Time Travel Omnibus, page 805
“But maybe they’re also warping across time progressions, too . . . without even realising they’re doing it. Then, as soon as they appear into our dimension or plane, one that operates on a different time progression . . . it’s like a chemical reaction and . . .”
I clapped my hands. “I know,” I said. “BOOM!”
“Right.”
“So what do we do?”
“Right now? Nothing. Right now, the balance has been restored. But the paradox will be repeated . . . around 2003, 2004.” He smiled at me. “Give or take.”
We went on walking and talking but that’s about all I can remember of that night.
The next day, or maybe the one after, we told Ed Brewster. And we made ourselves a pact.
We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell anyone about what had happened. Who would believe us? Where was the proof? A few boxes of slime? Forget it. And if we showed them the blackened stuff at the bottom of Darien Lake . . . well, it was just a heap of blackened stuff at the bottom of a lake.
But there was another reason we didn’t want to tell anyone outside of Forest Plains about what we’d done. Just like nobody else in town wanted to tell anyone. We were ashamed.
So we made a pact. We’d keep our eyes peeled—keep watching the skies, as the newspaperman said in The Thing movie . . .
And when something happens, we’ll know what to do.
What really gets to me—still, after all this time—is not just that there’s a bunch of aliens somewhere out there, maybe heading on a disaster course with Earth . . . but that, back on their own planet or dimension there’s another bunch of creatures listening to their messages . . . a bunch we killed on the streets of Forest Plains almost 40 years ago.
WHAT GOES AROUND
Derryl Murphy
Episode One: We meet our hero, learn a bit of his background,
and leap wildly back and forth through time
THE OPENING SEQUENCE OF “SPACE COPS” VIRTUALLY GUARANteed a great audience from the very beginning. Special effects that were extremely sophisticated for the time, exciting music and fastpaced action, and of course the handsome face of star and producer Henry Angel made for great television appeal, a very new concept at the time. As well, the series was true to the beliefs of the 1950’s; while fear of nuclear destruction hung over the heads of millions of Americans, the family, strong values and mostly a bright future were what they wanted to see on their primitive picture tubes each week.
Witness this portion of the opening. Before credits roll, Captain Maxwell (played by Angel) and his sidekick Corporal Exeter (played by former child radio actor Spike Chapman) board their space car and launch from the asteroid they use as headquarters.
Flames jet out from the exhaust, the car tumbles wildly, bucking and heaving until, through sheer physical might, Captain Maxwell rights it and flies into the camera, the dissolve moving from space car to Maxwell to space car to Maxwell almost seamlessly.
Is it any wonder that such a nation, influenced so mightily by one show, would become the single most dominant space-faring country right into the late twenty-first century?
From “Space Cops”: A Modern History,
An AmeriNet 46 production
■ ■ ■
Captain Michael Davis of Sector Seven pulls himself along the rails, eschewing the artificial gravity available to him at the wave of a hand. There is an emergency in his sector, a civilian ship overrun by criminals and pirates, and he needs to get to his space car as quickly as possible. Red lights flash and alarms ring all around him.
“Davis, you there?”
Captain Davis taps his wrist, activates his comm. “Here, Slam.” Slam Rankin is the dispatch officer for Sector Seven.
“There are three of them, rogues that spilled over from the Belt Wars. We managed to get good pictures before they downed the emergency activator. One of them is Marcus Heimdal.”
“Thanks, Slam. Over.” Heimdal! Davis picks up speed. Heimdal was the scourge of the force, but he’d gone missing four years before. Apparently to pull mercenary duty in the Belt. What was he doing back?
Private Eddie Stern is waiting in his seat in the space car when Davis arrives. They quickly check all the functions, then get clearance to launch. The roar is momentarily deafening, and they are punched back into their seats as they clear Sector Seven H.Q. The car bucks and rocks and rolls for a moment, but Davis pulls it back under control and they head off to intercept the civilian ship and the pirates aboard it.
Private Stern occupies himself with readying the weapons and checking his helmet. Nerves of steel, that boy.
They approach the civilian ship.
■ ■ ■
Henry sits in his living room, black and white TV screen flickering silently in the background, bottle of beer in hand, waiting for another visit. He knows that if he goes into his bedroom, it will happen right away, but he does not want that. In a perfect world, none of this would be happening, he wouldn’t be afraid that he was losing his sanity, he wouldn’t be losing himself in three cases of beer a day. In a perfect world he would have made it, wouldn’t have been caught with that lighting tech and fallen into a daze of beer and whiskey, paid for by hocking furniture and crappy little jobs for shithead directors in films that no one will ever see, or ever want to see.
And a fucking crazy ghost from the future wouldn’t be visiting him.
■ ■ ■
As we see in this colorized footage of him signing autographs, Henry Angel was not only remarkably successful and popular, he was also very genial. He was especially fond of children, and often broke off early from public functions if he knew of a pick-up game of baseball being played in some nearby neighborhood.
But, it must be admitted, there was a dark side to Henry Angel. He was twice-divorced, and records show that he once received a speeding ticket from the California Highway Patrol (see: CHiPs; Erik Estrada; 1970’s). But this did not ever get in the way of his popularity.
“Found him!” The voice is distant, kind of muffled.
“Hmm?”
“I said I found him. He’s locked, Michael, settled and ready to pull!”
Michael switches on slomo/delay, tunes half of his view to see a representation of Arnold’s face; a little fuzzy, motion not quite realtime, little mem going into receiving the visit, most being kept for the standard functions. “You’re serious?”
Arnold’s face jumps about as he nods; his scalp slides off and floats momentarily through the air before settling in again on his chin, a new beard. “I found him at the address we got from those old files.”
“Does he know?”
A herky-jerky smile, teeth dancing a chorus line, all dressed up in perfect little tuxes. “I’ve been there three times now, tried to talk to him. He doesn’t want to hear it, so I figure I should do the pull, explain from this side. Fait accompli, as it were.”
“Good idea,” says Mike. “I’ll be out as soon as I finish running this mission.”
■ ■ ■
When the ghost comes the last time for him, Henry is ready. Good and pissed, but ready. He stands, a little shakily, brushes pretzel crumbs from his shirt and pants, then stumbles forward into the receptor, glaring white light and screaming winds pounding his senses, scaring him so bad he shits his pants as he steps in and falls through time.
I mean, why the fuck not?
Episode Two: Our hero begins to see the future
as it might really be
(POV Shift: Pull camera back, encompassing view of large office area. Tangled mass of wires lead from deposit site to fuser and two well-used pocket supercomputers sitting on otherwise empty desk, walls a nondescript and unadorned brown, doors occupying three of them)
Henry staggered as he hit the floor, shuffled drunkenly for a second or two, then fell flat on his face. A pair of hands gently grabbed him around the waist and lifted him up, helped him shuffle along the floor and through a door, where he was sat upon a cot. He blinked fiercely the whole time, trying to shake the vicious light from his head, the spinning of the decades and more from his eyes.
“There’s a toilet behind you,” said a voice, presumably belonging to the hands. “I’ll leave you for a few minutes, let you clean up. You can drop your clothes in the basket by the sink; there’s a fresh uniform for you, hanging on the wall behind me.” A door shut.
Henry sat for another moment to let his eyes clear, uncomfortable with the lump of stool in his pants, unable to convince himself to get up. As things slipped back into focus, he took notice of what surrounded him in the room. It was small, maybe ten feet by twelve, the walls a quiet shade of brown and the door an off-white. The cot was small, low to the ground, and didn’t seem to have springs or any other metal; he felt with his hands and bent over to look, but couldn’t tell what it was made of. The toilet and sink were in plain view, no door or walls to block it off. Like a prison.
The clothing hanging on the wall looked familiar. Henry stood up, with some trouble, and shuffled over to have a look.
Aw, fuck!
It was the uniform, that fucking uniform from that fucking show, the one that busted him, that caused so much shit and grief in his life. One episode and marked for life, even though couldn’t be more than a few dozen people even saw the thing. Stupid show, stupid tech, stupid booze, stupid everything!
He went to the toilet, puked up the last dregs of his liquid supper, pissed, then cleaned himself. He stood there, looking at the uniform, trying to keep from shaking, and desperately wanting a beer.
■ ■ ■
“Here we see the U.S.S. Spelling as it drifts silently through deep space, well beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Note the sleekness of her design, the fins and grids, pods and wires, that dance from her hull like leaping, shining metallic rainbows. The gun and missile placements bristle angrily, ready to take on any and all comers, looking for an excuse to put down further armed rebellion.
“This newest ship in the fleet, the pride of our armed might in space, is the replacement for the late, great U.S.S. Tesh, sadly lost with all hands in the gravity well of Saturn after a cowardly attack by . . .
“Jesus, I’m getting all, all emotional. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll be all right, but . . . those boys, they died for our country.”
From AmeriNet 46 News at 0336
■ ■ ■
After much hesitation, Henry decided to put the uniform on. It fit well, better than that piece of crap that the costume designers had come up with for the pilot. It also had the added advantage that it didn’t stink like shit.
Shortly after dressing, the door cracked open tentatively, then opened wide. A man stood there, the oddest-looking man Henry had ever seen.
He was wearing a dull grey sweater that every few seconds rippled with what looked like tiny waves of oil-slick water, running in a different direction each time. His slacks were dark blue, almost black, and appeared to stiffen as the man stood still and then crack in a wild pattern of shiny crow’s feet whenever he shifted a leg; he wore pale green sandals and matching socks.
He wasn’t tall, this man. Maybe five foot six at best. His skin was darker than Henry’s, but not so dark that he could be called a negro. Small, glittery things, like slivers of a shattered mirror, protruded from his tall forehead. He wore dark glasses that obliterated any view of his eyes, quite possibly from any angle. And his hair . . .
His hair was a wild conglomeration of wires, tubes, strings of tiny blinking lights, plastic and metal and maybe even some real hair hidden in there someplace, dark and stringy and matted in bunches under the foreign material. It was, thought Henry, as if this man had embedded his head in a Christmas tree just after a horrible soldering accident.
Upon seeing that Henry was wearing the uniform, the man broke into a huge, unrestrained grin. “Oh, this is so good to see!” said the man, accent unidentifiable but language definitely English, and he danced a few strange steps right there, Christmas lights bobbing in asympathetic rhythm. Then he stopped and saluted Henry, a salute modeled after the style created for that stupid show; right fist to left shoulder, then open palm out, fingers facing left, elbow crooked to keep the arm half extended (didn’t want to look too much like a Nazi thing).
Henry nodded in return, cautious and a little scared, especially now that the booze seemed to have unfortunately deserted his system. “Are you . . .” His voice was scratchy, so he paused to swallow, to breathe and clear some of that shit from his skull. “Are you the guy who was visiting me? From the future?”
“No!” shouted the man, sounding excruciatingly delighted and excited at this riddle. “I’m the man who visited you from the present!” At this he giggled and danced a little more; the blinking lights on his head seemed to take up a more frantic pattern, pants cracking and resetting with each step.
Episode Three: More thrilling scenes
from this week’s episode
Captain Michael Davis, fresh from his heroic encounter with Marcus Heimdal (currently on his way to serving a thirty-year sentence at the Charon Penal Colony—let’s see him bust out of there!) has raced back to Earth with the aid of the newest in space travel technology. Less than a day to get there, as opposed to the two months it used to take, laughing in the face of modern physics.
A quick slingshot around the Moon, using its gravity to slow down rather than speed up (trust us on this), then captured by the Earth’s gravity, sinking into a low orbit that makes parking on a dime after slowing down from 300 miles per hour in only four feet look easy. Private Stern gives him the thumbs-up. Perfect positioning.
A quick check of instruments, and then communicate with headquarters back in good old U.S. of A. Salt Lake City, to be exact, taking over where Hollywood left off after it sank beneath the waves.
“Captain Michael Davis, Sector Seven, to Sector One Headquarters, requesting permission to land.”
A brief pause, and then, “Permission granted, Captain Davis. And congratulations on a job well done.”
■ ■ ■
The strange man interrupted his equally strange dance to mumble something unintelligible, the Christmas lights blinking ever more fiercely. Then he grinned at Henry. “Come with me, please.”
Henry followed him out of the room, shuffling along nervously. They walked through another room (previously described) and the strange man (whose name was Arnold, although there is no way that Henry could yet know that), bypassed the desk and the mass of wires and opened the door on the far side of that room.
Still following, Henry saw that another man was there, similarly attired and wearing dark and very large goggles, sitting in something like a dentist’s chair, more wires and gimracks protruding from his head, as well as several tubes leading from his arms and one even coming from his belly. The wires led to a receptacle in the wall, the tubes to a metal and plastic and something-else contraption sitting hunched beside the chair, humming along to itself in ever-changing pitches.
■ ■ ■
Private Stern disappears, replaced by Arnold, all fuzzy and grainy and jerky again, a cheap representation of his real self. Bits of skin slag off and drift for a moment before reattaching themselves; one eyeball drifts away for a moment, before Arnold can capture it with his tongue, all four feet of it.
“Darn it, I wish you wouldn’t do that!”
“He’s here, Michael,” says Arnold, ignoring the admonition. “Time to come on down.”
■ ■ ■
Arnold reached over and touched a button on the humming machine. “He’s here, Michael. Time to come on down.” The machine shuddered and spit and whistled and belched and even barfed some sort of greyish fluid onto the floor, which was promptly cleaned up by four small cartoonish brooms with arms, each carrying two very real wooden buckets. Henry blinked his eyes, unsure where they had come from, and when he looked again they were gone, as was the barf.
The tubes withdrew, some going from arms to machine and some from machine into the arms, the (slightly larger) one in the belly pulling out from there and being sucked into the machine, accompanied by the sort of slurping noise one associates with a child eating spaghetti. The wires disentangled themselves, and pulled into a slot in the wall or else wrapped themselves around Michael’s skull, a cheerful rainbow of Medusan snakes settling in for a nap.
■ ■ ■
The space car lands, magnificent Salt Lake City’s towers thrusting into the sky all around it, like fingers reaching for God. Captain Michael Davis reaches out, touches a button, and watches the car and the city dissolve around him, fading to nothing. He turns his head, gazes with fondness and consternation at Arnold, with definite capital-A Awe at Henry. Time to sit up.
Episode Four: A brief hysterical interlude
(POV Shift: Swing camera in close, closer, closest. Burrow deep into the skull, sneak the camera past the blood-brain barrier, find your way along the neurons, synapses firing and sparking at a savage rate, pretend you have a wondrous device to translate what follows)
—Oh God oh Christ I can’t believe what the fuck is happening to me here. Maybe maybe maybe this is only a dream, maybe I got the fucking DT’s, maybe I’m gonna wake up in a few minutes and laugh at all this. Noise in my head buzzing that’s gotta be it—
—Shit no I’m still here these guys are for real maybe they aren’t even from the future maybe they ’re aliens or something; come to grab me from their flying saucer—
—Calm down, don’t let them see you scared. Maybe they can smell fear like dogs or something—
—Shit—
Episode Five: Your trip to the outer reaches made easy
Michael stood up, pants cracking to allow him access to the floor, stiffening to keep him up. He hawked and spat on the floor, phlegm and a little bit of blood mixing, but not enough to worry about, cleared his throat a couple of times.
