Screaming Science Fiction

by Brian Lumley

  —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….

  I

  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….”

  II

  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 con
versation, 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?”