A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  I was left speechless, and the Colonel went back to messing about with the Chronotron, a tyre pump in his hand. The Professor returned to us moments later.

  ‘Is it in some sort of working order, Colonel?’

  ‘Ready for departure,’ the other man said.

  ‘Well then, unless you’re feeling anxious, Seosamh, we’ll take it out.’

  It was a quiet night, and the light of the Moon shone down on Loch Neagh. We embarked.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to sit on the floor,’ the Professor said. ‘We’re going to be packed in like herring in a barrel. Colonel, 1920!’

  The Colonel started fiddling with levers, buttons and the throttle. I heard a low humming that only lasted for the blink of an eye, a shock went through me, and I felt the Chronotron pulsing beneath me, as if it were alive. I looked out the porthole. There was no starlight to be seen anymore; there was nothing to see but pitch darkness. The pulsing stopped, and my eyes were suddenly blinded by sunlight streaming in through the porthole.

  ‘We’re in 1921, Professor,’ said the Colonel. ‘I couldn’t get any closer to it.’

  The Professor spoke with an impatient tone. ‘It’s close enough,’ he said.

  I let out a croak of astonishment. ‘We’re in the same place that we were before, but now it’s day! I can see Loch Neagh over yonder!’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Professor. ‘Loch Neagh, on a summer’s day in 1921. London, Colonel!’

  The Colonel pushed another button, and the Chronotron rose from the ground with the speed of a bullet. It took me by surprise and laid me flat on my back.

  ‘The Chronotron isn’t exactly how I’d like it to be,’ the Professor said, levelly, ‘but it will improve once it is able to move through Space and Time in the same go. As it stands, it will take us ten minutes to reach London. I should explain to you why I’m going there. Here’s a question for you, Seosamh – in your opinion, which event from Irish history is most to blame for the hideous state of the country today?’

  I thought about it for a second.

  ‘The Coming of the Normans,’ I said, ‘or the Famine, maybe, or the legacy of the Civil War.’

  ‘Exactly! Now, I’m not confident enough in the Chronotron to go all the way back to the time of the Normans, and I don’t yet know how I would go about erasing the Famine, but I think I can save Ireland from the Civil War.’

  ‘You’re blathering, man! There’s no—’

  He grabbed me by the shoulders, and there was a strange glow in his eyes.

  ‘It isn’t blathering at all. Imagine it, Seosamh – if it were possible to wipe London off the face of the Earth in 1920, along with the British government, the monarchy, the docks and the armouries. The IRA would win the day. We have the means to do it – with an atomic bomb! Isn’t it a striking image? Hiroshima in ’45, and the capital city of England twenty years before that!’

  I knew then that I was dealing with the worst kind of maniac, and that he would do exactly as he said. Overcome with horror, I tried to calm him down.

  ‘Don’t do it, Professor! It’s not right to oppose God’s will! What’s done is done. And think of the millions of innocent English—’

  The Professor gave a wry smile. ‘Innocent English!’ he said, mockingly. ‘There’s no such thing!’

  My mouth was dry, and my heart was turning over with fear and revulsion.

  ‘Does – does the Colonel know what we’re involving him in?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d care that much. He’s an engineer, and his expertise is limited to engines. He doesn’t have an imagination. He’s really only an engine himself.’

  The Colonel stuck his head back. ‘London,’ he said, all relaxed.

  The Professor scrambled up beside him and examined the measuring and telemetry instruments.

  ‘Another few degrees north, Colonel,’ he said, ‘to avoid the Thames.’

  The Professor took a tiny little bomb out of the back, and a small trap-door opened in the floor of the Chronotron.

  ‘Now, Colonel, rise a couple of hundred feet, and as soon as this explodes – back to Ireland as fast as the wind!’

  ‘Ready?’ asked the Colonel a moment later.

  ‘Ready!’ said the Professor, and the little bomb dropped out of sight. The Professor pulled the trapdoor shut. I shut my eyes and covered my ears with my palms …

  It seemed to me that I was waiting for ages before the piercing blast of the conflagration came. The Chronotron was tossed back and forth like a feather caught by the wind, but the Colonel managed to steady it somehow, and I felt it recover.

  We must have been halfway home to Ireland before I found the courage to raise my head and open my eyes. The Colonel was bent forward and cursing anxiously under his breath. And the Professor? I was dumbfounded. There was no Professor at all there! Wherever he was, there wasn’t hide nor hair of him to be found on the Chronotron.

  I grabbed hold of the Colonel’s arm.

  ‘Where did the Professor go?’

  He pulled his head back, and he was saucer-eyed with astonishment.

  ‘He must have fallen out the trapdoor,’ I said, shaking with fear.

  ‘He didn’t fall, or anything like it, because he was on his knees beside me at the exact moment of the explosion. After that I was too busy trying to regain control of the ship to take much notice of him. But never mind that. Whatever that blast did to the thruster, we’re losing speed …’

  I moved back and huddled against the wall. My head was spinning with the horrors and wonders of this adventure, and worries about the Professor. What terrible, mysterious thing had taken him? God, what could have taken him? And the whole time, there was a memory way back in the back of my mind, annoying me and tormenting me, a memory connected with that date in 1921, a memory that could possibly explain Professor Ó Néill’s absence. I pressed my fingers to my temples, trying to find it …

  The Chronotron was rocking back and forth alarmingly as the Colonel struggled to keep control of it. Then, in the depths of my memory, I saw a couple of lines I had read in some newspaper once:

  ‘This renowned scientist was born in London, England, in 1921…’

  And then, I thought, I understood the whole thing. What had happened was – it would stop your heart to think of it – that the Professor’s mother had been killed in 1921 by the atomic bomb that the Professor himself had dropped on London! Thus – oh, how horrible to imagine it! – the Professor was never born!

  The whole thing was like a nightmare, a dream that only a lunatic would have, a dream to make the sanest man go mad.

  Suddenly, while my head was reeling from the tempest of horrific thoughts inside it, the Colonel let out an urgent shout:

  ‘Save yourself, man! It’s out of control! We’re falling into Loch Neagh!’

  When I came to, I was lying on my belly, soaked through. A small crowd had gathered all around me.

  ‘Where’s the Colonel?’ I asked, half-gasping.

  ‘You’ll meet him soon,’ said one of them, sort of evasively.

  ‘And the Chronotron?’

  They glanced knowingly at each other.

  ‘Stay calm, friend. I’m sure the doctor will be able to provide you with a Chronotron, or whatever you call it.’

  And then they took me here and locked me in this cell, a place where there is nothing that I could hang myself with. Yes, they left me in here, teasing apart that question until my senses were deranged and I lost my reason. I have never been able to forget that question; no such deliverance has come to me. It is an unbelievable tangle, to be sure, for if it was true that the Professor’s mother was killed in the atomic explosion, he couldn’t have been born. Thus, he never built any Chronotron, and he never dropped any bomb.

  But if that’s true, his mother was not killed in an atomic explosion in 1921, and thus, as the newspaper account had it, he was born, was brought home to Ireland, grew up, found respect and renown as a scientist, invented the Chronotron, invi
ted me to dinner, took me back through the years, dropped the bomb on London, and killed his own mother! But if so …

  … but …

  The Exile

  CATHAL Ó SÁNDAIR (1960)

  The final story of this collection comes

  to us from the glittering future of Cathal

  Ó Sándair’s Captaen Spéirling series. In

  between averting World War III, fending

  off a Martian invasion and preventing

  a war between Earth and Venus, the

  eponymous Space-Pilot helps to

  establish trade relations with the moon

  (Luna) and the other civilisations of the

  solar system. The more things change,

  however, the more they stay the same,

  and even in this wonderful space-opera

  world, Irish youngsters still emigrate

  in search of a decent living. This story

  was originally published in Irish as ‘An

  Deoraí’, which appeared as an appendix

  to Captaen Spéirling agus an Phláinéad

  do Phléasc (1960). This translation is by

  the editor.

  SEÁN MURPHY had decided to return from Luna to this world, and to spend the end of his life in his native land – Erin’s emerald isle.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to himself, ‘to be back in a place without any need for an artificial atmosphere or space suits; that’s what would cheer my heart.’

  A long time before this, when Seán was a strong young man in County Kerry, he saw an advertisement in one of the newspapers:

  EMPLOYMENT ON LUNA

  The Government of Luna welcomes young men and women between 18 and 25 years of age. The Government will cover the cost of the journey from Earth, and migrants will be employed as soon as they arrive. Additional information and a free booklet, Your New Life on Luna, can be obtained on request from the Lunar Information Office, O’Connell Street, Dublin.

  For a good while before he spotted this ad, Seán Murphy had been entranced by all aspects of space travel. In addition, there were few households in the community that did not already have a family member that had gone to the Moon to seek their fortune. There were good wages to be had in the glass-canopied Lunar cities, and there was no rain up there either. Seán already knew all of that, but his mother never dreamed that he would ever actually consider going. She never imagined it – until she saw the envelope of the letter that came for him from the Selenites’ office in Dublin.

  She left the letter in a place where Seán would see it; having done so, she gave a broken-hearted sigh. Her husband was long dead, and except for Seán, her children were all married, and none were living nearby. She had been hoping that Seán might marry one of the local girls, and that they might keep her company in her old age.

  That afternoon, Seán spent a long time reading the booklet that the Lunar Information Office had sent; of course, the images contained therein were delightful. One of them was a picture of a spaceship that had just landed at a Lunar airport (the famed Airport of the Moon, obviously), full of passengers from Earth. There were three stages to that journey. For the first stage, passengers would ascend to the Space Platform that orbited the Earth like a satellite; this stage was carried out in a ‘ferry’ ship, whose purpose was identical to that of ferry-boats in the old days when bigger ships still crossed the ocean. For the second stage, passengers would board a bigger, sturdier spaceship to cross the firmament to Luna’s Space Platform. There, they would board another ‘ferry’ ship for the third stage, the journey from the Platform to the surface.

  The other pictures in the booklet were just as enticing: pictures of Luna’s capital city; pictures of the wonderful factories situated there; pictures of its theatres, and its elegant hotels – and yes, pictures of the statues, monuments and works of art that had been created in honour of Captain Spéirling, the Irish space-pilot who first established contact with the Selenites in 2007.

  Seán Murphy’s mother did not ask him any questions about the letter. Over the following week, however, her heart was almost torn asunder with worry – and, in fairness to the poor creature, this worry was not baseless. A week after the letter arrived, Seán spoke to her about it.

  ‘Mam,’ he said, ‘I’m about to … I’m going to be leaving you. At the end of the month, I’ll he setting off for Luna.’

  His poor mother did not know what to do or to say. She wanted to hug him and beg him not to leave her there, old and lonely, but she did not give in to this urge. She remembered those young men whose mothers kept them at home; and she remembered how some of those men turned sour, as if they had suddenly aged.

  ‘Well, Seán my love, I won’t stand in your way,’ she said. ‘Go, if you think that you’ll do well out of it – and I hope that you will!’

  Seán was deeply moved to hear this, and the tears were not far from his eyes in that moment, because he knew how impossibly difficult it was for his mother to let him go.

  ‘I’ll be back in five years, Mam,’ he said. ‘I will, without a doubt. I’ll be back with a power of money then, you’ll see. I’ll buy a fancy car, and I’ll bring you to see every nook and cranny of Ireland.’

  ‘Indeed, I’d love to take a trip like that, Seán,’ his mother said. ‘May we both be safe and sound to see it!’

  Even so, that night she cried herself to sleep. She had little hope that Seán would return as early as he said he would. Of those she had seen go to Luna, few of them came home before twenty years had passed, and she was sure that she would be dead and gone before that time was up.

  The end of the month came, and Seán went. He got the atomic train up to Dublin, and after that, he boarded the space-ferry. He got a good job in one of the huge Lunar mines, and three years later, he had been promoted to a kind of manager. A week after this promotion, however, he received a message from home – his mother was dead, and she had already been buried alongside his father.

  For a good while after that, it seemed to Seán that his life was not worth living. Very often, while he was in the middle of his work, he could not help but think that he had failed his mother. He had been too hopeful that she would live longer than she did, that she would not be heartsick after him. However, he eventually shed that sorrow – especially after he and Nora Ryan got to know each other.

  Nora was a steward on one of the space-ferries. She and Seán met each other in the Irish Club in Luna City. They got along with each other immediately, and a year later they were married.

  ‘My goodness, it’s a long way from here to there!’ Seán said to himself, on one of the days when he was thinking about returning to Ireland. He and Nora ended up together for forty years, and they saw their seven children disperse in all directions: Brian was an engineer on Mars; Pádraig was there too, working as a nuclear physicist, and Séamas was working all over Africa. Máire, meanwhile, was married to a man who had a job near the North Pole; Brigid had gone to Venus, where she was working as a nurse. Poor Peadar died when the spaceship he was travelling on was destroyed, and Mícheál, the youngest, was a space-pilot, and he spent more time flying around the void than he did on solid ground anywhere.

  All of them gone! Them, and their mother Nora, who had passed away three years before. And so it was that at the age of seventy, Seán Murphy was left all alone in the house where his seven children had grown up.

  Hans Marsden was the name of his next-door neighbour; Hans had a good pension, and he and his beloved wife Irma had a fine, comfortable way of life. Seán told Hans that he had decided to return to Earth, ‘to die there’.

  ‘Hans,’ he said, ‘before I go, I want one more view of the nicest place under the sun. I’ll take a coach trip around Killarney, and after that, I won’t do any more travelling. I’ll find lodgings in some friendly house, and on my death-bed, I’ll bequeath them whatever I have.’

  Hans shook his head sadly. ‘That’s what you think right now, Seán,’ he said, ‘but I fear that
you’ll be greatly disappointed. The Irish climate will not suit you, with you having lived on Luna for as long as you have. And another thing, Seán – very few are left of the people you knew when you were young.’

  Hans did his best to convince Seán to stay where he was, but his efforts were futile. However, Seán did accept one piece of advice from him: Hans told him not to sell his house on Luna yet, and Seán agreed.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right, Hans,’ Seán said, laughing. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t sell the old nest until I have a new one sorted. I’ll leave the keys with you. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found a place, and then you can sell the house for me.’

  After that, he went to the Luna City Bank. He had a good amount of money stored there – a little over £10,000 in Irish money, he reckoned. He took a fifth of it in cash, and instructed the bank to credit the rest to a particular bank in Killarney. At the start of the summer, he bade farewell to Hans and Irma; they were as old as he was, and they were sure that they would not see him again. They said goodbye to him sorrowfully, and it was not without sadness that Seán wished them well.

  When he reached Ireland, he stayed in Dublin for a few days. At the start, he enjoyed being out in the open air, instead of being under Luna City’s glass canopy; before long, however, he was reminded that the air here can get very cold indeed. The following day, he was shivering, and he started to suffer from frequent bouts of coughing.

  After spending a week in Dublin, he took the atomic train to Kerry. He arrived in Killarney as night was setting in, and as he was walking down the main street, he saw the Moon high above.

  ‘Luna!’ he said to himself. ‘I can hardly believe that I spent most of my life up there!’