* * *
Lying amongst the fragments of shattered glass moments later, Jake mused that it hadn’t gone too badly. At least they hadn’t beaten him up before they threw him through the window.
Glancing up at the full moon, he thought it a shame that no-one ever believed his shaggy dog stories.
Still, that would soon be rectified, he knew. The monthly transformation was already tingling through his veins, the bestial change taking grip. Admiring the fur starting to sprout from his hook, he calculated that in a few moments he’d banish all doubts.
The rowdy sailors had watered him but soon it would be time for them to quell his hunger too. And bosun boy would make such an appetising starter…
Future Tense
Douglas Jennings swallowed, mouth parched. He looked longingly at the water fountain across the control centre but knew he daren’t leave his post – not now; not when the telemetry from the probe was due any moment.
“Excited?” a voice behind him asked.
He flashed a thin smile to his female assistant.
“Terrified, more like. I can’t stop shaking,” he confessed. “I keep thinking of all the hundreds of things that could go wrong.”
“It’ll be fine,” Marie insisted, motioning to the rows and rows of terminals, all manned by intense-looking boffins. “The best brains in the country have worked day and night on this for two years. We’ve had enough funds to run a banana republic and unlimited access to the latest mathematical and engineering breakthroughs. It’ll work, trust me.”
Douglas hoped so. It was more than just their jobs and scientific reputations on the line. If the project failed, their angry critics would use it to attack NASA; arguing that the Space Agency had lost its senses and should be wound up.
He shivered, remembering the Washington Post headline three months before ‘TIME TO END THE MADNESS!’ and the thunderous attack: “Professor Jennings is deluded if he thinks his hare-brained rocket scheme will succeed. It is not just impossible, but is an irresponsible waste of taxpayer dollars at a time when our nation is crippled by recession.”
Yes, it was expensive, Douglas told the various Senate committees, but the possible rewards were incalculable. It would alter everything – how the human race lived, how they viewed the future, whether they should strike out to colonise the stars.
“I cannot deny that the research is theoretical and hugely controversial,” he’d conceded. “But it could be the most significant breakthrough in history.”
That had won the philosophical debate, but there still remained doubts over the cutting-edge technology.
Staring at the terminal, he ticked off every worrying variable. Success depended on the hyper drive performing perfectly, on the probe surviving the immense acceleration forces, and on the returning info stream cutting through the swirling solar interference.
And then there was the almost mystical science… accurately interpreting radiation decay, ion disturbances, gravity fluctuations, planet drift, the expansion of matter, radio wave distortion and numerous other factors. All to calculate one thing – the rate of entropy gripping the cosmos.
A beep interrupted his troubled thoughts. The telemetry was coming in! He yelped in relief as bursts of numbers and algebraic symbols raced across the screens.
Marie grinned.
Then almost instantly, she frowned.
“This can’t be right,” she hissed, fingers clicking across her keyboard.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, elation evaporating.
“It’s the prediction figure for the collapse of the universe. The data says it will end in twelve billion–”
“What? Millennia?”
“No…”
“Centuries? Years?”
“No,” she gulped. “Nano-seconds.”
Twelve billion nano-seconds! That was ridiculous, he told himself. It was only a fifth of a minute, for Heaven’s sake!
“Let me have a look,” he snapped, pushing her out of the way. “It’s simply not possi–”
Christopher Robin Went Down
- With Malice!
The siren grew louder – its eeyore, eeyore, eeyore screech coming nearer and nearer as Winifred gazed ruefully at the body by her feet…
An Ugly Way To Go - and other Quintessentially Quirky Tales Page 16