Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction Read online

  Then, Silibot began to light up like a buoy in a storm—a glowing lighthouse in a sea of time-glitched students

  “Sili? Now what’s going on?”

  “I’ve been working on reproducing the matrices of the time-pitch, “she said quickly. “I’ve used myself to encase the space-time singularity. We’ve got to get you back home before you both destroy all time versions of yourselves and really get killed off--forever.”

  “You duplicated my time-pitch. But you need an accurate copy of the azimuth-time bearings and the instruments--you need —a time-pitch to copy—You? Silibot? You stole my time-pitch?” It all made sense. Only a Silibot could enter a hot time-tank and function enough in time-fog to reach inside my pocket! And she used it to bring the bad boy copy of me here!

  At that moment, Silibot became incandescent and looked positively nuclear, burning red-hot like the white-hot nose of a reentry pod--a firebot goddess. She decelerated the light all around us. I found myself getting that heavy feeling I got whenever I began to go into the drag of time-fog. Soon I’d be speechless and immobile. She didn’t seem to need the sanctuary of a time-tank to control time.

  My counterpart came back into the room and raced toward me with a huge semi-automatic syringe pointing straight at me. He wore a pair of time-fog glasses exactly like mine, which meant Sili’s time-shifting didn’t affect him.

  Silibot glowed brighter than a small sun.

  I leaped at his glasses.

  I missed.

  “Hey, Gramps! Catch!” From the classroom door, Veronica threw me a pair of time- fogs, which I caught.

  “Gramps?” I cringed at the word.

  “Don’t get all emotionally disabled. I’m your great- great- great- great granddaughter.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the broken bantam-bot and like a shot-put thrower from ancient Olympia she heaved the bot around once, twice and then let it go. It hit the other me in the chops and knocked his time-fogs to Timbuktu and he dropped his semi-syringe dispenser but he still managed to shoot me with an old fashioned bullet spewing gun.

  He deadened my right forearm, but in midair, I twisted like a slo-mo ninja master and threw my broken time-pitch to the floor, slamming the whole scene into stasis.

  Ribbons of my blood hung in the cold, eerie aura of decelerated light. Globlets of my flesh and chunks of arm bone created a macabre sculpture around me. With the time-fog glasses on, I forced myself to move quickly grabbed the gun from the now suspended intruder. I walked amongst the suspended pieces of my blown-away arm, netting all of the bits and chunks with the lining of my coat, blood and bones and flesh quickly gathered. I gently closed the coat holding it in place with my good arm. Then I removed my glasses and entered into time suspension and made the chrono-leap home.

  Days later I awoke and found myself in my own bed, clean and comfortable. I heard a sound in the other room. “Marie,” I called out. I knew in my head it wasn’t possible. I’d screwed up and hadn’t killed the killer of my sweet Marie. Yet I dared hope that somehow it had all turned out. My heart leaped with anticipation.

  “Marie?” I called again.

  A moment later the Silibot whirred into my room.

  “There’s a surprise for you,” she said in a sing-song voice, “under your covers.” I pulled my right arm from under the covers. It shone as metallic and robot-like. My fingers whirred and articulated better than they had when they were flesh and blood. I noticed that my shiny tensor steel techno-right arm ran right up to the shoulder.

  “I had you repaired,” she said. Silibot smiled

  Sili gracefully lowered herself onto the end of my bed.

  I looked her straight in the blue quartz of her blink-less eyes.

  “I love you,” Sili blurted. “All time-versions of you.”

  I grabbed her by the throat with my new arm. I squeezed her hard enough to make her eyes bug a little. “You killed my wife,” I said. She did look human, even though I knew a metallic chassis lay beneath the shifting sands of her strange synthetic skin. I nearly lost my resolve, but then I thought of Marie.

  I sensed Silibot’s unease and squeezed a little harder. The light in her quartz eyes began to pulsate.

  “I love you,” she choked out. “Marie had to die.”

  “If I destroy you then Marie can’t die,” I said coldly.

  “I’m bio-tec. Time doesn’t affect me. Destroy me and I’m a pile of junk, but it changes nothing for you

  I looked into Silibot’s blue quartz eyes.

  I remembered Veronica’s warm brown eyes, like Marie’s. Marie was out there somewhere. She’d made it and existed in one of the time-lines because we had a triple great granddaughter!

  I snapped Sili’s neck with my new arm. Then I lit a cigarette and drank the cup of coffee she brought me, held it tight with the fingers of the new hand. With its awesomely fine motor skills. I found my new limb very useful.

  I carefully plucked out Sili’s matrices and considered the difficulty of finding an ace that’d be able to jam her guts into a time-pitch casing. I’d find someone who could do it--finding people-- that’s the kind of thing I did for a living. I’d find someone to fix my time-pitch, and then I’d find Marie, even if it took all the time in the world.

  END

  The Lemonade Stand

  They led me into a field of very long grass, the backdrop to their small lemonade stand. The little boy selling crickets in cleaned jam jars convinced me to go with them. His sister sold the lemonade, and he sold the bugs.

  I’d never seen a cricket in the daylight. I’d only heard them at night. This youngster readily found crickets, and that seemed unusual. I asked him to show me how, because I really wanted to find my own cricket bait for fishing. He’d led me down a steep bank into a field filled with grass three feet over my own head. The top of each blade where it had gone to seed was the same dusty blond colour as my hair. In fact with my khaki shorts and white t-shirt I was pretty well camouflaged in there. As a slim guy, Id been told once or twice that I could easily hide behind a single blade of grass.

  Immersed in the nine feet tall grass, I had to trust that the boy knew his way around. His sister disappeared, and I assumed she went back to her post by the roadside. He showed me where he caught the little crickets. There were green ones, brown ones, and some white. He showed me how to turn over a giant blade of grass to find the alien looking creatures. Sure enough, there were many. Each grass blade that he touched appeared to support dozens of the tiny critters. While he collected several handfuls, I removed the lid from my water bottle and sipped on the lemonade.

  This was another terribly hot prairie day following weeks of heat and dust. Id lost my way on this backcountry road, looking for a fishing hole described on my map. When I saw the lemonade stand, I pulled over, thinking I might get directions. But the boy and his sister shook their heads. They had never heard of the lake.

  Id purchased two paper cups full of the lemonade. The older sibling sold the drink for five cents a glass. The sugary sweet lemonade with bits of pulp floating on the top left a strange, but not unpleasant aftertaste. I guessed that a can of frozen lemonade and tap water were its main ingredients.

  The boy sold the crickets for ten cents each. According to local accounts, the trout waiting in my missing lake were hungry. But for the moment I was lost in the tall grass. Then I saw the boy’s thin arm waving to me from behind a particularly thick clump of nearly tree high grass. I moved to join him, and he put his hand out to stop me.

  “Look.” he said, in a whisper. I drew closer, and noticed he pinched a fat, succulent grass blade so that it bowed away from the other strands. With a steady hand he held the blade and revealed that it was thick with tiny crickets. “Orthoptera, Grylloidea,” he said, and smiled, then licked his lips as if he planned on eating them himself. The small crickets clustered like aphids on my rose stems at home. I never saw anything like it.

  He began pulling and picking them away, careful not to make them jump
. He put them into the quick-seal bug bag he’d pulled from his pocket, and I guessed he’d be there a while stripping that grass.

  “Must be difficult sleeping at night, in these parts,” I said.

  “We don’t sleep,” he said.

  “Cause of the crickets?” I asked, wondering what he meant.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  “Why do you get so many crickets around here?” I questioned again, trying to make conversation while he filled his bag with the bugs. They appeared docile in his hand, as if they didn’t mind being picked away.

  “The spray,” he said.

  “The spray?”

  “Yeah,” he pointed up to the sky.

  “You mean the rain?” I asked, wondering if he must be mistaken.

  “The spray for the crops, it’s like rain. Kills the birds, so the crickets can thrive. The spray makes the grass grow, and the crickets like it,” he said cheerfully.

  “I see,” I said, but did not. I think I’ll head back to my car now. Are you all right here by yourself?

  The boy looked up at me, squinting in the hot afternoon sun. He had brown eyes, so brown that I couldn’t make out the pupils. He never blinked, only squinted, and I became uneasy with his stare. “You know your way back?” I asked again.

  He nodded. And he kept staring at me as I walked away until I could no longer see him through the grass.

  I never did find the road. At least not for three days.

  I tried jumping in the high grass. I climbed a large rock and still couldn’t see anything except a sea of grass. I tried following a path of bent and broken blades only to be led in a circle. I called out and shouted with no response from the children. I did hear something in the grass, a mewling sound or small squeak. At one point I thought I heard croaking, the kind of sound a large frog might make. I checked around, but not carefully, thinking; no, I wouldn’t know what to do with any creature I might find.

  After fifteen minutes of useless wandering and hopping, I sat down and began to reassess my situation. As I calmed myself, I heard the children’s voices, talking and laughing quietly. I listened carefully, hoping to follow the sounds back to the roadside and my car. Exactly what they were saying was not clear. Thinking was becoming more difficult.

  I crawled quietly in their direction, trying hard not rustle, but an insistent breeze brushed the blades noisily together, producing a whispering rasp that was almost indistinguishable from the children’s voices. On my hands and knees, I peered between the blades and caught a glimpse of the lemonade stand and the road, or so I thought.

  What I actually saw was perhaps the result of wishful thinking, or a mirage. I don’t know but the road eluded me. I began to think about the two children. Where was their house? Fields covered this area for as far as the eye could see. I didn’t recall a nearby house. I assumed their parents were working a field and had set their children up, not really expecting a single individual to show up to the kids’ lemonade stand. But quite a few nickels and dimes filled their collection jar. Earlier, when I’d transferred the remaining lemonade into my water bottle; the girl immediately produced another from beneath her small white tablecloth.

  They’d seemed normal enough. A little quiet perhaps. I’d purchased several of the boys’ crickets, not all, because he had quite a few. The boy had carefully taken the lid off the larger jar in order to extract several crickets, which he placed in the smaller containers. I’d selected all brown bugs -- brown -- thinking caddis fly nymph, because trout liked whatever hatched, and the caddis fly hatch was on. My selection caused the boy some puzzlement, so I explained my reasoning. He didn’t complain. In fact, for the first time since meeting him, I sensed in him a spark of interest. He asked about fishing. What was it? How did I do it? This last question really surprised me. A country boy who did not know what fishing was? As I described one of my fishing adventures, he listened and stared and complied with my request for brown coloured bait. As he opened the container a large green cricket escaped, springing from the lip of the jar. I think the cricket caught a small tailwind, because it launched itself straight into the middle of the lemonade. We all watched as it helplessly struggled to escape the liquid. It looked as if it peddled a bike with a broken chain. At that moment I believed the sister was going to let the creature drown, but she pulled a long blade of grass from the side of the road and slipped it into the jug, allowing the cricket to take hold. Her brother took the grass with the rescued cricket and put the green swimmer back into the larger jar, grass blade and all, folding and crunching the giant stalk until it fit.

  I looked at the girl. You can’t sell that lemonade, now.

  She stared back at me. And only later, as I thought about it, did I realise that she had the same dark eyed stare as her brother. No visible pupils, no blinking. She silently picked up the jug, walked over to the field and poured the lemonade onto the roots of the grass. When she returned, she pulled another full jug from beneath her table.

  How long I’d wandered and crawled through that maddening field wasn’t clear. After drinking my full supply of lemonade, I began chewing on the blades of grass. They were succulent and sweet. I found that chewing on several of them actually quenched my thirst. Aware of the boys warning about the spray, I took care to pull the blades from near the ground and rubbed away any grime, then chewed near the roots and not the tops. The urge to chew blade after blade was so strong, I began to wonder if the children were trying to turn me into a cricket to put in a jar and sell at their roadside stand.

  Just as I was about to give up all hope, I heard a woman’s voice, then the voices of the two children. They were walking and talking, and headed straight toward me, as if they were tourists on a hike. “Hey,” I said, scrambling up to them, spitting away a blade of grass. Before I had a chance to tell them of my plight, the young woman who was with them began babbling. She wore a suit, and navy blue pumps. Her bag hung from her shoulder on a long strap; and she looked like a travelling saleswoman.

  “I’m Freda. I sell books to bookshops. I was on my way to a client when I saw this lovely little lemonade stand,” she said, cheerfully.

  The little girl was holding her hand and staring at me. This woman was over-dressed for the weather, and her discomfort was beginning to show. Her eye makeup was running at the corners, and beads of sweat formed over her top lip, although her rusty coloured hair still held its bounce. She was overweight, and didn’t look fit enough for any kind of journey through the field. The little girl slipped a cookie into the woman’s hand. “Another? Oh, thank you, you sweet child.” The woman gobbled the cookie. The little boy took her other hand and they began walking away from me.

  “Wait!” I shouted, and there was such desperation in my tone that they stopped in their tracks, as if their feet were suddenly nailed to the earth. They all looked expectantly at me.

  “I’m lost,” I finally said. I’ve been wandering out here for hours.

  “Not anymore,” the sales lady said, smiling. “Join us.”

  “Where?” I couldn’t imagine where the odd trio was going.

  “The children promised,” she said. She released the girl’s hand and finally wiped the sweat from her brow.

  “Promised, what?” I asked.

  “To show me the crop circle.”

  I began to laugh then cry, and they stood there and watched. When I finally regained control of myself I apologised.

  “So I take it you’re not a believer?” she asked, with an annoyed tone.

  I shook my head, no.

  “Not a problem,” the woman responded. “Wait here, well pick you up on the way back,” she said.

  “Oh, no. I’m not letting you out of my sight. Better yet, I’m not letting these two out my sight. I’m going with you.”

  “Come on then,” she said, holding the children firmly by their hands.

  Off we went.

  They made us walk a half-hour in the tickling, whispering grass. I timed us. Finally the woman insist
ed we stop. She needed a rest and she needed to refresh. She pulled out a small silver flask from her purse. “Lemonade,” she said, and offered me some. I took it and drank a small mouthful. It tasted awful. I spit it out.

  “What? Was there a bug in it, or something?”she asked.

  “It’s foul,” I said, looking at the two children.

  “It tastes bad because you’ve been chewing the grass,” the boy said.

  “Yeah, well the grass tastes a lot better than that stuff.”

  The two children looked at each other and exchanged a smile. Then the little boy whispered something to the woman and she nodded in response. He disappeared into the long grass.

  “Hey,” I shouted. “Where’s he going?”

  “Pee,” the woman said.

  “Oh sure,” I said, and sprinted after the boy, not believing for one minute that nature called. I nearly kept up to him. But he was fast, like a jackrabbit racing between the clumps of grass. He was smart too. He stopped running, after awhile and hid. He had to be hiding. “Come on, kid, the funs over, time to go home.”

  No answer.

  I tried again. “Get me out of here and you can go fishing with me,” I said, and waited. To my shock the boy answered.

  “I don’t know how,” he said.

  I needed to keep him talking so that I could find him, or better yet convince him to come to me.

  “It’s easy,” I said. “I can show you how to do it.” As I spoke I crept through the grass, hoping to find and grab him. When I thought I’d discovered his hiding spot, an island of dark, green, lush grass, I pounced. Crickets leaped into my eyes, and small ones went up my nose. Frantically, I brushed the insects away, my eyes tightly shut. I had goose bumps; I hated the feeling and the idea of all those bugs on me. “Hey,” I shouted, “kid, are you there?”

  Silence.

  Of course I’d lost him, and the others, too.