Crime Scene: an excerpt from a Work In Progress.

A crime scene.

Dawn was breaking over the eastern horizon as the city came to life. Paris buzzed with the morning traffic. There were shouts, and horns, and bells, and the roar of bus exhausts.

One window, the one farthest from her bed, was open. Cheerful yellow chintz curtains bellied and luffed like sails on a ship at sea. Birds chirped and sang as they only do at a certain special time of the year, when they are just back from Africa or Spain and are in a rush to claim a home and begin another brood.

Muriel Ducharme steadied herself before attempting to dress. The room was chill after removing her night-dress, as she splashed water on her face from the bowl and ewer on the dresser top.

The clock on the wall read six-thirty-two a.m. It meant nothing to her, only that another day had begun. The habits of a lifetime were impossible to break. The doctor had once suggested she could take it easy and sleep in, if only on a Saturday. Trying it more than once, she had found it impossible and had spoken almost sharply to the doctor about such nonsensical ideas.

When she got really tired or had one of her dizzy spells, she would sit in a chair and doze lightly for a few minutes, or perhaps half an hour at most. Their snickers and indulgent remarks meant nothing to her. They treated her like a little old lady, and perhaps that was just. That much she could accept. She could still hear people speaking in the background. The maids and the cook had gotten used to it. They didn’t make a fuss or take much notice, although they might be a little careful of what they said. This was a good thing, for the help could be a mite too talkative at times. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for them all on some human level, but they must know their places or they would soon get out of hand. It wasn’t like she could ever really be intimate friends with them, although the environment a real house created was and should be intimate and friendly for all concerned.

She dried herself thoroughly, used to the chill of dawn after all these years of a morning routine that hardly varied. Changing into clean underwear, sturdy if plain, choosing which housedress to wear this fine Monday, noting the cheerful sounds outside of the set of three windows which admitted light and air to her boudoir, her mind was ahead on the tasks of the day.

They’d gone without coal much of the time in the War, and no one died or froze to death. They just put on another blanket or two and wore sweaters and coats if necessary. A smile crossed her face at some of the memories. It was in the nature of seventy-seven year-old ladies that their minds jumped about a bit, but she didn’t mind that at all. It made life interesting. That was important at her age. She had done without a lot of things, as had they all, which made her present fortune all the more bearable. As someone had once said, the only thing worse than getting old was not getting old. The best revenge lay in living a good life.

They were certainly lucky to have such a good house to live in and food to eat and beds to sleep in. They would never lack for anything, and yet people could be so selfish, so stupid.

She must phone someone somewhere and lay in the fish for Friday, for last week it had been atrocious. That fish came from Monsieur Normand’s. Normally she sent Eloise out for it on Wednesdays, however they would have to find another place. Not after the way Monsieur Normand’s assistant spoke to her. He was altogether too flippant for her liking. She buttoned her dress firmly all the way to the top and also habitually, found a loop of clean elastic ribbon to hold her grey hair in the severe bun she had affected since her husband’s passing almost thirty-four years ago. The dress, a faded royal blue one today, hung almost to the floor, leaving only the fronts of her feet exposed. It was almost a reflex to take up her rosary and put it around her neck.

She stood in front of the mirror, over which was a crucifix. Bowing her head, she said the first prayer of the day. It would not be the last. The world was very wicked, or perhaps it was just some of the people in it, and one couldn’t be too careful when it came to one’s soul. It was a sign of humility to pray, and to pray barefoot had always seemed the best way. It was different in church of course, all those feet with all those warts and funguses—sometime the floor was quite filthy, even her old eyes couldn’t help but notice, but this was her home and no one kept a cleaner one as far as she knew. It made her feel good about the day ahead.

She sat on the Louis Quatorze chair, the left one of a pair beside a small writing desk she never used, and found her stockings as laid out the night before by Sophie, her dearly beloved grand-niece. She was such a beautiful child and grateful to help out around the house, which made up in part her free room and board. Not that Muriel begrudged the girl, she was just at an age and what girl wouldn’t want to see Paris? And perhaps make a suitable match, if one could be found. At sixteen and a half, her raven-headed charge was a bit young for such thoughts but that was the way it was these days, all these newspapers and radio shows, and the posters in the metro all full of sex and glamour.

How would it all end? No one could really say, and so she prayed for everything to work out…

Black, knee-high silk stockings, as she could afford it, came next, and then the plain, brown flat-heeled, sensible shoes. Although this pair had seen better days she wasn’t going out so they would do. It was just her, Sophie, the cook and the housemaids today.

Her heart brightened at the thought of beginning spring cleaning, although it mustn’t interfere with the normal cleaning routine. She would speak to the girls about it and let them decide.

If Olivier dropped around near lunchtime as was his wont, if he was in the neighbourhood, her youngest son would hardly notice her shoes. That was one thing for certain.

Muriel stuffed her handkerchief up into her left sleeve and pulled the curtains back to ensure the windows were fully open. The middle one had always been stiff in the guides and she must be careful not to put a crick in her back or her neck, in spite of that she leaned into it and gave it a good heave. Up it went with a groan. It was early summer now and the rooms up on this floor could get quite stuffy as the house faced south onto the street. Big front windows admitted glaring sunlight, and in fact it was better in high summer, when the sun was more directly overhead.

The whole place could use a good airing as it had been damp lately and the towels for one thing were taking forever to dry. A person should be able to use a towel more than once, without it starting to smell, she thought.

She never could stand closed curtains, especially on such a lovely street as hers. The constant throng of traffic brought life and entertainment of a kind, right into her sitting room, where she could knit and listen to the radio or the gramophone, keeping a sharp eye over her world.

Snapping off the light, for electricity was very dear or so it seemed to one who had grown up without it, she left her bedroom door all the way open and headed for the salle de bain to complete her morning toilette.

Muriel had her morning tinkle, flushed the toilet and washed her face and hands with hot water and soap. The pipes gurgled faintly behind the walls as she snapped off the light and carefully closed the door.

They rarely had visitors up here, but proprieties would be observed, besides, it kept any suggestion of a rank smell out of the hallway and the rest of the upstairs.

As was her custom, she turned right for the servant’s stairs instead of left for the more formal main stairs. Her first stop was always the kitchen. She would stoke up the boiler, as she always said, and put the kettle on for when Therese arrived.

Pausing at the head of the stairs, she studied herself in the oval hanging mirror placed there on the wall for just such a purpose. Thoughtful, pale blue eyes with a hint of warmth and humor had always surprised her when she saw them. Her spectacles were smudged, she could see it in the mirror in the glow of the small wall-sconce. It was the most frustrating thing, but they were almost impossible to keep clean with crabbed fingers and the small tremors in the hands. The girls really couldn’t be trusted with such a job.

Is that really me? She had always wondered, but the eyes were the windows into the soul, or so the poets always said.

She had looked better, but it would have to do.

Gripping the handrail firmly, with her head carefully tipped down and her glasses firmly on, with the light in the stairwell snapped on, the grand old lady began making her way down the dark and narrow boards of the staircase.

***

Wheezing slightly, her temperature feeling slightly elevated as was her heart-beat, she came to the bottom step where she paused. The hall light was just inside the doorjamb as light spilled out into the front of the kitchen. Finding it, she turned it off as she stepped out into the room. The switch for this room was to the right, on the wall. She fumbled in the dark for it as the kitchen was at the back of the house and the dim light of pre-dawn wasn’t making much of an impression.

The silence of the morning was special somehow, also the fact that it would be a sunny day. They said it might go up to thirty degrees later in the afternoon.

An unseen hand hit the switch on the far end of the room and she gasped, hand clutching at her rosary beads. She stopped where she was and awkwardly turned, peering to see who it was. It was much too early for the cook.

“Oh!” Her eyes bulged in shock and belatedly, real fear.

“No!”

The first shot hit her high in the chest, going through her hand with its pathetic beads, and she spun to the left as she fell.

“Oh! Oh, mon Dieu.” She lay on the bottom of the stairs as footsteps approached, sounding cold and distant, echoing in her head which made whoosh-whooshing noises. “Hail Mary, full of grace…”

Her lips were moving as the second shot hit her in the back, with the angle and the convulsive shock, for this was a strong old lady, still with plenty of light left in her, and it flung her half onto her back again. She stared up in dumb shock, unable to comprehend, let alone believe what was happening to her. The pain came then, and with it, the reality of what was happening to her.

“Why? Why?”

There was no answer given.

“The Lord is with thee…”

The sound came of a pistol cocking.

“Why?” She gaped, blood pouring out of her open mouth, eyes glazed with the pain.

There was no answer. One final shot to the head made all such questions superfluous. The impact smashed her head back onto the stairs to stare sightlessly up at the kitchen light fixture, albeit the lights were quickly turned off again, and the footsteps rapidly faded on the stairs of the rear exit.

A long and narrow alleyway, home to old carts, broken glass, dustbins, and the occasional outcropping of tree or brush, led all the way the length of the block.

Half an hour or so later, the cook arrived, finding the door unlocked and with broken glass from a single small pane set up high scattered both inside and outside of the threshold. At the sight that greeted her eyes, she gave a single great gasping sob. Throwing aside her packages, she put her hands over her mouth, staring with eyes bugging out, and then she ran out into the alley.

She screamed, once, twice, and then again. Crying and sobbing and with her lungs heaving, she ran down the two flights of steps and out of the small back courtyard and around to the next house. She pounded on the rear door, repeating over and over again that she needed to use the telephone.



End of excerpt.

The usual disclaimer.

This is a first draft. The story may be subject to minor changes and possibly some cutting. But this is basically how I work. And the copy as it is seems pretty clean. My spelling is good and the grammar seems all right.

Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery, the first in the series, is presently free on Kobo as well as other fine online retailers.

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Redemption-Inspector-Gilles-Maintenon-mystery/book-kS23AvtcCESx-DhwNBJg9A/page1.html

Simenon's House.

(Flamenc. Wiki.)

The house pictured is where Georges Simenon, the great Belgian writer of detective fiction was born. It’s 34 Leopold St. It’s in some shit little town in Belgium. The housing is fairly typical of big cities all over Europe, and you can find similarities with buildings even in North America and in the former European empires in Southeast Asia. A murder has to happen somewhere, right? One place is as good as another.


While it is by no means necessary to have a floor plan, which some mysteries do, it’s interesting just to learn by looking. It’s what a proper detective would do.

How do the residents get into the private apartments above? These homes were all built separately, yet the norm appears to be an unobtrusive door at sidewalk level on the left side of the building. The business entrance is much more prominent. In my hometown of Sarnia, Ontario, in Canada, there are similar buildings uptown, admittedly only three or four stories tall. There are definitely stylistic differences, but in art form follows function.

But what they do have in common is a business on the ground, and private apartments up above, with separate doors for each.

Any reader of mystery novels can see that the layout, how people came and went from a murder scene, whether it was the victim, or the killer, witnesses, it all has a bearing on the outcome of the event, the case, and the book. How many people live there and who else has access?

Looking at this picture, it’s impossible to say if there is an alley behind it or not. For the purposes of fiction, let’s say there is. Where did it lead to? Can patrons of the shops on the first floor use the alley? One would think not. Delivery men, possibly…the reader sees where I am going. We can learn much by the layout of the place and yet all we really know is that someone was murdered there. As a writer, we have to start someplace, and in a murder mystery, to begin at the beginning is to present the reader with a nice, luscious, tasty victim, i.e. a corpse.

What prevents people from wandering in off the street? How do people get to the second level, which also appears to be a place of business?

Presumably the private apartments, which start on the third floor in this building, have some kind of locked door on a landing at the top of the third flight of stairs. There is the need for some kind of research, if only to visualize the simple movements, and to learn what is possible and what is not. Just as an afterthought, the houses may have had fire escapes, over the roofs. I haven’t decided yet. I’ll throw it in if I need it!

I don’t know for sure, but it is possible, or possibly there might be an external staircase on the back of the building.

Watching House Hunters International a few years ago, they did a show where they looked at apartments in Paris. It was the dream of a lifetime for the people involved. Imagine: to live in Paris.

It was amazing to learn that a half a million U.S. dollars inside the city limits of Paris, would buy four or five very small and oddly-shaped rooms, stacked up vertically inside a narrow building on a street with no parking for miles and cobbles right up to the doorsills. The bathroom was little bigger than a broom closet, and the stairs were more like the kind you would find on a schooner from the 1840s. They were narrow and steep. The stove was eleven inches wide…you get the idea.

This puts the houses in this picture into their proper perspective. Assuming one private owner, there is some prosperity in the picture. My present novel takes place in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, which affected France a bit later than some other countries.

Other than that, I don’t want to give too much away.

Swimming.



Swimming gives wonderful intangible rewards.



Swimming is a wonderful low-impact workout for the entire body.

In all honesty, I’m not much of a swimmer. The important thing is that I like it. That alone qualifies me to try and motivate others to get out and have a bash for all the right reasons.

You’ll soon see what I mean.

As a non-swimmer who took lessons for years, there is some real satisfaction, a kind of intangible reward involved.

A little over halfway to my goal, there is a feeling where the arms begin to burn, and yet I feel strong, I’m managing my breathing, I can see the shore going by at a pretty good clip, and I know that I can do this…

This afternoon when I arrived it was lightly spitting rain.

There are those who say you can’t go swimming when it’s raining because you might get wet.

Ignore those people, for surely they are misogymnasts or something. Some kind of gymnast, anyway.

I swam yesterday, using a combination of strokes, without touching bottom. I went about ninety metres the first time and about seventy metres the second time. I would describe myself as a non-swimmer for that alone—after that I need a rest. Otherwise I’m plummeting to the bottom, my sordid failures and lurid mediocrities flashing before my eyes like a blue light special at K-Mart before they closed her down.

Okay, so today, I did eighty metres three times. I swim to the next groyne (that’s a real word by the way) starting more or less where my shoes are. I go out until I’m in about four feet of water. When I swim, I do a modified dog paddle, with a two-footed kick, very slow but also very large—I make a thump like a ship’s propeller when I kick. I keep my head up so I can see where I’m going. My arms are under me, not out to the sides, and I sort of scoop backwards, both hands at once, just like a beaver or muskrat. When I just can’t do it any longer, I might roll over on my back. I don’t do a classic back stroke, it’s too hard. I burn out too quick. I might scull along with my feet trailing, and I have a couple of odd little strokes for that. It’s not a question of speed, but of using what reserves I do have as efficiently as possible.

I can do a proper face-down crawl, but synchronizing the breathing has always been beyond my ability. A crawl with the head up is faster, but I burn out quicker and then have to rest anyway. But I can do a crawl for maybe thirty metres. An excellent upper body workout involves doing a heads-up crawl with legs trailing. If you’re not kicking efficiently to begin with, this is surprisingly efficient and almost as fast. I can do a side-stroke on my left side, but the right side isn’t anywhere near as good.

In order to save my life, in water of relatively warm temperature, the odds are I could swim a lot farther than eighty metres. Draining everything I had, (and taking my time, and not panicking) I might be able to go the full 240 metres, grab a dock or a rope or most likely crawl ashore. I might survive, right?

Now, if I was lost and traveling across country, I wouldn’t try to swim even a thirty or forty-metre wide river or swamp. It’s too chancy, and you’re going to want to preserve your clothes. You might be carrying a few things to begin with. If you go upstream a ways and can’t find a ford, you might want to swim for it. A strong swimmer pushing a raft or float can survive a fairly long time if the water isn’t too cold. The raft allows you to keep your clothes and shoes dry.

In my opinion, and at least in my own case, that sort of stuff is strictly last resort.

Swimming is low-impact. Unlike throwing a ball, which might tend to pull and yank on tendons, or running, which tends to pound and punish the knees and ankles of joggers, there is a lower risk of serious joint and ligament injuries. I’m a tall, skinny guy, and without football drills or weight lifting, my neck’s not that strong. I have a long, skinny neck, some back injuries and at my age, every so often the knees, the elbows, the neck bother me.

Even walking waist deep in water is good exercise, although doctor-prescribed hydrotherapy usually takes place in a heated pool. Cold water is good for reducing pain and inflammation.

(That’s why you put ice on a sprain.)

Right now, my neck feels like it had a good workout, as did my arms and shoulders. Swimming is an excellent aerobic exercise. There is some sensation in my lower back, but I am far better off to work that lower back, in a reasonable manner. This pays off in winter, when I’m a lot more sedentary. My knees bother me a lot more in winter, possibly due to the cold, but in winter I’m not cycling or swimming either. You fall out of shape pretty rapidly. That’s just a fact.

Walking on a nature trail for a kilometre or maybe a little more, once or twice a month, doesn’t hurt me any either, although it does cause some pain in the hips. In terms of riding the bike, (which I’m actually pretty good at) my longest trip this year was about thirty kilometres. That’s not bad for a fifty-four year old guy with long-standing back problems. (And he smokes, too. – ed.)

I used to take pain pills, prescribed by a doctor. I still had pain, often a lot of it. So what I did was to stop taking the pills—and stop doing stupid things like trying to go back to work as a drywall guy, or a roofer, or doing something really hard like high-pressure water-blasting, on twelve-hour shifts, on call and on shut-downs.

All I was doing was punishing myself and not getting anywhere. I failed at all of them jobs!

I guess you could say I retired early, and now I do whatever the hell I want. It doesn’t pay much but I have my freedom.

You got to like that, ladies and gentlemen.

Ghost Planet.



























What the hell happened, I will never know. It was just some rare electronic glitch that brought me down.

I was on my way to my sister’s wedding.

In transit from Galactic East, clear across to the other side, it made sense in terms of energy curves to cut straight across the southern arm and make a shorter trip to my destination of Westside. In purely conventional terms the Galaxy spun in that direction anyway. Technically the universe is isotropic, in that half of all galaxies spin clockwise, and the other half counter-clockwise. Without some agreed-upon convention, we wouldn’t know which way is up.

Crossing the Great Dark Sea, an anomalous term but not without merit, it never occurred to me that I might have a breakdown. The Petrel had never let me down, or at least nothing that I couldn’t fix on my own and with the few tools and spares available.

When she sputtered and the display warnings lit up, my first reaction was a little mild cussing.

Before long I realized it was serious, as both engines were down, and the re-start procedure failed three times running.

The realization that I was a hundred and thirty or forty light years from the nearest human or other habitation was sobering.

Looking at my map display, I opened it up on a large scale, tracking magnetic anomalies in the projected glide path—I’ve never used that term before or since, but that’s what it was, and I quickly determined that the electronic suite was showing green on all points. According to the computer, there was nothing wrong with the quantum engines. Without knowing what was wrong, I had no idea of how to proceed.

All I could do was to run all diagnostic programs on the software, looking for bugs, glitches, and missing bits of code, which happens often enough. This would take a little time, so I went back to the maps.

One major bulge in the fabric of the space-time continuum bore further investigation. On zooming in, I saw a string of numbers and a pinprick of yellow light. The un-named white dwarf had one planet, and the planet had been mapped a couple of centuries ago. It had that much going for it. There was an asterisk, indicating a robotic surface probe. It was so close to the end-point on this trajectory that it seemed like I was going there anyway, whether I liked it or not. There were some ruins of archaeological interest but no present habitation. The ruins were classified as belonging to a well-known, highly-dispersed group of predecessor species. They were thought to have died out or moved on fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, according to my search of onboard files. While not the most up to date encyclopedically, these were usually good enough for the time being.

Managing a ship without engines is a simple problem of thermodynamics, and it didn’t take long to calculate emergency maneuvering thrust from the auxiliary bottles, which I would have to mount within the next two or three days if I couldn’t get her running otherwise. The ship was stored with the minimum legal number of six, which would require some space-walking. Not my forte, really, but it might have to be done.

Unfortunately, that is exactly the way things turned out.

***

With a bigger ship, I never would have made it down. With its lifting body shape, more of a styling thing these days with transmission booths everywhere and the modern propensity for saving time, money and docking fees by leaving ships in high orbit, but the atmosphere had sufficient density. My jury-rigged thrust bottles gave enough braking power for insertion. I could at least steer to the initial point.

The low gravity of the planet itself, which was only about one-half of one standard planetary mass, made the glide into the selected destination fairly calm, although there was quite a bit of turbulence in the troposphere.

Picking my spot, dropping the skids, deploying flaps and speed brakes, kept me busy enough, but the signs of past civilization were there all right. The electronics suite was just blank, a new experience for me. It was all dead down there, the people departed long in the past.

There was nobody home.

My landing was slated for an oval saline lake bed, fifteen kilometres wide and about forty long.

I only had one shot at it, and so I held her a bit high, bleeding off speed in a series of pull-ups, gentle stalls, and finally one big, diving S-turn right over the downwind end of the lake.

At three thousand metres, we had plenty of space in front of us. We were falling at a thousand metres per minute. With no place else to go but down, I was committed to the landing.

The ship flared when I pulled back on the stick, battery power still holding out, which was good as hitting a little too hard would have been fatal. Ground effect, which I had never experienced, surprised me and it was like she just wanted to glide forever. There wasn’t even a bounce. Once she set down, she stuck nicely.

It took a long time to stop on the pebbly salt surface, with an improbably blue mirage coming up fast under the nose. My heart raced at the sight of all that water, and the possibility of having to make an underwater exit.

The ship came to rest in a foot of water, nose pointed out into the middle of the lake, and I had gotten very lucky indeed.

The temperature outside was about twenty-eight degrees Celsius and the winds were from the southwest. It was nine-thirteen-thirty-six a.m. by the ship’s chronometer.

I sat in my seat for a long time, but sooner or later I had to go out there. Scanning with the manual emergency periscope, it looked like the nearest mountains, and the most likely place to find fresh water and hopefully local game animals, were about fifteen or twenty kilometres to the northeast.

Hopefully the rescue beacon I’d left in one of the LaGrange points for this system would be spotted by somebody, but that could take a long time if it happened at all. Of necessity, the things were low-powered and traffic out here was pretty much non-existent. Any passers-by would be looking for salvage as much as anything. The ship had its own transponder, one with a little more juice to it, but my hopes were very slim.

Skimming through the start-up checklist, I tried yet again to get the motors running.

No luck, no clue as to what the problem was. She just wouldn’t go. I sat quietly thinking about that. One last restart was all I dared. I was going to need those batteries, at least in the short term, just trying to stay alive for as long as possible in hopes of rescue.

That didn’t seem very likely.

The truth was that I could very well die here—probably would, and no one would be the wiser.

This was my new home.

***

Without any idea of whether the ship would settle into the silt, which seemed hard enough at first examination, I faced some tough choices. The natural inclination was to stay right where I was. That’s what all the survival manuals said.

Coming down in pretty much any other part of the Galaxy, staying aboard might have been an option. While rescue was not exactly assured—it still took days, weeks or months for missing ships to be found, the thought of leaving her behind and striking off all alone into the barren wastes of an alien planet far from home was not attractive. I figured it had to be done, and the sooner the better. The more supplies I kept in reserve, the more options I had in an emergency.

The thinking seemed clear.

Just sitting there until food and water ran out was not an option.

One way or another, I had to find food, water, and with a little luck, a more permanent shelter.

As for inhabitants of this rather unattractive little pebble in space, they had left long ago, and there wasn’t much we could do about that.

I left a note on my seat and the hatch unlocked. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

I took enough solid food for a three-day journey. I figured one day there, and one day back, which left a day to sit around and wait for something to walk by. If I could find something to eat, that would be helpful. Hopefully, if I could see it, I could hit it with the old .45 I kept for pirates and landings on inhabited but otherwise inhospitable planets, of which I’d seen a few in my time.

Clambering down the ladder, I stood in the warm brine and looked off to the north and east. Walking around underneath, the Petrel seemed in good shape. That was some consolation.

I had no famous last words, just the terrible thought of dismantling parts of the ship and pioneering, hopelessly alone, for the rest of my life out there in the middle of nowhere.

It took twenty minutes just to find dry land. Turning, the Petrel looked forlorn, lost and out of her natural environment. From this angle, she seemed down by the nose already, and again I wondered just how much she might settle.

I did have one last word, and having said it, I turned with grim resolution towards the low dark smudge on the horizon, the only thing I could see that held any promise at all, and then I started walking.

***

Like many a true spacer, my physical condition was not the best. All that time spent in artificial environments, and tightly-constrained ones at that, meant that I was soon sweating. My lower back and hips had some twinges, but I kept going. Hopefully that would ease over time.

I reached the base of the hills in less than two and a half hours, an oddly impressive feat. It wasn’t as far as I had thought. Partly I think that was due to something called atmospheric perspective, something else spacers weren’t too familiar with. The air dimmed the colour of the distant scene. What I thought were mountains a couple of thousand metres tall were just hills less than a third of that. Rising out of the sun-baked white plain I trod, the first big ridge loomed up in front of me. At first it was welcoming, with glades of grass, and an open park-like forest of tall green vegetation on its lower slopes, with some of the stems two or three metres thick. It was inviting enough until I comprehended the meaning of the bare tops and reddish tint of the summit, sticking up above the tree-tops.

I was sticking to the bottom of a cleft, for surely this was my best chance of finding water, and in fact I was heartened to see rounded rocks, patches of sand and gravel, and the occasional sign of the bank coming down recently. There were roots and dark topsoil exposed in vertical walls of dirt.

So far, no water, but I felt I was on the trail of something. I drained the first of my one-litre bottles and stuck it back in the side pocket of my pack.

Then I set out to find the top of the mountain.

After a few minutes the forest closed in, and the ground got steeper. The thicker brush implied some occasional rainfall if nothing else, for the small gulley I was following was still dry. Up ahead was a tangle of broken rock, roots and fallen vegetation. I got out of the gulley but tried to stay beside it as best I could. The problem in my mind was evolution. If the trees had evolved over millennia for a dry environment, then signs of rain or water might be months old, and of course what looked like trees and grass in my limited knowledge might be anything but comparable to trees and grass elsewhere in the Galaxy. They might be able to go a very long time without rain, but unfortunately I was going to need water in the next two days or it would be a long walk back for more.

While that was my initial plan, and my backup plan still. The view from the top would help me to decide what to do next, or where to go next, is more to the point.

When the trees gave out, there was nothing but the stringy green growths, which had an unfortunate tendency to rip out and let go just when I tugged on them to get up a steep spot. Finally, I was on all fours, slipping and sliding until I got to one final ledge. Above me the rocks were bare and wet-looking. A light mist clung to the summit, one which hadn’t been there when I first started up. Walking along the base of the ominous rock slope, wondering if I really ought to even attempt it, I found a crack, gushing with a small rivulet that petered out within yards. The rocks were green with slime, there were small round pads of something spongy and pale green, and the darker grass circling beyond that was thick and lush.

The water was cool, clear, and there was really only one way to find out. I sucked some up thought a filtered hand pump, examining it in the clear tube of the body. It looked okay. I pumped some through into my mouth.

Unbelievable. I never knew water could taste that good. I filled my empty bottle, drank half of it off now that there was no shortage, and filled it up again.

For the first time in my life, I really appreciated water, which sounds odd for a spacer but it’s true.

That’s all I can say.

So far I hadn’t felt hungry, and I really didn’t feel hungry now, but contemplating the climb that lay ahead, it seemed like a good time. With the mist hanging between me and the lake, I couldn’t make out the ship. That was a lonely moment, and without further hesitation I opened up the pack and took out the first of my meals. Opening a tin of something indecipherable, I saw row after row of small fish packed in a reddish sauce with bits of green leaf in it. That one, I think, had been in the back of the galley cupboards for a very long while. With a lightweight plastic fork, I dug in and began eating dutifully. Whether I liked it or not, I had no choice but to eat every bit of it. Looking down, it looked like a thousand metres or more. I had no experience judging distance by naked eye in such an environment, a sobering realization.

The humblest, most scuttling little four-legged varmint had at least that much of an advantage on me.

It was one hell of a view from up there.

***

An hour later, drenched in sweat from the unaccustomed effort, I pulled myself onto a flat slab of red rock, banded with wide strips of white, and looked back the way I had come. There was a tiny black dot in the sparkling aquamarine of the dead lake. For all I knew, it was the Petrel.

The thought of climbing back down that wet seventy-degree slab, cracked and studded with ledges and crevices as it was, was not a good one.

The sun was high in the sky. The planet’s rotation indicated about a sixteen and a half-hour day at the equator. This time of year, there were about seven hours of darkness at this latitude.

With a shrug and a strong pull of will, I turned and looked the other way. My knees seemed weak and wobbly.

This actually took some guts. As things turned out, I was deathly frightened whenever I looked down. It was a kind of razorback ridge of up-ended slabs. This made standing tall out of the question—I crouched there, and yet the other side didn’t look quite so bad.

That was a bad moment. To look back, and to fear the descent. To look forward, and it was only marginally better…

Going over the lip was bad, yet I had enough objectivity, once safely clinging to the edge and standing on the first outcropping, to take a moment and try to figure out where I was headed.

Below lay a snaking blue watercourse. Obviously, down was my first priority. The next thirty metres were the worst, for on this side the plant life if I can call it that began almost immediately.

Having a branch or root to cling to was better, especially going down. The fact that I had made it up at all, was something of a miracle.

On one side, it was barren desert, on the other side, a river and a temperate forest. Every spacer must know a little bit of planetology, if only for trading purposes, and it didn’t seem too outlandish. The hills blocked the rain and kept it from getting to the desert. Elementary school stuff. There was a much better chance of food here as well.

Once I felt safe again, I took a little more time to study the prospect laid out below.

The river’s curves tightened up and got closer together on the right, and it seemed wider there. The hills on the far side diminished in the distance, and maybe the valley opened up a bit. Off to my left was nothing but mist, so it wasn’t a fair comparison. I decided to follow the current when I found the river.

Based on what I saw, my instinct was that the river ran to the right, and grateful for the low brush screening my view of precipitous depths and plumb vertical drops, I carefully worked my way down, becoming conscious at some point that the light was fading and it wasn’t all due to the hillsides or the forest blocking out the daylight.

Night was coming and it was time to find somewhere safe to hole up.

With that thought came another kind of dread.

I had a sleeping bag, I had my toothbrush. All that sort of thing, but the real problem was that I had never really been away from home before—I’d always had one ship or another to call home.

So far I hadn’t seen any animals, nothing that even resembled an insect, or anything, really.

The thought wasn’t much comfort.

***

I didn’t even think of having a fire that first night. I just curled up in my sleeping bag and tried to put all thoughts out of my mind. Sleep was essential, and to get too exhausted in physical or psychological terms was stupid. I would need every edge to survive, even in the short term. Just sitting in the ship for day after day would bring inevitable thoughts of despair. I was no worse off out here, and there was every chance I would learn something of value. I needed that knowledge.

By now, people would know that I was missing. They would be so worried. I thought of my mom, and it was wretched. Tears almost overwhelmed me but I kept them back, sniffling a bit and wiping my nose on the sleeve of my jacket. They at least, would be fine. I didn’t have to worry about that. It wasn’t helping me to dwell on it.

My most important asset was what was inside my head.

I had everything I needed to survive out here, at least that’s what I told myself. As the sky darkened and the temperature dropped shockingly fast, I watched the stars come out and marveled at my fate, thinking about some of the survival stories that I’d read or heard about over the years.

The only sound was the wind. On a ship there are noises, always something running in the background. But here there was only the wind.

It occurred to me that if I ever got out of there…I would be one uniquely privileged individual.

The most amazing thing about the experience is that I finally did sleep.

***

Nothing ate me in the night.

I woke with a bang, with the rustle of the wind in some low bushes right beside me, and of course I had to pee. The sleeping bag was warm, and the air on my face felt cold, but nature’s call must be obeyed.

My shoes were right there.

After climbing back in the sleeping bag, I waited for a little more daylight, but I could only stand it for another ten or so minutes. There was nothing for it but to go on. At least I had a water source within easy walking distance of the ship, although there was no guarantee the small spring I had found would be there in all seasons.

In an hour and a half of walking, the forest had grown to trees thirty or forty metres tall, maybe higher.

That’s when I came upon a road. At first, it was just a wide slash across my line of travel, which tended downhill and what was indicated planetary west on my old-fashioned compass.

Looking to the left, it seemed to narrow, but the shadows might have been deceptive. It also seemed to climb, while on the right, perhaps due to the angle of the sun, the way seemed more open, and it also appeared to drop in the distance. Through the tops of trees I could see a bright gleam off the water.

I followed the slash to the right, for while my initial impression was of a street or road, there was nothing underfoot to indicate pavement or asphalt or anything like that. It was relatively flat in small, interlinked patches.

It went on for a while and then the forest on the left opened up and I could definitely see that I was paralleling the river. I still wanted to see which way the current was going, so I stepped into the forest proper again and cautiously made my way down to the bank.

Just because the planet was uninhabited, that didn’t rule out big, predatory animals, although I had seen none so far. Neither did it rule out other hazards, inimical plant life, parasites, and unknown diseases, many of which would be water-borne.

***

The second night found me in what once must have been quite the metropolis. The ruins were a strange mixture of massive stone blocks clearly belonging to a barbaric age, and then crumpled heaps of something much more recent, and fairly high-tech if the bits and pieces of building materials literally sticking out of the grass in places were anything to go by.

Metal would have long since corroded, or simply sunk out of sight. I grabbed the end of one that looked like a twenty-five millimetre T-section. I gave it a good tug, but it wouldn’t come up out of the ground. The impression was of stiff plastic, rather than light metal. There were even small buildings entirely covered in brush and undergrowth, and yet the shape of it revealed that the house inside might still be intact. I considered hacking away with my little hand-axe, and what the interior would probably look like, and gave that idea up. All I really needed was shelter.

Some of the huge masonry ruins had arches and recesses relatively out of the rain, and it was to these that I turned my attention.

Off in the distance, the rumble of thunder, a darkening sky and flashes of light spurred my search.

I found a likely spot, what might have been a temple or shrine, all pale and smooth marble or limestone, or who knows what. It was like a semi-spherical band-shell, and the right end was angled against the prevailing wind.

With some thought to the prowlers of the night—I’d seen a few tracks at waterholes along the way, I gathered up dead branches and sticks, heaping them in big armfuls along the trail. This was on the bank of a small, clear stream that went through in there.

More thunder, and the wind whipped up a little now, and then I started bringing in the heaps, making a big pile three or four metres from where I planned to sleep. I went back for more, thinking that I had really only had two meals so far. Other than a clean white skull and three other small bones from some omnivore judging by the teeth, I hadn’t seen any wildlife so far.

The tracks by the river said otherwise, and although there was nothing there much bigger than a dog would make, the key thing was to be the predator, rather than ending up as prey.

With that thought, I unrolled my sleeping bag and stuck the .45 under the rolled-up jacket I was using as a pillow. If I left the camp, that baby was going with me. First thing in the morning, I would have to figure out a better way of carrying it.

***

The storm had passed, although flashes still came over the horizon from the south-east. My watch said four a.m., a little after. I must have fallen asleep pretty early, zonked as I was from all the walking. The flickering of adjacent walls made an eerie impression.

I could have sworn I heard voices, a lot of them.

I froze in terror inside the bag. My hair prickled and a chill of something shot right through me.

My guts slowly relaxed as I listened. It was a kind of awe, for surely it must the creek, gushing and gurgling along, dropping over small ledges and bustling past snags and small boulders. I’d never heard anything like that before in my entire life. That stream made the weirdest noise effects.

It was the most horrible thing. I had the impression of laughing, and people talking, like at a cocktail party, one going on just over on the next block but you can’t catch even a word of it.

I mean, like when your ears burn and you think everyone’s talking about you, and there’s another wild burst of laughter just to ram the point home.

My heart ticked over at a steady beat. Maybe a little faster than it should. With dawn still some hours away, I lay as still as possible and tried to convince myself that I didn’t have a care in the world, let alone worrying about what a planet full of stupid ghosts thought of me.

***

“So, you made three of these expeditions, spending a total of thirty-four days on the planet’s surface?”

“Yes.”

“And you managed to finally get some food?”

“Um, yes. There were starchy fruits growing on low bushes. I did see a couple of animals, small furry ones, but I didn’t try to shoot them as they were too far away.”

Constable Owen Barnaby of the Patrol looked sympathetic on the view-screen.

“And then for whatever reason, on impulse, you tried to start the ship and it worked. Okay, that seems clear enough. We can’t find any service bulletins for the GB-19 series, and this one is definitely serious.”

“Yes, also, my folks will be asking about me.”

“Confirmed. Would you like to patch through, or maybe we could notify someone?”

“No. I’ll call in a few minutes.”

“Well, thank you for filing a report. As for a planet there, we don’t have anything on that. Our records just show the magnetic anomaly you spoke of.”

There were some implied doubts regarding my story in that statement, but I was prepared to let it drop if he was. They were more concerned with my safety than anything else. Certainly there were no criminal charges they could lay, as I had filed a flight plan and my ship’s log showed the engine failure and a landing on something.

Going on and on about my irrational thoughts or feelings about the experience was not an option. These guys could yank a permit on a whim if they got grumpy, and a pilot’s mental state is definitely grounds for inquiry.

“Well, if there’s nothing else, Mrs. Snelgrove, all we can do is to let you get on with your busy day.”

“I’ll have the ship checked over as soon as I get home.”

He nodded and stuck his thumb to the screen.

I stuck my thumb on the screen and sealed the file as far as I was concerned. There was more, a whole lot more, but duty was done and unless he asked a specific question, I wasn’t going into it.

“Thank you.”

We broke the connection at the same time.

I especially didn’t want to bring up the feeling that I got after my first big fright, that demoralizing feeling that someone was watching me, every stinking minute of every stinking day. I don’t know how long I would have lasted out there on my own if I hadn’t gotten lucky with the ship.

I will always think of that place as the Ghost Planet. I would also very much like to get all these voices out of my head.

***

Here is the Louis Shalako page on iTunes, where all my titles are presently free. Not appearing here are Time Storm and Selected Poems. Those titles are available free at several other fine online bookstores.

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The Implosion Bomb.

A burst of radiation...and then it was gone.

“The implosion bomb works on a very simple principle, ladies and gentlemen.” Doctor Stephen Morley was addressing a top-secret symposium of the planet’s most imposing sub-nuclear scientists.


The grizzled African-American father of two peered over half-glasses, his notes neatly arrayed on the podium. He hardly needed them, but they provided reassurance.

He had full confidence in the findings, and well he should. The thing was a reality now, in a twenty-five year project that made the Manhattan Project look like a fart in a windstorm.

He put the first slide up on screen. It was an asteroid, hanging dim and mottled in the inky blackness of space. On the far side of the sun from Earth, its detection, or rather the lack of its presence, would not be remarked by unfriendly powers for many years. He’d done the math himself, and the secret location was highly-classified. Space was free territory. Other powers could easily investigate, if only they knew where to look. Stephen had given countless briefings over the years, including the present and three past presidents.

“As you know, the atom is mostly empty space. So, it turns out, are the sub-nuclear particles with which we have all become familiar. Or at least thought we had.”

The room was dead silent as he went on.

“Modern scanning techniques go far beyond molecules, atoms, and particles. Now, ladies and gentleman, we have glimpsed the very matrix, the space-time continuum itself. It promises great revelations for the future, and yet this technology must still be proven. Research must still be paid for. The work must go on.”

He waited. Eyes gleamed back at him in the darkness, lit only by the slide on the screen.

“What if we took all that empty space and made it go somewhere else?”

He put up the next slide. At first, it looked like a washout, all white glare with smudges of pale grey and finally charcoal in the corners. The next slide came up when he clicked. This one showed a spectrum of radiation, a very strong impulse, with major frequencies shown with graphic scales of the signal strength beside each one. The figures didn’t make sense at first. The numeric values were astronomical, although the scales had been designed with such a possibility in mind.

The swell of talk began to envelop the room as the brains behind those glazing eyes and open mouths took in what he was saying and it all began to sink in…

“Now you see it—and now you don’t.”

The talk turned to an uproar as a field of stars appeared, the exact same stars as in the previous image. The picture was clearly taken from the same vantage point, probably a satellite or small spaceship. The significance of the photo’s time and date imprint became collectively known and then everyone was out of their seats and shouting questions and even some abuse in his direction.

Quickly the lights came up, a safety precaution as they were all out of their seats by this point.

“That’s right, ladies and gentleman.” He stood at the rostrum grinning down at his colleagues, all six hundred of them here tonight. “That’s right.”

Hiding in plain sight, the symposium’s main venue was the ballroom of the Anaheim Hilton hotel. Security arrangements were unobtrusive but intense.

The uproar dropped down a bit, almost reluctantly, or so it seemed at first, but then it spontaneously built to a crescendo. The applause of his peers and the shouts of his supporters and admirers quickly drowned out the inevitable moaners and groaners, asking questions about ethics and what all this was costing and just exactly how it all came about. All the really fun science was happening right here in the good old U.S. of A.

It was a triumph of science and engineering, and they all knew it.

“Matter, and space, time and energy, ladies and gentlemen. It’s all rolled into one now.”

He clicked on the icon for the slide show to roll automatically. Dramatic music swelled as the lights dimmed, interspersed with coughing and shuffling noises as people looked around and found their seats again.

“What’s really interesting is that we theorize that all of the laws of conservation of momentum ceased to apply at the moment of implosion. There is no debris to follow along a trajectory, ladies and gentlemen. It has ceased to exist.”

The room got very quiet.

“So there are still many gaps in our theory. Science brings us constant surprises.”

Pictures of the asteroid, close-ups of the space-ship, one which they had never seen before, drew gasp after gasp from the assembled watchers. The room was dead silent again, as the implosion event played across the screen, from multiple angles, varying distances, and at different time-markers, beginning at Point Zero.

Finally there came a picture of the device itself, which was not much bigger than a deluxe backyard barbecue. It even bore a passing resemblance on its tall trolley wheels and with a keypad slung on each side of the device for arming and programming. The next pictures showed a power panel, mounted on the left side. The right panel held a keyboard and a small screen, and a pair of old fashioned key switches.

A collective rumble went up. It was a psychological moment in this type of briefing.

The doctor concluded his briefing, holding up a hand to still applause. He wasn’t quite done yet.

His peroration was short and to the point, a quote from J. Robert Oppenheimer, spoken after the Trinity test at Alamagordo in 1945.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have become Death, the destroyer or worlds.”

The uproar broke out again, but he shouted them down.

“And it’s true, isn’t it ladies and gentlemen? We have become destroyers of worlds.”

Which was more shocking, the pictures onscreen or the image of a serious scientist yelling his damned fool head off at what had become a mob of frightened humanity, no one could say, but the people eventually quieted. Reluctantly, they listened and watched with spellbound attention as Stephen concluded with some minor points.



There was no way to keep such a thing a secret, of course. The question was how and when to announce it to a tired world, one which had seen enough power politics and gunboat diplomacy, long before the implosion bomb came along.

That would be the next item on the symposium’s agenda. Inwardly he could see the relationships already sorting themselves out, into cliquish little study groups, each and every person wondering what the hell to say. How could they ever cover their own asses in the pitiless lens of history…the unpalatable answer of course, what that they hadn’t known about it.

They would have plenty to say about it. He knew most of them, some of them very well.

The real work was just beginning.

“All I do is invent them, ladies and gentlemen. Your job is to figure out what to do with it. And may God have mercy on our souls.”

It wasn’t exactly the Bhagavad-Gita, but it would have to do.



END



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