Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  He reached the top of the hill overlooking the hazy blue-misted spaceport that was still seven miles distant, and he sat down to rest. He knew time was of the essence, and that he'd have to take the shortest route to the spaceport, which meant going through the sprawling forest below and on through the outskirts of a little village that was only now stirring on this quiet Sunday morning.

  Higgledy ran over to him and rested its head in his hands. Danny stroked and patted the creature, then inhaled the cool morning air and got to his feet again. He'd missed out on so much sleep playing with his nocturnal friend, and the lost hours were beginning to take their toll, but he had to fight the creeping drowsiness or risk losing Higgledy forever.

  "Come on." Danny descended the steep long-grassed hill with Higgledy in close pursuit. Near the bottom of the hill, he dived into the tall grass for cover when he spotted the V-formation of police aircars flying low across the sky. Higgledy thought he was messing about, and nudged him playfully with its head.

  "Stop it boy. Keep still." Danny was afraid to look skywards.

  The shadows of the police aircars flitted over him as they flew on towards the village. The danger had passed. It was time to move fast, although the tiredness was steadily taking an insidious hold on him, and it had almost forced him to stay there in the warm grass, but he had somehow summoned every ounce of willpower and hauled himself up to run towards the forest. Deep inside that forest, Danny sat down against the trunk of a black poplar tree. He opened his satchel, took out the neatly packaged jam and peanut butter sandwiches and unwrapped the foil. He munched on one, then offered another to Higgledy, who seemed to sniff it, but refused to taste the sandwich, and lowered its antennae – as if it felt guilty at its seeming ingratitude. Danny relished a quenching swig of icy Evian polywater syrup from the flask, then rested against the tree again and closed his eyes. He listened to the incessant tweeting of the forest birds and the soft relaxing drone of the flies. The hot summer sunlight flickered dreamily through the leaves and felt warm on his face. He sank deeper and deeper into a quicksand of sleep.

  Higgledy watched him for a while, then wandered about, scooping up fallen leaves with its mouthparts.

  Something darted past Higgledy. It was a brown hare. The timid-looking animal stopped and looked at the alien, then bounded off in fright. Higgledy chased it, but soon lost sight of the long-eared coward.

  A strange undulating sound drifted through the forest. Higgledy listened to the unfamiliar music and became impelled to trace its source. The creature crawled out of the forest towards the origin of the choral transmissions. The harmonious sounds became stronger as Higgledy approached the small village church. Inside, the congregation were singing the words of a 19th century hymn called All Things Bright and Beautiful:

  All things bright and beautiful,

  All creatures great and small,

  All things wise and wonderful,

  The Lord God made them all

  Higgledy walked up the three large stone-slab steps and entered the church, unseen. The creature looked about at the beautiful spectral patterns of multi-coloured light on the floor of the aisle created by the sunlight blazing through the stained glass windows, The creature continued down the central aisle. Screams erupted as a group of elderly people spotted the unearthly invader. The hymn faded, and more screams echoed around the church. Then the organ faltered and ended abruptly. There was a stampede to the front of the church. Men, women and children filled with terror trampled over one another in retreat from Higgledy. The insect backed up and turned around, then fled out of the church, It was sometime before one of the church-goers was brave enough to rush to the front of the holy building to slam, lock and bolt the heavy oaken front doors to keep the demonic intruder out.

  A black gloved hand shook Danny, He woke and looked up at the stern face of Sergeant Hackett. A group of nine officers stood in the background. Some were speaking to one another via their telepathy helmets.

  "Where's the creature?" Hackett asked the farmboy.

  Danny looked about with a worried expression. "Oh no. He must have wandered off when I fell asleep."

  "How long were you asleep?" Hackett's probing, unblinking eyes stared right into Danny's mind.

  "I don't know. About thirty minutes. Not long." Danny estimated.

  Hackett grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him up to his feet. "C'mon. You're going home."

  The spaceport sergeant accompanied Danny to an aircar and took him straight home.

  Captain Zack Pye staggered drunkenly up the ramp of the merchant spaceship Ellan Vannin and inspected the work of the robotic stevedores. All of the cargo had been stored neatly in the ship's hold. Captain Pye was feeling rather depressed after losing half of his weeks' wages on an all-night poker game, so he felt he more than deserved a little cheering up from the bottle of Chinese whiskey hidden in the space helmet he carried. He climbed through the hatch in the hold and ascended the spiral staircase to the ship's cockpit, where he swigged away his troubles whilst waiting for the clearance message from the spaceport's control tower. Fifteen minutes passed, and a sarcastic voice from the space traffic controller came over the radio, informing Pye that he had forgotten to raise the cargo ramp and close the hold door. The captain responded by cursing the voice, then pressed a button which illuminated itself at his touch. The cargo ramp whirred up into the ship and a clanging noise ensued as the door of the hold slid shut. What Captain Pye didn't know, was that six minutes before, Higgledy had wandered up the ramp and was now crawling around the ship's cargo hold. After obtaining the clearance signal from the space-traffic controllers, the Ellan Vannin's anti-gravity engines whined and the ship zoomed skyward, bound for a nine-week interplanetary journey to a research space station in orbit around Jupiter.

  The Ellan Vannin climbed at a hypersonic speed, passed through the blue sky and out into the blackness of near space.

  Danny had to suffer two heartbreaks that week. Higgledy had disappeared without a trace, and Scarecrow was dead, with no possibility of being repaired and resurrected, Mr Thurber had tried every robotics repair specialist, and was told by each one that Scarecrow's electrical components had long been discontinued. Danny tried Ebay, and there was one component dealer - but he was on Obamaville - on Mars, and despite the prohibitive shipping costs, the dealer only had a few of the required parts. Some offered to buy the lifeless robot for scrap, but Mr Thurber refused. In the end, he dug a hole in a patch of earth outside the farmhouse and lowered Scarecrow into it. Danny sobbed throughout the ad hoc funeral of the robot. Mr Thurber placed the hat the robot had worn upon its chest, then took a spade and began to shovel the soil into the hole, Danny had asked his father if Scarecrow would be buried in the cemetery, Mr Thurber said the Church would not allow that, because robots did not have a soul and were not really alive. After the impromptu burial, Danny and his father placed a small wooden cross over the grave and they stood there for a while, gazing down at the earth in the heavy silence.

  Two weeks into her voyage, the Ellan Vannin should have been sighted by the human and computerised lookouts in the lighthouse perched upon the Martian asteroid Phobos. Their radar should have detected the passing ship, but there was no sign of the merchant vessel. The crew of the City of Boston, an American freighter returning from the Jovian moon Ganymede, reported seeing a vessel that looked like the Ellan Vannin trapped in the outer ice-shell of an unchartered comet that was moving out of the Solar System. But the Blue Star Shipping Line that owned the missing vessel quickly dismissed the report. A month passed, and there was still no sign of the Ellan Vannin. Six months later, a search party was despatched to look for the overdue vessel, but no trace of wreckage was ever found. A minor comet was pursued by two rescue ships for three months but they never caught up with the accelerating mountain-sized iceball. The speeding comet was soon out beyond the orbit of Pluto, and then out even further beyond the ring of cometary ice known as the Oort Cloud which lies a light year from the
Sun. Beyond the prying eyes of even the most electronically souped-up telescopes of the Solar System, the comet fell into the mind-bogglingly huge sea of interstellar space with the Ellan Vannin embedded in its outer layer of steel-hard ice. Captain Pye's dead body was encased in a hard blue frost. He had been in a drunken stupor when the disaster struck, and with the autopilot and radar scanners accidentally switched off, there had been no warning when the rogue comet loomed out of the eternal night of space. In the cargo hold of the frozen ship, Higgledy had gnawed its way through the crates of raw foodstuffs in an effort to provide itself with enough energy to stay alive. But the fierce cold had easily penetrated and immobilised the out-sized insect. Higgledy was unconscious, and barely alive. Its alien metabolic rate had been reduced almost to the point of death by the subzero conditions.

  Ten years rolled by, and the erratic, elongated trajectory of the high-velocity comet took it across the unrelenting emptiness of interstellar space to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun. As soon as the warm rays of the approaching reddish sun struck the comet, it started to produce a small tail of icy vapour as its outer shell melted. The great thaw resulted in the detachment of the Ellan Vannin. The ship hurtled through space for months until it was captured by the gravitational field of an Earth-sized planet named Stendek, after the terran Paul Stendek, who had first discovered the world. Stendek had nothing that man could exploit. No minerals, no exotic ores. Nothing but desert and weird desert plants. And of course, the Jund, a small tribe of sallow-skinned dwarves who still seemed to be in their Bronze Age.

  The Ellan Vannin went into a decaying orbit around the alien world for months until it was finally pulled into an irreversible descent. As it fell through the upper atmosphere of Stendek, the ship's re-entry shield glowed incandescently. The angle of entry into the planet's atmosphere was far too steep, and the ship was doomed to burn up like a meteor. The white-hot shield started to flake, and the super-heated gases blasted their way into the ship, causing a small explosion, which in turn triggered the emergency auto-pilot circuitry. The auto-pilot immediately adjusted the Ellan Vannin's angle of descent and gradually curved the falling ship's trajectory. A sonic boom echoed through the sky of the strange world, and the Ellan Vannin, with her dead captain at the helm, screamed as she shot across the purplish cirrus clouds with a tail of smoke behind her. The autopilot fired the emergency braking retros and took the ship into a controlled descent,The merchant vessel and her skeletal captain landed in a dark desert valley, and seconds after touchdown, the cargo ramp lowered automatically to allow the toxic fumes from the fire to escape.

  The Jund tribe had witnessed the incident from a mile away, and were already making their pilgrimage to the Ellan Vannin, which was not a spaceship to their primitive minds, but a shining, burnished gift from the gods.

  That evening, as the dim red sun Proxima was setting, the Jund encircled the Ellan Vannin and started to chant. Down the ramp came Higgledy, dripping wet from the thawed ice, The creature was still weak from its decade-long coma, and it stumbled as it dragged itself from the ship. Several members of the Jund ran in terror, but the leader of the tribe, Mavron, kneeled and lifted his ornate club to the darkling sky and gave thanks to the gods for the golden-eyed idol before him. After the solemn ritual, Mavron ordered his people to gather food for the giant insect.

  In the ten years since the disappearance of Higgledy, Danny Thurber had passed the entrance exams into the Space Academy and had graduated into the Space Corps with flying colours. Now he was a dashing young man of twenty who turned the heads of the girls on Venus and Mars, but he had no plans to settle down to a domesticated life just yet. He still had his childhood ambition to fulfil; to become a space explorer. For that reason he had Joined the Interstellar Surveyors, a respected band of service daredevils who had to see what was out there in the great unknown regions of uncharted space. The mortality rate was naturally high. A majority of those who went out usually lost sub-space radio contact and were never seen or heard from again.

  Alone with a humanoid robot called SD-11 that acted as a navigator and something to talk to during the endless months in space, Danny steered his surveyor ship Searcher Seven through the outer fringe of the solar system. After the three-week passage through the icy limbo of the Oort cloud, Danny prepared to take the ship into hyper-drive. In a moment, it would feel as if he were riding to the stars on a hydrogen bomb.

  Service Droid-11 watched Danny as he carried out the procedure for initiating hyper-drive and automatically reminded him in its cold uninspiring voice to activate the inertial neutralizer, a padded frame which was merely a glorified type of seatbelt. Danny hated the way SD-11 reminded him of the obvious. He also disliked the way the conversation with the robot was always one way. The thing was invaluable as a walking wikidatabase and a top-class navigator, but it certainly wasn't a conversationalist. In the last minute before the ship produced fifty megatons of thrust in its combustion chambers, Danny unzipped his arm pouch and took out a small black piece of rectangular plastic. The memory chip he had taken from the rusted corpse of Scarecrow all those years ago. One night in his childhood he exhumed the remains of Scarecrow and tried to resuscitate him with a battery and two jump leads. In the end he felt like a surgeon who had battled in vain to save a doomed patient, and Danny had to be content with a memento from his dead friend; a component plucked at random from a socket in Scarecrow's wired innards, A computer memory chip that would now hopefully serve as a lucky charm.

  As he put the souvenir back in his arm pouch, the ship shook and Danny was pressed back into his chair with a force that nearly sent him into unconsciousness. The explosion in Searcher Seven's combustion chamber hurled the ship across millions of miles of interstellar space on a course for a newly discovered giant asteroid named Hades, which orbited the sun at a distance of one and a half light years. The journey time to Hades would be five months. Once there, Danny and SD-11 were to land on the minor planet and commence exploratory drillings for valuable ores and minerals.

  The Searcher Seven accelerated into the unknown leagues of the cosmos with a miniature nuclear sun burning behind it, pushing the 68,000 ton ship further and further out. The laser-primed fusion pulse engine produced almost two million pounds of thrust, The ship's hemispherical combustion chamber - which glowed white hot at 1,500 degrees Centigrade - was slightly larger than the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The Searcher ships were notorious for falling apart with the sheer inertial fatigue from their oversized engines, and Danny had lost two friends who died instantly when their vessel had disintegrated and exploded with the ferocity of a supernova six months back. But it was an accepted risk to the Interstellar Surveyors. Danny knew it could happen anytime, but he always tried to push the black thought to the back of his mind. Then four months into the voyage to Hades, Danny was suddenly confronted with his repressed nightmare.

  "Mr Thurber! Wake up! Condition Red Twelve," SD-11 shook Danny out of a light sleep.

  "Uh? What's going on?"

  "Unacceptable stress levels in the ship's reactor frame. Break up will follow in three minutes and forty-four seconds. Condition Red Twelve. Commencing escape drill," said SD-11, punching in a eight-digit code on the keyboard of the ship's control computer. "Oh no. I don't believe it." Danny watched the frame of the inertial neutralizer automatically descend onto him. It braced him for the jolt that was to follow. SD-11 sat in its chair and two seconds later, there was a tremendous explosion as the cone-shaped nose of the Searcher Seven separated from its doomed stern.

  Three minutes later, the engine of Searcher Seven exploded and produced a blinding ball of light that expanded into a ring of incandescent material. Then a deadly shower of glowing shrapnel from the explosion hit the hull of the jettisoned nose section. Razor-sharp hull-plates from the deceased ship sliced through the outer layers of the nose cone and severed piping and electrical cables, An incandescent bolt whizzed through the hull and embedded itself in Danny's right shoulde
r. He screamed in agony and blacked out.Danny came to and the harsh scent of an antiseptic substance filled his nostrils. He tried to get up, but he felt groggy. SD-11 bent over him.

  "Don't try to get up yet. You have to rest," said the robot.

  "What happened?"

  "A piece of shrapnel from the Searcher Seven punctured the hull and entered your shoulder. I have patched up the hull. I have removed the bolt from you and have stitched up your shoulder. Please rest," said SD-11 in a comforting tone.

  "You mean you operated on me?" said Danny, astonished at the robot's programmed capabilities.

  "Yes."

  "Thanks, Where are we now?"

  "I don't know. The ship's navigational computer is out of order. Damaged by shrapnel. I am also damaged.

  "Look." SD-ll's head whirred around one-hundred and eighty degrees, and the automaton pointed at the gaping hole in the back of its smoothe chrome skull. The hole was deep, and Danny could see the remnants of pulverised nano-circuit boards within it.

  The cone-shaped craft tumbled through space towards the planets of another system. Danny hauled himself out of his chair and walked to the window. He pressed a button and the two-inch thick molybdenum shield slid away, revealing the glaring red light of Proxima Centauri. Danny was shocked. Not only was he obviously further from the solar system than he had imagined. The reflection of his face was bearded. He lifted his hands to feel the beard and noticed that his nails were two-inches long.

  "Please rest." said SD-11, behind him.

  "How long have I been unconscious?" Danny turned to SD-11 as he spoke.

  "Four and a half months. Please rest. I will continue to feed you intravenously."

  "Four and a half months?" Danny rushed to the controls and saw to his horror that all the displays on the panel were dead. No readouts of speed, right-ascension and declination, nothing. He'd have to guide the ejected craft down onto a planet by manual skill alone. Almost an impossibility.