The Egg-Shaped Thing
Page 25
“I don’t understand.”
I said: “You will.”
“But…can’t you get us out of this?”
“Only if you can recognize it again.”
Then his face blurred away.
I saw a shape.
My pulse rate thrashed up to a hundred and forty as the vertigo crescendoed and I was spinning in a nothingworld.
I realized, as I yawed and stumbled, that the shape I could see was very familiar and should be easy to recognize, to file in the memory, to retain.
And yet I could not.
I staggered away, and my shoe shuffled against something. I swung the fight down; and picked up the object my foot had struck.
It was a cat’s collar, fully buckled-up.
And revealing a desperate lack of cat.
So I started to walk around the fourth corner of the concrete box…
If you enjoyed The Egg-Shaped Thing check out FISTFUL OF DIGITS by Christopher Hodder-Williams here.
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Author’s Epilogue
Stories containing science-fiction ideas can only be approximations; and in this book I have ventured several light-years beyond the disciplines of Quantum-Physics and Relativity, just to see what I could do with them.
However, you can’t take liberties with the rules until you know the rules; and had it not been for the generosity, wit and vision of Professor Banesh Hoffmann, of Queen’s College of the City University of New York, and at present at Harvard University, who read the original draft, this novel would have had no anchors at all with which to warrant the liberal references to the scientific principles it is designed to reflect. Even now I have perforce criminally misused the Quantum; and the responsibility for this mutilation remains entirely mine. Naturally, I believe every word of it: Professor Hoffmann does not! But my bible throughout was his book The Strange Story of the Quantum, which is a much better book than this, and which may — to some extent — have kept me on the rails.
Richard Stratton, Chief Engineer of Hovertravel Ltd at Ryde, gave much valuable help technically on hovercraft; and I am most grateful to him, as I am also to Norman Barfield of The British Aircraft Corporation (Weybridge) for advising me on the robust airframe of the Valetta — an unglamorous but rugged old-timer developed from the Wellington Bomber of the Second World War.
Editors, as well as other of my friends, kept this book from getting too nutty and though I fought hard I benefited from their advice in lavish proportions (though officially I never take any notice of them).
In passing I must state that James Fulbright had a much less agreeable experience of the inhabitants of Telscombe Cliffs than I did.
No author can possibly operate without the help of the Police, in this case The Cumberland and Westmorland Constabulary, who helped me locate the place I have called Moorbridge. It actually turned out to be Patterdale, where I did my battle training in 1945. All they had to go on was the zigzag road; and even that is overgrown now.
But it was no casual whim that impelled me to choose this particular site. For it was there that I learned, from the squawky little radio in our tent, that the first atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.
Christopher Hodder-Williams
October, 1966