What the hell was “off” Land’s End? I called up the atlas on my computer and got the answer: the Isles of Scilly. But it was the wrong answer. There were also several lighthouses.

When I got back down I had three months’ accumulated R and R and plenty to do with it, but first the Program Officer I/C wanted to see me. In Lyon I went up to Jean-Pierre Durant’s office and was ushered in. Durant was a short, sturdy man in his fifties, wide as a door, short-cropped graying hair, big hard hands, very powerful looking. And he was powerful in every way; but big-hearted with it, a man who loved his fellow men. Right then, however, I had a down on ESP because of Andrew (to me, they’d seemed too eager to write him off) and possibly it showed in my face. Also, I was in a hurry to get across the Channel to England, and down to Land’s End, and out to see my brother in the old deserted lighthouse he’d made his home. So Durant was the Big Boss—so what? I considered this an intrusion into my time. And perhaps that showed, too.

“Sit down, Ray,” Durant invited, smiling, waving me into a chair. He spoke English which his accent made warm and compassionate, salving a little of the anger and frustration out of me. “And don’t worry,” he contin-ued, “I don’t intend to waste your time. I’ll get right down to it: we think there’s maybe something we can do for Andrew—if it’s at all possible.”

My heart gave a leap and I started to my feet again. “The medics have come up with something?”

Durant shook his head, pointed at the chair. Frowning, I sat. “The psychoanalysts!” I burst out again, leaning forward. “It was psychosomatic, right? Some kind of mental allergy?”

“Ray,” he said, again shaking his head, “they’re working on those things—and getting nowhere fast. And Andrew isn’t helping by making it hard for anyone to see him. So…we’re not making much progress. Not along those lines, anyway.”

I was still frowning. “So how can you help him?”

Durant looked tugged two ways; he sighed, shrugged, stroked his chin. “Personally, I think he should go back out into space again.”

I stared at him for a moment, then slumped. “We tried that,” I said, disappointed.

He ignored my expression and my answer, and said: “Way out in space.” But it was how he said it. This time there was no way I could remain seated: I jumped up, leaned forward across his desk. If Durant meant what I thought he meant…it had always been our wildest dream!

“Titan?” I finally got it out.

He nodded, and repeated himself: “Way out! Far beyond the influence of whatever it is that’s killing him. If we can get him up to Moonbase for a year…we think we may have the Titan hardware ready by then. You’ve been up on the Luna Orbiter and know how hard they’re all working up there. The Titan wheel was going to be unmanned at first, as you know, with its life-supports on green just waiting for a crew when we were ready to send them. However—” And he smiled again, and shrugged.

I took a pace back, collapsed into my chair, dazedly shook my head as a mixture of emotions flooded through me. “But…why tell me? I mean, haven’t you told Andrew?”

Now the smile, a worried one at best, left his face. “I told him last week—by letter, special delivery, a jet copter—and his answer…wasn’t satisfactory. I told him yesterday, and when he could bring himself to answer the phone I got the same response. And I’ve tried to tell him again this morning, but apparently he’s not taking calls. So maybe you’d better tell him for me.”

“Unsatisfactory?” Over everything else he’d said that one word had stuck in my mind. “His answer was unsatisfactory? In what way?”

“Ray,” Durant looked straight into my eyes, “your brother is convinced he’s going to die—of other people’s pain. He says he’s given it plenty of thought and knows there’s no way of stopping it. And he says that since it’s coming, he’d prefer it came here on Earth than out there. Going out into space would only delay it anyway, he says. So you’re his last chance. Possibly he’s already too far gone physically for the job, in which case you’ll not only have to talk him into accepting it, but also get him back up on his feet one last time. You did it before, between you, so maybe you can do it again. That’s the whole thing, and that’s why I sent for you….”

“Do my parents—?” I started, but he cut me off.

“Your parents are your parents, Ray. I know them almost as well as you do. In some respects I know them better. Andrew has forbidden them to visit him, says not to baby him and that he’s doing fine, and when he’s ready to see them he’ll turn up on their doorstep. Do you think it’s likely—or even right—that I should tell them he’s going downhill? But I have told them we might send him out to Saturn if he wants it, and that it’s up to him. Though in fact it now looks like it’s up to you. When are you seeing him?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “As soon as I can get there. Right now, if there was any quick way.”

“There is,” he told me. “Get your things together, whatever you want to take with you, and be at the helipad in one hour. I’ll clear it and see that you’re jet-coptered over. Two and a half hours and you’re there, OK?”

And of course I said yes, that was OK….

I didn’t try to call Andrew first; it was to be a surprise, and it was. But on the way across I talked to my pilot, the one who’d taken Durant’s letter to Andrew on Perring’s Rock. “How did he look to you?” I asked him.

Josh Bertin was a Belgian and had been a jet-copter pilot for ESP as long as I’d been around; I knew him personally and he knew our history. “Andrew…wasn’t his brightest,” he answered, carefully. And, before I could quiz him further: “You know why he bought the Rock, of course?”

“Oh, yes,” I nodded. “Miles out to sea. No people. No pain. Not so much, anyway.”

Josh glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “Yes…and no,” he said. “Oh, that’s the reason he settled there, for sure, but—”

When his pause threatened to go on indefinitely, I prompted him: “But?”

“He mentioned something you and he call the PE? Something to do with how close people were to him? Well, he told me it’s breaking down. All the way down.”

“Josh,” I was really alarmed now, “I think you’d better tell me—”

“But,” he broke in on me, “he’s coping with it—so far. Learning to live with it. All he has to do is keep telling himself it’s not real, that’s all—that the pain belongs to someone else—and then he’ll be OK. As long as nothing big happens. But right out there in the sea? Well, he’s not expecting any disasters, you know? And Ray, that’s it. No good asking me any more, ’cos that’s all he told me.”

I said nothing but simply turned over what he’d said in my mind. And while I was still turning it over, that’s when the pain hit me. Andrew’s pain—and I knew it!

It came from outside of me, slamming into me like an explosive shell and fragmenting deep inside. It was like a tankful of pain had overflowed into my guts. Someone was crushing my heart, yanking it this way and that, trying to tear it out of me. I had thought I knew what pain was, but I hadn’t. This was pain! Big Pain!

It would have driven me surging to my feet, but I was strapped in. I cried out, or gurgled, and then I must have blacked out….

When I came to Josh had slapped an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth and was shaking me. He’d switched the jet-copter to automatic pilot, and he was white as death. But as soon as I opened my eyes, dragged the mask off my face and let it fall, then he took a deep breath and climbed down a little. “Are you OK?” he said. And: “Jesus, Ray—what was all that?”

At the time I’d known what it was, but now I couldn’t be sure, didn’t want to be sure. I had thought it was Andrew, something from him that couldn’t be contained, overflowing into me. But…I didn’t even know if that was possible. Being a twin, I knew all about the so-called “Corsican Brothers” case, but nothing like that had ever happened to me (to us?) before. So…maybe it was just me. My heart? Had I been pushing it too hard?

“I don’t know what it was,” I finally answered Josh. “I’m too scared to think what it was. I only know it was pain, and that it’s gone now.”

But I didn’t tell him that something else had gone, too, something which I hadn’t even been aware of until suddenly—right there and then—I no longer had it. It had been a warm feeling, that’s all. A feeling that there was something out there other than what I could see, feel and touch. A sure knowledge that the universe was bigger than me. Now that I’d lost it I knew that it had been something greater than merely “I think, therefore I am.” Perhaps it had been “we think….” But now there was just an emptiness, with nothing out there at all except the world and all of space and all the other stars and worlds in it. And for the first time in my life I experienced loneliness. Even with someone right there beside me, I was lonely….

It was mid-September, still warm but very soggy, and fog lay like a milky shroud on the ocean where Perring’s Rock stuck up like a partly clenched fist from the grey surging water, its lighthouse index finger pointing at the leaden sky. Perring’s Rock was the sloping acre and a half plateau of some drowned mountain, rising seventy or eighty feet out of the sea with the lighthouse built at the highest point of the slope. There was something of a tiny scalloped bay and beach to the west, away from our approach path, and a flat area on our side of the lighthouse picked out with typical helipad patterns.

Like ninety per cent of all lighthouses the Rock had been abandoned since before the turn of the century, when super high-tech Radar, Skyspy and the W-sats had put them out of business for good. But the way they’d built this one, the sea wasn’t going to claim it for a long time still to come. And desolate? The place looked about as lonely as I now felt. Except as we landed I saw that it wasn’t, or saw something which caused me to think that it wasn’t.

It was Andrew himself!—leaning over the rail of the lighthouse’s circular balcony or platform, waving to us through the blast from our fans as we came down. Then I was free of my straps and sliding the cabin door open, out of my seat and down under the rotors before they’d even nearly stopped turning, and running up the rock-carved steps to pause at the foot of the tower. And there was my brother up top, still leaning on the rail high overhead, his shirt-sleeves flapping in a breeze sprung up off the sea. Except…he wasn’t looking down at me at all but at something else. And he was so still, so very still there at the rail. Not so much leaning on it, I now saw, as propped up by it.

I was inside and up the steps three at a time; and no need to worry now about the state of my heart for I was galvanized, my actions electric, supercharged! Yanked aloft by a fear and a pain beyond physical pain, I hurtled up those steps, while from behind and below me Josh Bertin’s cry followed despairingly from the well of the corkscrew: “Ray!…Ray…!’

Up to the old lamp room I swept, and on up its iron ladder and through the open trapdoor on to the flat, circular roof. And there was Andrew clinging to the iron three-bar safety rail—or rather hanging on it. One foot had slipped through and jammed there, dangling in space, and the other leg was bent at the knee, propping him against an upright. His left arm lay loosely along the top rail, while his opposite shoulder and arm lolled stiffly across it, supporting his weight. With his shirt-sleeves flapping like that and his head on one side, he looked like…like a sorry scarecrow fallen from its cross. And I saw that I was right and he hadn’t in fact been looking at us as we came in but at something else, down on the beach—as he’d blindly stared at it ever since his final, killing pain had reached out to me and knocked me out during the flight.

The mist had curled away a little and now I too could see it there on the narrow shingle strand. A beached whale, with three great, deep crimson slashes across its spine where some liner’s screw had broken its broad back!

The blood was still pumping, though very sluggishly now, sporadically; overhead the gulls wheeled and cried their excitement, like vultures waiting for the last spark to flicker low and expire; out at sea a cow and her calf stood off and spouted, and it seemed to me that over and above my own pain I could feel something of theirs, too.

…Until, like ice-water down my back, there dawned the realization that I could actually feel it, and finally I knew that I was compensating for Andrew’s loss….

That was three months ago and since then…I’ve thought about it a lot up here, where there’s plenty of time and space to think. And my thoughts have been diverse.

I watch the curving reef which is Japan appear at the rim of the mighty Pacific, and as it slides closer I can point a trembling finger at the very bay where in these same moments of time the dolphins are still being slaugh-tered in their thousands. I feel the outward rush of human agony as bombs explode in Zambia, while the African continent slips by so distantly beneath my observation ports that my eyes see nothing but its beauty. A million babies are born and their mothers cry out, and a million men die—but they only feel their own pain while I feel something of all of it. And with every revolution I feel more.

Nine months to go, and Saturn is waiting for me out there beyond the pain of the world. But now and then I ask myself: will the wash from the world one day reach out to me even there? Or will I have moved on, outwards to the stars, before then?

Sometimes I wonder: are there other men or beings out there, in the stars?

And sometimes I pray there are not….

The Strange Years

Seven years before “The Man Who Felt Pain,” this next story had also made its debut in

Fantasy Tales

(Spring, 1982). Now, I’ve always had a weird fascination for the

Attack of the

What-the-Hell-Ever subgenre of stories, whether it’s body-snatchers or fifty-foot women or killer tomatoes, so sooner or later I knew I was going to have to have a go at it too. And let’s face it, there had been some very strange years in the late 1970s. Anyway, Steve Jones—one of the editors and the guiding light of England’s most prestigious, best-remembered fantastic magazine at that time—Steve called “The Strange Years” “an apocalyptic jewel,” about which I was well pleased. But the story may even in its way have been a little prophetic, too. Because truth to tell there’s been some even stranger, far more malicious years since….

He lay face-down on the beach at the foot of a small dune, his face turned to one side, the summer sun beating down upon him. The clump of beachgrass at the top of the dune bent its spikes in a stiff breeze, but down here all was calm, with not even a seagull’s cry to break in upon the lulling hush, hush of waves from far down the beach.

It would be nice, he thought, to run down the beach and splash in the sea, and come back dripping salt water and tasting it on his lips, and for the very briefest of moments be a small boy again in a world with a future. But the sun beat down from a blue sky and his limbs were leaden, and a great drowsiness was upon him.

Then…a disturbance. Blown on the breeze to climb the far side of the dune, flapping like a bird with broken wings, a slim book—a child’s exercise book, with tables of weights and measures on the back—flopped down exhausted in the sand before his eyes. Disinterested, he found strength to push it away; but as his fingers touched it so its cover blew open to reveal pages written in a neat if shaky adult longhand.

He had nothing else to do, and so began to read….

“When did it begin? Where? How? Why?

“The Martians we might have expected (they’ve been frightening us long enough with their tales of invasion from outer space) and certainly there have been enough of threats from our Comrades across the water. But this?

“Any ordinary sort of plague, we would survive. We always have in the past. And as for war: Christ!—when has there not been a war going on somewhere? They’ve irradiated us in Japan, defoliated us in Vietnam, smothered us in DDT wherever we were arable and poured poison into us where we once flowed sweet and clean—and we always bounced right back.

“Fire and flood—even nuclear fire and festering effluent—have not appreciably stopped us. For ‘They’ read ‘We,’ Man, and for ‘Us’ read ‘the world,’ this Earth which once was ours. Yes, there have been strange years, but never a one as strange as this.

“A penance? The ultimate penance? Or has Old Ma Nature finally decided to give us a hand? Perhaps she’s stood off, watching us try our damnedest for so damned long to exterminate ourselves, and now She’s sick to death of the whole damned scene. ‘OK,’ She says, ‘have it your own way.’ And She gives the nod to Her Brother, the Old Boy with the scythe. And He sighs and steps forward, and—

“And it is a plague of sorts; and certainly it is DOOM; and a fire that rages across the world and devours all…Or will that come later? The cleansing flame from which Life’s bright phoenix shall rise again? There will always be the sea. And how many ages this time before something gets left by the tide, grows lungs, jumps up on its feet and walks…and reaches for a club?

“When did it begin?

“I remember an Irish stoker who came into a bar dirty and drunk. His sleeves were rolled up and he scratched at hairy arms. I thought it was the heat. ‘Hot? Damned right, sur,’ he said, ‘an’ hotter by far down below—an’ lousy!’ He unrolled a newspaper on the bar and vigorously brushed at his matted forearm. Things fell onto the newsprint and moved, slowly. He popped them with a cigarette. “’Crabs, sur!’ he cried. ‘An’ Christ!—they suck like crazy!’

“When?

“There have always been strange years—plague years, drought years, war and wonder years—so it’s difficult to pin it down. But the last twenty years…they have been strange. When, exactly! Who can say? But let’s give it a shot. Let’s start with the 70s—say, ’76?—the drought.

“There was so little water in the Thames that they said the river was running backwards. The militants blamed the Soviets. New laws were introduced to conserve water. People were taken to court for watering flowers. Some idiot calculated that a pound of excreta could be satisfactorily washed away with six pints of water, and people put bricks in their WC cisterns. Someone else said you could bathe comfortably in four inches of water, and if you didn’t use soap the resultant mud could be thrown on the garden. The thing snowballed into a national campaign to ‘Save It!’—and in October the skies were still cloudless, the earth parched, and imported rainmakers danced and pounded their tom-toms at Stonehenge. Forest and heath fires were daily occurrences and reservoirs became dustbowls. Sun-worshippers drank Coke and turned very brown….

“And finally it rained, and it rained, and it rained. Wide-spread flooding, rivers bursting their banks, gardens (deprived all summer) inundated and washed away. Millions of tons of water, and not a pound of excreta to be disposed of. A strange year, ’76. And just about every year since, come to think.

“’77, and stories leak out of the Ukraine of fifty thousand square miles turned brown and utterly barren in the space of a single week. Since then the spread has been very slow, but it hasn’t stopped. The Russians blamed ‘us’ and we accused ‘them’ of testing a secret weapon.

“’79 and ’80, and oil tankers sinking or grounding themselves left, right and center. Miles-long oil slicks and chemicals jettisoned at sea, and whales washed up on the beaches, and Greenpeace, and the Japanese slaughtering dolphins. Another drought, this time in Australia, and a plague of mice to boot. Some Aussie commenting that ‘The poor ’roos are dying in their thousands—and a few aboes, too….’ And great green swarms of aphids and the skies bright with ladybirds.

“Lots of plagues, in fact. We were being warned, you see?

“And ’84! Ah—1984! Good old George!

“He was wrong, of course, for it wasn’t Big Brother at all. It was Big Sister—Ma Nature Herself. And in 1984 She really started to go off the rails. ’84 was half of India eaten by locusts and all of Africa down with a mutant strain of beriberi. ’84 was the year of the poisoned potatoes and sinistral periwinkles, the year it rained frogs over wide areas of France, the year the cane-pest shot sugar beet right up to the top of the crops.

“And not only Ma Nature but Technology, too, came unstuck in ’84. The Lake District chemically polluted—permanently; nuclear power stations at Loch Torr on one side of the Atlantic and Long Island on the other melting down almost simultaneously; the Americans bringing back a ‘bug’ from Mars (see, even a real Martian invasion); oil discovered in the Mediterranean, and new fast-drilling techniques cracking the ocean floor and allowing it to leak and leak and leak—and even Red Adair shaking his head in dismay. How do you plug a leak two hundred fathoms deep and a mile long? And that jewel of oceans turning black, and Cyprus a great white tombstone in a lake of pitch. ‘Aphrodite Rising From The High-Grade.’

“Then ’85 and ’86; and they were strange, too, because they were so damned quiet! The lull before the storm, so to speak. And then—

“Then it was ’87, ’88 and ’89. The American space-bug leaping to Australia and New Zealand and giving both places a monstrous malaise. No one doing any work for six months; cattle and sheep dead in their millions; entire cities and towns burning down because nobody bothered to call out the fire services, or they didn’t bother to come…. And all the world’s beaches strewn with countless myriads of great dead octopuses, a new species (or a mutant strain) with three rows of suckers to each tentacle; and their stink utterly unbearable as they rotted. A plague of great, fat seagulls. All the major volcanoes erupting in unison. Meteoric debris making massive holes in the ionosphere. A new killer cancer caused by sunburn. The common cold cured!—and uncommon leprosy spreading like wildfire through the Western World.

“And finally—

“Well, that was ‘When.’ It was also, I fancy, ‘Where’ and ‘How.’ As to ‘Why’—I give a mental shrug. I’m tired, probably hungry. I have some sort of lethargy—the spacebug, 1 suppose—and I reckon it won’t be long now. I had hoped that getting this down on paper might keep me active, mentally if not physically. But….

“Why?

“Well, I think I’ve answered that one, too.

“Ma Nature strikes back. Get rid of the human vermin. They’re lousing up your planet! And maybe that’s what gave Her the idea. If fire and flood and disease and disaster and war couldn’t do the trick, well, what else could She do? They advise you to fight fire with fire, so why not vermin with vermin?”

“They appeared almost overnight, five times larger than their immediate progenitors and growing bigger with each successive hatching; and unlike the new octopus they didn’t die; and their incubation period down to less than a week. The superlice. All Man’s little body parasites, all of his tiny, personal vampires, growing in the space of a month to things as big as your fist. Leaping things, flying things, walking sideways things. To quote a certain Irishman: ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’

“They’ve sucked, all right. They’ve sucked the world to death. New habits, new protections—new immunities and near-invulnerability—to go with their new size and strength. The meek inheriting the Earth? Stamp on them and they scurry away. Spray them with lethal chemicals and they bathe in them. Feed them DDT and they develop a taste for it. ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’

“And the whole world down with the creeping, sleeping sickness. We didn’t even want to fight them! Vampires, and they’ve learned new tricks. Camouflage…. Clinging to walls above doors, they look like bricks or tiles. And when you go through the door…. And their bite acts like a sort of LSD. Brings on mild hallucinations, a feeling of well-being, a kind of euphoria. In the cities, amongst the young, there were huge gangs of ‘bug-people!’ My God!

“They use animals, too; dogs and cats—as mounts, to get them about when they’re bloated. Oh, they kill them eventually, but they know how to use them first. Dogs can dig under walls and fences; cats can climb and squeeze through tiny openings; crows and other large birds can fly down on top of things and into places….

“Me, I was lucky—if you can call it that. A bachelor, two dogs, a parakeet and an outdoor aviary. My bungalow entirely netted in; fine wire netting, with trees, trellises and vines. And best of all situated on a wild stretch of the coast, away from mankind’s great masses. But even so, it was only a matter of time.

“They came, found me, sat outside my house, outside the wire and the walls, and they waited. They found ways in. Dogs dug holes for them, seagulls tore at the mesh overhead. Frantically, I would trap, pour petrol, burn, listen to them pop! But I couldn’t stay awake for ever. One by one they got the birds, leaving little empty bodies and bunches of feathers. And my dogs, Bill and Ben, which I had to shoot and burn. And this morning when I woke up, Peter parakeet.

“So there’s at least one of them, probably two or three, here in the room with me right now. Hiding, waiting for night. Waiting for me to go to sleep. I’ve looked for them, of course, but—

“Chameleons, they fit perfectly into any background. When I move, they move. And they imitate perfectly. But they do make mistakes. A moment ago I had two hairbrushes, identical, and I only ever had one. Can you imagine brushing your hair with something like that? And what the hell would I want with three fluffy slippers? A left, a right—and a center?

“…I can see the beach from my window. And half a mile away, on the point, there’s Carter’s grocery. Not a crust in the kitchen. Dare I chance it? Do I want to? Let’s see, now. Biscuits, coffee, powdered milk, canned beans, potatoes—no, strike the potatoes. A sack of carrots….”

The man on the beach grinned mirthlessly, white lips drawing back from his teeth and freezing there. A year ago he would have expected to read such in a book of horror fiction. But not now. Not when it was written in his own hand.

The breeze changed direction, blew on him, and the sand began to drift against his side. It blew in his eyes, glazed now and lifeless. The shadows lengthened as the sun started to dip down behind the dunes. His body grew cold.

Three hairy sacks with pincer feet, big as footballs and heavy with his blood, crawled slowly away from him along the beach….

No Way Home

Like “Snarker’s Son”—but very unlike it, too—“No Way Home” is a parallel universe story, first published in the prestigious

Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF)

in September of 1975. I was still a serving soldier and had recently spent time back in the UK on leave (furlough). But many of the highways seemed to have been extended, rerouted, changed—some of them even appeared to have mutated!—while I’d been out of the country. Also, I was used to driving on the right-hand side of the road and back in the UK I was driving on the left again; or maybe I was just tired out and not taking enough care reading the road signs. Whatever, the fact is I’d gone and got myself lost. Now how in

hell

can you get lost in your own backyard? Well, actually it’s easy—even in your own backyard—and easier still in hell….

If you motor up the Ml past Lanchester from London and come off before Bankhead heading west across the country, within a very few miles you enter an area of gently rolling green hills, winding country roads and Olde Worlde villages with quaint wooden-beamed street-corner pubs and noonday cats atop leaning ivied walls. The roads there are narrow, climbing gently up and ribboning back down the green hills, rolling between fields, meandering casually through woods and over brick- and wooden-bridged streams; the whole background forms a pattern of peace and tranquility rarely disturbed over the centuries.

By night, though, the place takes on a different aspect. An almost miasmal aura of timelessness, of antiquity, hangs over the brooding woods and dark hamlets. The moon silvers winding hedgerows and ancient thatched roofs, and when the pubs close and the last lights blink out in farm and cottage windows, then it is as if Night had thrown her blackest cloak over the land, when even the most powerful headlight’s beam penetrates the resultant darkness only with difficulty. Enough to allow you to drive on the narrower roads, if you drive slowly and carefully.

Strangers motoring through this region—even in daylight hours—are known occasionally to lose their way, to drive the same labyrinthine lanes for hours on end in meaningless circles. The contours of the countryside often seem to defy even the most accurate sense of direction, and the roads and tracks never quite seem to tally with printed maps of the area. There are rumors almost as old as the area itself that persons have been known to pass into oblivion here—like gray smoke from cottage chimneystacks disappearing into air—never to come out again.

Not that George Benson was a stranger. True, he had not been home to England for many years—since running off as a youth, later to marry and settle in Germany—but as a boy he had known this place well and must have cycled for thousands of miles along dusty summer roads, lanes and tracks, even bridle-paths through the heart of this very region.

And that was why he was so perturbed now: not because of a pack of lies and fairy stories and old wives’ tales heard as a boy, but because this was his home territory, where he’d been born and reared. Indeed, he felt more than perturbed, stupid almost. A fellow drives all the way north through Germany from Dortmund, catches the car ferry from Bremerhaven into Harwich, rolls on up-country having made the transition from right- to left-of-the-road driving with only a very small effort…. and then hopelessly loses himself within only a fistful of miles from home!

Anger at his own supposed stupidity turned to bitter memories of his wife, then to an even greater anger. And a hurt….

It didn’t hurt half so much now, though, not now that it was all over. But the anger was still there. And the memories of the milk of marriage gone sour. Greta had just upped and left home one day. George, employing the services of a detective agency, had traced his wife to Hamburg, where he’d found her in the bed of a nightclub crooner, an old boyfriend who finally had made it good.

“Damn all Krauts!” George cursed now as he checked the speed of his car to read out the legend on a village signpost. His headlights picked the letters out starkly in the surrounding darkness. “Middle Hamborough?—Never bloody heard of it!” Again he cursed as, making a quick decision, he spun the steering wheel to turn his big car about on the narrow road. He would have to start back-tracking, something he hated doing because it seemed so inefficient, so wasteful. “And blast and damn all Kraut cars!” he added as his front wheels bounced jarringly on to and back off the high stone roadside curb.

“Greta!” he quietly growled to himself as he drove back down the road away from the outskirts of Middle Hamborough. “What a bitch!” For of course she had blamed him for their troubles, saying that she couldn’t stand his meanness. Him, George Benson, mean! She simply hadn’t appreciated money. She’d thought that Deutschmarks grew on trees, that pfennigs gathered like dew on the grass in the night. George, on the other hand, had inherited many of the pecuniary instincts of his father, a Yorkshireman of the Old School—and of Scottish stock to boot—who really understood the value of “brass.” His old man had used to say: “Thee tak’ care o’ the pennies, Georgie, an’ the pounds’ll tak’ care o’ theysels!”

George’s already pinched face tightened skull-like as his thoughts again returned to Greta. She had wanted children. Children! Damned lucky thing he had known better than to accept that! For God’s sake, who could afford children?

Then she’d complained about the food—like she’d been complaining for years—saying that she was getting thin because the money he gave her was never enough. But George liked his women willowy and fragile; that way there was never much fight in them.

Well, he’d certainly misjudged Greta, there had been plenty of fight left in her. And their very last fight had been about food, too. He had wanted her to buy food in bulk at the supermarkets for cheapness; in turn she’d demanded a deep freezer so that the food she bought wouldn’t go bad; finally George had gone off the deep end when she told him how much the freezer she had in mind would cost!

She left him that same day; moreover, she ate the last of the wurstchen before she went! George grinned mirthlessly as he gripped the steering wheel tighter, wishing it were Greta’s scrawny neck. By God—she’d be sorry when she was fat!

Still, George had had the last laugh. Their home had been paid for fifty-fifty, but it had been in George’s name. He had sold it; likewise the furniture and the few clothes she’d left behind. The car had been half hers, too—but again in George’s name, for Greta couldn’t drive. It was all his now: his money, his car, everything. As he’d done so often in the last twenty-four hours, he took one hand from the wheel to pat reassuringly the fat wallet where its outline bulged out the upper right front pocket of his jacket.

It was the thought of money that sent George’s mind casting back an hour or so to a chance encounter at Harvey’s All-Night-Grill, just off the Ml. This drunk had been there—oh, a real joker, and melancholy with it, too—but he had been so well-heeled! George remembered the man’s queer offer: “Just show me the way home, that’s all—and all I’ve got you can have!” And he had carried a checkbook showing a credit of over two thousand pounds….

That last was hearsay, though, passed on to George by Harvey himself, the stubble-jawed, greasy-aproned owner of the place. Now that earlier accidental meeting and conversation suddenly jumped up crystal clear in George’s mind.

It had started when George mentioned to Harvey that he was heading for Bellington; that was when the other fellow had started to take an interest in him and had made his weird offer about being shown the way home.

God damn! George sat bolt upright behind the steering wheel. Come to think of it, he had heard of Middle Hamborough before. Surely that was the name of the place the drunk had been looking for—for fifteen years!

George hadn’t paid much attention to the man at the time, had barely listened to his gabbled, drunken pleading. He’d passed the fellow off quite simply as some nut who’d heard those fanciful old rumors about people getting lost in the surrounding countryside, a drunk who was making a big play of his own personal little fantasy. He would be all right when he sobered up.

Now that George thought about it, though—well, why should anyone make up a story like that? And, come to think of it, the man hadn’t seemed all that drunk. More tired and, well, lost, really….

Just then, cresting a low hill, as his headlights flashed across the next shallow valley, George saw the house with the big garden and the long drive winding up to it. The place stood to the right of the road, atop the next hill, and the gravel drive rose up from an ornamental stone arch and iron gate at the roadside. Dipping down the road and climbing the low hill, George read the wrought-iron legend on the gate: high house. And now he remembered more of the—drunk’s?—story.

The man had called himself Kent, and fifteen years ago, on his tenth wedding anniversary, he’d left home one morning to drive to London, there to make certain business arrangements with city-dwelling colleagues. He had taken a fairly large sum of money with him when he drove from High House, the home he himself had designed and built, and this had worked out just as well for him. Turning right off the Middle Hamborough road through Meadington and on to the London road at Bankhead, Kent had driven to the city. And in London—

Kent was a partner in a building concern with head offices in the city…or at least he had been. For in London he discovered that the firm had never existed, that his colleagues, Milton and Jones, while they themselves were real enough, swore they had never heard of him. “Milton, Jones & Kent” did not exist; the firm was known simply as “Milton & Jones.” Not only did they not know him, they tried to have him jailed for attempted fraud!

That was only the start of it, for the real horror came when he tried to get back home—only to discover that there just wasn’t any way home! George now remembered Kent’s apparently drunken phrase: “A strange dislocation of space and time, a crossing of probability tracks, a passage between parallel dimensions—and a subsequent snapping-back of space-time elastic….” Now surely only a drunk would say something like that? A drunk or a nut. Except Harvey had insisted that Kent was sober. He was just tired, Harvey said, confused, half mad trying to solve a fifteen-year-old problem that wasn’t. There had never been a Middle Hamborough, Harvey insisted. The place wasn’t shown on any map; you couldn’t find it in the telephone directory; no trains, buses, or roads went there. Middle Hamborough wasn’t!

But Middle Hamborough was, George had seen it, or—

Could it be that greasy old Harvey had somehow been fooling that clown all these years, milking his money drop by drop, cashing in on some mental block or other? Or had they both simply been pulling George’s leg? If so, well, it certainly seemed a queer sort of joke….

George glanced at his watch. Just 11:00 p.m. Damn it, he’d planned to be in Bellington by now, at home with the Old Folks, and he would have been if he’d come off the Ml at the right place.

Of course, when he’d left England there had been no motorway as such, just another road stretching away north and south. That was where he’d gone wrong; obviously he’d come off the Ml too soon. He should have gone on to the next exit. Well, all right, he’d kill two birds with one stone. He’d go back to Harvey’s all-nighter, check out the weird one’s story again, then see if he couldn’t perhaps latch on to some of the joker’s small change to cover his time. Then he’d try to pick up a map of the area before heading home. He couldn’t go wrong with a map—now could he?

Having decided his course, and considering the winding roads and pitch darkness, George put his foot down and sped back to Harvey’s place. Parking his car, he walked in through the open door into the unhealthy atmosphere and lighting of the so-called cafeteria (where the lights were kept low, George suspected, to make the young cockroaches on the walls less conspicuous). He went straight to the service counter and carefully rested his elbows upon it, avoiding the splashes of sticky coffee and spilled grease. Of the equally greasy proprietor he casually inquired the whereabouts of Mr. Kent.

“Eh? Kent? He’ll be in his room. I let him lodge here, y’know. He doesn’t like to be too far from this area….”

“You let him lodge here?” George asked, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

“Well, y’know—he pays a bit.”

George nodded, silently repeating the other’s words: Yeah, I’ll bet he pays a bit!

“G’night there!” Harvey waved a stained dishcloth at a departing truck driver and his mate. “See y’next time.” He turned back to George with a scowl. “Anyway, what’s it to you, about Kent? After making y’self a quick quid or two?”

“How do you mean?” George returned, assuming a hurt look. “It’s just that I think I might be able to help the poor bloke out, that’s all.”

“Oh?” Harvey looked suspicious. “How’s that, then?”

“Well, half an hour ago I was on the road to Middle Hamborough, and I passed a place set back off the road called High House. I just thought—”

“‘Ere,” Harvey cut in, a surprisingly fast hand shooting out to catch George’s jacket front and pull him close so that their faces almost met across the service counter. “You tryin’ t’ be clever, chief?”

“Well, I’ll be—” George spluttered, genuinely astonished. “What the hell do you think you’re—’

“Cos if you are—you an’ me’ll fall out, we will!”

George carefully disengaged himself. “Well,” he said, “I think that answers one of my questions, at least.”

“Eh? What d’you mean?’ Harvey asked, still looking surly. George backed off a step.

“Looks to me like you’re as mad as him, attacking me like that. I mean, I might have expected you to laugh, seeing as how I fell for your funny little joke—but I’d hardly think you’d get all physical.”

“What the merry ’ell are you on about?” Harvey questioned, a very convincing frown creasing his forehead. “What joke?”

“Why, about Middle Hamborough, about it not being on any map and about no roads going there and Kent looking for the place for fifteen years. I’m on about a place that’s not twenty minutes’ fast drive from here, signposted clear as the City of London!”

Suddenly Harvey’s unwashed features paled visibly. “You mean you’ve actually seen this place?” he whispered. “And you drove past…High House?”

“Damn right!” George answered, abruptly feeling as though things were all unreal, a very vivid but meaningless daydream.

Harvey lifted a flap in the counter and waddled through to George’s side. He was a very big man, George suddenly noticed, and the color had come back to his face with a vengeance. There was a red, angry tinge to the man’s sallow features now; moreover, the cafeteria was quite empty of other souls, all bar the two of them.

“Now look here—” George blurted, as Harvey began to maneuver him into a corner.

“I shouldn’t ’av mentioned ’is money, should I?” the fat man cut him off, his piggy eyes fastening upon those of his patently intended victim, making his question more a statement than a question proper.

“See,” he continued, “I’d ’ad a couple of pints earlier, or I wouldn’t ’ave let it drop about ’is predicament. ’E’s been right good to me, Mr. Kent ’as. ’Elped me set this place up proper, ’e did—an’ I don’t cotton to the idea of some flyboy tryin’ to—”

Again his arm shot out and he grabbed Benson’s throat this time, trapping him in the dim corner. “So you’ve been down the road to Middle Hamborough, ’ave you?—And you’ve seen High House, eh? Well, let me tell you, I’ve been looking for that place close on six years, me an’ ol’ Kent, an’ not so much as a peep!

“Now I knows ’e’s a bit of a nut, but I like ’im an’ we gets on fine. Stays ’ere, cheap like, ’e does, an’ we do a bit of motorin’ in ’is ol’ car—lookin’ for those places you say you’ve seen, y’know? But we never finds ’em, an’ we never will, ’cos they’re not there, see? Kent bein’ a decent gent, I ’umors ’im an’ things is OK. But I’m no crook, if you see what I mean, though I’m not so sure I can say the same for everybody!”

He peered pointedly at George, releasing the pressure on his windpipe enough for him to croak: “I tell you I have seen High House, or at least, I saw a place of that name and answering the description I heard from Kent. And I have been on the road to—”

“What’s that about High House?” The question was a hoarse, quavering whisper—hesitant, and yet filled with excited expectancy. Hearing that whisper, Harvey immediately released his grip on Benson’s neck and turned to move over quickly to the thin, gray-haired, middle-aged man who had appeared out of a back room behind the service counter.

“Don’t get yourself all upset, Mr. Kent,” Harvey protested, holding up his hands solicitously. “It’s just some bloke tryin’ to pull a fast one, an’—”

“But I heard him say—” Kent’s eyes were wide, staring past the fat proprietor straight at Benson where he stood, still shaken, in the corner.

George found his voice again. “I said I’d seen High House, on the road to Middle Hamborough—and I did see it.” He shook himself, straightening his tie and shrugging his disarranged jacket back into position. “But I didn’t come back in here to get involved with a couple of nuts. And I don’t think much of your joke.”

George turned away and made for the door; then, remembering his previous trouble, he turned back to face Harvey. “Do you have a map of the area by any chance? I’ve been in Germany for a long time and seem to be out of touch over here. I can’t seem to find my way about anymore.”

For a moment Kent continued to stare very hard at the speaker; then he turned to Harvey. “He—he got lost! And he says he’s seen High House…! I’ve got to believe him. I daren’t miss the chance that—”

Almost sure by now that he was the victim of some cockeyed leg-pull (and yet still experiencing niggling little subconscious doubts), George Benson shrugged. “OK. No map,” he grumbled. “Well, goodnight, boys. Maybe I’ll drop in again sometime—like next visiting day!”

“No, wait!” the thin man cried. “Do you think that you can find…that you can find High House again?” His voice went back to a whisper on the last half dozen words.

“Sure, I can find it again,” George told him, nodding his head. “But it’s well out of my way.”

“I’ll make it worth your trouble,” Kent quickly answered, his voice rising rapidly in what sounded to George like a bad case of barely suppressed hysteria. “I’ll make it very worthwhile indeed!”

George was not the man to pass up a good thing. “My car’s outside,” he said. “Do you want to ride with me, or will you follow in your own car?”

“I’ll ride with you. My hands are shaking so badly that I—”

“I’m coming with you,” Harvey suddenly grunted, taking off his greasy apron.

“No, no, my friend,” Kent turned to him. “If we don’t find High House, I’ll be back. Until then, and just in case we do find it, this is for all you’ve done.” His hand was still shaking as he took out a checkbook and quickly, nervously, scribbled. He passed the check to Harvey and George managed to get a good look at it. His eyes went wide when he saw the amount it was made out for. Five hundred pounds!

“Now look ’ere, Mr. Kent,” Harvey blustered. “I don’t like the looks of this bloke. I reckon—”

“I understand your concern,” the older man told him, “but I’m sure Mr.—?” he turned to George.

“Er, Smith,” George told him, unwilling to reveal his real name. This could still be some crazy joke, but if so, it would be on some bloke called “Smith,” and not on George Benson!

“I’m sure that Mr. Smith is legitimate. And in any case I daren’t miss the chance to get…to get back home.” He was eager now to be on his way. “Are you ready, Mr. Smith?”

“Just as soon as you say,” George told him. “The sooner the better.”

They walked out into the night, to George’s car, leaving fat greasy Harvey worriedly squeezing his hands in the doorway to his all-nighter. Suddenly the night air seemed inordinately cold, and as George opened the passenger door to let Kent get in, he shivered. He walked round the. car, climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.

As George started up the motor, Kent spoke up from where he crouched against the opposite door, a huddled shape in the dark interior of the car. “Are you sure that—that—”

“Look,” George answered, the utter craziness of the whole business abruptly dawning on him, souring his voice, “if this is some sort of nutty joke….” He let the threat hang, then snapped, “Of course I can find it again! High House, you’re talking about?

“Yes, yes. High House. The home I built for the woman who lives there, waiting for me.”

“For fifteen years?” George allowed himself to indulge in the other’s fantasy.

“She would wait until time froze!” Kent leaned over to spit the words in George’s ear. “And in any case, I have a theory.”

Yeah! George thought to himself. Me, too! Out loud, he said, “A theory?”

“Yes. I think—I hope—it’s possible that time itself is frozen at the moment of the fracture. If I can get back, it may all be unchanged. I may even regain my lost years!”

“A parallel dimension, eh?” George said, feeling strangely nervous.

“Right,” his passenger nodded emphatically. “That’s the way I see it.”

Humoring him, George asked, “What’s it like, this other world of yours?”

“Why, it’s just like this world—except that there’s a village called Middle Hamborough, and a house on a hill, and a building firm called Milton, Jones & Kent. There are probably other differences, too, but I haven’t found any yet to concern me. Do you know the theory of parallel worlds?”

“I’ve read some science fiction,” George guardedly answered. “Some of these other dimensions, or whatever they’re supposed to be, are just like this world. Maybe a few odd differences, like you say. Others are different, completely different. Horrible and alien—stuff like that.” He suddenly felt stupid. “That’s what I’ve read, anyway. Load of rubbish!”

“Rubbish?” Kent grunted, stirring in his seat. “I wish it were. But, anyway, you’ve got the right idea. Why are you stopping?”

“See that sign?” George said, pointing through the windscreen to where the headlights lit up a village sign-post. “Meadington, just a few miles down the road. We’re through Meadington in about five minutes. Then we turn left where it’s signposted to Middle Hamborough. Another five minutes after that and we’re at High House. You said it would be worth my while?”

Now comes the crunch, George told himself. This is where the idiot bursts out laughing—and that’s when I brain him.

But Kent didn’t laugh. Instead he got out his checkbook, and George switched on the interior light to watch him write a note for….

George’s eyes bulged as he saw the numbers go down on the crisp paper. First a one, followed by three zeros! One thousand pounds! “This won’t bounce?” he asked suspiciously, his hand trembling as he reached for the check.

“It won’t bounce,” said Kent, folding the note and tucking it into his pocket. “Fortunately, my money was good for this world, too. You get it when we get to High House.”

“You have a deal,” George told him, putting the car in gear. They drove through slumbering Meadington, its roofs and hedges silvered in a moonlight that shone through the promise of a mist. Leaving the village behind; the car sped along the country road, but after a few minutes George pulled into the curb and stopped. His passenger had slumped down in his seat. “Are you OK?” George asked.

“There’s no turnoff,” Kent sobbed. “We should have passed it before now. I’ve driven down this road a thousand, five thousand times in the last fifteen years, and tonight it’s just the same as always. There’s no turnoff, no signpost to Middle Hamborough!”

“Yeah.” George chewed his lip, unwilling to accept defeat so easily. “We must have missed it. It wasn’t this far out of Meadington last time.” He turned the big car about, driving on to the grass verge to do so, then headed back towards Meadington.

George was angry now and more than a little puzzled. He’d been watching for that signpost as keenly as his passenger. How the hell could they have missed it? No matter, this time he’d drive dead slow. He knew the road was there, for he’d been down it and back once already tonight.

Sure enough, with the first of Meadington’s roofs glimmering silver in the near distance, a dilapidated signpost suddenly showed up in the beam of the car’s lights. It pointed across the tarmac to where the surface of a second road ribboned away into the milky moonlight; a sign whose legend, though grimy, was nevertheless amply legible: middle hamborough.

And quite as suddenly George Benson’s passenger was sitting bolt upright in his seat, his whole body visibly trembling while his eyes stood out like organ stops, staring madly at the signpost. “Middle Hamborough!” he cried, his voice pitched so high it almost broke. And again: “Middle Hamborough, Middle Hamborough!”

“Sure,” said George, an unnatural chill racing up his spine. “I told you I could find it!” And to himself he added, But I’m damned if I know how we missed it the first time!

He turned on to the new road, noticing the second signpost at his right as he did so. That was the one they’d missed. Perhaps it had been in the shadows; but in any case, what odds? They were on the right road now.

Kent’s trembling had stopped, and his voice was quite steady when he said, “You really don’t know how much I owe you, Mr. Smith. You shall have your check, of course, but if it were for a million pounds it wouldn’t really be enough.” His face was dark in the car’s interior, and his silhouette looked different somehow.

George said, “You realize that fat Harvey’s been having you on all this time, don’t you?” His voice became quite gentle as he added: “You know, you really ought to see someone about it—about all…this, I mean. People can take advantage of you. Harvey could have brought you here any time he wanted.”

Suddenly Kent laughed, a young laugh that had more than a trace of weary hysteria in it. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it, do you, Mr. Smith? Can’t you get it through your head that I’m not mad and no one is trying to make a fool of you? This is all real. My story is the truth. I was lost in an alien dimension, in your world, but now I’m finally back in my own. You may believe me, Mr. Smith, that you have earned your thousand pounds!”

George was almost convinced. Certainly Kent seemed sincere enough. “Well, OK—whatever you say. But I’ll tell you something, Mr. Kent. If that check of yours bounces when I try to cash it tomorrow, I’ll be back, and you better believe I’ll find High House again!”

The silhouette turned in its seat in an attitude of concern. “Do me a favor, will you, Mr. Smith? If—just if, you understand—if you can’t find the road back to Meadington, don’t hesitate to—”

George cut him off with a short bark of a laugh. “You must be joking! I’ll find it, all right.” His voice went hard again. “And I’ll find you, too, if—”

But he paused as, at the top of the next low hill, the headlights illuminated a house standing above the road at the end of a winding drive. George’s passenger grabbed his elbow in terrific excitement. “High House!” Kent cried, his voice wild and exultant. “High House! You’ve done it!”

George grunted in answer, revving the car down into the valley and up the hill to pull in to a halt outside the wrought-iron gates. He reached across to catch hold of his passenger’s coat as Kent tried to scramble from the car. “Kent!”

“Oh, yes, your check,” answered the young man, turning to smile excitedly at George in the yellow light from the little lamp on the gate….

George’s jaw dropped. Oh, this was Kent, all right. Little doubt about that. Same features, same suit, same trembling hand that reached into a pocket to bring out the folded check and place it in George’s suddenly clammy hand. But it was a hand that trembled now in excitement and not frustrated but undying hope—and it was a Kent fifteen years younger!

One thousand pounds, and at last George knew that he had indeed earned it!

Kent turned and threw open the gates, racing up the drive like a wild man. In the house, lights were starting to go on. George fingered his check unbelievingly and ran his tongue over dry lips. His mind seemed to have frozen over, so that only one phrase kept repeating in his brain. It was something Kent had said: “If you can’t find the road back to—”

He gunned the motor, spinning the car wildly round in a spray of gravel chips. Up on the hill at the top of the drive, Kent was vaulting the fence, and a figure in white was waiting in the garden for him, open arms held wide. George tore his eyes away from them and roared down the hill. For the second time that night he headed for the Meadington road.

The check lay on the empty passenger seat now where he’d dropped it, and money was quite the last thing in George’s mind as he drove his car in an unreasoning panic, leaping the low hills like some demon hurdler as he tried to make it back to the main road before—before what? A hideous doubt was blossoming in his mind, growing like some evil genie from a bottle and taking on a horrible form.

All those stories about queer dislocations of space and time—the signpost for Middle Hamborough that was, then wasn’t, then was again—and of course Kent’s story, and his…rejuvenation?

“I will be very glad,” George told himself out loud, “when I reach that junction just outside Meadington!” For one thing, he could have sworn that it wasn’t this much of a drive. He should surely have been there by now. Ah, yes, this would be it coming up now, just round this slight bend….

No junction!

The road stretched straight on ahead, narrow and suddenly ominous in the sweeping beam of his lights. All right, so the junction was a little further than he’d reckoned. George put his foot down even harder to send the big car racing along the narrow road. The miles flew by without a single signpost or junction, and a ground mist came in that forced George to slow down. He would have done so anyway, for now the road seemed to be exerting a strange pull on his car. The big motor felt as if it were slowing down! George’s heart almost jumped into his mouth. There couldn’t be anything wrong with the car, could there?

Braking to a halt and switching off the car’s engine and lights, George climbed out of the driver’s seat. He breathed the damp night air. On unpleasantly rubbery legs he walked round to the front of the car and lifted the hood. An inspection light came on and he cast a quick, practiced glance over the motor. No, he’d worked in a garage for many years and he knew a good motor when he saw one. Nothing wrong with the car, so—

As he straightened up, George felt an unaccustomed suction on his shoes and glanced down at the road. The surface was rubbery, formed of a sort of tough sponge. A worried frown crossed George’s face as he bent to feel that peculiar surface. He’d never seen a road surfaced with stuff like that before!

It was as he straightened up again that he heard the tinkling, like the sound of tiny bells from somewhere off the road. Yes, there, set back from the road, he could make out a row of low squat houses, like great mush-rooms partly obscured by the mist that swirled now in strange currents. The tinkling came from the houses.

The outskirts of a village? George wondered. Well, at least he’d be able to get directions. He stepped off the road on to turf and made for the houses, only slowing down when he saw how featureless and alike they all looked. The queer tinkling went on, sounding like the gentle noises that the hangings on a Christmas tree make in a draught. Other than that there were only the billowing mist and the darkness.

Reaching the first house, stepping very slowly now, George came up close to the wall and stared at it. It was gray, completely featureless. All the houses looked alike. They were indeed like enormous mushrooms. No windows. Overhanging roofs. Flaps of sorts that might just be doors, or there again—

The tinkling had stopped. Very carefully George reached out and touched the wall in front of him. It felt warm…and it crept beneath his fingers!

Deliberately and slowly George turned about and forced one foot out in front of the other. Then he took a second step. He fought the urge to look back over his shoulder until, halfway to the mist-wreathed car, he heard an odd plopping sound behind him. It was like the ploop you get throwing a handful of mud into a pond. He froze with his back still turned to the houses.

Quite suddenly he felt sure that his ears were enlarging, stretching back and up to form saucer-like receivers on top of his head. Everything he had went into those ears, and all of it was trying to tune in to what was going on behind him. He didn’t turn, but simply stood still; and again there was only the utter silence, loud in his strangely sensitized ears. He forced his dead feet to take a few more paces forward—and sure enough the sound came again, repeating this time: ploop, ploop, ploop!

George slowly pivoted on his heel as muscles he never knew he had began to jump in his face. The noises, each ploop sounding closer than the last, stopped immediately. His legs felt like twin columns of jelly, but he somehow completed his turn. He stumbled spastically then, arms flailing to keep himself from falling. The nearest house, or cottage, or whatever, was right there behind him, within arm’s reach.

Suddenly George’s heart, which he was sure had stopped for ever, became audible again inside him, banging away in his chest like a trip-hammer. All in one movement he turned and bounded for the car, wondering why with each leap he should stay so long in the air, knowing that in fact his body was moving like greased lightning while his mind (in an even greater hurry, one his body couldn’t even attempt to match) thought he was in reverse!

Not bothering, not daring to look back again, he almost wrenched the car door from its hinges as he threw himself into the driving seat. Then, in an instant that lasted several centuries, his hand was on the ignition key and the engine was roaring. As he spun the car about in a squeal of tortured tires and accelerated up the rubbery road, he looked in his rearview mirror—and immediately wished he hadn’t!

The “houses” were all plooping down the road after him—like great greedy frogs—and their “doors” were wide open!

George nearly went off the road then, wrenching at the wheel with clammy hands as he fought to control his careening car on the peculiar surface. A million monstrous thoughts raced through his head as he climbed up through the gears. For of course he knew now for certain that he was trapped in an alien dimension, that the space-time elastic had snapped back into place behind him, stranding him here. Wherever “here” was!

It was only several miles later that he thought to slow down, and only then after passing a junction on the right and a signpost saying: middle hamborough 5 miles. His heart gave a wild leap as he skidded to a halt on a once more perfectly normal tarmac road. Why, that sign meant that just half a mile up the road in front he’d find Meadington, and beyond Meadington…Bankhead and the Ml!…Except that Meadington wasn’t there…. Instead, the mist came up again and, worse, the road went rubbery. And no sign of Meadington. When he saw a row of mushroom “houses” standing back from the road, George did an immediate, violent about-turn, rocking the car dangerously on the rubbery road. Trouble with this weird surface was that it gave too much damn traction.

Amazing that he could still think such mundane thoughts in a situation like this. And yet, through all of this protracted nightmare, a ray of hope still shone. The road to Middle Hamborough!

Back there, down that road, there was a house on a hill and beyond that a real, if slightly different, world. A world where at least two of the inhabitants owed him a break. From what Kent had told him, it seemed to George that the other world wasn’t much different from his own. He could make a go of things there. He gunned his motor back down the road and out of the mist, back on to a decent tarmac surface and into normally dark night, turning left at the leaning signpost on to the now familiar road to Middle Hamborough.

Or was it familiar?

The hedges bordering the road were different somehow, taller, hiding the fields beyond them from the car’s probing headlights, and the road seemed narrower than George remembered it. But that must be his imagination acting up after the terrific shocks of the last ten or twenty minutes; it had to be, for this was the road to Middle Hamborough.

Then, cresting the next hill, suddenly George felt that hellish drag on his tires, and his headlights began to do battle with a thickening, swirling mist. At the same time he saw the house atop the next hill, the house set back off the road at the head of a long winding drive. High House!

There were no lights on in the place now, but it was George’s refuge none the less. Hadn’t Kent told him to come back here if he couldn’t find his way back to Meadington? George gave a whoop of relief as he swept down into the shallow valley and up the hill towards the wrought-iron roadside gates. They were still open, as Kent had left them; and as he slowed down fractionally, George swung the wheel to the left, turning his car in through the gates. They weren’t quite open all the way, though, so that the front of the car slammed them back on their hinges.

Up the drive the front lights of the house instantly came on; two of them glowed yellow as though shutters had been quickly opened—or lids lifted! George had no time to note anything else—except perhaps that the drive was very white, not the white of gravel but more of leprous flesh—for at that point the car simply stopped as if it had run head-on into a brick wall! George wasn’t belted in. He rose up over the steering wheel and crashed through the windscreen, automatically turning his shoulder to the glass.

He hit the drive in a shower of glass fragments, screaming and expecting the impact to hurt. It didn’t, and then George knew why the car had stopped like that: the drive was as soft and sticky as hot toffee. And it wasn’t a drive!

Behind George the wide fleshy ribbon tasted the car and, rising up, flicked it easily to one side. Then it tasted George. He had time to scream, barely, and time for one more quite mundane thought—that this wasn’t where Kent lived—before that great white chameleon tongue slithered him up the hill to the house, whose entire front below the yellow windows opened up to receive him.

Shortly thereafter the lights went slowly out again, as if someone had lowered shutters, or as if lids had fallen….

The Man Who Saw No Spiders

In mid-1977 (yes, I was still in the Army), I wrote “The Man Who Saw No Spiders.” An arachnophobe, me? Naaah! But I know a lot of people are, and I don’t confine my fiction to things that scare just me; I enjoy giving other people the shudders, too. I mean, that’s what it’s all about, right? Entertainment? No? Ah, well, to each his own.

Anyway, two years later W. Paul Ganley used the story in his award-winning small press magazine

Weirdbook 13…

and that’s about all I can say about it. But if

you

haven’t seen any spiders just lately, or if you should find that you don’t even want to

think

about them—

—Er, what was I saying?

“He what?” asked Bleaker, Conway’s neighbor, incredulously.

Conway smiled at his friend’s astounded expression, then repeated himself, adding: “It’s quite genuine, I assure you, Jerry. He won’t admit of spiders. They don’t exist for him.”

“Then of course he’s a madman,” Bleaker shrugged. “I mean, it’s like someone saying he doesn’t believe in mushrooms…isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” Conway answered. “The man who says he doesn’t believe in mushrooms at least admits of their theory—by the very act of naming them—if you see what I mean?”

“Frankly, no,” Bleaker shook his head, reaching for his drink. He lived only a short walk away from Conway, along a beautifully wooded path, set back half a mile from the main road that wound out from the nearby town and over the hills northward. The area was lonely but lovely and a hand-ful of well-to-do families had their homes on the edge of the woods that stretched away to the hills. Bleaker and Conway had built comparatively close together, hence they were “neighbors,” even though their houses stood almost a quarter-mile apart.

“OK, Jerry, look at it this way,” Conway persisted. “If I say I don’t believe in God, then there’s not a great deal you can do to convince me that God does indeed exist, is there? No I’m not trying to be offensive, I assure you. I could just as easily have made it Father Christmas or Easter Bunny. However, while I don’t admit of a God, I can readily enough understand others who do believe. I know what they are on about; I understand the theory of it.”

“Yes, but—” Bleaker began, wishing that the girls would come on out of Conway’s kitchen and get him off his psychiatric hobbyhorse.

“—But suppose I refuse to accept something as tangible as a good old-fashioned English mushroom. What then?”

“Why, then I bring you one, Paul. I let you touch it, smell it, eat the bloody thing! I show you the word in an encyclopedia with a picture of the real thing alongside. I get out a dictionary and spell it out for you: m-u-s-h-r-o-o-m…! I take you into town, the market on a Friday, where I buy you a pound of them. You can’t escape them, they’re there. Mushrooms are—you have to accept them.” He sat back, smiling at his own cleverness.

“Good!” said Conway, successful psychiatrist written all over his face. “Now then, assume that when you bring me the mushroom I ignore it. As-sume that my senses won’t, can’t recognize it. Assume that when I look at your dictionary I see ‘mush’ above and ‘mushiness’ below, but no ‘mushroom’ in between. That I don’t even hear you when you say the word ‘mushroom.’ That I wonder why you’re making funny faces when you spell the word out for me. What then?”

“Then you’re a nut, pure and simple.”

“Oh? And suppose that in every other instance I am a perfectly normal human being. An upstanding member of the community. A happily married man with no problems worth mentioning. In short, assume that in every way save one it’s clearly demonstrable that I am not a nut. How about that?”

Bleaker frowned. “Hmm…. Could you possibly have some new, weird, exotic disease? Shall we call it, say, ‘fungitis’? Even then, though, it has to be a disease of the mind. However harmless you are, you still have to be a nut.”

Conway looked disappointed. “Yes, well the man we’re talking about is not a nut. He’s Thomas Waterford, gamekeeper for Lord Daventry at The Lodge. And with him it’s not mushrooms but spiders. He doesn’t believe in them, can’t see them, he might as well never have heard of them. And from what I’ve seen of him, he’ll never hear of them again.”

“He’s a nut,” Bleaker insisted, without emphasis.

“He’s as sane as you or I,” Conway denied. “I’ve used every trick in the psychiatric book to test his sanity and I’m certain of it.”

“So what caused it then?” Bleaker demanded to know. “Has he always been this way?”

“Ah! Good question. No, he hasn’t always been this way; I was lucky to get onto him so quickly. It started a week ago yesterday, on a Saturday morning. Rather it started on the Friday, when his wife asked him to clean all of the cobwebs and spiders out of the cellar of the gatehouse where they live. She hates spiders, you see. Yes, that was on the Friday. He told her he was busy, said that Lord Daventry was worried about poachers and he’d be out in the woods for most of the night, but that he’d clean out the spiders in the morning. He believed in spiders then, you see? But when she reminded him on the Saturday he ignored her. And when she took him down into the cellar to see how badly infested the place was, he—”

“He couldn’t see the spiders?”

“Right! At first she thought he was kidding her on, but later she started to worry about it. On Monday she told Lord Daventry about it and he had a go at Old Thomas. Then he contacted me. It seemed such an interesting case that I took it on gratis, as a favor. I drove over the hills to The Lodge that same afternoon….” He paused.

Interested despite himself, Bleaker prompted him: “And?”

“Jerry, it’s like nothing I ever dealt with before. For the last five or six days spiders have had no place whatsoever in Thomas Waterford’s life. Here, listen to this tape. I recorded it on Wednesday morning, five days after the thing began.” He went over to his tape recorder and pressed a button, listening as snatches of speeded-up conversation babbled forth until he found the spot he was looking for. A second button slowed the tape down and the recorded conversation became audible:

“Well, we really don’t seem to be getting anywhere, do we, Thomas?”

“P’raps we would, sir, if I knew what you was after. I’ve plenty of work on at The Lodge, and—”

“But Lord Daventry said you’d be only too happy to help me out, Thomas.”

“‘Course, sir, but we don’t seem to be doing much really, do we? I mean—wot am I ’ere for?”

“Spiders, Thomas!”

(Silence)

“Why are you afraid of them?”

“Afraid of wot, sir?”

“Creepy-crawlies.”

“Wot, bugs and beetles and flies, sir? I hain’t scared of ’em, sir! Wotever made you think that?”

“No, I meant spiders, Thomas, Hairy-legged web-spinners!”

“I mean, I sees bugs every day in the woods, I do, and—”

“And birds?”

“Lots of ’em.”

“And trees?”

“‘Ere, you’re’ aving me on!”

“And—spiders?”

“‘Course I sees trees! The ’ole bleedin’ forest’s full of ’em!”

Conway speeded the tape up at this point, and while it crackled and blustered on he said to Bleaker, “Listen to this next bit. This was the next day, Thursday. I had some rough drawings for Thomas to look at….”

He slowed the tape down and after a few seconds Bleaker heard the following:

“Just have a look at this, Thomas, will you? What do you reckon that is?”

“Bird, sir. Thrush, I’d say, but not a very good drawing.”

“And this one?”

“An eft. Newt, you’d call it, but I’ve always called ’em efts.”

“And this?”

“A tree, probably a hoak—but wot’s the point of all—”

“And—this?”

“Blank, sir. A blank piece of paper!”

(Pause, then a cough from Conway.)

“And how about, er, this?”

“A bleedin’ happle, sir!”

“Yes, but what’s on the apple?”

“Eh? Why, a stalk, and a leaf.”

“And?…What’s this thing here, staring at you?”

“‘Ere! You’re ’aving me on again, hain’t you? There’s nothin’ there ’cept your finger, sir!…”

Conway switched the tape recorder off. He looked at Bleaker and said, “Both the ‘blank’ and the thing on the apple were—”

“Spiders?”

Conway nodded.

At that point the women came in from the kitchen carrying plated salads. “Spiders!” exclaimed Dorothy, Conway’s wife, in disgust. She turned to Bleaker. “Don’t tell me he’s going on about old Tom Waterford again? I’ve had to listen to nothing else for a week!”

“But this sounds so interesting,” said Bleaker’s wife, Andrea. “What’s it all about? One of your cases, Paul?”

Dorothy held up her hand and took charge of the situation before it could get out of hand. “No you don’t, Paul, not tonight. You’ve got Jerry here bored stiff. And anyway, I’ve told you what the answer is.”

“Oh?” Bleaker looked at her. “What do you reckon then, Dorothy?”

She held up a finger and shushed them, looking very serious. “Flying saucers!” she said.

They all laughed.

“Oh, it’s not so funny,” she cautioned, unable to avoid giggling, despite her semi-serious expression. “It was just before Old Tom went funny that the light was seen over the hills.”

“A light?” Andrea repeated, completely out of her depth.

“Yes, a queer light, over the hills near Lord Daventry’s place,” Dorothy said. “Myself, I reckon the Martians got Old Tom!” And again they all laughed; but Dorothy laughed loudest for she’d succeeded in changing the subject, which was all she had wanted to do….

The “lights” were seen again much later that same night, this time from the other side of the hills. Lord Daventry, sitting in his study, caught the bluish flash out of the corner of his eye as he sat studying some papers. Looking out of his window, away over the hills he saw a beam of light like a solid bar striking from heaven to the earth. It lasted for just a second, then was gone, but it reminded him of similar lights he had seen over a week ago. That had been about the time that Old Tom started his queer business.

Thinking about his gamekeeper made the peer suddenly wonder how Conway was getting on with the case. Lord Daventry knew that the psychiatrist had spent a fair amount of time with Thomas.

Well, Conway usually worked late, didn’t he? There was no reason why he shouldn’t call the man up and find out how things stood. They were, af-ter all, old friends of sorts. Perhaps he’d also ask if Conway had seen the light. He thought about it for a few minutes more, then picked up his telephone and dialed Conway’s number.

He heard the answering brrp, brrp, brrp, from the other end, then the distant telephone was lifted from its cradle in Conway’s study. “Conway?” said the Lord. “I hope I’ve not got you out of bed?”

“Not at all,” Conway’s voice came back, promptly and clearly. “I was doing a bit of work. Had a drink with some friends earlier but they’re long gone. Dorothy’s in bed.”

“Good. I just wondered if you’d seen that peculiar light? I saw it a minute or so ago from my window. Seemed to shine down pretty close to your place. Funny sort of thing….”

Conway didn’t answer. He was staring out of his own window. Out there, just beyond the dense copse at the foot of the garden, emitting a pul-sing sort of auroral radiance whose like he had never in his life seen before, the bluish dome of an alien vessel showed like an obscene blister against the background of nighted hills. Closer to the house, looking at Conway where he stood staring out of the window, something loomed on stilt-like legs—something huge, hairy and hideously ugly beyond nightmare—something much more monstrously alien than the spacecraft which had brought it here.

It was, of sorts, a spider—but already Conway was beginning to forget that there were such things.

The bushes at the side of the house, from which even now a smaller spider emerged, swaying almost mechanically into view; the garden and copse and blister of strange light beyond; the dark backdrop of hills and roof of star-strewn skies: all of these things were peripheral in Conway’s awareness, as the frame of a picture seen close-up is peripheral in the eye of the viewer. His concentration, to the contrary, was centered on the spider, on its eyes.

At the other end of the wire, Lord Daventry waited patiently for an answer. After a little while, wondering at the delay, he asked: “Paul? Are you still there?”

Conway, staring into the vast, crimson, hooded orbs of the thing’s eyes where they glared at him hypnotically from the garden, shook his head as if to clear away some mental smog. He finally answered:

“Yes, I’m here. Could you repeat what you said just then? I didn’t catch it the first time.”

“I said did you see the strange light?”

“No, I saw no light.” Conway made no attempt to enlarge upon the subject.

Believing Conway must be tired, the peer decided to keep the conversation short. “Ah….” he cleared his throat. “Look, sorry to be a nuisance, Paul, but I was wondering about Old Thomas….” He paused.

Conway made no comment.

“Old Thomas,” repeated the peer more loudly, becoming frustrated. “Thomas and his spiders!” His voice came sharp and clear, if a little tinny, from Conway’s telephone.

Conway grunted impatiently and frowned. He jiggled the telephone, blew into the earpiece, and said: “Look, I’m sorry, sir. Terrible line tonight. Can’t hear a thing you’re saying. Can I ring you back in the morning?” And with that he replaced the receiver.

He was dimly, hazily aware, while he performed these casual, automatic tasks, that the smaller of the two creatures outside bore in its mandibles the body of Andrea Bleaker—that as its mouth worked avidly at her middle, the uppermost of its three globular semi-opaque abdomen-sacks was turning a dull red—but this also was peripheral knowledge. Not once did his attention waver from the eyes of the larger creature. He couldn’t divert his attention if he tried.

That night thirty thousand backup vessels beamed in, an entire taskforce, most of them far bigger than the half-dozen or so scout craft al-ready in situ. In the morning Conway made his telephone call, as he had promised, to Lord Daventry, but there was no answer. At midnight a craft had landed in the peer’s garden and its pilot had been hungry.

By midday there were still one or two pockets of uninitiated people in isolated places—the odd Eskimo family or settlement, a reclusive order of Tibetan monks, the crew of a marine survey vessel just north of the southern pack ice—all of whom still believed in spiders, but not many. As for the invaders: there were not especially worried about finding these as yet unbranded mavericks. That could wait.

Right now there was the herding to think about, and then the giant factory ships would have to be brought in….

Deja Viewer

Now we fast forward almost quarter of a century to 2002. I was trying to give myself a break, get away from writing novels for a while, which I seemed to have been doing almost nonstop since retiring (from the Army in December 1980). Now, I’m the kind of fellow who often has odd or peculiar thoughts (what do you mean, you would never have guessed!?) and it had recently occurred to me that when I look in a mirror I don’t see myself as I

but as I

was

the tiniest fraction of a second ago… because light isn’t an instantaneous medium. In fact there are no instantaneous media—except, or so we’re informed—in “quantum entanglement.” (Okay, so you knew that.) Anyway, that is the thought which led me to this next story, and to say anything else about it, except where it first appeared, in a limited edition, small press British publication called

Maelstrom Vol. 1,

Calvin House 2004, would simply mean giving it away.

(And as for giving it away, well the title doesn’t help too much, either!)

Yes it’s possible. And yes, I’m pretty sure they’ll do it one day, even if I’m no longer in the program. Which I won’t be, not the way I am now. But best to begin at the beginning, back when I was eight or nine years old.

I had wanted to be an astronaut…huh! Bad timing. Just when all of that was winding down. And here we are in 2044 and it never did wind up again, not all the way. Oh, there’ve been more Mars probes, and gas-giant moon probes, but all automated, computer driven, and no astronauts worth the mention. We still have the manned, Lego-like, Earth-orbiting international space-station twirling and twinkling away up there, and the Moonbase that no one’s been back to for seven years since its dome was popped by a pea-sized Leonid meteorite, but that’s it, that’s your lot.

No great future in astronautics, obviously.

But with my grades I could at least theorize on space, the universe and like that, even if I wasn’t going to go out there. And with my aptitude for physics—of the more truly physical variety as opposed to, or hand in hand with, the theoretical—I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on a job in some research laboratory; just about any research facility, for that matter. But the dreams (in fact they were nightmares) came a long time before that, when I was eight or nine years old….

They were sort of vague at first.

I remember my father comforting me, sitting on my bed with his arm around me, holding me tight. “What was all that about?” he asked me, with a frown on a face that mine was the image of except for all the lines, that face which on waking I imagined had solidified right out of my nightmare, causing me to shrink back from him. “What was it, Davy? Some kind of bad dream?”

And I remember telling him, “It was a face—I think it was your face, Dad—but the mouth was all twisted up and hurting, and the face was all blurred. You were shouting at me, I think. Telling me not to do it.” And I sat there shivering.

“I was telling you not to do it? Hey, what’s all this, son? Are you feeling guilty about something?”

Guilty? Me? But have you ever known a nine-year-old boy who didn’t feel guilty about something or other? Like his curiosity about girls and their differences? Or the stolen cigarette that made him sick behind the garden shed last Thursday? Or the ten-dollar bill he found in the road and didn’t tell the neighborhood cop about? Or the sparrow he killed with his BB gun before putting the weapon in its box and locking it, and shoving it to the back of a shelf where he couldn’t any longer see it; out of sight, out of mind sort of thing? Of course I felt guilty. But that’s not what the dream had been about. And so:

“No,” I told him, still shivering in his arms. “It was just a dream—a bad dream, that’s all—but it’s gone now.” Which was true enough at the time, except I didn’t know then that it hadn’t gone very far. Or not far enough….

It happened a good many times after that, too many times, while I was still a kid; but on every occasion it was dark and vague, just like the first time, like a bad memory that keeps floating to the surface but never enough that you recognize its origin or what it’s about. Guilt? Conscience? No. I don’t think so. I mean, I had never done anything that bad, had I? Apart from the usual troubles that kids get into my childhood had been pretty much idyllic. I had loved my Ma and Da, and in return had been much loved.

Yet I must have been to blame for something. The dream, my nightmare, must surely be something out of my past, some badly scarred bit of mental baggage or other. Or so I supposed, as I quickly came to dread it without quite knowing why. For let’s face it: it wasn’t that much of a nightmare, now was it? What, a dark blurred face and an obscure warning?

That was all it was, yes. Yet every time it came I would wake up in my clammy, tumbled bed, with those anxious, urgent, distant but insistent demands echoing over and over in my head even as they receded:

“Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t make it happen! For God’ sake, don’t…do…it!”

There were periods, weeks and months at a time, when I slept deep and peacefully and my dreams were nothing much out of the ordinary. And at times like that I tended to forget about the vague visage and its meaningless warning. Or rather I tried to forget it, tried hard to convince myself that whatever it had been, whatever the dream had meant, it was done with now and no longer meant anything.

I tried to put it to the back of my mind, tried to cage it there; a tactic that seemed to work, at least at first. But any reprieve I might have gained was always temporary—it wouldn’t stay caged. Eventually, invariably, it would regroup, refashion itself, and return out of limbo to start tormenting me all over again. And again there would be times when it totally dominated the dark hours, as regular and recurrent as the night itself.

Yet somehow I learned to live with it. Oh, I worried about it—and worried more than a little about the state of my mind—of course I did, who wouldn’t? But since it obviously wasn’t going to go away…well, as that old saw has it, “familiarity breeds contempt.” But in fact it wasn’t so much contempt as an awareness that there was nothing I could do about it,

In my early teens, following a year long hiatus, the nightmare returned in a new, far more disturbing format. Where before its main focus had centered upon a blurred, twisted, frustratingly familiar face, now any sense of familiarity—of recognition, however remote—was absent, replaced by something completely unknown and utterly terrifying.

It happened like this:

Having earned a course of advanced education as a reward for my exceptional grades in Jr. High, I was attending a local college and sleeping at home. On the night the dream returned, taking on this more definite, truly horrific form, my parents were visiting with friends and didn’t hear my shouting…or more properly my screaming. I’m not ashamed to admit it: this time I woke up screaming for my life, screaming my lungs out!

In the dream:

At first there was only the darkness and a certain uneasy awareness; I had felt this before, and so knew what was coming. Then the darkness swirled, like smoke made luminous in the beam of a movie projector. And there in the gloom, out of this weird ectoplasm, the face gradually firmed up, coalescing into a more solid projection. But it wasn’t the usual face, or at least it didn’t seem to be. And:

“Don’t!” That ethereal warning, even before the thing had fully developed. “Don’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t!”

I wanted to answer—to ask what it was I mustn’t do—but my mouth was dry, made clammy with sleep and fear. And all the time this foggy outline putting on flesh…or losing it? For abruptly, as suddenly and shockingly as that, the face was full-formed. But it wasn’t nearly a full face! And:

“Don’t you do it!” the scorched thing gurgled yet again—this crisped and peeling, bodiless, agonized visage—hanging there like an apparition in the dark. “Don’t you dare do it!’”

Its hair smoked, burned away from one half of a blistered scalp. Its left eye was a gaping, blackened hole in a scorched and peeling roast of a face whose seared cheekbone was clearly visible. Its mouth was welded shut in the corner on that side, causing its withered lips to writhe as they issued its urgent, stilted, inexplicable warning:

“Don’t do it! You mustn’t…mustn’t…do it!”

And finally I was able to swallow, to squeeze saliva into my throat and moisten it, and choke the question out. “What is it that…that I mustn’t do? I mean, what do you want of me? What are you asking?”

At which the thing—this ruined face, this apparition—twitched, blinked its good eye and despite its awful injuries somehow managed to assume a bewildered expression as it slowly backed away. And emboldened I called after it, “Wait a moment. Don’t go. What is it you don’t want me to do?”

But then its attitude seemed to change, to harden. For a moment it hung there in midair, gazing at me intently through that one good eye. And as I in turn tried to back off—which needless to say I couldn’t, because one can’t in nightmares of this sort—so the thing rushed upon me, angry now, frustrated that it wasn’t getting through to me or because it didn’t know how to. And as I tried to ward it off:

“Don’t!” it shouted, spitting blood and yellow pus in my face as frustration split its welded lips, and strips of seared skin curled like wafer-thin shavings down its chin. “Don’t you do it!”

Its voice was full of pain, and its teeth were white, red and clenched; they were grinding where they showed through that fretted left cheek!

Which is when I woke up screaming, screaming my lungs out, and I’m not ashamed to admit it….

After that…thankfully the nightmare’s incidence in this its most recent, more grotesque form was only sporadic, and by chance or sheer good fortune I was seventeen before it once again came to the notice of my parents. By then, however—having scared the wits out of my mother one night with my gibbering and shrieking—I had decided it was time to reveal the extent of my problem and perhaps seek help.

By then, too, I had submitted four extremely well-received scientific papers and had been assured a position in one of the country’s finest experimental labs when my formal education was complete, and I knew the last thing that any future colleagues of mine would want to discover—or that I would be prepared to reveal—was that since my childhood through young manhood I had been suffering from…well, how best to put it? A deep-seated persecution complex? Mental depression? Some rare psy-chological disorder? Any or all of these things? Possibly.

I saw several shrinks (please excuse my use of this term, and try to understand: I’ve never had much faith in psychiatry, so this was somewhat of an ordeal for me), one of whom went so far as to attempt regression. Perhaps my cynicism was to blame for his total failure; or perhaps it was simply that there was nothing in my past, my childhood, that he could focus in on or pinpoint as the source of any emotional problem whatsoever.

And so, not knowing when it would strike next, I was left to suffer the nightmare, all through my final term of education and well into my nineteenth year, when mercifully its fortnightly, then monthly, then quarterly incidence seemed to indicate a gradual remission. So that by the time I took up my position at “the facility” (whose location I may not reveal for reasons of national security) I had again begun to believe that perhaps this time my troubles were truly behind me—

—When in fact they were ahead….

The facility.

While I may not reveal its location—for fear of making it a prime target in any future conflict—its purpose isn’t any longer a matter of national security. Indeed, and for the last decade, a majority of the world’s technologically advanced countries have been engaged in just such research.

As for the research in question:

Wasn’t it Einstein himself who declared the concept of a past, a present, and a future—the concept of time, in fact—an illusion, albeit a persistent one? That at least was the substance of it if not in so many words. Temporal physics, yes, dizzying even by quantum standards. But as to why anyone would want to travel through time, to speed up their passage through it, or indeed reverse it….

Well, I shall risk my status as a citizen and a hero and propose one of my own theories. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to slide a century or so back down the space-time cone and adjust history somewhat, just a tweak here and there? No of course it wouldn’t! And I know that any reasonable, reasoning mind would recoil in sheer terror at the notion. Ah, but tell that to the government, and to those military men who believe that a world without Hitler—a world which had never known men such as Mao or Osama, or a hundred others of that ilk—would be a better world. Perhaps they are right, but what if they are wrong? At least the world we know is stable, the status quo maintained.

But of course I’m only guessing (despite the presence of the CIA and certain uniformed types in an allegedly “advisory” capacity.)

And so at just twenty-one years of age—and because we all have to earn our keep—that is where I had been working for two years and some months when my nightmare manifested yet again in its final, most monstrous form and at the worst possible, indeed the only possible, time….

The facility’s Powers That Be had eventually decided, despite what I’ve said above, that the past was forbidden and nothing physical could be made to materialize there. They had reasoned that if it were at all possible it would have already happened; surely we would have sent something into the past, and, knowing in advance what we were going to do would have been witness to its arrival—which is an indication of how far ahead we were with the project—which in turn is to say that we were ready. Or ready for the future, at least.

Only then—if we could get that far and send some object a few minutes into the future—would we reconsider the past. As to the time-traveler in question: since earlier experiments had indicated that a non-metallic element would have the first best chance, the subject of our experiment was to be a simple glass paperweight.

I was to be the last one out of the vault, the one making the final minute, feathery adjustments to the equipment. But of course I can’t describe the equipment, not if I’m interested in preserving my heroic image and citizenship.

And there I was alone of humanity in that vast underground lab, me and the machine. And I must say I felt oppressed by the sheer weight of protective lead surrounding me on all sides—protecting those on the outside, that is—yet at the same time excited by the knowledge that much of this, not only the theory but also in large part the actual design of the experiment, was the product of my own imagination and creativity.

Oppressed yet excited…but was it only the lead shielding I felt weighing upon me? And might not my excitement in fact be fear? But fear of what: the possible consequences of what I was about to do? Suddenly I felt oddly perverse: I sensed a danger, yet welcomed it! But there again, was Einstein perverse when he formulated his most famous equation, E=mc2? No, neither man nor equation…not even in the searing light of Hiroshima. Science is science, after all. And as for me: I was no Frankenstein….

But finally we were ready; my monitors and meters were displaying optimum readings, and outside the vault my colleagues—in fact my team—were reading their own monitors, conversing excitedly, and beckoning me to join them beyond the reinforced carbon-crystal portholes.

Which was when I felt the darkness swirling and knew that it was happening again; not a nightmare this time but a waking horror, a daymare! Again it had come to plague me. I was awake, yes, yet must have seemed half-asleep to those who watched me; asleep and staggering in the grip of invisible forces, swaying like a zombie, mesmerized by this thing which only I could see:

That tortured, fire-blasted face forming out of a darkness conjured in my mind. But more than a face this time, this last time…a face, a neck, and the upper half of a torso, all of it ravaged and worse than ravaged. The left arm had been torn free of a shoulder that spurted blood, spattering the apparit-ion’s laboratory smock. But…a laboratory smock?

And finally I understood, knew what it was all about, what it had always been about. Which was perhaps the most staggering revelation of all. So that even as the thing gibbered its first and last warnings at me—”Don’t do it! You mustn’t do it!”—I was passing out, my mind refusing to take it in, shriveling in upon itself like an abruptly deflating balloon.

I remember stumbling against a laboratory table, trying to grasp it and steady myself, and the experiment’s remote control device falling from my suddenly spastic fingers…then of its landing face-down, of course, on the button, and so triggering the experiment.

With me inside the cone zone.

Then the blast like a great bomb going off in my face, the wash of alien heat lifting me up and taking me with it, and the pain that I felt without really feeling it. No, for I must have been half out of it before…well, before I was out of it.

But it’s possible that I remember one other thing: wondering whose arm it was, spraying blood as it went spinning across the laboratory floor…?

As for the glass paperweight:

I’m told it disappeared, only to reappear a minute or so later as a scattering of perfectly formed clear glass marbles of various sizes, which blinked out of sight before they could roll off the smoking laboratory table…materializing a week later as a clump of silicon crystals before disappearing again…and reappearing after four months as a small heap of glass dust, then at once vanishing…to return in a three-month as an acidic vapor that blinded the technician who had been left in charge of the obviously ongoing experiment.

Since when there has been nothing.

So while time travel is possible, we still have a long way to go before we’ll have even a short time to go! But I believe we’ll succeed in the end. And while I’m no longer able to give of myself physically, my mind is still keen…indeed, only a very small part of it has escaped me…

So then, what had happened?

Well as anyone with even a basic schooling in science will know, every action has a reaction. I had sent something of the paperweight into the future, its elements if not its structure. But since time is kept in balance by space, the spacetime universe had reacted, compensated. And I was the one in the cone zone.

My mind, or something of my mind (certain of its elements at least) had been blasted down the time-cone into the past, aware that it had an urgent warning to impart if not what the warning was about. And for thirteen years or thereabouts that dazed thought had been visiting its former habitation, trying now and then to warn me of my deadly future, but ever fading and losing coherency—

Until the time when I first dreamed the thing, when I was just eight or nine years old; dreamed of the face—my future face—before the fragment sped off into an even earlier time, when there had been no me to warn….

Feasibility Study

So then, here’s me writing this Science Fiction stuff and as of yet I haven’t even managed to get off the planet! I’ve put some peculiar things on planet Earth but I haven’t yet sent anything or anyone off into space… not too far, anyway. Well, “Feasib-ility Study” puts that right, as do the two tales that follow it and close out the book.

Written in November/December, 2004—just a month ago as I sit writing this—it’s one of my two most recent tales, and in its way has turned into something of a moral story, even though that wasn’t my original intention. Much like “The Strange Years” and “The Man Who Felt Pain,” it makes, I think, a strong case for conservancy.

And before you ask: no I’m not a Green… or a blue, black, purple or gray either. And I’m certainly not a pink. But you’ll see what I mean….

From the Journal of Laurilu Hagula, 2nd Engineer,

United Earth grav-drive vessel Starspike Explorer

out of Darkside Luna, Earthdate 2nd January, 2403.

Ophiuchus VIII Equivalents, Earth standard:

Diameter……………0.875 approx.

Day……………0.875 approx.

Mass……………0.889 approx.

Atmos.……………Breathable.

Life……………Varied, non-sentient.

“I have always had problems with this ‘non-sentient’ thing. According to my antique dictionary, which was published in the last decade of the 20th Century, the adjectival sentient means: ‘conscious, capable of sensation; aware, or responsive to stimulus. While paradoxically (or so it seems to me), as a noun it bears the description, ‘sentience, that which is sentient; as a sentient being or mind’—my italics. A contradiction in terms, it seems—or perhaps a contradictionary? I mean, does a plant have a mind? As a vegetarian, that concerns me.

“Ophiuchus VIII is not the first world on which I have come up against this paradox. But then, neither is it unknown on the home world, planet Earth. Is a squirting cucumber sentient? Is a scallop? Is that shrub (I can’t remember its name, but then I’m no botanist) whose myriad leaves on all the neighboring bushes close up in apparent distress if just one leaf feels the artificial heat of a struck match?

“The first (my dictionary says it’s a cucurbitaceous plant, native of Earth’s Mediterranean regions) forcefully ejects ripe seed pods when it ‘senses’ footfalls or ‘feels’ an animal brushing against it. Well, it’s certainly not ‘aware’—but ‘responsive to stimulus?’ As for the scallop: it is, after all, only a bivalve, having a shell in two parts. But it also has rudimentary eyes, a good many, and avoids oceanic predators by clapping its valves and ‘swimming’ away from them. And we (human beings, that is) have been eating them for untold thousands of years.

“So then, these things are patently mindless—they have no appreciable brains; and, in the botanical examples as specified above, none whatsoever—but they do respond to stimuli. This is my problem, and confronted by Ophiuchus’s javelin-hurling tree ferns, I thank goodness I am not the ship’s exobioecologist!

“One other thing about the tree ferns: they sing, and when ‘hurt’ they wail. I have heard their wailing and it is painful; or perhaps pain-filled? In future I shall follow the example of my Number One: leave the forest well alone and stick to tending my engines….”

RESTRICTED! RESTRICTED! RESTRICTED!

Non-electronic. By hand only!

ANOMALY 13: Preliminary Report.

By: Helmut W. Silberstein Jr.

Comdr United Earth Station IV.

Dated: 5th Aug. 2407.

To: Security List “A” only.

Non-electronic. By hand only!

Retrospective:

Of the 12 previous so-called “anomalies” recorded since United Earth Station One was commissioned in 2297, one was a disintegrating comet whose fragments fell into the sun; three were NEOs (Near Earth Objects) of which only one came inside Luna’s orbit; six were “drifting scrap iron”—debris left over from the various “space races” prior to planetary reconciliation and harmonization—since dismantled, assisted into decaying orbits, and allowed to burn up in atmosphere; one was a quarter million tons of rock and ice on a collision course with Earth, atomized by massive nuclear bombardment from Titan Base; and No. 12 was detected, observed and recorded by a robotic early warning buoy for a period of six days Earth standard in an apparently stable orbit around Venus. It then removed or disappeared…this was some three years and four months ago.

In every respect this penultimate anomaly—No. 12, which was more properly an anomaly in the truest meaning of the word, not merely a means of reporting (usually) NEOs—was identical to the subject of the following report, namely ANOMALY 13. This did not become a proven fact until midway through the following sequence. However, in any event, my course of action would have been no different as the exploration and investigation of space is the approved business of the United Earth Space Agency and I am a Commander of that organization….

REPORT

Sir, I have to report that:

At approx 2340 Hrs. 1st Aug. 2407 I was the Officer in Command of UES IV, in a stable orbit over the North Atlantic, when Anomaly 13 was detected, a) by onboard radar, and b) manually, telescopically, some seven kilometres in advance of the UES in a corresponding orbit.

At approx 2347 Hrs, when it was observed that the anomaly’s proximity had narrowed to six kilometers, I authorized a manned shuttle approach a) to determine the nature of the anomaly, and b) to remove any obstruction in the event it should prove to be “orbital junk,” or c) to take it aboard the shuttle and eventually the UES for atmospheric inspection and investigation if it should prove to be of obscure or unknown origin.

I then computer-encoded a message and in addition used the scrambler to inform Space Central Arizona of my actions so far, with which the Officer-on-Watch readily concurred.

Shuttle pilot James Goodwin with co-pilot Susannah Rafferty launched in Shuttle One at 2358 Hrs approx. Meanwhile Astrotech 1st Class Andre Galante had got the computers back on line following a period of sporadic sunspot interference and completed a comparison with the aforementioned Venus-orbiting anomaly.

About 0004 Hrs, 2nd Aug., Goodwin reported on the nature of the extra-terrestrial vessel. It was:

1) Pyramidal with four triangular sides, any of which could be said to be the base. Measured from the base or bases to apex or apexes, the vessel was some eight feet in length.

2) It was made of a dull silvery metal—possibly silver or nickel-silver, or a similar alloy.

3) It showed no sign of damage or long-time exposure to the void, and had gathered no dust despite that it possessed a weak magnetic field.

4) It had triangular “windows” of a material which at first appeared transparent, possibly reinforced glass or crystal, set centrally in each facet. The windows reflected moon, starlight, and the shuttle’s inspection beams dazzlingly.

6) One of these windows was located in what could well have been a triangular hinged hatch.

I then relayed this information on scrambled to Space Central, along with live-action footage from Shuttle One. The Officer-on-Watch double-checked with all relevant agencies that the vessel was not a) one of theirs, and b) that it was not a previously uncharted weapon left over from the 20th Century’s space race. Acting on instructions from Space Central, I then authorized EVA from Shuttle One, and at approx 0023 Hrs pilot Goodwin and co-pilot Rafferty exited their shuttle to initiate a closer examination of the (probably) alien vessel.

Why both of them? Because this being, in all likelihood, an historic occasion—the first proof of ET intelligence, namely contact with an alien artifice or vessel of a spacefaring species—one hundred per cent corroboration of all activity would be required, including pictures. Using extreme caution, Goodwin would approach the vessel and attempt to look in through one of its windows, while Rafferty photographed and performed a commentary on his activities. Both of them were tethered to and life-supported by Shuttle One, of course. And I had already launched Shuttle Two for backup.

As to what next happened: we have photographic footage from the automatic camera on Shuttle One; also the statements of the crew of Shuttle Two, who were fast approaching point rendezvous when the incident occurred. In addition, we have a recording of Rafferty’s commentary—or more properly her conversation with Goodwin—up to the point of termination.

As a reminder I append a transcript of the last few seconds of that conversation, as follows:

TRANSCRIPT

Rafferty: “Jim, what’s the mass of that thing, you reckon?”

Goodwin: “That’s hard to say, Sue. It looks kind of flimsy, though. I’ll have a better idea of how solid it is after grabbing hold of it, which I must if I’m going to take a look in one of those windows.”

Rafferty: “Okay, as long as it doesn’t set you spinning. Go easy, won’t you, Jim?”

Goodwin: “It isn’t tumbling fast enough to trouble me much, and in any case I think I can take a couple revolutions without throwing up—and my jetpack is working just fine. Sue, are you worried about me or something?”

Rafferty, laughing: “No, not really. It’s just that I think you’re dizzy enough already!”

Goodwin, laughing: “Okay, stand off and get some good shots of this. I’m going to grab the next apex as it swings on by me. A case of one small touch for man, one fantastic grope for mankind! Here goes, and…Whoah!”

Rafferty, anxiously: “Jim, what’s wrong?”

Goodwin: “Wrong? Oh, nothing. Just that this thing seems to be weightless, is all. Might as well be a paper bag! Brought it to a halt just like that! Now I’m taking hold of the raised rim on the hatch, if that’s what it is, and—”

Rafferty: “Jim?”

Goodwin: “I’m, uh, trying to look in through the window. It looks like glass or maybe crystal—it looks transparent, too—but isn’t. Maybe it’s frosted up. The glitter is blinding. Like a mess of diamonds. Can you come in a little closer? If we both use our torches together…”

Rafferty: “Here I am. Move over a bit.”

Goodwin, chuckling: “How come we’ve never got this close in atmosphere, like on board the UES?”

Rafferty: “‘Cos it’s against regulations, that’s why. Ready with your torch?”

Goodwin: “Okay. Lights, action, cameraaggghhhh!”

END OF TRANSCRIPT

Less than six hundred metres away from rendezvous at that time, (0030 Hrs), the copilot of Shuttle Two recorded what he could see of the contact between his colleagues and the alien vessel. Also, the camera on Shuttle One was continuing to function, and thus both observed and corroborated the facts of the matter. As Goodwin and Rafferty shone their torches in through the window, either a) the beams were reflected blindingly, or b) the vessel itself emitted an intense and all-encompassing light. This took the form of a single dazzling “flash,” as opposed to continuous illumination, and when the light returned to normal—which it did immediately—Goodwin, Rafferty, and the alien vessel were no longer there. Together with so-called “Anomaly 13,” the crew of Shuttle One had disappeared; their life support tethers were subsequently found to have been sheared through as by an incredibly sharp cutting instrument that left no marks or indication of forceful laceration.

There was no debris, neither human nor artificial, as would be expected in the aftermath of a massive explosion; no detectable radiation; nothing to indicate the whereabouts of the vanished persons and artifice or explain their disappearance….

Sir, I have stated as best possible the terrible facts of the matter. Now, as the Commander of United Earth Station IV—in the sure knowledge that without their shuttle’s life support systems Goodwin and Rafferty would have something less than two hours to live, and the fact that they have been listed “missing in the performance of their duties” for over seventy-five hours now—I take this early opportunity to request a) that Shuttle One be adorned with a commemorative plaque recording the names and relevant details of its crew and their demise, and b) that the shuttle itself be enabled to remain permanently in orbit as a most suitable mausoleum and monument to these most honorable astronauts.

And I remain, sir—

—Your Most Obedient Servant,

Helmut W. Silberstein Jr.

Comdr UES IV.

5th Aug 2407.

III

From the Notebook of Michael Gilchrist,

exobioecologist aboard United Earth grav-drive vessel

Starspike Explorer, Earthdate 4th January, 2403.

“Really must have words with the Captain, keep this bloody woman off my back! A vegetarian, vegan or whatever? God, but if she keeps this up she’ll be living on hay and water and nothing else! Why hay? Because on an untamed, unsettled planet where as yet there are no herbicides, combined harvesters or lawnmowers, namely Ophiuchus VIII, hay is grass that has died naturally and dried out in the sunlight, in other words, we ‘cruel exobioecological types’ can’t be accused of torturing it first! And come to think of it, I have probably just prescribed the perfect diet for the silly cow! And as for water—so-called ‘pure’ water—I’m tempted to point out to her that every time she takes a sip she’s sending countless innocent microscopic organisms to their soupy graves in her own acid-bath digestive system!

“She has a problem, she says, with the wailing. Well I have a problem every time the Starspike Explorer wobbles into or out of grav-drive. I have a problem trying to understand how we can hook up on ripples in sub-space that have their source in stars that went bang billions of years ago. I’ve got neither the math nor the right kind of mind for it, which is why I keep the hell out of the engine-room: because that place frightens me just as much and probably more than the Ophiuchus foliage—namely the tree ferns—frightens her.

“It’s the tree ferns, yes….

“Well, actually, they don’t frighten her…it’s just that she’s sorry for them! But all of Ophiuchus’s greenery is weird. I keep trying to tell her it’s a young world, and Nature hasn’t quite sorted it out yet. We have plants on Earth that look like animals, and animals that look like plants; that’s just evolution, is all. And it’s the same here, except things are evolving somewhat differently. Here it turns out the flora and fauna are just a tad more like each other. But sentient? Hell no! No such thing. And man cannot live by bread alone, especially when he’s eighty light-years from a wheat field!

“Ophiuchus VIII:

“There’s a little less oxygen in the air: 20.2 percent, and a little less nitrogen: 77 percent; with swamp methane, carbon dioxide, argon, neon and the usual suspects soaking up another 2.65 percent, along with a smidgeon of krypton, zenon, and like that. And yes, I know I’m far too casual, too familiar with all of this stuff, but I’m never contemptuous of it; not like Laurilu Nagula when she takes it out on an inoffensive gravimonitor with a twelve-inch monkey-wrench in mid-drive!

“Anyway, putting her out of mind if not her misery, which I might yet—

“—Ophiuchus VIII:

“It took us eighteen months to get here and when we’re done it will take us another eighteen months to get back. But that’s no big deal really, not when you come to consider it. If I remember my history correctly, didn’t it take Christopher Columbus just as long to get to America and back to Spain? He called his discovery the New World but it was never a new planet—and he certainly didn’t have to sail across eighty light-years of deep space in order to discover it! But there I go again….

“My problem: I’m too easily distracted. I have a butterfly mind, or so they tell me. It flits hither and thither. Thither: a damn silly word. Say it often enough, quickly enough, it soon becomes meaningless. Thither, thither, thither.

“See what I mean? So where was I? Ah, yes:

“Since the discovery of the gravity drive ninety years ago humanity has been spreading out—but actually we’re spreading inwards, sideways, and up and down—throughout the Milky Way galaxy; more properly throughout our spiraling arm of the galaxy. But since the Milky Way is a hundred thousand light-years across, even with the propulsive energies of dead stars giving us a push we’ve a long, long way to go yet.

“So why are we here—I mean out here, on Ophiuchus VIII?

“Well, while stars like Sol are fairly common, planets like the Earth are few and far between. And the Earth is ecologically moribund, overpopulated, no longer able to supply its people with fossil-fueled energy or even sufficient good, clean food. In a nutshell and while yet there are such things as nuts, it’s way past time we moved house. Back on Earth the population can, must, will be controlled, and maybe in another hundred years there will be room to move and breathe again. But we cannot let mankind stagnate, go into decline, die; and out here, if we can find new planets to tame, settle, populate, then the human race can blossom all over again, explode throughout space, and eventually, even if it takes millennia, become literally universal.

“Personally I’m of the belief that this was Old Ma Nature’s plan in the first place. I see the Earth as a nest and humanity as the nestlings. That’s us, what we’ve been: fledglings bumping about in our nest. And Ma Nature, the mother bird, has been trying to feed us as fast as our greedy little beaks could snap up the food she’s regurgitated. But the bigger and the stronger we got the more we bumped around, until we just about shook the nest to pieces. We shook it, shit in it and fouled it up generally, until it could no longer support us. And the mother bird, Ma Nature, finally said, “Okay you lot, it’s time to fly. I’ve been a good mother but now you must fly away and build your own nests, your own worlds.” And that’s what we’re doing.

“But as for what I said about the home world—how maybe in a hundred more years it will be viable again—who do I think I’m kidding? The fact is it’s done, burned out, finished…I was never so happy to get the hell out of it! And that’s why I became an exobioecologist; because the way I see it there’s no future in Earth ecology.

“Okay, I realize that if I was an ecologist back on planet Earth I’d probably be burned at the stake for what I just wrote. But that’s because hope springs eternal and they’re all hanging on in there, hoping they can turn things around. Some hope! But me: I’m an exobioecologist, out here where Old Ma Nature intended me—intends us, humanity—to be, building our new nests on new worlds….

“So then…why am I writing all this stuff when I should be finishing my feasibility study and working on a report? Answer: because a silly vegetarian bitch who worries about wailing tree ferns has irritated the hell out of me, that’s why! God, I should never have gotten into conversation with her! She understands as much about alien life-forms as I do about her gravity drive engines—nothing!

“But on the other hand…well, some of the things Laurilu has said have sort of stuck in my mind. And once again if I was a Green—an ecologist on Earth—I would probably agree with certain of her arguments. Hell no, I know I’d agree with them—it’s just that they’re a few hundreds of years too late, that’s all!

“Okay, okay, let’s put her out of mind, but definitely, and try to work up some notes toward my feasibility report….

RESTRICTED! RESTRICTED! RESTRICTED!

CLASSIFICATION: EXTREMELY URGENT!

ANOMALY 13: Secondary Report.

By: Helmut W. Silberstein Jr,

Comdr United Earth Station IV.

Dated: 12th Aug. 2407,

Time: 1032 Hrs.

To: Security List “A” only.

Retrospective:

Sirs, see my preliminary report, dated 5th Aug. 2407, in particular my request in re honoring the crew of Shuttle One out of UES IV.

While this was under consideration by Higher Command, I was ordered to recover Shuttle One into a secured bay aboard UES IV where a series of exhaustive tests were to be carried out by an investigative team out of Space Central Arizona. The investigative team would launch today at 1400 Hrs and rendezvous with UES IV at 1540 Hrs.

In the light of further developments—made specific in the report which follows—I now respectfully request that the investigation be held in abeyance and that a medical team replace the investigators. UES IV does have its own doctors, of course, but we lack a) a forensic pathologist, and b) a qualified psychoanalyst….

REPORT

Sirs, I have to report that:

About one hour ago, at approx 0930 Hrs, the automatic alarm in Shuttle Bay Five—the secured bay where Shuttle One is held in isolation awaiting inspection and investigation—was activated by a then unknown agency.

Despite that the UES’s sensors had failed to indicate any impact, and at first suspecting a hull breach, probably of meteoric origin, in accordance with Station SOPs I ordered a team to suit-up in order to enter the bay and investigate the occurrence. However, when it was observed that the computers had not registered any abnormal loss of atmosphere, I belayed the suit-up order and instead sent in the UES’s Rapid Reaction Team as a precautionary measure. All of this in just a few brief minutes.

Then, even as the seals on Bay Five’s hatch were removed, a garbled communication in the form of an SOS—a cry for help on a space-suit’s frequency—was received from within the bay; in fact from the vicinity of isolated Shuttle One. Patched through to me by the Station’s Radio Op, the voice was unmistakably Jim Goodwin’s. We do have a recording; suffice it to say that shuttle pilot Goodwin’s message was barely coherent and punctuated by much foul language. Also, he sounded utterly exhausted.

Within Bay Five and close to Shuttle One, both Goodwin and copilot Susannah Rafferty were discovered naked and in a mutilated condition. Their pressure suits lay nearby; pilot Goodwin had used his to make the call for help. Rafferty was dead, in a state of rigor mortis, and Goodwin was unshaven and hysterical. Moreover, the mutilations that the pair have suffered, of which Rafferty would appear to be the principal victim, are grotesque in the extreme. On that subject I cannot find words to properly express my feelings; the visuals that accompany this report may explain my reticence in this respect, also the urgency of medical/psychological assistance.

Sirs, I can offer no reasoned explanation for anything that has occurred here, other than to stake my reputation as a Commander of the Space Agency on this being the work of inimical ET intelligences.

And at 1047 Hrs, 12th Aug. 2407, I remain—

—Your Most Obedient Servant,

H. W. Silberstein Jr.

Comdr UES IV.

Journal of Laurilu Nagula,

2nd Engineer, United Earth grav-drive vessel

Starspike Explorer. Earthdate: 5th Jan. 2403.

“Hateful though I find it, still I couldn’t resist it. So today I went out again to watch them—if only for a minute or two—at their work. ‘Them’: Mike Gilchrist and his crew. Exobioecologist Gilchrist, who styles himself ‘a 25th Century Darwin, but far more important than the original.’ His reasoning: Gilchrist is not so much concerned (he says) with cataloging a multitude of species as with preserving one in particular—mankind! Egotistical bugger! But…I suppose in a way he’s right. That is why we’re here.

“Anyway, decked out in boots and protective clothing I went out into the forest to where the tree ferns flourish. From some two hundred yards away I could hear them beginning to wail, and I knew that Gilchrist and his gang of—but no, I shouldn’t say it, shouldn’t call them butchers; there, I’ve said it anyway—knew that they were stripping a tree.

“The wailing…makes my flesh creep. Mournful? It’s quite literally a dirge! Yet despite that I’m caused to cringe at the sound I’m reminded of the squirting cucumbers and of that shrub back on Earth with the heat-sensitive leaves. They are not—I mean definitely not—sentient. So why should I feel so passionately for the tree ferns? Or could it possibly be that I’m more truly ecologically-minded than Gilchrist?

“Damn! But there I go again, torn two ways. We’re here, and we must eat. Not us especially, not the thirteen-member crew of Starspike Explorer, but those who will follow us to settle Ophiuchus VIII, which of the several worlds we and our four sister ships have visited so far is by far the most eminently suitable for colonization. So says Michael Gilchrist, and of course he’s right. No terraforming necessary, or very little, and plenty of fresh water. At 30.9 ft per sec², the equatorial gravity is just a touch less than Earth standard, and we have an acceptable atmosphere. Also—and most importantly—the soil will support a good many terrestrial trees, cereals, and other food crops; which in turn will support plenty of animal species. As a result, the barest minimum of terraforming that’s required will be achieved ‘naturally.’ And yet more importantly—far more importantly—there already exists an ample supply of food here….

“…Which brings us back to the tree ferns.

“Gilchrist was sitting on a rock well back from the action, outside the range of the javelins. Actually, they are more like darts or small arrows; it was me who dubbed them javelins after the definition from my antique dictionary: ‘javelin, a throwing spear.’ And for a fact the tree ferns do throw them. I was just in time to witness that for myself when one of Gilchrist’s crew fell victim to the fact. He was standing arms akimbo within the radius of fire, from which location he watched three colleagues at work, when suddenly he yelped, jumped six inches in the air, and fell on his backside clutching his right knee. And:

“‘Shit!’ the squat, bearded Gilchrist grumbled. ‘See that? Took a javelin in the knee. That’s another man in the sick bay, knee swollen up like a puffball for at least a week, maybe ten days. Three down and three to go. Shit!’

“I was surprised because Gilchrist’s man was wearing protective clothing—his ‘armor’—no less than me and Gilchrist. But as his man came staggering and cursing, the exobioecologist explained: ‘The barbs on the tips of these things are flexible, a sort of cartilage. Instead of bouncing off this light-weight armor they slither along it into the first available joint.’

“‘A typical example of non-sentience?’ I lifted an eyebrow at him. I knew that I wasn’t only wrong but that I also exacerbated matters by enjoying all of this, of course. Indeed, that was the point of my remark: it pleased me to irritate him.

“‘A simple response to stimuli!’ He snapped. ‘Also, it’s a typical example of exoevolution. These little armadillo things that chew on the tree ferns—these rat-sized woodlice—they are armor-plated too. Now answer me this: why do blackberries have thorns, eh?’

“‘Earth brambles?’ I shrugged. ‘To keep the birds off?’

“He shook his head. ‘Birds eat the fruit, carry the seeds, shit them out miles away so propagating the plant. No, in point of fact the bramble favors birds like flowers favor bees. The thorns are to ward animals off—including men—and keep them from trampling the vines. Much like your Mediterranean, squirting bloody cucumbers.’

“‘So what do I know?’ I said. ‘You’re the ship’s exobioecologist!’

“‘Would be,’ he said, ‘if people would stop interfering and bloody well let me get on with it!’

“Pale behind his visor and limping quite badly, Gilchrist’s wounded man reached us. ‘Goddamn thing shot me!’ he said unnecessarily, staring at his leg where five or six inches of tufted javelin protruded from his armor’s knee joint.

“‘This may hurt a little,’ Gilchrist told him, and without pause stooped to yank it out. The barb was stained red but the javelin was already wilting, drooping like a piece of wet spaghetti. The injured man shuddered and went paler still.

“‘Go on back to the ship,’ Gilchrist went on. ‘Mildly poisonous, but Doc will give you a shot and you’ll be okay. Can you make it on your own? Good.’ And off the man staggered.

“Meanwhile one of his colleagues in the clump had commenced attacking the offending tree fern—with a flamethrower, of all things!

“‘What on earth are you doing?’ I screamed at them, as the tree fern began wailing and burst into flames.

“‘Nothing, not on Earth,’ Gilchrist answered for them.

“I might have rushed forward but the air was suddenly full of javelins. ‘I mean, it’s not as if you can punish the thing!’ I yelled at them, stamping my foot. ‘It’s only a plant!’ So why was I so inflamed?

“‘Natural reaction,’ Gilchrist told me, chewing his lip and looking just a little guilty. And for a moment I thought he was talking about my reaction. But no, he wasn’t. ‘Stinging nettles in your garden,’ he went on, ‘you cut ’em down. Poison-ivy, you burn it out. Hurt, you take revenge.’ And he shrugged. ‘Natural reaction.’

“By now the whole clump was wailing; maybe three dozen tree ferns, lashing the air with their fronds, releasing myriad javelins, sending a horde of squealing woodlice (which in fact are six-legged mammals that on the run look like nothing so much as chitin-plated meerkats, except they are herbivores and Ophiuchus VIII’s dominant life-form) tumbling for their lives.

“But I had seen more than enough. Turning away, I caught up with Gilchrist’s injured man and helped him back to the ship. I couldn’t help hoping, though, that his shots were going to hurt like hell….”

SESSION SEVEN.

Subject: James Goodwin,

former crew member United Earth Station IV.

Object: following eight weeks of (apparently) successful psychotherapy applied in order to eliminate a severe psychological blockage, to interview shuttle pilot Goodwin in relation to his experiences following abduction by unknown inimical extraterrestrial intelligences.

Interrogating Officer:

Dr. Gardner L. Spatzer,

Space Central, Arizona.

12th Oct. 2407.

RECORDED INTERVIEW

Dr. S: “Good morning, Jim!”

Goodwin, gloomily: “Yeah, sure.”

Dr. S: “How are you feeling?”

Goodwin, nervous and agitated: “How do you suppose I’m feeling, Doc? Okay, I’ll tell you—I feel like shit! Now maybe you can tell me something: do you intend to stick any more of those needles in me?”

Dr. S: “No, that shouldn’t any longer be necessary—well, depending on your self-control. But if you should become excessively aggressive again…it was for your own good, Jim.”

Goodwin, warily: “Okay, but be honest about it: do you have any needles on you, like right now?”

Dr. S, with a partly suppressed chuckle: “None whatsoever.”

Goodwin: “Good! So I won’t need to fight you off again….”

Dr. S: “Do you feel like talking now, answering some rather important questions?”

Goodwin: “You mean, am I able to talk about it? To tell you what happened to us? To tell the truth, I don’t know…maybe. Do I want to talk about it? Hell no! But I might if you go easy on me. See, it’s like the needles. Why do I fight them? Because if someone had stuck in your veins what they stuck in mine—in ours, mine and Susannah’s—then you’d fight them the same as I do. You say I had a…a what? ‘An extreme reaction?’ Doc, the needles are just a very small part of it. But right now, if you were to show me a pin, a tack, or a nail—almost any-fucking-thing with a sharp point—then I can assure you you’d get the same reaction! I mean, Jesus, it’s…it’s…it’s—”

Dr. S: “It’s okay, Jim! Perfectly okay that you should feel upset. Perfectly natural. But do try to calm yourself down, and believe me when I tell you I understand.”

Goodwin: “No, you don’t. But okay, I’m calm. Perfectly calm now. So go right ahead, ask your questions. Only first I’d like you to answer one more of mine.”

Dr. S: “I will if I can, certainly.”

Goodwin: “I dunno, maybe you’re not qualified. I mean, sure you’re a mind doctor, but what I want to know is—I mean, it’s not of the mind, at least I don’t think so. It’s sort of—”

Dr. S: “What, some physical thing? Relating to your current infirmity, perhaps?”

Goodwin: “That’s right. It’s like…I mean…I’ve heard it said that if you lose something…or things, like that—”

Dr. S: “—that you can still feel them?”

Goodwin: “Yeah.”

Dr. S: “And can you?”

Goodwin: “No. Just the hurt, is all….”

Dr. S: “Well the hurting should stop—eventually. It’s not like the mind, Jim. You will heal in time—which isn’t to say that your mind won’t, except that once again it will take time. Me, I only wish we had time or that we knew how long we’ve got. As for your physical pain: there are pain-killers, drugs, if it continues to trouble you. But don’t let’s forget the prosthetic they’re working on; that will give you mobility and should help to take your mind off…things. You see, it’s not like you’re going to be helpless or confined or anything—not for too much longer, anyway.”

Goodwin: “But as you just pointed out, Doc, it’s not just a physical thing, not just physical pain. I mean, I remember now. When I relax and stop fighting it, I remember. You caused me to remember. And you know something? I should hate you for that. I should really fucking hate it that you’ve made me remember! You and your needles, and your questions, and all your fucking psychobabble crap, and—”

Dr. S: “Jim! Jim. you have to cut that out! We’re past that now. You have to stop thinking for yourself, start thinking for your world. What you’ve got locked up in your head, we need it, Jim! We need you to tell us about it. You’re an astronaut, Jim, one hell of a tough guy in a hell of a tough job. Which is why we know you can do this.”

Goodwin: “Get it right. I was an astronaut, past tense.”

Dr. S: “Well, I’m not going to lie to you; it must be obvious that we can’t give you that back. But it’s possible there’s something almost as satisfying; perhaps something that will put everything else—most of everything else—right for you.”

Goodwin: “Oh really? Like, you really think there is such a thing? Like what?”

Dr. S: “Like revenge! Why take it out on yourself, or on me and the others who are trying to help you, when you can take it out on them, the ones who did this to you?”

Goodwin, his voice suddenly shuddery, hoarse: “Them…. God, but you’ve never seen them! So cold, impersonal, inhuman, insensitive. We were—I don’t know—nothing more than specimens, that’s all. Bodies for biological or medical examination, dissection…except we were alive! You want me to remember? Oh, I remember all right! I only wish to God you would let me forget! I want to forget! But I can’t, because every time I talk to you it’s just like now. You make me…you make me…you make me fucking…rememmmmm….”

At which point Goodwin, traumatized, slipped back into what has become his safe haven, a comatose, psychoneurotic condition typified by severely restricted mental activity: a total neural shutdown. I am reasonably sure now that some unknown psychoactive agent has been introduced into Goodwin’s system to prevent him from speaking about his ordeal; perhaps they didn’t intend that he should talk about it. Nevertheless, I am encouraged to believe that we’re making some progress, and I’m sure that the anticipated early delivery of Goodwin’s prosthetic will accelerate the process.

Dr. Gardner L. Spatzer.

VII

From the Notebook of Michael Gilchrist,

exobioecologist aboard United Earth grav-drive vessel

Starspike Explorer, Earthdate 7th January, 2403.

“Knocked on the door of Laurilu’s bunk last night…. Don’t know why. Or maybe I do: wanted to apologize for what must have seemed my callous attitude out in the forest the other day. The fact is I’m not quite the unfeeling bastard she thinks I am.

“Anyway, and amazingly, she let me in! I thought maybe because she wanted to have it out with me—and that’s out with me, by the way, not off with me!—which she did, and so did I, though to tell the truth neither one of us knew where to start.

“She had just opened a can of strawberry flavored juice—colored water, of course, with some added fizz—and asked me if I would like a drink. I accepted; we drank. And seeing a way to get through to her, I told her that only the fizz was real.

“At first she didn’t know what I meant, then said, ‘Oh, you mean the strawberries?’

“‘Ain’t no sech thang,’ I said, ‘not anymore. This is artificial flavoring, chemicals, that’s all. Since the soft-fruit disease—what, seven years ago?—there aren’t any soft fruit; well, except for the blackberries. They’ve been around forever; we never much tampered with them, and they’re tough. But as for the rest of the soft fruit…you can forget it. It’s a bug, a killer virus in the soil. But no way to kill it without killing the soil, which is three-quarters dead anyway.’

“‘What?’ she said, sitting up straighter and looking really good in her ship’s uniform. ‘I didn’t know it was that bad.’

“‘Why would you?’ I said. “You’re the 2nd Engineer, not the expedition’s ecologist, or bioecologist, or exobioecologist.’

“‘Touché,’ she said, not a little ruefully. ‘But…you’re saying all the soft fruits—all the berries, with the exception of brambles—saying they’re gone forever? It’s like, where have I been? I mean, I thought I was well up on all that stuff. How come I missed that? I really didn’t know about it!’

“‘People don’t generally,’ I told her. ‘What, you think the World Health people, Calorie Control Council and food-rationing agencies—all the various Ministries of Agriculture, Farming, Fisheries, Hydroponics—you think they’re likely to advertise the fact that the Earth is not-so-slowly dying, the air full of shit, the seas and lakes polluted, the ground poisoned? I think not. That is why we’re out here, Laurilu. Er, if you don’t mind me calling you that?’

“‘No, that’s okay,’ she told me, ‘er, Mike?’ And then continued: ‘But that’s the Earth you were talking about, while this is Ophiuchus VIII. Which—’

“‘—which will soon be Earth II,’ I cut her off.

“‘Where we’ll start—have started—the whole rotten process all over again?’ She wasn’t any longer sounding off…she just seemed a little sad, or a lot sad, as she slowly shook her head and continued, ‘The destruction of a world, beginning with its inhabitants.’

“‘You mean the tree ferns? They’re just lettuces, cabbages, kale, Laurilu.’

“‘But they wail when they’re hurt!’

“‘It’s the wind in their fronds when they start in whipping them about, is all.’

“‘And they hurl their javelins.’

“‘Which is a result of them whipping their fronds! Because they evolved along with those meerrats or whatever you want to call them. But you know, if they could up roots and walk about, well! I wouldn’t be any too happy about it either. Hell, I’m not especially happy about it anyway! But they’re just plants—you even said so yourself.’

“Laurilu started to shake her head, then stopped and said, ‘Yes I did. But still it seems to me that they protect themselves, even deliberately.’

“‘The cactus has its spines,’ I told her. ‘What’s more, and as well as deadly stinging tentacles, the Portuguese man-o’-war navigates the ocean’s currents under sail. But not one of these species is equipped to think or do anything deliberately, Laurilu. They do things automatically, yes. But deliberately, no.’

“While I could see that I had her half-convinced, still she said, ‘So what do we get out of a full-grown tree fern? I mean, pound for pound, dollar for dollar, are they worth it?’

“‘Oh, yes!’ On that I was positive. ‘A full-grown tree? We get maybe nine gallons of sap. Add a little sweetener—it’s as good as milk. Whip it, it’s cream. Curdle it, it’s cheese. Then there’s the tender roots, of which there’s almost as much below ground as above; maybe half a ton. And they’re as good as potatoes. As for the fronds: they break down into fiber for textiles. The bark is thick but pliable: cork. And the wood…well it’s wood, for burning. To settlers here the tree ferns will be like coconut-palms to the South-Sea islanders—when there were coconuts and South-Sea islands, that is.’

“‘And when they’ve gone?’ she said, staring at me, so that for the first time I noticed how beautiful her eyes are. ‘After we’ve used them all up? What then?’

“‘We won’t use them all up. For every one we cut down we’ll plant another. The only ground we clear will be for farming, to support us and whichever Earth livestock can thrive here. We’ll put home-world fish into the lakes and oceans, put grass out on the creeper plains…we’ll even have soft fruit again.’

“‘Oh? How?’ she said. I thought you said they were gone for good—or for bad.’

“I shook my head. ‘No, I didn’t say that. You said that. On Earth… they’re probably gone for good, yes. We fooled around with them genetically and weakened them. We may even have introduced that virus into the soil, albeit accidentally. The breeds—all the exotics—they were the first to suffer. But we have seeds, shoots, cuttings, all carefully preserved or in hibernation, just biding their time, waiting to be planted in a little rich, living soil under some generous G-type sunlight.’

“She sighed her relief and said, ‘Which means that when the first settlers get here—’

“‘Which is only a few short years away, once we get back to Earth and I deliver my feasibility report.’

“‘—that at least for a little while, and probably quite a while, they’ll have to be vegetarians? Can I at least have that much to look forward to?’

“‘Ah—not so.’ Trying not to take too much pleasure in it, I shook my head. ‘See, it’s the general rule that if something eats something we eat, we can usually eat the first something. There are exceptions, of course, but….’

“Laurilu frowned and said, ‘Come again?’

“And by way of explaining, I said: ‘Those little, er, armadillo guys?’

“Her jaw fell open. ‘Those little…but they’re animals!’

“‘That’s right—and very nutritious, too. And what do you think cows, rabbits, goats, sheep and pigs are, Laurilu? And as for chickens…well, we’ll have them all here, eventually.’

“Clenching her fists, she almost stood up. ‘What do I think they are?” she said. ‘I think they’re sentient! Oh they may not think too good, but they do respond to stimuli…they do have brains, feelings—’

“‘—And souls?’ I got it in quick. ‘Are you religious?’

“‘What?’ she said, caught a little off guard. ‘Religious? I think so. My god may not be your god, but I don’t believe everything is just accidental.’

“‘Well me neither,’ I said. ‘And the Good Book tells us Man shall have dominion over all…We’re that far above the other animals, that’s all. We’re almost as far above the home world’s fauna as it is above the flora! So of course we eat it. Fish or fowl or four-legged beast, if it isn’t poisonous we eat it! But we have to find that out first…which is what me and my team have been doing here on Ophiuchus VIII.’

“‘But—’

“‘But there’s no but about it, Laurilu! Put it this way: do we just let humanity go to hell in a bucket along with the home world? No, of course not. It’s us or the lesser species, kid.

“Again she shook her head, sighed, and said, ‘Another world to ruin.’

“And I admit I nodded, sighed with her and said, ‘Yes, only now we can do it a whole lot faster….’ But I knew at once that I had made a mistake.

“Laurilu narrowed her eyes and said, ‘We’ll do what? How do you mean?’

“I shrugged, but not negligently, and answered, ‘We managed to finish off the Earth in about—oh, I don’t know—say four or five thousand years? But that was from our tribal beginnings to where we are now; from a time when the only fires were campfires to a time when we’ve sucked all of the black juice out of the ground and burned it in our cars, in heating our cities and powering our machines; from clean air and oceans to radioactive ruins and skies that leak dilute acid rains…. Are you with me so far?’

“‘Go on,” she said, but very quietly now.

“‘Ten years from now,’ I said, just as quietly, ‘they’ll be sinking oil wells here. Twenty, there’ll be towns, small cities. Twenty-five: airplanes and ocean-going liners, roads and tracks joining up the towns, motor cars on the roads and trains on the tracks. Another thousand years…well, by then we should have found Earth III, or IV, or even V. It’s evolution, Laurilu. Mankind is evolving, expanding throughout the universe.’

“‘And leaving precious little room for anything else,’ she said.

“‘But is there anything else?’ I asked her then. ‘We’re it, as far as I can see. Where sentience is concerned, we’re definitely it, Ma Nature’s clever kids, Laurilu. The universe is our playpen, our schoolyard, our many worlds—all the places we’re going to grow up in.’

“‘You’re saying that nature is so utterly uncaring, insensitive of the rest of her creations, that she’s given us a whole universe to sack? All those stars and planets out here—or out there—and they’re all for us? Only for us?’

“‘That’s how it appears,’ I replied. Then I asked her: ‘Did you ever hear of SETI?’

“‘SETI?’

“‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,’ I told her. ‘SETI operated for over two hundred years sending radio signals out to the stars. Now we can get there faster than the signals! But you know what? There wasn’t a single reply, not one. By now those signals have reached out over four hundred light-years in all directions, and no one out there gives a damn because there is no one out there. It’ll take us two thousand years to get to all the places those signals have already left behind, where as far as we know there’s nothing like us to compete with. So yes, it looks like it’s all ours, Laurilu. If there is a god, we are his—or her—main men.’

“‘Men and women.’ She corrected me, shivering a little.

“So I put my arm around her, and she drew close. ‘We’re all there is,’ I said. ‘So we must make the best of what we’ve been given. Even of each other.’

“She pulled away just a little. ‘But we haven’t, we aren’t, making the best of it. We’re making a mess of it at the expense of everything we touch! And yet something you said has given me hope.’

“I smiled and pulled her in again. ‘Now don’t you start going soft on me, Laurilu!’

“She drew away again, quite suddenly, which caused the zipper on her uniform blouse to unzip two or three inches. But she didn’t seem to notice. I noticed; after all this time away from Earth, well I was bound to. But just then it didn’t occur to me that she’d been the same time away. And: ‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t distract me!’ (Though I didn’t know I had.) ‘It’s what you were saying about the tree ferns: how the settlers can use every bit of them. See, it’s all the waste that I hate the most.’

“‘The waste?’

“She was up on her feet in a moment; one pace of those long legs took her to her bookshelf…there’s not too much room in a grav-ship’s bunks. And: ‘See,’ she said again, ‘when I got to know I was assigned to the Starspike Explorer’—she got down a book, one of her several antique volumes, and came and sat down again—‘I decided to take at least an interest in every aspect of the expedition, which included ecology: planet Earth’s ecology; or, as you might say, “when it had one.” So I picked up a couple of old books on the subject. And this is one of them.’

“‘Ah!’ I said, nodding however reluctantly.

“‘Even in those days there were people like me who deplored the waste,’ she went on. ‘And when you look at this you can see why. It’s perfectly horrible!’ Opening the book to a bookmarked page, she handed it to me. I knew at once what it was that Laurilu found so disturbing, and said:

“‘Buying this was probably a mistake. An aunt of mine moved into an old house and explored the attic. She found a five-hundred-year-old book on human diseases—the Compendium of Common Ailments & Household Cures, or some such. And from that time on she had every disease you can name! If they were in the book my aunt got them, one at a time and often, or so it seemed, by the half-dozen! It was all in the mind. And you know what, Laurilu? She’s still going strong at eighty-two! Still thinks she’s sick, too.’