by Dave Stone
in five minutes flat, to ride out the transformation of their world. It was - well, the way you did it would never have occurred to me in a million years, if at all.’
‘Well, there is that, I suppose.’ The Doctor brightened a little, flattered despite himself.
‘It was a work of the purest genius,’ said Victoria, ‘believe me.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ the Doctor said. It was just a little something that occurred to me on the spot.’
He became cheerful with a suddenness that was shocking, as if an electrical switch had been thrown on a nature that was quite simply unable to live in the past, no matter how hard it might on occasion try.
‘Well, we’re not doing any good just moping around,’ he said, swinging himself down from the coat rail.
He clapped his hands and rubbed them together, the little twinkle back in his eyes. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about what I did wrong in repairing the TARDIS the last time, and this time I really, truly, absolutely, positively think I know what it was...’
* * *
‘And where shall we go now?’ asked the Doctor, who was sitting in a stripy deck chair by the pool, a frosted glass of iced tea in his hand, a new hat - which he was trying on for size before he would allow it out in public, and which he would be testing in this manner for several years before he might feel it was ready - pulled down some way over his eyes so that only his nose and mouth were visible. ‘Somewhere fun and relaxing, I hope.’ ‘Do you know,’ said Romana, languidly sculling around on the pool itself - the heavy water with which it was filled was of such a molecular weight that she didn’t so much as break the surface, ‘I don’t feel like relaxing at all, somehow. I’m feeling that I’d really like to get involved in some sudden and perilous adventure. Maybe we should start doing something to find the Key to Time again or something. Something,’ she continued sourly, ‘that doesn’t involve us ending up as nothing more than glorified doormen.’
‘Well, as I said before’, said the Doctor, ‘we can’t always expect to take what you might call a proactive role.
Sometimes, in this life, we’re lucky if we can so much as work out what’s going on, much less whether what we do has an effect. As a man with a big beard, whose name I unaccountably forget, once said: great events are the result of the interactions of people who are largely indifferent to each other.’ The Doctor smiled to himself. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure that something will turn...’
‘Up has no meaning, Doctor!’ said a squeaky little voice, suddenly.
‘And neither for that matter has down or sideways!’
Standing on the edge of the pool was what looked to be a little man, less than three feet high. At least, he was presumably a little man: he was covered from head to toe in a voluminous and rather grubby raincoat and a Sam Spade fedora hat.
‘You have been taken...’ The little man paused dramatically. ‘...Out of three-dimensional space by the Committee for Paradimensional Affairs, and so you shall remain here until you agree to do our bidding...’
‘You see?’ said the Doctor. ‘What did I tell you?’
Appendix
Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science!
The Giant-sized Monthly for the Fan of the Future who Knows what He Likes Compiler’s Note: Following the involution of the Lychburg Discontinuity, a number of items were left in a transitionary state - that is, caught and fixed between two different levels of reality. Many of these items are of interest only to molecular physicists - a tyre iron or a slice of processed cheese, for example, being basically the same in any real sense, no matter how ‘real’ it ontologically is. Randomly hybridified organisms like the so-called ‘pigrat’ did not survive for long, and certain other items containing the possible seeds of new technologies were instantly classified by the powers that be.
Surviving artefacts where the primary function was and is to display some form of information, however, are slightly more interesting. There are BetaMax videotapes of Hollywood action movies, for instance, where the characters seem to stop in the middle of the pyrotechnics, say ‘I’ve had enough of this’ and walk off the screen. There are murder mystery books where, halfway through, the narrator tells us that we must be incredibly stupid if we haven’t solved the mystery yet, names the murderer and stops dead, leaving the remainder of the pages blank.
We present here, in the interests of completeness, excerpts from one such surviving artefact, an issue of the popular science-fiction magazine, Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science!
* * *
From the Editor’s Astonishing! Desk
Greetings and welcome to the latest thrilling issue of Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science! We here at Astonishing! have worked real hard to put this month’s issue together; the linotype is set and ready for the presses and all systems are ‘green for go’, despite the sad news that our most gracious publisher of many years, Goblinslather Press, has declared bankruptcy following the disappearance of its honoured founder, Arlo Goblinslather, in a tragic ornithopter accident over the Malagasy South Seas. Our new proprietors, Wamco Holding Properties Inc. (Korea), share our God-given dream of bringing quality SF to those who are not only fans but also discerners, but have told us that we have to cut our costs by way of a drastic trimming of our page count, word rates and permanent editorial staff. There was some consternation about that in the Astonishing! bullpen, I can tell you! But our little family rallied together and we are proud to present a collection of tiptop yarns by all-new writers which continue in the finest Astonishing! tradition of E. Dan Belsen, Charles ‘Bubba’ Delancey and Podmore Sloathe! None of whom, unfortunately, appear in this issue for contractual reasons.
So let the so-called critics in their decadent ivory towers gnash their reefer-stained teeth at the so-called ‘pulps’ for all they like! For all their lit’ry talk of the transcendence of content over form, the telling particular and litotes, they are nothing but denouncers who will never understand how a monthly like Astonishing! can do its tales in the Scientific Method that only the cleverest and most technically educated geniuses can truly do. They sit there with their fountain pens and little gilded pocketbooks, drinking their prissy little cups of tea and absinthe, getting their so-called ‘ideas’ from the funny papers and this World Wide Internet of theirs, and I’ll bet they couldn’t work a basic piece of engineering equipment like a slide rule if their worthless lives depended on it.
Fear not though, readers, Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science! will be around, now and for ever, to show them the error of their ways! The Manifest Destiny of Mankind (and Womankind, too!) awaits! On with the chronicles of our glorious and indomitable Future!!
‘Jolly’ John E McMacraken, Editor-in-Chief
* * *
Snail Women from Uranus by Norbert Edgar Trant
(Hideous galactic aliens are come to defile our fairer human sex, and nothing within the power of mortal Man to stop them! How this horrifying and seemingly insoluble problem is solved can only come from a plot twist so devilishly original and ingenious that only a mind such as that of Norbert Edgar Trant could have ever possibly thought it up. The prolific Mr Trant has sent us, without fail, a new and meticulously handwritten manuscript from his home in Westlake Falls, Virginia, for every month since our first ever publication, which we have always looked forward to and read with lively interest This is his first appearance in the pages of Astonishing! Itself.) The stars were bright that night, whole constellations and the galaxies in them shining in the pitch-black sky and laying there like scattered jewels on velvet, shining down on the sleepy little town of Kitchen Falls, set deep in the majestic forests of Kitchen Falls. Still and quiet, the stars were fixed for all eternity - but something else moved through the sky, slashing across it and leaving a fiery screaming trail in its very vacuum. This was no brightly boiling furnace of the nebulas... it was a spaceship! An alien spaceship... and who knew what crawling, slithering terror and horr
or those alien monsters who were in it would bring...?
Norman Manley wasn’t thinking about aliens, for all he had just been to see a movie about them at the Kitchen Falls drive-in. The movie had been Snail Women from Uranus, starling Candy Crawford and Lara Dane, and the thrusting womanly globes thus on so blatant display had made him feel real frisky. You could see through their tops and everything. This had given Norman some ideas, so he had tried to touch the pliant orbs of the girl he was with, but she had slapped him hard and raked his face with her nails until it started to bleed. She really had wanted Norman to touch her, the girl, whose name was Myra Monroe, had then explained, but she was an old-fashioned girl with lots of primitive sex hang-ups, and she could not be doing with anything like that until she was respectably married.
Well, Norman had plenty of other girls whose minds had not been canalised with illogical and outmoded sex-ideas that had no place in the New World Order of the Atomic Age, so now he was driving his bright red ‘hot rod’ automobile into nearby Stovetown to meet one of them. Her name was Dorothee McShane, and she was a stripper in a bar called the Beer Cellar, which she did because, apart from the money, she really liked to do it and it made her feel real hot. She was a real ‘swinging’ lady, and once they had even done sex right there on the stage, after the bar had closed and the lights had gone out.
That was why the existence of aliens - though as a ‘switched on’
kid who listened to the radio news, he knew it was impossible that they should not exist - was the last thing on Norman Manley’s mind... until he turned a corner in the narrow country road, and something landed in the woods off to one side in an explosion of fire and with a devastating crash! Instantly, Norman made his ‘hot rod’ squeal to a stop, dived through the door and started running through the woods as fast as his well-muscled athlete’s legs and firm young buttocks could carry him.
‘It must be a crashed jet plane out of Table City Air Base!’ he thought to himself grimly, and vowed to retrieve the unfortunate pilot, if the pilot had survived, even at the cost of his own life! The giving of his own, he thought, to save one of those brave boys who even now stood as the final bastion between all that was decent and good and the Godless foreign hoards, would be a life well spent indeed.
What he found, however, was something different. Instead of the crashed and mangled remains of an air plane, a shining ovoid squatted in the burning scrub and maples, resting on tripodular support struts. Norman was no fool. He recognised this thing for what it was instantly. ‘Aliens!’ he snarled. ‘What hideous deeds can they be up to here?’
And it was then that a hatch opened in the side of the ovoid with a hiss of noxious alien gases. And something came out of it... something so monstrous and horrible that to even begin to describe its monstrous and horrific form would drive you mad with the suppurating horror of it! And Norman Manley clawed at his eyes and screamed as if his lungs would burst...
The next day, Myra Monroe was behind the soda-pop stand in the drugstore that she worked in, when Norman walked into it wearing his best suit of clothes, carrying a marriage licence and a gold ring with a diamond as big as a tree-snipe egg that must have cost every cent of a year’s pay from his fancy job, and asked her if she would do him the honour of becoming his wife.
No girl could have resisted! ‘Yes!’ Myra cried. ‘Oh, Norman, let us get married right away!’
They were married an hour later by the Justice of the Peace, and set off for their honeymoon in the swanky Kitchen Falls Hotel, which stood on the top of a mountain outside of town and which had more than fifty different rooms and bellhops who all wore little hats. Black storm clouds were gathering, however, and it was a dark and stormy night when they at last reached their room and got ready for bed.
‘Oh, Norman,’ Myra said, coming from her foamy bubble bath and sitting on the big wide bed in a little lacy negligee, ‘you have made me the happiest girl in all the...’
There was an explosion of lightning and thunder outside.
The girlish delight in Myra’s voice trailed away, and her eyes went wide at what the lightning had so horrifically revealed.
‘I am not your “Norman”,’ said the thing as it lurched towards her, a snarling grin upon its face and a hellish light inside its eyes as they ran all over her delectable female form. ‘I have merely taken control of the puny hu-man who you know as Norman’s body. I am a space alien, from a galaxy so many miles away that your mind cannot imagine them! I am Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck seven, come to kill all Earth men and to breed with all Earth women...’
Myra Monroe looked a little strangely at the thing who had once been Norman Manley, through narrowed eyelids. ‘Oh, do you really bloody think so?’
‘What...?’ The thing inhabiting Norman’s corporeal form seemed a little nonplussed by this sudden change in tone, and made to take an involuntary step back, grazing a calf quite nastily on the corner of the minibar. ‘What are you - ?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Myra said, reaching for the zipper in the back of her neck, and pulling off her Human Being suit. The thing that had been Norman Manley stared, aghast, at the form that lay within, a creature now bulking itself outwards on a telescopically articulated, polysilical skeletal structure, internal organs unfolding in some dimensionally complex manner as though from nothing, a retractable carapace extending over them, encasing them, effectively, in a sheath of living armour...
‘Fifteen thousand years,’ the monstrous creature snarled, looming over the now quite frankly terrified thing that had once been Norman Manley, jagged-talon’d claws clenching and unclenching as though only the merest thread of self-control prevented it from tearing him apart. ‘Give or take. That’s how long we’ve been working with our guys - and it’s a thankless bleeding task, I can tell you. I mean, we’ve only just got the buggers to the point where they put the bleeding seat up, let alone down afterwards! So if you think we’re gonna let a bunch of little sods like you come in and have us start again from scratch, you’ve got another think coming...’
The creature put its face close to that of what had once been Norman Manley. ‘So come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough, slime boy, or, tell you what, why don’t you just piss off back where you came from?’
If active and sufficiently advanced satellite-based tracking systems had been trained on that particular area of the North American continent, they might have have tracked the vector of a sad and rather diminutive glowing ovoid as it rose and set a dispirited and vaguely elliptical course for the far side of the moon, where a larger vessel waited. Once line-of-sight transmission could be established, and had they been capable of registering the correct frequencies, the radio-telescopic dishes of humanity might have noted and decoded the exchange detailed below.
But they weren’t and they didn’t and they weren’t, and so they didn’t:
‘Report, Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Seven,’ said a brusque and somewhat atonic voice from the mother ship. ‘Is the world of puny humans ripe for foul unending domination?’
‘Yeah,’ said another and slightly more enthusiastic voice,
‘and are there any girls down there, Queeg?’
‘It’s no go, guys.’ said the voice of Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Seven. ‘It’s just no good. They have weapons down there.’
There was a brief, contemplative pause.
‘What sort of weapons?’ said the first voice from the mother ship.
‘Horrible obliterating weapons of devastating and utter death, OK?’ said the voice of Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Seven. ‘Can we go home now?’
In the Honeymoon Suite of the swanky Kitchen Falls Hotel, Norman Manley woke up and rubbed at the back of his head, which hurt real bad, like he had been drinking beer. ‘My God.’ he said to himself. ‘What happened? What did I do last night..?’
He realised that he was not alone, and that this other was not looking at him in a particularly friendly
manner.
‘You married me.’ said Myra Monroe, coldly.
‘Oh.’ said Norman, and with a remarkable sense of self-preservation, began to think of ways he could back-pedal right from the start.
* * *
Termination on Golgotha by Dexley Blandings
The assault craft ploughed into the swamp with an explosion of sludge and superheated steam. Concussion-bolts detonated and a Teflon-coated butterfly hatch racked itself back and up into its housing in the polyceramicised, fractured-prismatic shell.
John Daker worked the action on his pulse-pump, slamming a subatomic charging cell into the inject-breech and priming it.
He dropped from the hatch, the shock-pads of his boots taking the impact on the soft, still steaming ground.
The Golgothian wildlife shrittered and whooped in the swamp around him. Daker flipped a switch in his helmet and a sensor-readout unfolded on the virtual screen chipped into his brain, behind his eyes: a troupe of inquisitive fomprats were circling cautiously off to one side, but, given their carrion-eating nature, there would have to be one Sheol of a lot more of them. Daker himself would have to be dead before they’d feel brave enough to move in. Daker shouldered the pulse-pump, quickly double-checked the other systems of his power armour’s anti-personnel package, and set off in the direction of the transponder-blip he’d tracked in orbit.
At last, he thought, after a quarter of a galactic-standard century of searching, after twenty-five Earth years of following a hopscotch interplanetary trail, of hunting down rumours, of dead ends, wild goose chases, red herrings, dead ends, dead red herrings and of beating people viciously in 473 separate planetary and/or orbitally based space bars... At last he neared the end of his search; the termination of that long, long arc through space and time that had begun with the destruction of all that the young John Daker had held dear.
