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Other Times and Places

Page 7

by Joe Mahoney


  “Did you test it?”

  Holy cow, there was a question. Had he tested it? Of course he had tested it! Two, three times. The technician frowned. How to respond to this remarkably stupid question? This insulting question.

  He said, “Yes.” No need to add, “Of course”.

  “And it worked.”

  The technician wanted to say, “Well, no, it hadn’t. But I used it anyway.” But he was on shaky ground to begin with and sarcasm wouldn’t help, even if deserved.

  So he said, “Yes, it worked. Every time. All three times I tested it, yes.” That ought to drive the point home. The Executive Producer laughed. Because he wasn’t exactly sure why the Executive Producer was laughing, the technician just sat there.

  “Wow,” the Executive Producer said. He shook his head. “What a screw-up, eh?”

  The technician shrugged. “Well.”

  “They had to fill back at the station. Had to play fill music for the whole show.” The Executive Producer laughed again. “Cause we sure as hell weren’t there.”

  The technician refused to laugh. It wasn’t funny, not to him, not yet. It was embarrassing, as embarrassing as hell. The whole live audience had been waiting, waiting for the show to begin. All the lines back to the station had been tested. He had done hundreds of these remotes before, they had become routine, but still there was always that moment of tension just before you went live. Would it work? Everything you had set up, would it get the signal back to the station and then out onto the air and make everybody happy? The producer? The host? Especially the host?

  Then the moment was past and the host was talking, the theme was playing and you were live, you were on, the producer was smiling, the host was smiling, the audience was smiling, you were smiling, everybody was as happy as pigs in poo.

  Not this time. The moment was upon them and nothing worked. Nothing. Everything was dead. The host’s mouth was moving and nothing was coming out. The Executive Producer was shouting, the host was freaking out. The audience was murmuring, wondering. In that instant, the technician checked a thousand things. The CD player didn’t work, neither did the tape machine, the microphones, the wireless, nothing. It all pointed to the damned console.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” the producer shouted.

  “It’s the console,” the technician told him.

  “What can we do?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t bring another one.” And the station was too far away to go and get one. The technician never liked to beat around the bush, and he didn’t see the point in doing so now. He hadn’t brought a spare, and there was nothing they could do about it. All they could do was tell everyone involved that the show was over before it even began. Tear down and go home.

  A bad day.

  Now they were in the Executive Producer’s office, going over it all again. The Executive Producer had stopped laughing. The Department Head was still there, and had yet to say anything. Nice of her to have brought the coffee, though. The technician began to get annoyed. Where was this leading? It was time to stop beating around the bush.

  He said, “Well, it was my fault, I apologized to everyone already. I should have brought a spare console. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  Were they going to fire him? Or just make him feel bad? He waited. He’d said his piece, laid his head on the chopping block. The ball was in their court.

  Then it struck him. Rolf. Early retirement. That’s why the Executive Producer had started this meeting by mentioning Rolf! They weren’t going to fire him, they were going to make him accept some stupid package! Get rid of him that way. It all made sense. He wanted to lean across the desk and choke the Executive Producer, choke the life right out of him. It wasn’t his fault, it could have happened to anyone!

  The Executive Producer was being cruel. He had a goofy grin on his face. The Department Head was smiling too. How could they be so heartless? “Yes sir, quite a screw up. Biggest one this corporation has seen in a while.”

  “So you’re going to force me out.”

  The Executive Producer looked puzzled. “What?”

  “You’re getting rid of me, right? No more embarrassing mistakes,” the technician said bitterly. “You’re going to force me to accept a package.”

  “Hell no.”

  “What then?” What else was there?

  The Executive Producer leaned forward. “You have a gift for screwing things up. That means you have a bright future ahead of you in public broadcasting.”

  The Department Head extended her hand. “Congratulations,” she said. “We’re making you a manager.”

  Author’s Notes

  Moonstone is my tribute to the work of Fritz Leiber. I’ve always loved the swords and sorcery genre, especially Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. But that’s not entirely what inspired Moonstone. One day, back around the turn of the century, I read an obscure swords-and-sorcery tale in an obscure magazine no longer in publication—I can’t remember the name of either. I enjoyed the story but thought, “I can do better.” Moonstone took me about a year to get right.

  I wrote The Wizard’s Castle in a few short hours one summer day. I wrote it in longhand, like every story I wrote before I got my first computer in the early nineties. It was one of those rare occasions when the words just flowed, although it did require a bit of buffing up before I sold it to Horizons SF. In 2005, Barbara Worthy produced a version of the story in which an actor performed the text while playing the piano. If you flew Air Canada around then you could have heard this version on Air Canada’s in-flight channel KidzAir.

  Fizz took a few drafts to get right. Graeme Cameron included it in the third issue of Polar Borealis, a magazine of Canadian SF.

  Of Platypuses and Things is another rare instance of the story virtually writing itself. This was before I acquired the unfortunate habit of editing my writing as I went along, a terrible habit that I’m only now overcoming. Of Platypuses and Things found a home in an Australian magazine called Planet Relish.

  The Pitch is the only story in this collection never to have been published before. It was never meant to be a short story at all. It was originally written as just what its title suggests: a pitch for a show on CBC Radio. I’ve tweaked it slightly for this anthology. Sadly, The Pitch did not result in an actual radio show.

  The Scapegoat is the oldest story in this collection, completed on September 26th, 1987, when I was twenty-two years old. The Canadian magazine Challenging Destiny bought it for its April, 2000 issue. It’s the first short story I ever sold.

  John’s Worst Enemy was inspired by a psychological hypothesis called bicameralism that argues that at one time the two hemispheres of the brain were essentially distinct from one another, creating the impression of two entities residing within a single body. Some in the scientific community speculate that this may have been a fact of life for pre-historic humans, before their brains evolved into the ones we currently possess, though vestiges of this phenomenon may remain in some of us today.

  I belonged to a union in a tumultuous relationship with management when I wrote The Screw-Up, back in the late nineties. I was, in fact, on strike in 1999 when Our Times: Canada’s Independent Labour Magazine published the story. Less than a decade later I became a manager myself (not because I screwed up a remote, though), so really, I’m just making fun of my future self. These days I have a much more charitable attitude toward management.

  Author’s Bio

  Joe Mahoney’s short fiction has been published in Canada, Australia and Greece. He’s been nominated twice for an Aurora Award, one of Canada’s top awards for science fiction and fantasy, for his work on CBC Radio. He lives in Whitby, Ontario with his wife and two daughters, and their golden retriever Maxwell and Siberian forest cat Lily.

  Other Titles by Joe Mahoney

  A Time and a Place

  Barn
abus’s nephew is behaving oddly.

  Calling upon Doctor Humphrey for assistance has not been particularly helpful, because the good doctor’s diagnosis of demonic possession is clearly preposterous. Even the demon currently ensconced on the front room couch agrees it’s preposterous. But then, how else to explain the portal to another world through which his nephew and Humphrey have just now disappeared? Barnabus knows their only chance of rescue is for Barnabus J. Wildebear himself to step up and go through that portal.

  Thus begins an existential romp across space and time, trampling on Barnabus’ assumptions about causality, freewill, identity, good and evil. Can Barnabus save his nephew—and incidentally, all of humanity?

  Now available as an audiobook on Audible!

  Praise for A Time and a Place

  Mahoney’s work is great for those who like their speculative fiction thoughtful, eloquent, and messy.

  — Publisher’s Weekly

  “This book packs a surprising emotional punch.

  Jenny Dee, Amazon.com

  “How often does one get to read a book involving time travel and aliens, set in Prince Edward Island? It’s a riotous read and thoroughly enjoyable.”

  Timothy Neesam, Goodreads

  “I greatly enjoyed the chapters in which our time and dimension travelling hero finds himself in the body of an alien, purple-furred cat with opposable thumbs and then a seagull.”

  Nancy Kay Clark, Goodreads

  “Dr. Who on Acid”

  Bonnie Keck, Goodreads

  “Joe Mahoney’s A Time and A Place is a meditation on deep philosophical questions disguised as a rollicking science fiction adventure.”

  Frank Faulk, Amazon.ca

  “A great book… I really am a big fan of Time Travel written and done well.”

  Neil A. Sinclair, Amazon.com

 

 

 


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