by A. A. Glynn
“Are you trying to say she was only a legend too, like Vanderdecken?” growled the Skipper who now, uneasily, remembered that Carla Stanton was under his command for the first time and he, too, knew nothing of her antecedents. Impulsively, he moved to the command console, took up the voice piece of the ship’s Central Computer and barked into it: “report on history of Stanton, Carla, Surgeon officer First Class, aboard for this voyage.”
Almost at once, the smooth female voice of the computer answered: “No record of this person aboard for this voyage. No such person recorded in the service.”
“A legend,” breathed the bewildered Skipper. “Was she only a legend? Were we really just instruments in closing an ancient tale?”
“But she was real enough to stitch the cut in my arm not a month ago and I have the scar to prove it,” objected Chandos, the second officer.
“And she was real enough when we were off-ship. Though she was not detailed to be in the party and no one noticed her in its number. She was just there in some peculiar way,” said the Skipper. “What was the term you used, Chastain—mystic? The whole damned affair is mystical, all right. Did we in reality encounter a legend, astray in deep space—or we were all simply Tunnel-happy after all?”
“Where do legends end and reality begin?” queried the second officer. Then, showing unsuspected out-of-the-way scholarship, he added: “Old John Stuart Mill wrote long ago that under every legend there is usually a foundation of truth.”
“Well the only solidly comforting truth in all this is that I don’t have to put in a missing-on-duty report,” the Skipper said. “How can I when Stanton was not recorded in the crew and, seemingly, not even in the service?” He gave an ironic laugh. “You’ll all have a tale to tell when you reach home—but you’ll never be believed. Never in a million years.”
And in the vision-screen, there was only the tranquil and limitless vista of the ocean of stars, where a legend of the earthly seas had died and a new one of the interplanetary deeps had just been born.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony Arthur Glynn was born in Manchester in 1929, and had a disrupted wartime childhood, including enduring the Luftwaffe’s blitzing of the city in 1940 and 1941.
Drawn to art and writing from an early age, he was strongly influenced by two uncles, one a newspaperman who, in his spare time, wrote a variety of articles as well as fiction for juvenile weeklies. The other, who settled in Canada, was a chief theatrical scenic artist, working on the sets for many top stage shows.
Reading avidly from a young age, he became interested in all kinds of books and devoured popular fiction. Discovering the American comic strip Buck Rogers when he was about seven sparked off a lifelong interest in science fiction, and he later became well known among British science fiction fans. This activity led to lasting friendships and opportunities to write and illustrate in the amateur fanzines of Britain and the US.
At twenty-two came his first professional science fiction sale. Others followed and he worked in other fields, including juvenile fiction and, eventually, western and detective novels.
He started work as a textile designer in Manchester at sixteen and studied the subject at Manchester Regional College of Art in the evenings. After two years’ National Service in the army, he changed direction for a short period, his fascination with theatre and film leading him into the professional film world—as a projectionist for the Rank Organisation.
In his early twenties, he became a reporter on a weekly newspaper in Cheshire, serving an enjoyable apprenticeship covering rural events and riding country lanes on a bicycle. Later, he returned to Manchester, produced some Western novels; worked on the features desk of the Sunday Mirror; and spent thirty-three years with the Bolton Evening News newspaper group as chief reporter, then assistant editor of one of its weekly papers.
Since retiring, he has written a number of new western novels, as well as short science fiction and fantasy stories for Wildside’s Fantasy Adventures series, some of which are collected in this volume. Currently he is planning a series of detective novels, the first of which, Case of the Dixie Ghosts, was published by Borgo Press in 2012.
