Beyond Uranus

by Stewart Bruce & Nigel Moreland

  “No it chuffing isn’t,” I replied. By this time my head was spinning. Macro, Quantum, Hyper, String, uncertainty, blah de blah, it was all as clear as mud. I cannot tell you how relieved I was when Simon said it was time for him to leave.

  I must admit that when Simon spoke about the physics all I seemed to hear was; ‘Making the mass of a ship travel at the speed of light dippy do-dah fizzy energy. Macro Physics did I put some lager in the fridge? Hyper Travel I could murder a curry or should I sit on a pizza?’

  “Don’t forget that I will pick you up at nine in the morning so please be ready. If I were you I would also leave the lager out tonight. You will thank me for it tomorrow.”

  “OK, thanks Simon.” I led Simon to the door and opened it for him. He stepped out and said “Good luck with the next phase of your journey. Don’t worry too much about all the physics tonight. I’m sure it will be second nature to you after a while but to be honest most of it you won’t actually need to know, because it will be looked after by your computer.”

  “Thanks Simon. And Simon...”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry about Your Anus.”

  I closed the door and walked into the living room. Seven forty five in the evening, time for a lager or three.

  Chapter 2 - Preparing to Leave

  Be bebe bebedebeep, bebe bebedebeep bebe bebedebeep...

  8.00 am on a Saturday morning and the last thing I wanted to hear was my alarm clock pounding in my ears. I opened my left eye and tried to focus on the offending noise-maker. With a grunt I pushed the snooze button.

  Be bebe bebedebeep, bebe bebedebeep bebe bebedebeep...

  8.05 am on a Saturday morning and the last thing I wanted to hear was my alarm clock pounding in my ears. “I’ve got to get up and sorted.” Off went the alarm clock and I went down to the bathroom for a quick shower.

  I think I might have had one over the eight again last night and was feeling a bit worse for wear. I had decided that a little celebration was in order and spent the evening drinking lager and playing my favourite games online. I have a number of online cyber ‘friends’ who I’ve never actually met in real life. I regularly played against them because they were very good players and a bit of a challenge for me. It was nice to say goodbye before I left to go and teach English abroad to deprived third world children. One or two of my friends were happy because it meant they now had a chance at getting to the top of the leader board and a few were genuinely gutted because they enjoyed the competition.

  I got dressed and went down for a strong cup of coffee to wake me up properly. As I finished making it the phone rang. “Hello.”

  “Roy? Why haven’t you phoned me? Don’t you care? I could have fallen down the stairs and broken something. I could be slowly dying in the hallway waiting for you to phone and help.”

  “Mum, I only spoke to you the other night, and if you remember you were the one who was going to phone me back, besides you’re only fifty nine years old. You’re not a decrepit grandmother with a mobility problem.”

  “A grandmother, I should be so lucky. You’d think working in a school, being surrounded by beautiful young teachers you would have no problem getting a girlfriend, getting married and having a family.”

  “Mum you really have no idea about the staff at my school. I’ve told you before there isn’t a chance in hell of me dating anybody from school. Even after drinking heavily at the Christmas parties the beer goggles aren’t strong enough to make me fancy any of them.”

  “Your poor father, he always wanted grandchildren, God rest his soul.”

  “Thanks mum you always know how to try and cheer me up. I always like the emotional knife in the back about what dad would have wanted. Did you actually want something or can I go and slit my wrists now?”

  “You’re so rude Roy and it’s no wonder you cannot get a girlfriend.”

  “Yes mum. What did you want?”

  “I was only phoning to make sure you’ve remembered that I’m coming up at half term and did you want me to bring any of my pickles?”

  “Mum we had this conversation last Wednesday and yes I would love some of your pickles. Oh, hang on, there’s a bit of a problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve jacked my job in.”

  “Are you completely out of your mind?”

  “I got a better offer.”

  “What sort of offer?”

  “I’ve agreed to go and teach abroad. I’m going to go and teach English to children in deprived countries.”

  “That’s very noble of you, teaching abroad eh, and will that pay your mortgage?”

  “Yes mum it’s all sorted. I will do at least three years and the house will still be here for me when I get back.”

  “Three years!”

  “It’s OK mum I will still get back to visit and you can phone me at anytime as my phone calls are all going to be redirected to wherever I am.”

  “Are you sure about all this? It’s very sudden and you’ve never mentioned to me about wanting to go and teach abroad. Is it something to do with that Simon what’s his name from the other night?”

  There it was again, I’m certain there was an edge to her voice when she mentioned him. “Mum I’m one hundred percent certain that this is what I want to do.”

  “Well it’s a good thing that you’re doing and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Half term is only four weeks away so you must be starting soon. I could come to visit you earlier if you like, just to see you before you leave. When do you leave?”

  “Today.”

  “TODAY!” I had to hold the phone away from my ear it was so loud.

  “Mum, I’m really sorry but it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I promise I’ll make it up to you and when I get back in the country I’ll spend a week with you.”

  “It seems so lonely what with your father gone, and now you’re going away too.”

  “But it’s not like I live close to you anyway. Come on, it takes me almost six hours to drive to you. We only see each other twice a year and I’ll bet I get so see you more often now I’m working abroad because I’ll come and visit you every time I’m back. Don’t forget you can still phone me anytime because all the calls will be redirected.”

  “As long as you promise to visit every time you’re back.”

  “I promise mum.”

  “OK well, in a strange way I’m glad and I’m sure that you’ll enjoy the experience.”

  The rest of the phone call was small talk about my uncle and aunt and various cousins and what they were doing. We said our goodbyes and she hung up. I had a strange feeling that there was something in our conversation that remained unsaid, was it something about my father? Maybe I was just being oversensitive.

  I felt a bit guilty about my mother, and always more so after being on the phone to her. I think it’s because I lived so far away from her and she always talked about my father. They had met at university and had married after graduation. They were married quite a while before I arrived but as their jobs were well paid, it meant I could indulge my childhood in computers and consoles. My father was great fun when he was there but he had long contracts somewhere abroad which meant that he wasn’t always around. Apparently, my mother had worked with my father to begin with, but when she became pregnant she had returned to the UK. She eventually taught in a secondary school which she absolutely loved and that meant she could spend all the holidays with me at home and sometimes with my father if he had the time off to fly back.

  He’d died about fifteen years ago in a mysterious accident at work. Mum never liked to talk about it, but they had never conclusively proved that the body they found was my dad and I think that mum secretly hoped it wasn’t. In her grief she had retired early at the age of forty four, just as I was going off to university. She said that the loss of my father had left her broken hearted and that she couldn’t face going into school to teach anymore. The compensation from the accident also meant that financially she was secure.
I felt bad about being at university for the first year because I left my mother at home to deal with her loss. Having that phone call brought all the memories and feelings back because it felt like I was doing the same thing again. I tried to feel better by convincing myself that my uncle and aunt lived nearby and there were the cousins who were also very close geographically but I guess at the end of the day I was her son and her only child. Perhaps when the three years were up I should sell up my house and move closer as I didn’t actually have a job in the area anymore.

  The door bell rang and I went and answered the front door. Simon stood in front of me wearing identical clothing to what he had worn the previous two nights, ‘hmm big wardrobe, little choice.’ I thought.

  “Are you ready Mister McCormack?”

  “As I’ll ever be Mr Philberts.” I left the house closing the door behind me. At the end of the drive I looked back at my house. I’d enjoyed living in my little two bed roomed house and I had a lot of happy memories. It represented good times with pizza and lager but I knew it was time to say goodbye and move on, I waved at the house and whispered “goodbye.”

  “Is there somebody in the house?” asked Simon.

  “No I was saying goodbye to my house.”

  “To your house?”

  “Simon, you have no soul. You should listen to more jazz.”

  “What?”

  “Oh nothing, just something my dad used to say.”

  We both rounded the drive and I stood and stared at the sleek black car. I was surprised, I half expected to see something like a DeLorean but this was a large car that looked more like a sporty Rolls Royce. The body work was one continuous seamless sheet of material with no sign of joints even for the doors. Simon pressed his hand upon the side of the car and a back door opened. I entered and looked around the spaciously plush interior, inhaling notes of leather and sandalwood and I half expected a butler to pop out of the glove box and offer me cocktails. The seating was a rich brown leather material and the sides and roof were cream coloured. Simon got in the driver’s seat.

  “Is this real leather?” I foolishly enquired, looking for something to say.

  “We don’t kill animals for raw material or meat so we use synthetic alternatives. The entire interior is made from a polymer that mimics the texture and qualities of leather.”

  *

  The car whined its way through the country side with wheels down so it didn’t attract any attention. It eventually slipped into the underground car park of a black glass building. A dark suited figure with short white hair and very pale skin left the vehicle followed by a middle aged man in jeans and a tee shirt. We made our way to the elevator and Simon pressed the button for the top floor.

  On arrival at the top floor Simon fetched out a bag from a locker and handed it to me. He pointed to a door and said “Could you please use that room to change into these.” I opened the bag and looked inside. There was some sort of garment. I reached inside, pulled it out and held it up. It was a white one piece jumpsuit with red stripes down the edges of the arms and legs. It was the kind of thing that wouldn’t have looked out of place on most science fiction shows and films. I have no idea why jumpsuits were seen as futuristic on these shows but I did know that they looked bloody awful. Maybe it was because nobody in their right mind wore them that they were seen as futuristic or maybe people in the future would have no fashion sense, like if people in the sixties with their quiffs, cool suits and brothel-creeper shoes could have seen people in the seventies with their stacked-up platform shoes, flairs or those crushed velvet loon pants and massive collars with ties you could use as an emergency hammock.

  “Are you kidding me? Do you know how bad these look? Do you realise how many shows I’ve seen with actors wearing similar garments that are so badly fitting you can quite easily see every ripple of their meat and two veg? I really don’t want to wear a bit of clothing that looks as though I have my John Thomas hanging out.”

  “Hmm. This is not an uncommon reaction although you express it more colourfully than my other recruits. Try the garment on. I assure you that your penis will remain hidden. The material is not Earth made and is of the highest quality. You will find it warm when cold, cool when warm, self cleaning, self repairing and extremely comfortable. Trust me.”

  “OK, but any hint of my wedding tackle and it’s off.” I went through the door into a changing cubicle and put the garment on. The fit was fantastic as Simon had said. I checked myself out in the mirror and to my surprise it actually looked good. I was also pleasantly surprised that you couldn’t see my sausage wriggling. The shoes were ankle high and were made from a very similar material and so much more comfortable than the trainers I had taken off. “What do you want me to do with my old clothes Simon?” I shouted.

  “Bring them out so we can put them in the locker for whenever you come back here.” I took the clothes out and put them in the locker. “Do you like them?” he asked.

  “I’ve got to admit I do. This material is brilliant and you can’t see my bits.”

  “Follow me please.” Simon led my through several corridors and through a door that opened into a massive room with half the roof missing. As I looked up I could see blue sky with a few clouds and although I could feel a very cool breeze against my face I felt nice and warm in my new clothing. In the centre of the room was a large spherical object. We walked over to it and Simon pressed his hand against the side. A small hatchway, big enough for me to step through, slid open from a seamless join in the craft.

  “This is an automated transport pod that will take you to a waiting shuttle in high orbit. The journey will take about half an hour and there is an orientation film for you to watch. Step inside and have a good journey.”

  “Thanks.” I held my hand out. Simon looked at it and then held his hand out. I grabbed hold of it and said “I’ll guess I’ll see you later.”

  “Sooner than you think perhaps.”

  I stepped inside and the door closed behind me. The inside of the craft was quite spartan. The curved walls were painted white and there was a very small window that I hadn’t spotted from the outside. To my left was a black chair that looked like it had come from a fighter jet, bolted to the floor and opposite there was a small TV screen which read ‘Please fasten your safety harness.’ I strapped myself in and felt that funny feeling you get when an elevator starts moving, though there was no initial jolt. As I looked out of the little window I could see the walls slipping away and then the top of the building followed by fields and trees that got slowly smaller and smaller. The ride was nothing like footage I’d seen of astronauts being shaken and pinned down with high g-force. The acceleration was smooth and graceful like a lift.

  The screen lit up and started to show a sort of information video. A lot of it was similar to what Simon had told me the other night. It started with a big lecture by Simon about all sorts of physics stuff with obscure words like quantum, Hyper Travel, dark matter, string theory which somehow heightened my feelings of inadequacy for science, especially Physics.

  *

  As the pod started ascending, Simon turned his back and quickly made his way to the elevator. He enjoyed this part of the job. This is where he would make his way to the Director’s office and they would watch the response of the potential recruit whilst they were stuck in a claustrophobic pod on their first ever trip into space.

  The information video didn’t really help. Especially the section about potential problems with catastrophic decompression and how the vacuum of space would boil the blood and make your eyes pop. Simon especially liked the special effects of a human floating in space and then expanding like a balloon and popping with blood, guts and gore being flung in all directions. He always thought the severed head bouncing off the camera lens was a nice touch. It was quite often at this point that a lot of recruits were turned away because the journey totally cracked them up. Their screaming could be quite amusing and every now and again there would be a special case wh
ere somebody would go supernova in the confined space of the pod. Even though recruits had forty eight hours between the initial contact with him and their journey into space, for some it was too much thinking time to mull over the consequences.

  Simon had been the recruiting officer for about a hundred years and even though technology had advanced over that period the response of the humans was still roughly the same as it was a hundred years ago. This was always the first real test and only too often the final one.

  Leaving the elevator, Simon knocked on the Director’s door and waited until he was summoned. As he entered the office the Director was sat forward in his chair staring at a blank monitor waiting for Simon to arrive. “Are you ready?” said the Director.

  “I most certainly am,” said Simon.

  The Director poised his finger over a button, looked at Simon, looked back at the monitor and then he pressed the button. The monitor flickered for a few seconds and then sharpened into focus on Roy. The Director looked at the monitor, then looked at Simon with raised eyebrows and then looked back at the monitor, “He’s asleep!”

  Chapter 3 - New Arrival

  A low, dull thud woke me up. For a few moments I was disoriented trying to remember where I was and how I’d got there, and then the dream collapsed into reality. As I rubbed my eyes and stretched, there was the sound of a slight hiss and the hatchway slid open. I took off my safety belt and stepped through the hatch into the shuttle. The hatch closed behind me and there was another quiet rumble as the pod detached itself from the shuttle to make its way back to Earth.

  The inside of the shuttle was like a small aircraft. There were eight black seats on either side of an aisle with window-like view panels beside each seat. The interior was painted white with a white carpet running the length of the isle between the seats. I made a mental note about their obsession with white. As I stared out I could see the Earth! It looked absolutely fantastic, a blue, green ball covered in parts by swathes of white set against the blackness of space. I stood watching the view mesmerized by the beauty of my own planet. This was the most fantastic thing I’d ever seen.