Friday, July 29, 2022

Home

 Welcome to William Hammett's Fiction Blog. I'm an author under my own name as well as a ghostwriter. Two of the more frequent questions I'm asked is "What kind of style do you use?" and "May I see a writing sample?" Actually, I use the style that fits the project for any given client. Any professional ghostwriter who cannot vary style to fit a client's needs or the genre or project at hand is in the wrong business.

All of the writing samples on this site were written by me and reflect the many genres that I've been interested in over the years as well as a diversity of styles I've used. I have always enjoyed trying out new things when it comes to writing, which is one the qualities I possess that I believe makes me a great ghostwriter.

Please browse the writing samples by using the Site Map to guide you to the index of all samples. These samples are, for the most part, excerpts from novels I have written, and all are formally copyrighted according to copyright law as codified by the U. S. Copyright Office. No sample may be used or reproduced in any medium without my express written permission.

Some of the samples are complete short stories, and others are flash fiction. These too are copyrighted under my own name even if they have previously appeared in literary journals, which is the case for several.

Many of the books in which these excerpts appear (or appeared) are on Amazon while others are out of print. Some are currently under consideration by literary agents or publishing houses. All are copyrighted.

If you're looking for a ghostwriter, I hope you'll find this site useful. But remember that the style I use for a client may be totally unique and not represented here.

Thanks for stopping by!

~William Hammett


Site Map

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Flash Fiction

Many of the samples on this site are flash fiction, but what exactly is "flash fiction"? Flash fiction is a very short story that may run 250 words to 1,000 words, although most of these short works average 500 words. They may be about anything and represent both literary fiction as well as other genres of fiction, such as romance, horror, science fiction, western, romance, thriller, suspense, and more.

Writing flash fiction can be challenging since an entire plot must be condensed to fit this unique format. That having been said, flash fiction may only hint at thematic elements, and it is the reader's task to infer larger meanings from the piece. In that sense, it is not unlike poetry, the defining characteristic of which is brevity (in most cases) and a compression of ideas. In essence, a work of flash fiction is a vignette, a brief narrative that seeks to convey a maximum amount of information in as short a space as possible.

Many consider Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology and its sequel, Across Spoon River, to be a collection of flash fiction pieces given that the hundreds of entries in these works are very brief prose poems that tell the stories of characters that, when taken together, comprise a complete picture of a small town. It is a highly experimental and innovative work that deserves more attention than it gets.

Some of the more notable writers of flash fiction are Joyce Carol Oates, David Barthelme, and Amy Hempel. Looking back at literary greats, however, the list is much longer. Some of the more famous practitioners of the "short short story" are O. Henry, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Garrison Keillor, Philip K. Dick, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, and H.P. Lovecraft. While flash fiction is not published as widely as novels and regular-length short stories, most literary journals and magazines with a literary bent, such as the New Yorker, publish the format.

One of my favorite flash fiction writers is Richard Brautigan, and a majority of my own flash fiction work resembles the flavor of Brautigan's short tales in that they are humorous and at times surrealistic.

Several examples of my flash fiction are exhibited on this site (and more will be featured in the future). I hope you will take the time to explore this very rewarding literary format.

~William Hammett


Site Map

Monday, July 25, 2022

The Queen of Jarvis Avenue (Horror)

Chapter One

 

She was the Queen of Jarvis Avenue, though no one outside of the warehouse district would have mistaken her for royalty.  She was a light-skinned African in her fifties, tattered black and yellow veils trailing behind her as she pulled her rusty wagon along the deserted street.   The other residents of the district simply called her Queen.  No one in this area, in fact, used his or her real name.  This was a no man’s land where even cop cruisers didn’t patrol.  No one here was a real person as far as society was concerned.

            Society?

            Society didn’t exist within these borders, at least not in the conventional sense of the term.  Society lay somewhere beyond the ten square blocks of dilapidated buildings and abandoned warehouses where signs announced their faded presences like weary, crucified ghosts: Columbian Coffee Imports; Riverside Wire and Cable; Louisiana Paper; Jarvis Street Welding.  Society was what inhabitants of the area left behind when they took up residence in the alleys and weed-strewn lots and vacant office buildings.

            The Badlands, as the area was known, was a place for broken souls and ruined lives, a place where the needle was very much alive, and dreams—how ludicrous!—were dead or dying.

            Queen pulled her wagon slowly, wheels complaining, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a sagging edifice that God himself had vacated many years before when local businesses began to relocate to suburban New Orleans.  Irish immigrants erected the church in 1858 and worshipped in the cathedral for several decades while they dug an intricate canal system throughout New Orleans, thousands of workers dying of malaria and cholera because of the mosquito-infested swamps they worked in.  St. Patrick’s was said to have more than its fair share of ghosts seeking a wee nip of altar wine.  By 1970, most of the church’s stained glass windows were shattered, pigeons cooing peculiar hymns near the vaulted ceiling.

            The wagon squeaked and clattered over the broken concrete sidewalk, knee-high weeds claiming the cracks, as Queen walked up Jarvis Avenue.  Her old Red Flyer held the instruments of her divinations, for she was priestess and soothsayer and teller of tales.  Her mother had been a practitioner of voodoo; her aunt had been a Catholic nun.  Her father had been a magician, and his most outstanding trick was the way he disappeared every evening in order to buy cheap whiskey.  When Queen was fifteen, he performed his greatest trick of all: he vanished when his wife announced that she was expecting their eighth child.

            Queen hardly noticed her father’s absence.  The dreams started, the ones in which she found herself conversing with slaves who’d died on Louisiana plantations in the nineteenth century.  The dream slaves instructed her in spiritual matters, told her stories, showed her how to become an eagle, a fox, a snake.  They taught her how to mix powders and fashion amulets.  They instructed her in the sexual arts, teaching her how two women could make each other pregnant by commingling their menstrual blood when making love.

            Queen wandered away one day—no one in her large family noticed—in order to learn even greater secrets from Papa Devereaux, a voodoo priest whose ancestors came from Haiti.  Papa was the one who showed her how to mimic death, to slow both heartbeat and respiration to produce the creature known as a zombie.

            As an adult, she lived in a small apartment in the French Quarter, making her living by helping barren women to conceive.  Even Caucasian women consulted her after spending thousands of dollars on fertility clinics.  Queen’s prices were more reasonable—a few dollars for rent and groceries—and her methods more successful, if somewhat unorthodox.  Some of her potions had unexpected side-effects, however.  One of her more desperate patients gave birth to a child who was robust and healthy, if not altogether human.  There had been many inquiries from the staff of the neighborhood clinic, and even some of her friends began avoiding her.

            Queen drifted to the Badlands, where she was free of nosy neighbors and knocks on the door at midnight by people seeking love potions, people who’d heard from a friend of a friend that she possessed special powers.  She was free to live in what Papa Devereaux called “the circle,” which was a frame of mind, a way of life in which destiny and free will were allies rather than opposites.

            She was in the circle on this very afternoon, as a matter of fact, when the wind stirred her hair.  She stopped, sniffed.  A cloud scudded across the sky before becoming impaled on a chain link fence that protected the empty New Orleans Transit Yard, once home to a hundred buses.

            Something was most certainly in the air.  Queen could always tell when something unusual was going to happen.  She could tell when the Devil’s Children were going to come out of hiding.  She could sense when a tourist, dressed in khaki shorts, was going to accidentally stray into the Badlands while studying a map, a tourist who rarely made it back to his or her hotel.

            But this wasn’t a tourist she was sensing.  This was something—someone—that was very unique.

            She looked around at the battered neighborhood.  No one else was on the street.

            She bent over, taking a handful of polished stones from the Red Flyer.  Breathing deeply, she knelt down on the sidewalk, passing the stones from one hand to the other, mumbling “tell me sky and tell me wind—tell me of salvation from the father’s sin.”

            She threw the stones onto the ground, where they tumbled in a random pattern.

            Random?

            Not to Queen.  She drew back suddenly, her eyes wide with surprise or fascination or some combination of both.

            “Come, little bird,” she whispered, her voice low and full of anticipation, like the first autumn wind.  “Come." 

            Queen’s upper torso spiraled, her hands outstretched, her eyes closed in a trance.  She hummed, circling some inner vision, some picture that could only be recognized by a soothsayer and teller of tales.

            The cloud impaled on the chain link fence moved on, no longer a prisoner of the Badlands.  Queen straightened up and smiled.

            The little bird—the one she’d seen in her death dream years before—was finally coming into the circle.

            A sound like thunder rumbled across the Badlands even though the sky was clear.  No storm menaced the deserted streets, but the air was nevertheless electric as the evening air turned crimson and violet.

            Another rumble echoed across Jarvis Avenue.  Queen turned to the Columbian Coffee Imports warehouse.  She wasn’t sure what the sound was.  It was too early in the month for the Devil’s Children to make their appearance, although lately she’d seen a few of the filthy urchins lurking in shadows and doorways, and that was causing Queen some concern.  Perhaps a beam inside the warehouse had become dislodged and fallen.  Perhaps a large storage drum had rolled across the warehouse floor.

            Perhaps.

            Queen resumed her journey, the Red Flyer’s wheels singing a song understood only by the blue jays perched on the chain link fence.


Site Map

 

Friday, July 22, 2022

It Doesn't Have to Rain at Funerals (Literary Flash Fiction)

The man stood among the mourners, looking somber and serious while dozens of black-clad figures huddled beneath dozens of black umbrellas as a steady downpour seemed to echo the sentiments of the occasion.  The deceased was being lowered into the ground.  People were sad.  Death had won again, and the sky was shedding copious tears.

Unable to hear the words of the presiding minister any longer, the man looked about, a mourner-turned-sociologist.  He felt like he was in a Hollywood movie, which almost always depicted funerals as events that occurred under glowering skies heavy with raindrops.  Movie funerals, he realized, were stereotypes, and he, for one, didn't intent to become a stereotype.  It was only raining, he reasoned, because people had expected it to rain.  Stereotypes can burrow into people's brains like worms into wood.

The man closed his umbrella and smiled.  The rain let up a bit, and a few more umbrellas were folded.  The rain slacked off even more, and that's when crowd mentality took over.  The umbrella mourners didn't want to look foolish, so they followed the non-umbrella mourners in closing up their bumbershoots as they stood reverently by the graveside.  The dark clouds and rain had all been a big misunderstanding. 

The sun came out, and everyone smiled as the minister finished ministering.  Rain and death and dark clouds, the man thought, were just a frame of mind.

"It doesn't have to rain at funerals," he proclaimed.

The mourners apparently agreed.  They all shook the man's hand after offering their condolences to the family members of the deceased.


Site Map

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

The Day of Offering (Science Fiction)

From the novel The Sky Father's Web by William Hammett
Copyright William Hammett 2018, 2022
All Rights Reserved


Chapter One

 

Bobby McAllister stood facing the semicircle of adults gathered on the fringe of the green town square. Behind him was the black iron statue of Lemuel Blackwood Tucker, founder of Tucker’s Ridge, Tennessee. A white cloud obscured the sun, although it was a pleasant enough August morning and a few sparrows observed from the century-old oak tree that some said looked like a blacksmith hammering a forge when the sun struck it at just the right angle in the late afternoon. A slight breeze stirred the bangs from Bobby’s forehead. He was eleven but short for his height, and the hand-me-down overalls were a size too big for him.

            “That a boy, Bobby,” a few people mumbled.

            “You can do it.”

            “Don’t be afraid. Just walk right in, and we’ll pray that you’re one of the ones who come out.”

            “God’s always with you when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” Minister Perkins intoned in a nasal voice from the edge of the crowd, five deep. He wore a black suit and held a black leather-bound Bible cracked at the binding from decades of baptizing and delivering sermons and burying townsfolk and offering comfort to lonely widows.

            I suspect you’ll be needing this,” said Ben Crick, handing Bobby a brand new claw hammer. The thin eighty-year-old man owned the brick hardware store on Main Street which ran horizontally directly behind the square. Crick was wiry, all elbows and knees draped with a red and black checkered shirt, and people said he looked like a scarecrow who’d up and left his pole out in the cornfield just to show the farmers of Tucker’s Ridge who was boss. He was gruff and liked to scowl at little children.  On the Day of Offering, however, he was more subdued, and his croaky voice, scraped raw by unfiltered cigarettes, didn’t convey its usual mean-spiritedness.

            Bobby accepted the hammer in his right hand, his left already clutching a loaf of banana nut bread.

            Hill Richardson, the postmaster, flicked his wrist, motioning for Bobby to turn around and commence his duty.

            Bobby’s heart beat quickly as he faced the opposite direction by moving his feet in small half-steps, swallowing hard as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a cork being tugged by a Trout in the stream that ran behind the mill a mile away. Bobby’s mother Samantha raised her smart phone and snapped a picture of her son, but his father, Dom Ray McAllister, pushed her hand down harshly, a clear indication that the event was not one that should be memorialized. She’d just wanted to get a shot of Bobby being brave . . . and just in case there would be no more photographs.

            Aye, that was the rub. Some children never came back again from the ceremony in that . . . thing up ahead.  A few did, and they usually had vacant looks in their eyes, as if they’d been hypnotized or stared too long at the spinning disks and wavy mirrors at a traveling carnival. These unfortunate kids were sometimes sent to Dr. Merwin Childress, a retired psychiatrist who lived in a large, ramshackle Victorian house half a mile from the end of Main Street. Childress wore a brown suit, red bow tie, and thick glasses that magnified his pale blue eyes, and he scared children and adults alike with his long, probing stares, as if mining for information from the depth of the souls he encountered when he retrieved mail from his Post Office box or did some shopping on Main Street. But did he help the children with vacant stares, known to the town as the Lost Souls? No, those unfortunate beings were usually sent to Bleak House, a nickname given by Charles McAllister, Bobby’s Father, to the gray, four-story, stone building that housed troubled or runaway kids from three adjoining counties. It’s Dickensian character was merited, for it was a facade of masonry that was like a black hole, a building from which no sounds emanated, and no one, neither child nor adult, was seen walking about the grounds of the three acres surrounding the facility.

            And there it was, shiny on its underside and black on top, a circular spacecraft that had silently fell from the sky with no more drama than a fall leaf floating to the ground. That had been in early May, and the alien ship had been on the green behind the statue of Lemuel Tucker ever since.

            Bobby McAllister bravely took a step forward, and then another. Then two more. After thirty seconds, he was dead even with the statue. He glanced left and frowned at the metallic likeness, which he regarded as a sham. Tucker had allegedly been an Army hero lost in World War One while fighting the Battle of the Marne in France. He’d never returned, not even as a dead body in a coffin, and rumors had been spread over the years that Tucker was a myth, a figment of the collective imagination of Tucker’s Ridge, a man who gave pride and purpose to a small town not far from a ridge that overlooked a green valley that rolled for miles. The town librarian and archivist said that she couldn’t find any birth certificate for Tucker or, for that matter, any records at all for a family named Tucker within a hundred miles of Main Street or the square or the flagpole near the bandstand, it’s rope and metal hooks clanging against the steel pole when a winter wind whipped through the town. Bobby had written as much in the essay writing contest a year earlier, and the principal of his school had wadded the paper into a ball and thrown it into the corner trashcan of his classroom, telling him that it was wrong, unpatriotic, disgraceful to shame his town, his roots, his heritage. Lemuel Blackwood Tucker was a hero. Mr. and Mrs. McAllister had promised the principal that Bobby would be more respectful in the future.

            “You’re nothing but crap,” Bobby muttered, talking to the statue as his legs carried him an extra step before craning his head to look at the expectant, nervous, watchful faces of the crowd behind him. There were, of course, no children present. No one under fourteen ever attended the Day of Offering unless it was his turn, girls being excluded from the ritual. But Bobby saw them in his mind’s eye nevertheless, the tall ones and the bold ones and those who could cut the wind like a knife when they played sports or catch or just horsed around in the schoolyard.

            Go away, runt!

            Still wearing your older brother’s overalls?

            Look! It’s the kid with two left feet.

            Bobby was never picked for any of the teams when Tom Windhoven and Carl Buck chose their baseball teams on Saturday afternoons at the sandlot behind the feed store. “he can’t throw or bat or catch,” Tom claimed. “At least not very well.” Bobby was only chosen if somebody was sick or had a broken leg, and he was always put into right field where he couldn’t do too much damage unless the left-handed Carl Buck hit a long fly ball. Sometimes Bobby caught it, but more often than not he dropped it since he was forced to use his big brother’s oversized glove.

            He turned around and stared harshly at the citizens, their nervous, hopeful eyes fixed on him, a boy, who was being asked to do a man’s job. He was always picked on, so why did he draw such an assignment? Why not let Eddy Bricker or Andy Pine, two hulking boys who played varsity football for Tucker High, bring the alien what it wanted. Both boys—and many more—were as solid as telephone poles or tree stumps.

            He faced forward again, angry. The alien had communicated with townspeople telepathically ever since the ship had landed. It said that its craft had been damaged upon entering earth’s atmosphere but that it couldn’t leave its ship, a detail that it obviously didn’t wish to explain. It had asked for various bits of hardware from Crick’s value Hardware and electronics from Will Payne’s electronics store, which sold smart phones, computers, and all things digital. The parts were allegedly to help the extraterrestrial repair its ship.

            There had been no military invasion of the town—no men in Black or CIA or Air Force brass to investigate the visitor—since the unseen being in the saucer had obviously used its telepathic powers to block anyone from entering Tucker’s Ridge. Cars pulled up to point five miles out of town on State Highway 12 and stopped, passengers getting out, scratching their heads, and muttering, “No, I think we should turn around. We must have taken a wrong turn. We certainly don’t want to go through that Godforsaken town.” Some claimed to have heard warnings about a medical quarantine of the town or a deadly chemical leak from a rail car passing on the tracks skirting the north end of the hamlet.

            The alien’s mental powers could also cause electronic havoc since no radio, cell phone, or television signal could get in or out of the town. It was as if Tucker’s Ridge existed in dead air space. Many people had stood on their green, manicured front lawns, looking skywards, but they saw no enclosure or dome such as the one in the story written by that fella in Maine who wrote the long books. No, the alien had severed contact with the rest of the world using the same telepathic powers—and who knows what other kind of alien mojo—that enabled him to place his thoughts, always in the form of demands and warnings, into the minds of Tucker’s Ridge inhabitants. The requests weren’t frequent, and were reminders that children should bring it the parts to repair the parts as well as food. No adults need apply, and that had become obvious when Sheriff Vernon Gimble had tried to enter the craft, not that he’d had the courage or moxie to get put down his donuts, get off his ass, and walk up to the craft and take a look-see at the craft. The mayor and townspeople had insisted that he act like a sheriff for once in his life since he mostly functioned as the school crossing guard in a town that hadn’t seen a crime committed since someone stole a few chickens from Mrs. Watson’s henhouse sixteen years earlier. Vernon had been thrust backwards on his derriere by . . . well, he didn’t know what had thrown him unceremoniously backwards fifteen feet when he’d climbed the sloping ramp that led into the ship. He foolishly said it had been an atomic ray, but that was Hollywood B movie parlance, and nobody believed it. What they did accept was that adults weren’t welcome and that something powerful and kept Vernon from trying to enter the spaceship.

            The statue to a man who probably never existed, Vernon Gimble’s cowardice and lies, the bullying from classmates—all of these things made Bobby mad, mad as hell. He breathed fast as he turned one last time to look at the faces of people sending a boy to do a man’s job—to hell with the alien’s demand. He was ready to shoot fire from his eyes and thunder obscenities if he’d had a louder voice, but the voice within was loud and he decided he didn’t give a lousy damn what or who was inside the ship. If he never came out, that would be fine by him. Whatever was inside, even if it tortured kids, couldn’t be worse than living in Tucker’s Ridge.

            Bobby turned one last time to look at the faces of the people sending David to face Goliath, a group of people huddled together and gawking as if the terrible event was almost recreation, a reprieve from the daily routine of their lives that was purgatory since living in a small town in the digital age had left people restless and unfulfilled and longing for bright lights, big city. He saw Joe Nighthawk, the Native American, standing on the edge of the crowd, playing cat’s cradle with Seamus, the town drunk. Joe had told a group of children huddled around a campfire one summer’s night that the earth and the planets and stars—everything, in fact—were just specks of dust caught in the Sky Father’s web, like flies caught in the intricate filaments spun by arachnids. He said that this was his tribe’s model of creation, and that the reason he constantly played cat’s cradle was because the string—flexed and angled and crisscrossing between two sets of hands—reminded him of a spider’s web.

            Joe paused, looked at Bobby, then smiled and nodded.

            Bobby was still mad—mad at the town and mad at life—but he thought Joe Nighthawk knew a thing or two about life, and Joe often talked to the boy when things weren’t going so well. Bobby could sit and listen to Native American wisdom for hours, knowledge passed to Joe by the elders of the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

            Bobby walked forward confidently, his heart no longer hammering against his ribs like a blacksmith’s hammer. The silver ramp of the craft slid forward from its belly as a door slid upwards, a black, ominous rectangle beyond.

            Clutching the hammer and bread, Bobby entered the ship. He walked down a corridor for ten yards—the craft seemed so much larger on the inside than he thought possible, leading him to think that the n three dimensions were somehow being stretched inside the round ship—and came to a round chamber with the creature sitting in a well at its center. It was a monstrous, gelatinous eye, ten feet tall, and it sat on the brown, rubbery body from which extended a dozen tentacles, thirty feet in length, that played along the sides of the craft, working its controls and causing thousands of lights to blink. The eye was periodically covered, bottom to top, by two large transparent membranes. Its black pupil rotated this way and that, dilating and shrinking as it surveyed its surroundings, but only a few seconds passed before it focused on Bobby McAllister.

            Put the hammer and loaf of bread at your feet.

            The words appeared magically in Bobby’s mind, and this was the first time that he personally had been in communication with the giant alien eye or octopus or whatever it was. The voice, the words were like the clashing of symbols, waves breaking on a shore, the echo in a large auditorium. So loud! But the words were intelligible, and Bobby knew exactly what was being asked of him. He placed the banana bread on the floor, and within seconds a tentacle snaked over a railing protecting the ship’s inhabitant and snatched the food and brought it to a slit in its brown body, where the loaf disappeared immediately.

            I don’t like the taste of human flesh. I’ve tried it. It’s nasty and doesn’t nourish me. Now give me the hammer.

            “Why does an advanced alien need hardware and electronics from twenty-first century earth. It’s not to repair your stupid ship!” Bobby spit out the words as he flipped the finger to the awful, dreadful, monstrously large eye. “No, I won’t give you the hammer, you . . . freak!”

            The tentacles began whipping about in a frenzy, Bobby ducking on rolling on the titanium deck plate, at times rolling forwards as if he were maneuvering a modern obstacle course. One tentacle slipped around his ankle, pulling him off his feet, but Bobby, adrenaline flowing like a river at crest through his bloodstream, tore the soft, fleshy skin of the limb with the claw of the hammer. A sound like a full orchestra—pain—exploded in the boy’s head. Another tentacle chased him, and six smaller tentacles, like fingers, grew from its parent groping and groping for the wrist of the elusive, stubborn human.

            It was during one of Bobby’s tumbles that his eyes aimed at the dome of the ship, glowing like a fluorescent dish turned upside down. His eyes widened, but he drove away the terror with sheer willpower as he beheld twenty of the town’s youth, stuck to the dome as if magnetized. Their forms were plastered against the glowing surface, arms and limbs and heads contorted in grotesque poses. The looks on their twisted features spoke of pain, fear, consternation. The boys, many of whom had been merciless as they mocked Bobby McAllister, looked like flies stuck to flypaper, their eyes, bulging and white, pleading with the boy below to do something—anything—to free them from the hell of being trapped inside the alien spacecraft. And yet no words were uttered by the captives, not even a grunt or a groan, their hair spilling over their ears and foreheads. The creature was muting the speech centers in their brains by whatever mental powers enabled it to do all it did while its craft was parked on the town square of the backwater known as Tucker’s Ridge.

            But the creature also needed to keep the boys alive, and Bobby noted that one of its tentacles was dedicated solely to feeding morsels of bread and vials of water to its captives high in the air.

            Bobby had an epiphany. His senses were razor-sharp, his mind working faster than a computer. In an instant, he knew that the creature needed some form of sustenance, and hence the bread and vegetables and fruit pies the children brought it, like offerings to a god, but it couldn’t digest meat or flesh and blood and bone, not animal, not human. What offered it the most sustenance was fear—pure, full-out, terror and fear. If it could send out thought vibrations, then it apparently could receive them as well, and in the case of the gigantic, all-seeing eye, it wanted the vibrations of horror and fright. It thrived on them and drew strength for whatever alien physiology it possessed. Bobby grinned, squeezed his eyes tightly, and sent waves and waves of contempt of hatred to the being, and it responded by thrashing its tentacles more wildly than ever. It didn’t like hate or courage or cunning—no, not in the least—and the eye spun rapidly, like a roulette wheel, its ugly eye blinking and blinking in confusion, its tentacles reaching for the young human on the circular deckplate in vain, missing by feet and even yards with each swipe and swoosh.

            “What’s wrong you stupid bastard?” Bobby called. “Don’t like what I’m feeding you? Are you choking? Am I impossible to digest?” he broke into laughter, which enraged the creature all the more.

            Stop! Now! I command you!

            Waves and cymbals and tubas and trombones and rocks tumbling down in a landslide. The sounds Bobby heard were these and others for which he had nno comparison, but they filled his mind as he continued to dart from one place to another, weaving in and out of the wild, swaying tentacles.

            The membrane no longer blinked over the eye, which was fully dilated. The entire round, jelly-like orb pulsed, nd Bobby felt or heard—he didn’t know which—a heartbeat.

            “I guess I’m raising your blood pressure,” Bobby cried out scornfully, brandishing the hammer like a sword. “Well, good! Do you hear me? I want to kill you, you bastard!”

            Bobby glanced at the dome? Was that hope he saw in the eyes above him, in the eyes of jack Smith, who regularly shoved him to the dirt in the schoolyard? In the eyes of Bill Rooter, who called him booger head at lunch?

            “Ah well, now, the shoe’s on the other foot now, mates! But I’ll make a pack with ya. If I defeat this bug-eyed son of a bitch, you’ll treat me better, now won’t you?”

            Bobby intended to do battle either way, but thinking now at the speed of light, he thought he would leverage the situation to his advantage. He would kill two birds with one stone. He would be king of the hill, Bobby the dragon slayer.

            While he’d been lost in his fantasy of ruling the schoolyard, of slaying the hideous strength before him, a tentacle, puffing out to twice its normal size was whistling through the air, aiming straight for his head. Bobby ducked and let the appendage fly over his scalp like the blade of a fan.

            He was on the mound, and it was the bottom of the ninth. The bases were loaded, but if he struck out the batter, then the visiting team would be crushed, defeated. Bobby cocked his right arm, fingers curled around the rubber grip at the bottom of the shiny steel shaft of what was now a weapon. Eyes squinting, he raised his left leg, inhaled, and brought his right arm forward with all the strength he could muster. He released the hammer, which went tumbling end over end, a blur, straight at the creature.

            Smack!

            The hammer struck the eye dead center with a swishing, gurgling sound as the orb began to hemorrhage. The entire ship vibrated as, one by one, children began falling from the dome to the deck, dazed and crumpled. The tentacles vibrated, as if the monster were having a seizure, and shards of the dome fell to next to Bobby’s feet. They looked like glass but were as heavy as iron or steel. Their jagged sides were sharp, like the blades on his father’s safety razor, and Bobby acted instinctively, knowing without premeditation exactly what he wanted—what he needed—to do. He bent over and clutched a piece of the broken dome and sliced the end of the nearest tentacle with a horizontal motion, his arm wheeling through the air again and again until he’d cut the ends of half a dozen appendages, all of which oozed green and yellow liquids.

             Death. I’m dying. No, Not death. Light years only to die? No . . . no . . . no. Come back, children. I die.

            Boys stumbled and staggered to their feet, dazed and unsteady on their feet, watching Bobby swing his terrible swift sword like a ninja or a knight in battle. For a few brief moments, the boy bullied by the youth of an entire town witnessed a killing machine as Bobby’s anger, pent up and raw and vengeful, attacked the creature that had kept Tucker’s Ridge as hostage.

            Bobby was nearly spent as he saw Odie Huff fall from the dome, land, and stand up, staring at his liberator. Odie was the one boy, ten years old and four inches taller than Bobby, who hung around the young McAllister and admired him for his intelligence and ability to mput up with so many butt holes, as he termed it.

            “Pretty amazing,” Odie mouthed silently. “Awesome. Thanks.”

            Smiling, Bobby looked at the collapsing eye as its vitreous humor oozed in all directions. The pupil had collapsed to a pinpoint, and its membrane—Bobby presumed it was an eyelid of sorts—peeled away like the petal of an orchid bending over in decay. The eye was shriveling, growing smaller by the minute, its inner crescendo of a voice now mute. The alien was dead.

            Bobby surveyed the interior of the spacious craft and knew exactly what he would do in the coming minutes. He would do it for himself, he would do it for the town. And he would do it for his persecutors, all of whom had been unjustly imprisoned. He threw down his makeshift blade and picked up a chunk of tentacle three feet long. It was soft but not slimy, as he expected it would be. Tiny pores littered its surface, and whether these had allowed the creature to breathe or were the places where its small fingers had grown was not something Bobby could discern, nor did he really care. That was for someone else to figure out. Maybe Professor Truebridge at the small city down the road could figure it out.

            “Come on, boys!” Bobby cried. “Follow me!”

            The young hero, swelled with deserved pride, led the band of ragtag boys from the saucer as he held the severed appendage, not a sickly gray color, high above his head. He marched triumphantly, and no other boy dared break ranks or run ahead of his leader.

The semicircle of townspeople at first drew back in apprehension, not sure of what they were witnessing. Was it an illusion? What was the young McAllister lad holding in his upraised hands? And were the children following him really their own, or were they ghostly apparitions, for, in truth, most parents had given up their young for dead. A collective gasp escaped their throats as they carefully edged forward again, realizing that these were indeed the lost citizens of Tucker’s Ridge.

As Bobby and his smiling, freckled brigade passed the statue of Lemuel Blackwood Tucker, he spoke in a loud voice. “The alien is dead.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I killed it.”

The crowd of adults parted as the procession drew closer, allowing Bobby to throw his trophy from battle down on the green grass. It was as if the Red Sea had parted, an entire nation having been freed from the oppression of Pharaoh. And then the jubilation could be contained no longer as children and parents rushed at each other, producing tears and embraces and cries of joy and surprise. Mothers fell to their knees, holding the cheeks of their sons in their hands, looking into their eyes as if to say, “It’s really you! It really is!”

As the reality sank in that the nightmare was over, that there would be no more days of offering, that children would not be sent to Dr. Childress or Bleak House, at least not because their town had been chosen as prey by an alien invader, their attention turned to Bobby McAllister, who stood tall, his mother and father flanking him, hands on his shoulders.

“That a boy, Bobby,” said someone in the rear of the assembly.

“Nice job, son.”

“Always said that boy would amount to something.”

“That’s what I call bravery. Yesiree.”

Bobby looked back at the craft. He now felt more sober about his accomplishment. He was proud—yes—but he could have been killed. He had acted nonetheless. He suspected his peers would give him more respect now—that was almost a given—but even if they didn’t, he knew how to hold his own, how to act, how to stand up for himself.

Parents and children cheered and whooped and hollered and applauded, and Bobby knew that it was for the town’s newfound freedom as much as it was for him. That was okay. He’d done his job and risen to the occasion, and then some.

He turned and looked over his shoulder at the craft. Already, in the absence of telepathic powers or some invisible shield around the town, Army jeeps were roaring into town circling the saucer, military men I dark green jumping out and forming a perimeter around the craft. Unmarked cars followed, with men in dark suits and short hair mingling among the townsfolk, taking names and interviewing them about events of the past months. In the hours and days ahead, everyone would be interviewed—debriefed, in military terms—and then interviewed again by people without names, people who scribbled in pads or typed on phones or took photographs. Cell phones would be collected and wiped clean of any pictures of the craft that had dominated life in Tucker’s Ridge. And there would be warnings to tell no one what happened. Indeed, the town would be quarantined for three months and supplies would be brought in by the military while tests were run. Soil samples would be taken, and people’s blood would be drawn, and men with electronic equipment far more sophisticated than that sold by Ben Crick would check for radioactivity and God knew what. There would be no media, no film crews. As the men in dark suits, the event had never happened.

But these events would unfold in their fullness in the days ahead. At present, Bobby examined the jeeps and men in military fatigues and knew that they would want to speak with him first and foremost since he’s the one who had slain Goliath with a slingshot and a rock, a claw hammer and a little pluck.

The town square and Main Street were emptying quickly as people returned home for a celebratory supper and welcome home parties and general relief or jubilation. The children had been lost but were now found, had been dead but were now alive, and live was now good again. Life would be normal, and farmers could harvest while people would gossip on the loading dock of Tuckers Seed and Feed. People would get haircuts and go to school and mail letters.

Bobby saw that the Wicked Woman, dressed in red as she always was, stood stock-still, as if hypnotized, gazing from the spacecraft to Bobby and back to the spacecraft. She’d been in town as long as he could recall, but people shunned her for reasons he didn’t understand. He supposed it had something to do with sex, which Odie had explained to him two years earlier.

Ben Crick had turned away, muttering “Bunch of foolishness is all it was. Nothing more, nothing less.” His gangly arms and legs made their way across Main Street like a spider extending its legs here and there to move across a surface. As he did so, Hill Richardson ran Old Glory up the flagpole, something he sometimes forgot to do on the days of offering. Minister Perkins leaned against a sycamore tree fifty yards away and sipped from a silver flask before returning to his parsonage.

The play was over, the curtain had come down, and Bobby had not taken a bow after his initial victory march from the craft. People had shaken his hand and rubbed his hair as if to say “Way to go,” but that was over now.

Lemuel Blackwood Tucker, of course, had seen it all, the way he saw everything that went on in town. He stood motionless, a piece of black metal that looked dispassionately at everyone and everything. Whoever he was, whoever he had been—if, indeed, he had been anyone at all—he was always there, watching, watching.

Bobby, with his parents, started walking home under the afternoon sun. From the corner of his eye, the boy spied two figures at the edge of the square. Joe Nighthawk and Seamus were still playing cat’s cradle.


Site Map


Monday, July 18, 2022

The Nine Lives of Cat Lancing (Romance)

From the novel The Nine Lives of Cat Lancing by William Hammett
Copyright William Hammett 2017, 2022
All Rights Reserved


Cat Lancing slammed the front door of her home after throwing Jason’s suitcase towards the curb.  He was still trying to load his SUV with his personal effects, the ones that Cat had hurled at him for the past hour.  CDs, framed pictures, sports trophies, clothes, soccer balls, a beat-up guitar—everything had been unceremoniously tossed into the yard on the front walkway after Cat had confronted her live-in lover, Jason Gardener, with his infidelity.  She’d hired a private detective a month earlier after Jason started arriving home from the office—he sold copy machines—later and later.  It turned out that Jason had been sleeping with his perky blond secretary named Dawn Durango, a Texas transplant who liked to two-step at cowboy bars.

Cat had shown Jason all the pics taken by her P.I., and the responses had been clichés.  “But honey, she doesn’t mean a thing.  It was just a one-night thing.  I was drunk.”  Then he had done the old turn-the-table routine.  “Cat, you’re just not interested in me anymore.  We only have sex three times a month.  You used to be all over me.  I just don’t feel loved anymore.”

That’s when Cat went ballistic.  Jason was a manipulative thirty-two-year-old man who was a consummate salesman.  He knew what buttons to push, what speeches to pull out of his mental archive.  He always had an answer for everything.  Cat responded by sucker-punching her man on the right cheek, causing him to reel backwards.  He’d looked up in disbelief, rubbing his face like a wounded third grader in the schoolyard.  Then he’d started to backpedal to the front door when he saw fire in Cat’s eyes, fire so hot and filled with rage that he knew his tenure at her home was over for good.

“Okay,” he said.  “I get it.  We’re over.  Just let me come back tomorrow and pick up my things.”

“Sorry,” Cat said unapologetically.  “You get out to your Ford, and we’ll have everything out of my house faster than you can say Dawn Durango, cowboy.”

That’s when Jason’s personal belongings began to fly though the air like debris in a Kansas tornado.  Neighbors came out on their front porches and or peeked through curtained windows.  This was first-rate entertainment, and Cat wasn’t holding back.  People up and down the block loved her, although everyone knew that the twenty-eight-year-old newspaper reporter was a spitfire.

“Did you think I was stupid?” Cat asked as Jason crammed clothes into the back seat of his Bronco.  “I’m a journalist, for God’s sake.  Did you think I can’t tell when someone’s lying to me?  Did you think I didn’t have the resources and know-how to track you down late at night?”

Jason had claimed as much as possible from the lawn and was now scrambling into the driver’s seat.  A hiking boot hit the driver’s side window just as he closed the door.  Cat was running towards the street as he turned the ignition, the Ford’s engine roaring to life.  She had a huge bowling trophy in her right hand, and he was afraid she might try to shatter a window.  The Bronco sped down the street after leaving rubber on the pavement next to the curb.

Cat lowered the trophy and laughed.  She turned around, walked back into her house, sat on the sofa, and broke down.  She cried for the next two hours. Jason was out of her life—Jason, who was the father of her unborn baby.        


Site Map

Friday, July 15, 2022

Parallel Universe (Science Fiction)

From the novel Goodbye Marta, Goodbye Earth by William Hammett
Copyright William Hammett 2018, 2022
All Rights Reserved
This excerpt cannot be copied or used without the author's written permission.

The thirty-man crew of earth’s first starship, the Icarus, had been interviewed on hundreds of programs televised on earth’s WTN, or World Telecast Network.  The men and women of the plasma-driven Icarus were heroes, the first humans to soon leave the confines of the solar system and voyage into the interstellar void.  More precisely, of course, they were going to enter hyperspace once the star drive helped the mile-long craft attain 85% of the speed of light in its trip to Tau Ceti, a G-class yellow dwarf in the constellation Cetus.  Tau Ceti, had five earth-like planets, one of which was thought to be a habitable, earthlike planet, a proverbial big blue marble with oceans, land masses, and oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere capable of sustaining human life.  The project’s chief scientific advisor, Professor Emilio Gonzales of the Western Alliance Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, predicted that the vessel would slip into a black void for a period registered as one month on the chronometers of the Icarus before breaking thrusters brought the ship to sub-light speed near the solar system of Tau Ceti.

“We have worked since the early twentieth century to achieve superluminal speeds,” Gonzales told reporters.  “Einstein is no doubt turning over in his grave.  We also calculate that slipping into the artificial wormhole created by the plasma drive’s rapid acceleration will cancel most of the distortions predicted by the theory of relativity.  The Icarus will explore the Tau Ceti system for approximately one year and then return to earth.  Our fourteen-month journey will register on the clocks of earth as two years, meaning that the time dilation one would expect at superluminal speeds will be minimal.  The relatives of the crew will be alive and well when we return.”

Andrew Peterson, Captain of the Icarus, had done his obligatory interviews many months before the scheduled departure date of April 20, 2188 so that he could supervise the final onboard preparations and calibrations of the plasma drive.  And, of course, tender a proper farewell to his wife, the beautiful thirty-year-one-old Dr. Marta Christenson, a Harvard exo-biologist who had been rejected for the mission.  No relative of any crew member was allowed to be part of the interstellar expedition given that this was the first “light jump” ever attempted by a craft with humans aboard.  Two remote-controlled unmanned ships had been lost in 2176 and 2182 respectively.  A third ship had successfully gone to and returned from Alpha Centauri in 2186.  The voyage was deemed safe but, as the media reported, not without considerable risk.  Captain Peterson therefore tried to spend as much time as possible in February of 2188 with his gorgeous and somewhat pouty wife, green with envy at her husband’s coming opportunity to make history.  Her long, straight black hair fell below her shoulders, her brown bedroom eyes swimming above fair kin and high cheekbones.  Her envy at her husband’s good fortune had been tempered considerably by news from her physician in January that she was pregnant with a male child, their first.

The couple had endured a tumultuous period in their four-year marriage when Marta discovered a lone cyber message on Andrew’s crystal touch screen computing station at their home in the woods outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Her own station had malfunctioned the previous December, denying her access to the World Digi-Light Com Network, so she’d used her husband’s station.  Before she could type in her own password to access the Satellite Photon Exchange, a small blue square on the clear rectangular screen on Andrew’s desk had flashed, signaling an incoming message.  Why had she opened his personal mail?  Andrew had been distant recently, and the couple had not made love in over a month.  Technology had changed, at least for earth’s Western Alliance, but human nature was as predictable and transparent as ever.

            Marta touched the screen, which shimmered and turned blue, with white letters scrolling filling the middle of the display.

 

            My Dearest Andrew,

Our bed is so empty when you are away.  I turn and reach for you and my hands clutch only the cold satin pillow.  Your last visit in October was so precious since I know that you will soon be headed for the stars.  How I wish I could be with you, my darling Captain, as you go to wondrous places and new worlds.  But have not you already taken my soul to amazing places when we make love or stroll along the summer grass and picnic with a bottle of wine.  I am sending you a photograph with this message, a recent one that I hope you will bring with you on your mission.  Look at it often and think of me.  You will remain in my heart though you travel light years from New Leningrad. 

                                                                                    All my love forever,

                                                                                    Nadia

            Marta had raised her right fist to smash the crystal station, but she had broken into tears instead.  Although he’d been an experienced pilot who had logged many missions to the Martian colonies, the forty-one-year-old Andrew had been an ambassador to the crumbling Eastern Alliance in the many years after the war of 2156.  After the turn of the century—2100—the earth had been divided into two alliances, the Eastern and Western.  The Western Alliance, comprised of North and South America, was a loose federation of democratic states that opposed the totalitarian philosophy that had dominated Europe, Asia, India, and Africa by the end of the twentieth century.  After decades of saber-rattling, followed by conventional missile attacks on the United States, limited nuclear exchanges in Europe and Asia had left the Eastern Alliance powerless.  Starvation, unemployment, and disease had decimated once-great countries.  Technology existed only in small areas in a portion of the world where migrant populations scavenged for food and lived in buildings damaged from the war.  Radiation sickness was rampant.

            Beginning in 2176, the two alliances had decided to begin a long, arduous journey to rebuilding a single, stable world government built on democratic models.  Beyond humanitarian aid, the first step in establishing a new world society was to help the Eastern Alliance rebuild its infrastructure and recover its shattered technology.  Andrew Peterson, a skilled engineer as well as renowned space pilot, was enlisted as one of hundreds of negotiators to work with the rag-tag remnants of the Eastern Alliance.  Apparently he had helped achieve détente in more than one way, Marta had thought to herself after reading the cyber mail.

            Andrew had been contrite and forthright, admitting that he’d had an affair with the blond, svelte Nadia Korozanski, Deputy Minister of Foreign Relations in New Leningrad.  Marta had gazed at the photo attached to the mail and seen skin whiter than snow, eyes bluer than the sky right before a winter sunset.  Her red lips were large and sensuous, and Marta wondered how many times they had touched those of Andrew.

“I wish I could say all the proper clichés,” Andrew had said when first confronted,

lowering his head and swallowing hard.  “That Nadia was a meaningless relationship.  Comfort away from home when I was so lonely.  Or that she was a temptress who seduced me when I was weak.  But none of those things would be true.  Nadia and I worked together and fell in love.”

            “Love?” Marta said, raising her eyes, her voice cold and sarcastic.

            “Yes.  Love.  But I knew the affair couldn’t go on.  You, dear Marta, are the woman I wish to grow old with.  I was going to use the coming mission as a way to break things off with Nadia.  I intended to send her a message from deep space via a hyperspace channel telling her that it was over and that I was resigning as ambassador, that I could no longer be part of the Superluminal Project while being a liaison to the Eastern Alliance.”

            “Does she know about me?” Marta asked, arms folded as she stood in the living room outside Cambridge.  “Does she know you have a wife in the West?”

            A tear trickled down Andrew’s right cheek.  “Of course.  I was even going to tell her that we were expecting a child.  Would you like that?  Having a child, that is?”

            Marta sighed deeply.  “Your son is already growing inside me, Andrew.  He will be born next July.  He’ll be a toddler when you return.”

            Andrew looked at his wife longingly.  “Are you saying that you will allow me to return home?  Are you telling me that our marriage isn’t over?”

            Marta turned her head and looked through a window.  The snow was falling heavily outside.  “Yes.  A child needs a full-time father in the fractured world that we live in.  Everything is uncertain.  Earth’s political future—even mankind’s exploration of space—is fraught with peril.  Our son will not be denied the guidance of two parents.  But you must never see Nadia again or even speak of her.  If you do, I shall take our child away from you.  Before you leave, you will sign papers granting me sole custody and forfeiting all rights of visitation for the rest of your life should you ever be unfaithful again.  And you will agree to wear a global tracking implant for as long as I deem it necessary.

            Andrew didn’t hesitate.  “Anything you say, Marta.  Thank you.  I love you so very much.”  He moved forward to kiss her, but she left the room and entered the kitchen.

            On the following day, Marta acted as if nothing had happened.  In the days leading up to Andrew’s departure, the two had grown close again, making love frequently.  Together, they had converted a spare bedroom to a nursery.  Most of the time, they held each other in front of a fire in the wide brick hearth in the den.

            Andrew Peterson had been a very lucky man—and he knew it.

*                                  *                                  *

The eyes of the world were trained on their viewing screens, inside and outdoors.  The

Icarus would be visible for a few hours when its solid rocket boosters, to be jettisoned after thirty minutes, nudged the huge craft from its stationary orbit twenty-five thousand miles above the equator.  The ships twelve nuclear engines would then fire, carrying the vessel beyond the debris field of the Kuiper Belt, a field where millions of comets, chunks of icy rocks, and planetesimals lurked near Neptune and beyond.  The Icarus would clear the Kuiper Belt within two days after departure.  Only then would it be safe to engage the plasma drive, which would, over the course of a month, accelerate the ship to 85% of the speed of light, after which it would enter the Great Void, a nickname for the wormhole that Professor Gonzales had taken from the Tao.

            Captain Peterson sat in his leather chair in the center of the bridge, staring at his forward viewer.  “Let’s make this happen, ladies and gentlemen.  May God be with us, and may the solar wind be at our backs.”

            The helmsman’s fingers played over a digital console, firing the ship’s long cylindrical rockets temporarily attached beneath the vessel’s hull.  From the night side of earth, the departure looked as if a star in a nearby constellation had suddenly gone nova.  At ten o’clock in the evening, Cambridge time, Marta Christenson looked around her, observing shadows of old-style lampposts cast on the streets.  From the bridge, those looking at the viewer could Barely detect any forward momentum until ten minutes later, when the bright face of the full moon began to grow larger.

            After thirty minutes, Peterson looked to his left at the engineering consoles.  Chief Engineer Rutger Halvorsen nodded.

            “Release the rockets,” Peterson ordered, “and fire all nuclear thrusters.”

            “Aye aye,” Halvorsen said.  The Danish-born engineer had been smuggled to the United States as an infant to escape the horrors of the Eastern Alliance.  He had a square jaw and thick blond hair.  He was a muscular, youthful fifty years old.

            Over the next three hours, the ship’s rear viewer showed the earth shrinking rapidly in size.  The Icarus was rapidly headed away from the home that had been mankind’s cradle of civilization.  Captain Andrew Peterson wondered what the coming centuries would bring if men and women would be able to successfully colonize distant extrasolar planets.  When his son attained manhood, would mankind be living on dozens of exoplanets hundreds or thousands of miles from the earth?  And what about his grandchildren?  Would they even call earth their home, or would they have been born on a planet circling a distant point of light as he and Marta sat on the deck behind their home, looking at the sea of stars that he had helped map?

            The next forty-eight hours passed quickly, and the Icarus exited the solar system, the sun merely a bright star behind the gray vessel with its many observation domes, radar antenna, and sensory equipment mounted on the titanium bulkheads.

The moment had come.  “Engage the plasma drive,” Peterson said, again seated on the

bridge.

            The helmsman’s fingers once more played over a digital console as Halvorsen monitored dozens of digital readouts at his engineering station.

            “Anti-gravity field holding,” said a technician on the far right.

            There was no discernible feeling of movement as the four round plasma engines glowed blue at the rear of the ship, but after only a few minutes, the stars visible on all ship’s viewers began to blur.  An hour later, they looked like shooting stars, blazing quickly and then disappearing.  As Dr. Gonzales explained, they weren’t actually passing stars, but rather seeing the effects of what he called the “superluminal distortion” of space-time as they approached the speed of light.

            “We’re hauling the mail,” First Officer Sheila Dalquist said from the science station, her comment echoing an old saying from the early days of the Apollo Space Program.  Astronauts would use this phrase as Saturn rockets gained speed while boosting Apollo capsules beyond earth’s atmosphere.

            “Well done, everyone,” Peterson said.

            “Six days and twenty-one hours before we slip into the Great Void,” announced Dalquist.  “We’re passing through the inner edge of the Oort Cloud at present, but navigation sees no cometary debris in our path.”

            The Oort Cloud was an additional field of rock, ice, and small planets that extended one light year beyond the sun.

            “Very well,” Peterson said.  “I’m going to my quarters and make my initial log entries.  Contact me if anything comes up.”

            Andrew Peterson stepped into the main turbo-lift and descended to Deck Three and entered his private room, which had an adjoining office with a desk and com station.  After an hour of detailing the ship’s latest maneuvers beyond the limits of the solar system, he stood and paced nervously about his cabin.  He couldn’t stop thinking about Marta.  What was she doing back at home?  Did she miss him?  Her demeanor had indicated that their lives had returned to normal, but he knew Marta well enough to know that, despite the romantic moments they’d spent before he left, she was coming to grips internally with her discovery of his unfaithfulness.  But there was more to the story of Nadia than he had revealed.  What if she used his absence to investigate the matter even further? 

            Andrew felt distracted and restless.  He left his room and headed for the dome above Section One of the Icarus.

            Observation Dome One was fifty meters in diameter.  Andrew pressed the pad that rolled back the dome’s metallic cover, leaving him standing beneath the center of the half-bubble on top of the shift.  Surveying the panorama before him, he saw the same streaks of starlight appearing and disappearing, just as on the viewers on the bridge.  Beneath him was trhe vast length of the Icarus , its top and sides studded with telemetry packages of every shape rising above the hull—squares, rectangles, circles, pentagons, and others.  Interior lights from various viewing ports within the ship, as well as thousands of running lights, gave the appearance of the New York City skyline at night.  Andrew took a deep breath, his mind drifting back to the cold nights when he and Nadia, dressed in heavy fur-lined coats, had held each other beneath the frigid but clear Russian sky.  He recalled their first kiss and how Nadia had pressed her slender body against his own.  She was a peculiar mix of assertiveness and vulnerability.  She knew how to pursue her goals, but at times she acted like a child in need.  Given the chaos in her country after the war, Andrew was not surprised when she would occasionally let her guard down and cry.

            Nadia had been more than an affair.  The twenty-nine-year-old diplomat and scientist had not just been his mistress, but his wife.  Andrew Peterson had been a bigamist.  Nadia knew of Marta because Andrew’s bio and reputation was well known.  She’d accepted that the presence of Marta in her lover’s life and asked only that he spend his time in New Leningrad with her, sleeping at her apartment.  She was willing to share him.  Healthy, attractive men in Europe were either diseased, married, or uneducated and poor.  True, there were many strong-willed men in the military, but they were petulant, nursing grudges against the Western Alliance for dismantling their way of life.

            Andrew strolled leisurely beneath the dome and the firefly stars.  Why had he married her?  The answer was simple: because of her neediness, those moments when she melted in her arms.

            Andrew’s father, a drunken college professor, had abandoned his mother when he was six, and Andrew had grown into the quintessential caretaker for his mom for many years, always putting his needs last.  Even as her had matured, gone to college, become an engineer, and become an engineer and space pilot, he had retained a nurturing side.  Like so many powerful, influential men, he’d had a private side and a private life after beginning his trips to Europe.  He had married Nadia, believing the potential for scandal to be minimal since record-keeping in the Eastern Alliance had become shabby and incomplete after the war.  Communications and the media had been severely compromised, and it was doubtful that anyone could find out that he had wed Nadia Korozanski in a quiet Russian Orthodox ceremony that was never recorded as a civil, governmental union.  It gave Nadia a feeling of security, and Andrew, after careful deliberation decided that there was a very fine line between Nadia being a mistress or a wife when their “status” would never become public knowledge.

            When he’d told Nadia that Marta had learned of their affair and that he must break it off in light of his becoming a father, she had sent him a single brief message saying that she would miss him and always love him.  She claimed that she understood his situation and would not pursue him.

            But why had he allowed himself to fall in love with another woman in the first place?  Had he felt guilty about cheating on his wife in Cambridge?

            Yes, of course he had.  But although he had surrendered to the caretaker part of personality to provide Nadia with security, he was also a man of supreme confidence.  Those under his command looked up to him and admired him.  He was a handsome statesman and pilot, and as he looked back at the events of the years leading up to the Superluminal Project, he realized that he’d let pride rule many of his decisions.  He enjoyed adulation and the perks of command.  Women flirted with him constantly, but it was Nadia who had pursued him aggressively.  He had indeed fallen in love with her—that part was genuine—and as he stood beneath the dome in the year 2188, he knew that ultimately he had committed adultery, not to mention bigamy, because he thought he could get away with it.  It was the combination of pride, power, and opportunity that had led him into the affair.

            His power would only increase, of course, if the mission to Tau Ceti was successful.  He would be the first man to lead a crew into deep space, and the accolades he would receive would be numerous.  Since boarding the Icarus weeks earlier, he’d done much soul searching.  If he were going to become even more influential in the destiny of mankind, he would have to learn humility.  And there was his future son to think about.  Yes, for the sake of his son, he would need to become permanently grounded in his marriage to Marta.  And permanently faithful.

            He returned to his cabin.  He would send a message to Marta, which he’d done each day since boarding the starship.  He loved her dearly and knew that she needed all the support he could provide. 

            It also helped to assuage his considerable guilt.

*                                  *                                  *

            A pinpoint of bright light was centered in the forward viewer.  All of the streaks of starlight seemed to be rushing forward, feeding the light ahead.

            “It’s beautiful,” Dalquist commented.

            “Six minutes before entering the Great Void,” Halvorsen said.  “We’re currently at 85.75% the speed of light.”

            “Steady as she goes,” Peterson said from his command chair.  “Dim the bridge lights to one-half intensity.  Everybody remain at your stations.  Look sharp.  This is what we’ve been waiting for.”  He glanced at Professor Gonzales, who stood to his right, staring at the forward viewer.

            Gonzales smiled.  “I suspect that we’ll enter the light ahead uneventfully and emerge into the Great Void in a matter of seconds.”

            “You suspect this?” asked Peterson.

            Gonzales pivoted toward the captain.  “It’s what my calculations indicate, but calculations are not a crystal ball.  They can accurately predict a phenomena, but not how that phenomena will actually feel.”

            “Understood,” Peterson said wryly.

            The Icarus was now enveloped by a bluish-white light that caused the crew on the bridge to shield their eyes and turn their heads away.  And then quite suddenly, the ship seemed to slow—indeed, almost stop—and then lurch forward.

            Blackness.  They had entered the Geat Void, which was absent of all star light.  There were no stars to speckle the night sky, for, in truth, the preternatural darkness in which the ship now traveled was not technically sky.  It was the absence of all known matter in the Milky Way.  It was a hyper-dimension that was quite real but that had no matter within it.

            “What was that lurch we all felt?” Peterson asked with a controlled look of concern on his face.  “As Dr. Gonzales indicated, the transition into hyperspace wasn’t supposed to be felt.  Or did I misunderstand all of our mission briefings for the past year?”

            Gonzalez moved from his station to the captain’s chair.  “I can’t account for it, but the important thing is that we made the jump.”

            Peterson looked at his second-in-command.

            Dalquist simply shrugged.  “Readings are nominal.  The ship is undamaged and the plasma star drives show no anomalies.  We seem to be traveling with utmost ease.”

            “Captain, I believe that the slight lurch was caused by the plasma emissions encountering hyperspace,” Halvorsen said.  “Think of it like a burp.  The engines were suddenly pushing against an entirely different medium, namely hyperspace.  I can recalibrate the star drives so that it won’t happen again.  A slightly narrower plasma beam from each unit would probably allow a smoother transition into superluminal velocity.”

            Peterson sighed heavily.  “Probably?”  He paused.  “Very well.  Gather data from the ship’s computer and see if recalibration is in order.  We have a few weeks to decide if we need to do anything.”

            “Aye aye, sir,” said Halvorsen.  “I’ll report when I have more information.”

            Peterson nodded.  “I’ll be in my quarters.”  He turned to Dalquist and spoke resolutely.  “Alert me if even the smallest detail seems out of place.”

            “You’ll be notified immediately, Captain,” she responded.

            Peterson, his tall body leaning forward slightly, entered the main turbo shaft and disappeared from the bridge.

*                                  *                                  *

            Andrew sat in his cabin, looking at the holographic picture of Marta displayed vertically by the quartz pedestal on the edge of his desk.  She was incredibly beautiful.

            He rubbed his face with both hands, mentally and emotionally fatigued.  If he returned safely from the mission—a small nagging voice, nothing more than vague intuition, was telling him that the journey was going to have its share of headaches—he decided that he would be more than faithful to Marta.  He would be devoted, loving, spontaneous.  He would show her small acts of kindness, give her presents for no reason at all.

            But what if he came back and found that Marta had changed during his absence.  What is she ruminated on his unfaithfulness and decided that she couldn’t forgive him after all?  Worse yet, would she be faithful while he was gone?  She’d had many lovers in her early twenties, and men still flirted shamelessly with her at parties and at her exobiology lab.  She had the opportunity.  Would she ultimately deal with his infidelity as so many wronged spouses did—by evening the score?  Even forgiving spouses felt that they needed something to purge the bad emotional feelings by some kind of concrete, though clandestine, act of revenge.

            He didn’t think she would, especially since she was pregnant, but two years was a long time.  Sometimes people changed.  He himself had fallen because of opportunity, and many people who stepped beyond the bonds of marriage were people who were the last ones ever expected to do so.

            Andrew realized that it was masochistic to consider the possibility.  He would drive himself mad.  All he could do was to send her hyperspace messages of love.  Such signals had been able to exit wormholes in the test craft sent to Alpha Centauri, and he hoped that she was receiving his daily letters.

            His thoughts were interrupted by a voice emanating from the com speaker over his desk: “Captain to the bridge.”

            Andrew jumped up and headed for the turbo shaft.  He’d just left the bridge within the hour and he was already being summoned back.  Perhaps his intuition about the mission had been correct.

            Peterson immediately knew why he’d been summoned the moment he stepped onto the bridge.  The forward viewer showed enormous arcs of red and blue light streaking through the wormhole.  Each arc lasted about thirty seconds.

            “Status report,” Peterson,” said, sitting in his chair.

            “The ship is operating normally,” Dalquist said, “but we have no idea what the arcs are.  There shouldn’t be anything at all visible inside the void.”

            “They’re obviously not stars,” Dr. Gonzales remarked, nodding his head in agreement.

            “I believe that the wormhole may be destabilizing,” Halvorsen said.

            “Because of that burp going into the Void?” Peterson queried.

            “Perhaps,” Halvorsen replied.  “I believe that the width of the beams from the plasma drives may have been too wide.”

            Peterson was becoming annoyed.  “We ran endless simulations for years, and nothing like this ever presented itself.”

            “Quite true, Captain,” said Gonzales, “but this ship is five times larger than the vessel sent to Tau Ceti and back.  Engineering specs took into account the larger mass, but maybe size of the Icarus has something to do with the phenomenon.  I’m simply throwing out possibilities, Captain.”

            “I think I’ve found the problem, Captain,” Halvorsen said.  “Star Drive Three is leaking a small amount of plasma.  Whether that caused the lurch or resulted from it is unknown.”

            “Should we shut down the drive?” Peterson asked.  “Can we still run on three drive units?”

            It was Dalquist who approached the captain’s chair and answered thoughtfully.  “We can, sir.  The ship could operate quite smoothly on three units, but reducing our speed could have some rather serious repercussions when we factor in time dilation at superluminal velocity.”

            “Such as?”

            “If we alter our velocity and run on three star drives, twenty years will have elapsed on earth instead of two when we return.”

            Silence claimed the bridge for a full minute.

            “Our relatives and friends will be a great deal older,” Dalquist continued.

            “I believe the safety of the ship and crew comes first,” Gonzales said.

            “If earth should launch a rescue vessel when it realizes that the Icarus is overdue,” Dalquist said, “then the second vessel might encounter the same problems that we have, especially is the size of the ship is responsible for what we’re experiencing.  We can’t warn them on any hyperspace radio frequency.  The wormhole is absorbing all random energies from the ship, such as plasma and hyperspace radio signals.  I’m fairly certain that’s what’s causing the arc lights.”

            “So you’re saying that we should continue with all four drives?” Peterson asked.

            “I’m saying that we should attempt to repair Star Drive Number Three.”

            “That’s very risky,” Halvorsen interjected.  “We’d have to shut down the drive to stop the leak.  It’s far too dangerous to attempt any kind of major repair while traveling at superluminal speed.  It would be insane.  It would also take considerable time to restart the engine safely, and then we’re again confronted with altering the time dilation.”

            Peterson thought of returning to a fifty-one-year-old Marta.  He didn’t think she’d wait for him that long.  She would surely be remarried by then, and his son would be in college.  But he couldn’t place his personal life before the mission.  Still, Dalquist had a point.  If earth launched a second vessel, it, too, might travel into an unstable wormhole.”

            “We’re going to attempt to repair the drive without shutting it down,” Peterson declared.

            Halvorsen, running his fingers through his hair, was about to protest when Peterson spoke again.  “I’m an engineer, and I worked on the development of these drive units.  My guess is that the magnetic field that propels and the superheated Xenon propellant is slightly out of alignment.  That would account for the leak.  It would also explain why we lurched into the Void instead of gliding in smoothly.  Part of Drive Three may have been pushing in a slightly different direction at the critical time of transition into hyperspace.”

            “It makes sense,” Halvorsen agreed, “although my instruments don’t show any anomalous readings for any of the magnetic fields.”

            “Then let’s get down to the access crawlway for Drive Three and have a closer look,” Peterson said.  “Rutger, you’re with me.  We’ll make a preliminary inspection and then take it from there.”

            Peterson and Halvorsen left the bridge and took the horizontal turbo tube to the rear of the ship.

*                                  *                                  *

            The aft section of the Icarus was one-quarter mile in length and was home to the engineering decks.  The Captain and the Chief Engineer hurried to the crawlway leading to Star Drive Three.

            “This is as close as we can get to the plasma drive,” Halvorsen said as the two men inched their way forward on their knees.  “My team in engineering reported as we passed through that the readings on the magnetic field is completely within normal parameters.”

            Peterson glanced over his shoulder to look at his chief engineer.  “Then maybe we need to narrow those parameters a bit.”  He pointed to a small control panel on the side of the crawlway.  “Look here.  The Xenon gas is too hot.  And the magnetic field that controls the Xenon reads as 100 percent functional.  Let’s knock that down to ninety-five percent.”

            Peterson’s fingers pushed a sequence of digital keypads and again consulted the instrument panel.

            “The temperature of the propellant is dropping!” Halvorsen exclaimed.  “For whatever reason, the magnetic coils on this drive got slightly twisted when we ramped them up to 100 percent of operational capacity.  We can get in there in contamination suits when we get to Tau Ceti and find out why the coils shifted.”

            Peterson smiled as he pressed the nearest com link pad.  “Bridge, this is Peterson.  What do you see on your viewer?”

            A moment passed.  There was complete silence.  Halvorsen and Peterson exchanged worried glances.

            “Bridge?” Peterson repeated.

            “Yes, Captain.  Dalquist here.  We see nothing on the viewer, which is as it should be.  Just the Great Void.  The wormhole appears to have stabilized.”

            “What’s our speed?” Peterson asked.

            “Our velocity has decreased by one tenth of one percent,” Dalquist replied.

            “That shouldn’t affect the time dilation or our schedule,” came the voice of Dr. Gonzalez.

            “Very well then,” Peterson said calmly.  “Steady as she goes.  Peterson out.”

            “Nice work, Captain,” Halvorsen remarked as the two men exited the crawlway.  “I see you still have your chops for hands-on work around engines.”

            Peterson smiled, but said nothing.  He would accept the compliment with humility.

*                                  *                                  *

            The four weeks passed quickly and without event as the Icarus traveled through the wormhole.  Andrew sent hyperspace messages daily to Marta, relating the problem with the magnetic field on Star Drive Three and how he felt lonely and isolated in the Void.

                        Dear Marta,

Although I have a great crew of one hundred men and women and a ship that has every amenity that one could hope for, it is still disorienting to have no frame of reference when looking out from the portals or observation lounges.  One sees only nothingness.  And that is what would be in my heart were it not for the presence of my love for you and our unborn child.  I regret daily the pain I caused you, but just as this mission heralds a new era for mankind, I hope that our new family will likewise mark the dawn of a new period in our lives.  I love you and only you.  As exciting as it is to make history by voyaging beyond the solar system, I would rather be holding you in front of the hearth.  We drop out of superluminal speed tomorrow, and the ship is now bustling with activity and expectation.  What new worlds will we find?  We hope, of course, to find the planet predicted by scientists, the earth-like planet that will be suitable for colonization.  Whatever we find, it will not give me as much joy as when I can next see and touch your face.  Until then . . .

                                                                        Love always,

                                                                        Andrew

            Andrew wondered if the Eastern and Western Alliances were continuing to make progress.  He wanted the world his son would be born into to be stable, peaceful.  Unfortunately, hyperspace messages could travel in only one direction: backwards.  Messages from earth were not able to overtake the Icarus as it defied conventional physics and moved farther away from earth.

            He looked at the hologram of Marta on the edge of his desk.  He loved her so much.

*                            *                                  *

            “Dropping out of hyperspace,” Dalquist said.

            Halvorsen smiled.  “Smooth as can be.  A good transition back into the here and now.”

            Eyebrows raised, Peterson swiveled in his chair, surveying the many stations on the bridge.  “All stations reported that the Icarus’ departure from the Great Void had been textbook.”

            “Good work, everyone,” Peterson said.  “Now comes the fun part.”  He pivoted toward his chief engineer.  “Rutger, engage maneuvering thrusters and let’s move in on Tai Ceti and see what brave new worlds we find.”

            Chief Navigation Officer Kellie Masters spoke next.  “Captain, the star field in this quadrant of space just isn’t right.  The start ahead isn’t Tau Ceti.”

            “Where are we then?” Paterson asked.

            Masters punched a few keys at her station, causing the viewer above her to display hundreds of stars, many of them quite bright.

            “My God!” Dalquist cried.

            Gasps emanated from all bridge personnel, and then there was silence.  The star on the forward viewer, which was growing brighter and brighter as the ship’s thrusters moved the vessel closer to its destination, was indeed not Tau Ceti.  It was Sol, the earth’s sun.

            “There can be only one explanation,” Halvorsen said.  “The unstable wormhole brought us back home.  I suspect the instability, thought rectified, caused hyperspace to double back on itself, as it were.”

            “We’ve failed,” Gonzalez said sullenly.

            Peterson stood and addressed his bridge crew.  “I know this is a big disappointment,” he said.  “We’ve been prepping for this voyage for years, but personally I’m encouraged.  We made it through the Void with the help of some troubleshooting, and if the only problem was a slight misalignment of the magnetic coils on Star Drive Three, I anticipate that the Propulsion Lab in Pasadena will give us a green light to try again in a year, maybe less.  They’ll naturally want to run diagnostics on all of the ship’s systems, but I believe the Icarus is destined for another trip into the Void.  She’s a good ship.”

            “Approaching earth,” Masters proclaimed.

            “Standard orbit,” Peterson ordered.  Communications, tell earth that we’re home and that I’ll be issuing a report within the hour.”

            “Something’s wrong,” Dalquist stated.  “Radio transmissions in the western hemisphere are sporadic.  In some areas, they’re nonexistent.  Transmissions over Europe and Asia, however, are numerous and active.”

            “The opposite of what they should be,” Peterson said.

            “Do you still want me to open a channel?” the communications officer asked.

            “No,” Peterson shot back.  “Dalquist, Gonzalez, and I will take a transport shuttle down to the surface.  

*                                  *                                  *

            With Dalquist at the controls, the shuttlecraft Armstrong slid into Earth’s atmosphere at the precise, narrow angle that prevented it from either skipping off into space of burning up from entry.

            “Where do we land?” Gonzalez asked.  “East or West?”

            A voice came over the craft’s radio com link before Peterson has the chance to answer.

            “Welcome home, Armstrong,” said an unfamiliar male voice.  “A tractor beam will bring you into space port at New Leningrad.”

            Dalquist swiveled in her chair, about to exclaim shock at the brief message, but Peterson motioned for silence in the forward cabin of the shuttlecraft.

            “Affirmative,” said Peterson.  “It’s good to be back.  Sorry there was no communication when we re-entered the Terran system.  The Icarus had to break harder than expected.  We’ve discovered that these wormholes can be tricky to enter and exit.”

            “Understood,” said the male voice.  “You’re heroes nonetheless.”

            Peterson raised his thumb and swiped it across his throat, indicating that Dalquist should close the communications channel.

            “What’s going on?” Gonzalez queried.  “They think we’re returning from a successful mission.”

            “True, but it’s more than that,” Peterson said.  “Something’s very wrong, and until I know what it is, we play along and play the part of the conquering heroes.”

            “The balance of political power and the ecosystem couldn’t possibly have changed so radically since we left,” Gonzalez noted.

            Peterson nodded as the three crew members exchanged glances.  They all knew that something far more radical had happened.

            The sleek shuttlecraft descended into the night skies above Russia.  Dalquist leaned back in her leather chair, raising her hands in resignation.  “Someone in New Leningrad is controlling the ship.  Hell, I wouldn’t know where to land anyway.”

            “The tractor beam’s a blessing in disguise,” Peterson retorted.  “Just act normal.  Whoever is waiting to greet us is probably expecting to see smiles and exuberance.  The first superluminal voyage with humans aboard has been a success.  If you look puzzled and confused, they’re going to know something is wrong.  It’s time to showcase whatever acting skills you possess.  Our lives might hinge on how well you can sell this farce.”

            Dalquist and Gonzalez nodded soberly.  “I just wish we knew who ‘they’ were,” he said.

            “I suspect we’ll find out soon enough,” Peterson said.

            Within minutes, the craft hovered above a large ring of blue lights next to a brilliantly lighted complex of modern buildings.  The letters EASC were displayed prominently on the closest building to the landing area.

            “I’m guessing those letters stand for Eastern Alliance Space Command,” Peterson commented.

            The craft’s thrusters fired automatically when the ship was one hundred meters above the circle of blue lights.

            “The prime minister will greet you personally on this historic occasion,” said the male voice over the com.  “And hundreds of members of the government press are assembled, although they will be kept at a reasonable distance.  Get ready to become celebrities.”

            Dalquist knitted her eyebrows as she mouthed the words government press?

            “It’s show time,” Peterson announced, standing and straightening the top of his uniform.  “If you don’t know the answer to a question, smile until you can come up with some neutral answer.”

            The three crewmembers stood in front of the shuttlecraft exit doors, which parted sideways as a ramp slid from beneath the vessel, arching to the ground in the center of the landing circle.

            Peterson emerged first as digi-cam lights shone everywhere, recording the arrival of the heroes as they set foot on their home planet.  Bright flashes also blazed in the darkness near the Armstrong as onlookers and reporters took pictures to install on their crystal touch screen computers.  Night was turning into day because of the intensity of the glare from the digi-cams, and the three heroes shielded their eyes with the palms of their hands as a figure walked forward to greet them.  Peterson couldn’t make out any features but presumed it would be governmental bigwig.

            “Welcome home,” said Nadia Korozanski, Prime Minister of the Eastern Alliance.

*                                  *                                  *

            Andrew Peterson froze before slowly lowering the palm of his hands above his eyes.  He wondered if he would be able to take his own advice—to remain cool and summon his acting skills so as to pretend that everything was just as it should be.

            Nadia’s hand was outstretched, and Peterson, his eyes growing accustomed to the intense lighting, took her hand and clasped it, bowing slightly from the waist.

            “Thank you, Madame Prime Minister,” he said.  “Thank you on behalf of the entire crew of the Icarus.  We are thrilled to be back.”

            “Tell us about Tau Ceti!” a reporter shouted.

            “Was the mission a success?” called another.

            “Yes,” Peterson replied instinctively.  “It has been a landmark voyage filled with wonder.”

            Loud applause filled the plaza in which the landing area was located.

            Peterson realized that he’d made a fundamental mistake as soon as the words had left his lips.  The data banks of the Icarus contained no information on Tau Ceti, exo-solar planets, or other constellations.  But he would deal with his faux pas later, for he was presently being led down a red carpet by an honor guard, Prime Minister Korazanski by his side.

            Nadia leaned ever so slightly toward the captain of the Icarus, speaking under her breath.  “I shall make sure we have some time together as soon as possible, my love, but first you must attend a small celebration.  Later, after an initial debriefing, you shall have to answer questions at a press conference.”

            “Of course,” he said.  “Just point me in the right direction and tell me what to do.  It’s been a long voyage, and we’re not used to large crowds anymore.”

            “I understand,” she said.  Don’t worry.  Everything shall be taken care of.  Relax.”

            Peterson started to roll his eyes and sigh, but checked himself.  Relax?  That was the last thing he would be doing for quite a while.

            Inside the main building for EASC, more reporters had gathered, and a fresh explosion of lights bathed the three crewmembers with warmth and more than a bit of adulation and wonder.  Peterson and his colleagues had been to another star system, had traveled light years and beheld new worlds.  History would never be the same.

            The crew members, escorted by Korozanski and her cabinet ministers, were taken to the Prime Minister’s private monorail car, which glided on a maglev rail to a large stone edifice with the words THE PEOPLE’S GOVERNMENTAL PALACE carved above the center lintel.  The party stepped from the car directly into a huge, elegant room, with chandeliers high overhead.  They walked across a marble floor and matching columns to linen-covered tables upon which sat dozens of bottles of champagne and tall fluted glasses.

            “A toast to Captain Peterson and the brave pioneers of the Icarus,” Korazanski intoned as she was handed a glass of champagne.

            Cries of “Hear, hear” echoed throughout the opulent palatial room.

            Peterson, having been handed a glass with which to toast, smiled affably and raised his champagne.  “To a new era in the history of mankind.  May there be many more voyages to the stars, where the fate of humanity undoubtedly lies.”

            More cries of “Hear, hear!” echoed through the room as glasses clinked and more applause erupted.

            Dalquist edged her way to Peterson while Korazanski turned to toast the ministers of her government.  “You’re gilding the lily pretty heavy, Captain,” she whispered.  “I don’t know how you’re going to walk this back, but you’re the one who sits in the big chair.”

            Peterson continued smiling broadly as he replied, his lips barely moving.  “It’s what’s expected.  You’ll have to do the same when the time comes, but try to avoid any details about the alleged mission.  Keep all responses as general as possible.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            Gonzalez toasted Peterson, his facial expression likewise spread in a wide grin.  But Peterson also knew that Gonzalez’s eyes were saying, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

            Peterson was well aware that he and his crew would have to walk a tightrope, but there’d been no other option.  Telling the truth to a world they no longer recognized or understood might have jeopardized their lives.  He was being guided by the instincts he’d learned as ambassador to the Eastern Alliance in the years leading up to the superluminal project.  For now, he would have to be on his best behavior and try to avoid any slip-up until he could be alone with his crew and figure out why they had not emerged in the Tau Ceti system.

*                                  *                                  *

            With the initial celebrations out of the way, Nadia Korozanski led Andrew Peterson to her private quarters in the east wing of the palace.  Dalquist and Gonzalez had been to guest quarters so that they could rest.  The sun was already starting to paint the distant horizon weak shades of violet and pink.

            Nadia approached her former lover, circling his neck with her arms and drawing him close.  Pressing her body hard against his, she kissed him passionately on the mouth, a long and wet lingering kiss.

            “How I missed you, my darling,” she said.  “And I haven’t even had time to show you Nicholas.”

            “Ah yes,” Peterson said coolly.  “Nicholas.”  He smiled as he took Nadia’s hands in his and gazed lovingly into her eyes.

            “Follow me,” she said, leading him to a room down the hall from her bedroom.  “He’ll be waking soon, and then you can hold your son for the very first time.”

            Peterson approached the crib, an old-fashioned baby bed made of cherry wood, something of an anomaly in the twenty-second century.  “He’s beautiful.  He has your nose and chin.”

            “But he has your eyes,” Nadia said, slipping her left arm around Peterson’s waist.  “Let us go back to our bedroom.”

            Within minutes, Nadia was nude, lying on the wide bed in the beautiful room appointed with so many antiques.  “Are you too tired, my love?  I don’t wish to pressure you.”

            Peterson shook his head.  “I’ve dreamt of little else for weeks,” he said.  He slipped out of his uniform and lay next to Nadia.  The two made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms as the sun rose over New Leningrad.

            Peterson was awakened by a soft kiss on his forehead.  He opened his eyes to see Nadia, dressed in a dark blue business suit, leaning over the bed.

            “Stay in bed and rest,” she said.  “You’ve earned it.  I’ll swing back for lunch and then it’s time to put you in front of the cameras again after a debriefing.”  She turned to leave the room but halted and glanced back at the bed as she slid a pair of black velvet gloves over her hands.  “By the way, Andrew, a team of our scientists will be going up to the Icarus today in order to start downloading some of the mission data.”  She smiled, turned to leave, and then stopped again, this time hurrying to the bed to kiss her husband on the lips one last time.  “I’m so glad you decided to defect, my dearest Andrew.  We would never have defeated the West without you.”  A smile spread across her lovely pale features, her lips highlighted with bright red lipstick.  “Nor would we have been able to reach the stars without your technical know-how.  You assembled such a splendid team to interpret the initial work done in the West on the Superluminal Project.”

            Nadia left, blowing her lover a final kiss before closing the door behind her.

            Peterson sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.  He didn’t have much time.  Within hours, the Eastern Alliance Space Command would know that there had been no voyage to Tau Ceti.  The EASC engineers would be even more baffled when they learned that the Icarus had been commissioned by the Western Alliance Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.  He needed to speak with Dalquist and Gonzalez as soon as possible.

            But first he needed to find out how and why he’d become a traitor to the Western Alliance.  He dressed hurriedly, finding a clean ship’s uniform hanging in the closet.  Next, he searched the lavish apartment inside the palace for a room that he most surely would have used as his personal office when in New Leningrad.  He found it three rooms down the hall and sat at the terminal of his personal crystal touch screen computer.  He worked quickly, searching for his personal diary.  His fingers moved panels across the screen and found that the diary wasn’t password protected.  And why should it be?  On the Earth he’d left, Nadia had been fully aware of Marta.

            He read dozens of entries in the space on an hour, and each line of text caused him to feel more and more distraught at his behavior.  He had indeed betrayed the Western Alliance, which had, according to the diary, fallen hopelessly behind in its research for the Superluminal Project.  The East had progressed farther than the West had realized in its own superluminal research, with scientists sequestered in the Ukraine doing highly classified research on the project, being given rations and technology not available to the rest of the population. 

            And Nadia had announced that she was pregnant.  She threatened to tell Marta of his infidelity if her darling Andrew didn’t defect.  It had therefore become a moot question: his marriage to Marta was over. 

            Peterson rubbed his chin, eyes shut tightly against the reality that was displayed on the screen.  It didn’t make sense.  The Marta he knew had found out about his affair to Nadia and forgiven him.  What had caused him to not only leave his wife but to alter the entire balance of power in the world?

            The answer was easily inferred from the balance of his diary entries.  He’d betrayed the West because of opportunity and a lust for power, which was an essential part of his character in any scenario that played out.  He could not resist adulation and the possibility of becoming a hero.  Nor would he have deserted the woman who was going to bear him a son—who had born him a son.  And he wanted to get to the stars.  The West had apparently lost focus in its superluminal research, and nothing was going to stop Captain Andrew Peterson from journeying to Tau Ceti in search of earth-like worlds to be inhabited.  Were not politics secondary to the fate of mankind, which was linked to colonization of endless star systems?  He’d decided that he was the only person who could make it happen, for the Superluminal Project might have collapsed altogether, never to be resurrected by either the East or the West.

            Peterson stood and paced the Earth.  He was fully cognizant that he was capable of making such a decision.  He was painfully aware of his faults as demonstrated by his infidelity to Marta before he’d left Earth.  But the one inescapable fact since they’d dropped out of the Void and seen the Earth drifting in space as they watched the viewers was this: they hadn’t been gone long enough for their home to be so completely changed.  There had been no time to discuss the obvious with the others as they stepped from the shuttlecraft, but he would shortly speak with Dalquist and Gonzalez about the reality that must surely have dawned on all of them by now: they had somehow stumbled into a parallel universe where history was playing out very differently.

            He knew that Nadia would return for him soon, and he needed to use the touch screen to learn of one final piece of crucial information:  where was Marta Peterson?

            He tapped into the vast databanks that he, as an ambassador, Captain, and husband of the Prime Minister, would have access to.  His search for his wife in the West was painfully easy.  Marta Peterson had lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but now resided in a psychiatric hospital in Boston.  Peterson’s fingers moved panels around on the screen even faster, searching for his former wife’s psychiatric records.

            These, too, he found with ease.  After he’d divorced Marta, she suffered a nervous breakdown, abusing alcohol and narcotics.  She’d been committed to Boston Psychiatric Hospital, where she still resided.  A picture of his ex-wife stared at him from the screen.  Her face was haggard a puffy, absent of all make-up.  She was staring straight ahead, a vacant gaze in her lackluster eyes.

            This was more than Peterson could stand.  He’d been a monster in this universe, and he hated himself for what he’d done.  In the universe he had come from, the West was gently trying to bring the East back into the fold, and it had been succeeding.  Nadia had accepted his decision to be with Marta, and they’d managed to mend their fences as well, although hurdles were surely going to be encountered even after the birth of their child.  As for the Superluminal Project, it might well have collapsed, although Peterson couldn’t know that for certain.  In this universe, the one in which he’d shifted the balance of power to the Eastern Alliance, he’d been a selfish bastard, ambitious and uncaring.

            He swallowed hard and left his office.  He needed to speak to Dalquist and Gonzalez at once.

*                                  *                                  *

            “I’ve been sleeping,” Dalquist reported.  “Nobody’s bothered to ask me a single question.

            “I’ve been visited by a few scientists who had a million questions,” Gonzalez stated, “but I told them that I’d answer everything after I’d been cleared to do so, which would probably be after a formal debriefing and press conference.”

            “Good job,” Peterson said.  “We all know what’s happened, right?”

            “We went down the rabbit hole,” Dalquist said.

             “Right into another universe,” Gonzalez confirmed.

            “Exactly,” said Peterson.  “Is there any way we can reverse the process?”

            Gonzalez looked thoughtful and spoke slowly.  “I assume that the engine trouble we had, the very same that caused the burp and the later appearance of those firefly stars, is what was responsible for allowing the ship to enter a different wormhole altogether rather than simply an unstable one.  It ends up being a matter of semantics.  Unstable versus different—hell, we’re messing with the space-time continuum.”

            “Here’s the million dollar question,” Peterson said.  “If we reproduce the exact conditions that got us here, can we retrace our course?”

            “You mean I should alter the magnetic coils on Star Drive Three to the very same misalignment that caused this?” asked Gonzalez.

            Peterson nodded.  “Yes.”

            Gonzalez shrugged.  “Theoretically, I suppose it could work, but I’ll be damned if I can think of anything more scientific than just reproducing what went haywire in the first place.”

            “I think it’s worth a shot,” Dalquist chimed in.  “Even when dealing with spatial aberrations in the space-time continuum, there should be some basic symmetry that we can use to our advantage.  We certainly can’t just go back to the ship, presupposing that it’s possible to do so, and just cruise around a universe where we don’t belong.  But this is what concerns me the most.  The symmetry I’m postulating may hold only for so long before space-time imposes a new set of conditions on the wormhole that brought us here.”

            “Meaning that we’ve got to try our experiment as soon as possible,” Peterson said.

            Dalquist and Gonzalez both nodded their agreement.

            “Okay,” Peterson said.  “Here’s what we do.  Emilio, use your pocket communicator to speak with engineering.  Tell them to align the magnetic coils on Unit Three to what they were when we first entered the Void.  Use a scrambled frequency.  And tell Halvorsen to be ready to get under way when as soon as we’re back aboard.  Same as before.  Solid rockets first, then the nuclear thrusters to clear the solar system.”

            “How the hell do we get back to the Icarus?” Dalquist asked.

            “I’m not at all sure,” Peterson answered.  “But let’s try to stay close.  We’ll have to look for the opportunity to make it back to the Armstrong.”

            “Even if we managed to get the shuttle off the ground, they could pull us back with their tractor beam,” Dalquist protested.

            “Emilio,” said Peterson, “I think you should ask to take a tour of their control rooms to thank everyone in person.  Maybe you can wreak a little creative havoc with that tractor beam.”

            Gonzalez smiled.  I can try,” he said.  “I can try.”


Site Map


Tales of Seven Kingdoms

From the novel Tales of Seven Kingdoms by William Hammett Copyright William Hammett 2016, 2022 All Rights Reserved   Haven Ballindor ha...