The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “You remember I said there was an entry in the current ship’s log about the creatures being concerned that they had somehow created the situation they found when they arrived?” We both nodded. “Well, that situation is explained in a little more detail in the previous record.” At this point, Jimmy-James sat back on his chair and seemed to draw in his breath.

  “Okay: the log says that they were following the course taken by an earlier ship – one that had disappeared a long time ago – when they experienced some kind of terrible space storm the like of which had never previously being recorded. For a time, it was touch and go that they would survive, though survive they did. But when the storm subsided, they were nowhere that they recognized. After a few of their time periods – which, based on the limited information in the new book, I would put at quarter days . . . give or take an hour – there was a sudden blinding flash of light and a huge explosion. When they checked their instruments, they discovered that the ship was about to impact upon a planet which had apparently appeared out of nothingness.”

  Ed looked confused. “So this explosion went off before they hit the planet?”

  JJ nodded.

  “I don’t get it,” Ed said.

  I said to let Jimmy-James finish.

  “There hadn’t been any planet there at all until then,” JJ said. “Then, there it was. And that planet was Earth.

  “They narrowly averted the collision,” JJ went on, “and settled onto the planet’s surface. After checking atmospheric conditions they prepared to go outside. The log finished with them wondering what they’ll find there.”

  While JJ had been talking I’d been holding my breath without even realizing it. I let it out with a huge sigh. “Are you sure?”

  The owner of the best mind in town shook his head sadly.

  “But you think you’re right.”

  “I think I’m right, yes.”

  “And they found us, right?”

  “Right, Ed,” JJ said. “They found us.” He waited.

  I thought over everything I had heard and knew there was something there that should bother me . . . but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was. Then it hit me. “The blinding flash,” I said. “If before that blinding flash there was nothing and after it there was the Earth . . . then, if the creatures’ time does move backwards, and their version of their arrival is – or will be – our version of their departure, that means the aliens will destroy the planet when they leave.”

  JJ was nodding. “That’s the way I figure it, too,” he said.

  I looked across at Ed and he looked across at me. “What are we going to do?” I asked JJ.

  JJ shrugged. “We have to stop them leaving . . . in terms of our own time progression.”

  “But, in their terms, that would be to stop them arriving . . . and they’re already here.”

  “Yes, that’s true. In just the same way, if we do something to stop them – and I see only one course of action there – then, again in our time, they never actually ‘arrive’ . . . though, of course, they’ve arrived already as far as we’re concerned. What we do, is prevent their departure in our terms.”

  Ed Brewster shook his head and pushed himself off the sofa onto the floor. “Jesus Christ, I’m getting a goddam headache here,” he said. “Their arrival is our departure . . . their departure is our arrival . . . but if they don’t do this, how could they do that . . . and as for palindoodad . . .” He stood up and rubbed his hands through his hair. “This all sounds like something off Howdy Doody. What does it all mean? How can we play about with time like that? How can anybody play about with time like that?”

  “I think it may have been the space storm,” JJ said. “I think, maybe, their time normally progresses in exactly the same way as our own . . . although Albert Einstein said we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be railroaded about time being a one-way linear progre – ”

  “Jesus, Jimmy-James!” Ed shouted, and JJ winced . . . glancing upwards towards his parents’ bedroom while we all waited for sounds of people moving around to see what all the noise was about. “Jesus,” Ed continued in a hoarse whisper, “I can’t keep up with all of this stuff. Just keep it simple.”

  “Okay,” JJ said. “I figure one of two things: either the aliens always move backwards in time or they don’t.

  “If we go for the first option, then we have to ask how they found their way into our universe.”

  “The space storm?” I suggested.

  “I think so,” said JJ. “If we go for the second option – that they don’t normally travel backwards in time – then we have to ask what might have caused the change.” He looked across at me again and gave a small smile.

  I nodded. “The space storm.”

  “Kee-rect! So either way, the storm did the deed. But whatever the cause, the fact remains that they’re here and we have to prevent whatever it was that caused the explosion.”

  We sat for a minute or so considering that. I didn’t like the sound of what I’d heard but I liked the sound of the silence that followed even less. I looked at Ed. He didn’t seem too happy either. “So how do we do that, JJ?” I said.

  JJ shrugged. “We have to kill them . . . kill them all,” he said. He pulled across the almost empty box that we all reckoned was the alien’s current ship’s log and lifted up the few lace-like constructions of interwoven clay pieces. “And we have to do it tonight.”

  I don’t remember the actual rounding up of people that night. And I don’t recall listening to JJ telling his story again and again. But tell it he did, and the people got rounded up. There was me, Sherriff Ben, Ed, Abel, Jerry and Jimmy-James Bannister himself. We walked silently out to the spaceship and weren’t at all surprised to see faint wisps of steam coming out from the sides or that the platform was up for the first time since . . . well, the first time since three days ago. As the platform lowered itself slowly to the dusty ground of the vacant lot across from Bill’s and Ma’s poolroom, I heard JJ call out my name.

  “Derby . . .”

  I turned around and he held up his rifle, then nodded to the others standing there on Sycamore Street, all of them carrying the same kind of thing. “Instruments,” he said.

  By then it was too late. The bets were placed.

  As soon as they appeared we started firing. We moved forward as one mass, vigilantes, firing and clearing, firing and clearing. The creatures never knew what hit them. They just folded up and fell to the ground, some inside the ship and others onto Sycamore Street. When they were down, Sheriff Ben went up to each one and put a couple of bullets into its head from his handgun.

  We continued into the ship and finished the job.

  There were sixteen of them. We combed the ship from top to bottom like men in a fever, a destructive killing frenzy, pulling out pieces of foam and throwing them out into the street . . . in much the same way as you might rip out the wires in the back of a radio to stop it from playing dance band music. God, but we were scared.

  When the sun came up, we put the aliens back on the ship and doused the whole thing in gasoline. Then we put a match to it. It burned quietly, as we might have expected of any vehicle operated by such gentle creatures. It burned for two whole days and nights. When it had finished, we loaded the remains onto Vince Waldon’s flatbed truck and took them out to Darien Lake. The barrier – or “force field”, as JJ called it – had gone. Things were more or less back to normal. For a time.

  It turned out that JJ found more of those ship’s logs that night, when the rest of us were tearing and destroying. Turned out that he sneaked them off the ship and kept them safe until he could get back for them. I didn’t find that out right away.

  He came round to my house about a week later.

  “Derby, we have to talk,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “The aliens.”

  “Oh, for crissakes, I – ” I was going to tell him that I couldn’t stand to talk about those creatures any more, coul
dn’t stand to think about what we’d done to them. But his face looked so in need of conversation that I stopped short. “What about the aliens?” I said.

  That was when Jimmy-James told me he’d taken the old diaries from inside the ship.

  Walking along Sycamore, he said, “Have you ever thought about what we did?”

  I groaned.

  “No, not about us shooting the aliens . . . about how we changed their past?” Someone had left a soda bottle lying on the sidewalk and JJ kicked it gently into the gutter. The clatter it made somehow set off a dog barking and I tried to place the sound but couldn’t. It did sound right, though, that mixture of a lonely dog barking and the night and talking about the aliens . . . like it all belonged together. “I mean,” JJ went on, “we changed our future – which is okay: anyone can do that – but we actually changed things that, as far as they were concerned, had already happened. Did you think about that?”

  “Nope.” We walked in silence for a minute or so, then I said, “Did you?”

  “A little – at first. Then, when I’d read the diaries, I thought about it a lot.” He stopped and turned to me. “You know the big diary, the full box? The one that ended with details of the explosion?”

  I didn’t say anything but I knew what he was talking about.

  “I went into more of the details about the missing ship . . . the one that had disappeared? The last message they received from this other ship was at these same co-ordinates.”

  “So?”

  He shrugged. “The message said they’d been moving along when they suddenly noticed a planet that was not there before.”

  “Do I want to hear this?”

  “I think the Earth is destined for destruction. The aliens were fulfilling some kind of cosmic plan.”

  “JJ, you’re starting to lose me.”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to lose me,” he said with a short laugh. But there was no humour there. “This other ship – the first one, the one that the diary talks about – I’ve calculated that it’s about forty years in their past. Or in our future.”

  I grabbed a hold of his arm and spun him around. “You mean there’s more of those things coming?”

  JJ nodded. “In about forty years, give or take. And they’re going to be going through this section of the universe and BOOM! . . .” He clapped his hands loudly. “‘Hey, Captain,’” JJ said in an accent that sounded vaguely foreign, “‘there’s a planet over there!’ And there’s no kewpie doll for guessing the name of that planet.”

  “So, if they’re moving backwards, too . . . then that means they’ll destroy us.” The dog barked again somewhere over to our right.

  “Yep. But if the aliens we just killed were going to do the job, how could the others have done it, too?”

  “Another planet?”

  JJ shook his head. “The co-ordinates seemed quite specific . . . as far as I could make out. That’s another problem right there.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The diaries are gone. They liquified . . . turned into mulch.”

  “All of it?”

  “Every bit. But it was Earth they were talking about. I’d bet my life on it . . . hell, I’d even bet yours.”

  That was when I fully realized just how much of a friend Jimmy-James Bannister truly was. He placed a greater value on my life than on his own.

  “Which means, of course,” JJ said, “that we were destined to stop the aliens the way we did.”

  “We were meant to do it?”

  “Looks that way to me.” He glanced at me and must have seen me relax a little. “That make you feel better?”

  “A little.”

  “Me too.”

  “What is it? What is it that’s causing the destruction?”

  “Hey, if I knew that . . . Way I figure it, they’re maybe warping across space somehow – kind of like matter transference. The magazines have been talking about that kind of thing for years: they call them black funnels or something.

  “But maybe they’re also warping across time progressions, too . . . without even realizing they’re doing it. Then, as soon as they appear into our dimension or plane, one that operates on a different time progression . . . it’s like a chemical reaction and . . .”

  I clapped my hands. “I know,” I said. “BOOM!”

  “Right.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Right now? Nothing. Right now, the balance has been restored. But the paradox will be repeated . . . around 2003, 2004.” He smiled at me. “Give or take.”

  We went on walking and talking but that’s about all I can remember of that night.

  The next day, or maybe the one after, we told Ed Brewster. And we made ourselves a pact.

  We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell anyone about what had happened. Who would believe us? Where was the proof? A few boxes of slime? Forget it. And if we showed them the blackened stuff at the bottom of Darien Lake . . . well, it was just a heap of blackened stuff at the bottom of a lake.

  But there was another reason we didn’t want to tell anyone outside of Forest Plains about what we’d done. Just like nobody else in town wanted to tell anyone. We were ashamed.

  So we made a pact. We’d keep our eyes peeled – keep watching the skies, as the newspaperman said in The Thing movie . . .

  And when something happens, we’ll know what to do.

  What really gets to me – still, after all this time – is not just that there’s a bunch of aliens somewhere out there, maybe heading on a disaster course with Earth . . . but that, back on their own planet or dimension there’s another bunch of creatures listening to their messages . . . a bunch we killed on the streets of Forest Plains almost forty years ago.

  CASTLE IN THE SKY

  Robert Reed

  Robert Reed (b. 1956) has been one of the more prolific writers of science fiction since he first appeared in 1986. His work is diverse but he is probably best known for his more extreme concepts, such as that found in Marrow (2000), about a group of aliens and genetically changed humans who travel through the universe in a ship that is so huge that it contains its own planet. Most of his short stories remain to be collected into book form but some will be found in The Dragons of Springplace (1999) and The Cuckoo’s Boys (2005). This story, which is published here for the first time, is a little more down to Earth, or at least the Moon, but contains a far-reaching concept with untold consequences.

  WHEN I WAS EIGHT years old, my best friend lived a few doors down the street – a little black-haired kid named Donnie Warner. Donnie was about as shy as anybody I’ve ever known, and he was desperately sweet. I always enjoyed my time with him. His toys were different from my toys, which is a major selling point among kids. We didn’t fight about anything, which means one of us probably got his way more often than not. And that was probably me, I should confess. But I don’t remember being particularly bossy, and I’m halfway sure that Donnie equally enjoyed my company. There was a long stretch during third grade when he came up to my house almost daily, to visit me and to escape from his own difficult home. My parents and other gossipy adults talked about Donnie’s family. The Warners didn’t have much money, it seemed, and I’d heard words like “weird” and “crazy” to define life under their roof. Nobody sat me down to explain why that was, but I always assumed it was because the mother was stuck home alone with four kids: Donnie was the oldest, and there were two baby sisters. There were also various cats and a young golden retriever rescued from the pound – a dog meant for Donnie, though my friend rarely showed interest in the beast. There was a father too, but he frequently traveled for work. On those rare occasions when I played at the Warner house, things seemed noisy but not exceptionally strange. The only genuine oddity, at least to my mind, was that both of the adults were into religion. Every room had at least one crucifix watching over it, and on Sunday mornings the entire family dressed up in their best clothes and piled into an elderly Oldsmobile station wagon, driving off to visit t
heir church and demanding God.

  One evening – a Monday evening – Donnie walked to my house and rang the bell, then with his usual shy politeness asked my mother if I could play for a little while. But Mom had other ideas. I was sitting in the kitchen, using a glue stick and plain cardboard to erect a spectacularly ugly castle. My assignment was due at eight-thirty in the morning, sharp. “Tell your buddy hello and goodbye,” Mom barked at me. “Then get back in here. I’m not doing any piece of this work.”

  I stepped onto our little concrete porch to explain things.

  Donnie was never angry. He had deer-like eyes, big and always edging into depression. And since eight-year-old boys usually don’t notice things like sadness, he must have been pretty miserable to get my empathy flowing. On that particular night, his voice was softer than usual. His father had just flown to Memphis, he explained. Gone until the end of the week. I couldn’t see why that mattered, but I said, “Okay,” and then, “Huh”. Donnie listened while I described my castle. Then I asked if he had his project done, and he said, “Yeah.” Except it didn’t sound like an answer to my question. It was polite noise, and I could tell that he wasn’t really listening to me. Which made me a little angry. Then he asked if he could hang out in my room and play with my Gameboy. It didn’t seem to matter what he was doing, so long as he was close to me. But I just kept telling him that I shouldn’t and he couldn’t, sorry, my school project was the only thing that mattered now, and I was really tired of my mother staring at us through the storm door.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay, Donnie?”

  He just nodded, gave me a weak smile and wandered off.

  I returned to the kitchen and finished the castle’s brown walls and a couple of tilted towers, and sticking a pennant or two on top, I called it quits.

  Maybe I felt bad about brushing him off, or maybe I just wanted help lugging my project to school. Either way, I stopped by Donnie’s house that next morning, ringing the bell until I was sure nobody was going to answer. Then I picked up my castle again and carefully went down the steps, pausing on the driveway for a few seconds, finally noticing the warm, faintly damp smell of car exhaust.