by Dave Stone
Even now, wading through the fetid swamps of Golgotha, the memories came back to plant hooks in his cythernesically implanted mind, and score it.
Memories of the blasted ash and rubble that had been his homeworld: the bones protruding from the ash; finding the remains of his mother, father, grandmother on his father’s side, brother, half-sister and beloved tame pararat, Cyril, and the abominable things that had been done to them before they died.
Memories of the brutish minions who had broken his legs and hands and left him for dead. Memories of his discovery by the emergency-service forces of Earth: of his recovery and enlistment; his desertion and his wanderings thereafter, making his way through the violent chaos of the Galactic Hub and out into the even more violent, lawless tract-gulfs of the Outworlds... all the while searching, never giving up, searching for the creature that had done this to him. Searching for Volok.
And finding him. ‘It ends here,’ Daker snarled, baring his teeth behind his impact-visor, though there was nobody to see or hear him. ‘It all ends here and now.’
The hut was strangely small and unprepossessing, little more than the size of a sublight SAD pursuit ship, its irregularly octagonal form lifted from the swamp on pilings cut from some local equivalent of wood. A shallow flight of mismatched steps led to a blank, stout-looking doorway.
Daker mounted the steps and hammered on the door with the stock of his pulse-pinup. ‘Open up! Open up you bastard!’
After a few moments, the door opened with a squeal of rudimentary hinge-springs, to reveal a hulking and Gorgonic form, its claws and the individually cantilevered incisors of its jaws clotted with festering gobs of fleshy matter and with old, dried blood, its eyes burning with an ancient and unknowable hunger that seemed a form of madness in its own right.
‘Can I help you at all?’ it said. It was wearing tartan carpet slippers, and was in the process of removing a triocular set of eyeglasses, which it now began to polish with a little cloth. A pipe depended from one corner of its slavering jaw, a particularly pungent variety of alien shag burning in the bowl.
‘I want Volok!’ Daker snarled, levelling the ejection vent of his pulse-pump at the monstrous form. Volok the Riever!
World destroyer! Volok whose hands run wet with the blood of a million women and children! Give him to me now...’
The creature frowned as though in momentary puzzlement.
‘Excuse me one moment.’ It turned its horrid head to shout back into the reeking dark beyond the door. ‘Delbert!’
There was the sound of movement inside the hut; a muffled crash and muttering.
‘Delbert!’ the creature shouted again. Its voice devolved into a coldly murderous growl. ‘Come out here. I want to talk to you...’
A second creature appeared. Though equally horrible in form, it was smaller and seemed to be younger than the first one.
‘Yes, Dad?’ It looked past the other, caught sight of John Daker and visibly blanched. ‘Oh...’
‘I’ll “oh” you, you little bugger!’ the larger monster cried, belabouring the smaller one about the head and shoulders.
‘You’ve been sweeping across the worlds of Man like a corrupt and all-consuming fire again, haven’t you! Grinding the bones of mothers and their sons beneath your iron heels!’
‘Aaow, Dad!’ cried the younger, clutching at its head protectively with its jagged claws.
‘What did I tell you about turning the skies black with the bodies of the burning dead?’ the older creature thundered menacingly.
The younger looked down at its monstrous feet and muttered something sullenly.
‘I can’t hear you...’ growled the older creature.
‘All right!’ the smaller creature snapped. No-turning-the-skies-black-with-the-burning-bodies-of-the-dead-if-I-want-to-live-under-your-roof. OK?’
‘Kids, eh?’ said the older creature, turning its attention back to the now completely astonished Daker. ‘Can’t live with ‘em, can’t put a blaster-bolt to the back of their heads and put them down.’ It took the younger by the ear and dragged it back inside the hut. ‘Please accept my most profound apologies.
Won’t happen again.’ It slammed the door behind it.
Daker looked at the flat expanse of wooden door.
‘ Um...’ he said.
* * *
Books from the Astonishing! Bookshelf Reviewed by Stanford Groke
It’s been something of a thin month for books, what with one thing and another. The big-shot houses seem to have misplaced our name on their review list, with the result that we have yet to receive copies of their latest output. Never fear, though, reader; judging from their efforts of the recent past, such output will consist of such perversion and squalor in the guise of ‘psychology’; such subversive, Godless propaganda and such so-called ‘speculation’ that flies in the face of all we know to be good and decent in the mind and heart of Man; such filth that would make the mind sick just from the reading of it, that the loss of them can only be a blessing.
To make up for that, we have two real treasures for you.
The Best of Astonishing! (Goblinslather Press, 445pp), in which you can read and savour again all the highlights you have read and savoured in these very pages. From Wiblik’s justly famous and Nebula Award-winning ‘Robot is Intransigent’, to Grand Master Henshaw’s ‘The Precise Ballistic Ellipsoid from the Asteroids to an Orbital Circumlocution of Io’, to the far-out brain feverings of Blandings ‘Wardrobe Eating Nanny’s Arm’, this surely is an indispensable compendium for historians of the SF
form. [Unfortunately, due to an error in the production stage, all bound copies of this book have been pulped and are no longer available - Ed.]
Our second book is of another stripe entirely. While not being science fiction in the proper sense, Future Impact.. The Apocalyptic Backlash (PractiBrantis Enterprises SA, 414pp) by Dr John Smith, is of vital importance to all those interested in the future of mankind and what futuristic things it will bring.
Dr Smith, as readers of these pages will know, has long led the life of a recluse, disappearing for years at a time in the company of his young ‘assistants’, appearing in public only sporadically to originate such neophysical concepts as the cheese drive - first championed in Astonishing! - the discovery of Pellucidor and the PractiBrantic processes that have informed one-tenth of the American-speaking world. For years now, it seems, Dr Smith has been secretly refining and expounding his theories as to just what, precisely, has gone wrong with the world - and now, at last, in Future Impact, he presents his conclusions.
As we grow older, says Dr Smith, the world makes cumulatively less sense. Things you used to buy for a penny become ridiculously expensive on the level of a factor of ten, Empires set to last a thousand years collapse seemingly overnight, the young people with their pompadours and electrical beat-combos begin to talk in what, increasingly, becomes gibberish to any sane mind, peppered with a blasphemy and outright filth that seems to come about as a matter of course. For too long, says Dr Smith, such phenomena had been dismissed as market-forces-driven monetary inflation, the social dynamic or being a senile old bugger who should do the world a favour and just die.
The truth, as detailed in Future Impact, is somewhat more alarming.
The world as we know it, Dr Smith asserts, is being actively invaded by Futurity. Far from merely, as we once thought, travelling through time at a second per second, we are in fact accelerating through time at a second per second per second, the physical matter of the universe falling through the fourth dimension towards some unknowable end like a collection of ornamental balls dropping to a concrete floor. And at some point - Dr Smith estimates it as within a decade - we’re going to hit it.
The effects of this catastrophe are being felt in our own time, the shock and shards of it rebounding to intersect with and impact upon our time line - discrete packets of what can only be called parareality which, in the same way that humour operates by the collapsing of some textu
al structure under reality, turns the very world around us into dumb and incredibly rotten old jokes. As proof, Dr Smith presents excerpts from any number of popular publications, the products of and mirrors of our world, the texts of which show such inconsistencies and glaring shifts in tone for it, cumulatively, to be virtually inconceivable as the mere result of the intransigence of writers, the incompetence of editors, or production errors.
The future, without question, seems bleak - or possibly not.
Loath to end on such depressing terms, Dr Smith provides one possible solution, involving the cooperation of all nations and the sinking of all private resources into a project to tunnel into the earth, extract its molten core and mould it into a massive grappling hook, which will then be fired back through time in the hope that it catches on to something and brings the temporally headlong plunge of Planet Earth to a stop. Indeed, he speculates that with the collapse of the more monolithic world powers and the animosity between them, the increasing disappearance of the high-profile rich under mysterious circumstances and the fact that there seems to be less and less actual money around these days, such plans might already be secretly in effect.
Of course, Dr Smith concludes, the ultimate result would be a planet hanging on a line and swinging back and forth through Time. So, whoever you are, wherever you are, it might be an idea to make sure you’re doing something nice - reading this fine issue of Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science!, say -
because at any moment you might suddenly find yourself doing it over and over again, for ever.
About the Author
Dave Stone is truly a prince amongst men, and women for that matter, and they all agree that he is quite possibly the highest pinnacle to which humanity can ever hope to aspire in form, thought and deed. Swordsman, bon vivant, polymath -
these are just some of the words he knews how to spell. All of which makes the current unavailability of half of the eleven-odd books he’s written more upsetting. He also writes comics.
Rumours that he personally ended World War II, the British Slave Trade and that he single-handedly pulled down the Berlin Wall with a pickaxe are entirely true, but he doesn’t like to talk about them. Mr Stone is currently living in a cardboard box under the Plaistow New Road underpass. When asked to comment on this new work, Heart of TARDIS, he said, ‘What? Who? Buy me a drink you b--.’
We wish him well.
Document Outline
Front Cover
Back Cover
Acknowledgements
Preamble
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Appendix
About the Author
