Jake’s Monthly
(Part 4)
Science Fantasy Anthology
Edited by Jake Johnson
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Table of Contents
Waiting for the Green-Eyed Monster to Blink by John H. Dromey
Believers in Savannahs of Grass by Ron Koppelberger
Tesla. Merlin. And the Buddha of Compassion by T. Fox Dunham
Sunshine in A Can by J. Mesch
The Hex Factor by John H. Dromey
Cold Relief by Sanjaya Kumar Mishra
The Night That Never Was by B. Ron Ryant
Half-Wit Savage by Ron Koppelberger
The Man Who Stole the Moon by Don Raymond
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Published by Jake’s Monthly on Smashwords.
All featured authors now receive their reprint-rights.
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Welcome to Jake’s Monthly! For the fourth time, this project has chosen a new genre, and for the fourth time, talented writers have worked and experimented with it. We’re a third through, if there only exist twelve of these, which there might. This time, one of the most obscure and unusual subgenres was chosen- Science Fantasy. The writers in this volume tied the disparate genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy together, balancing them masterfully to create something new and wondrous.
What follows is a brief, spoiler-free description of the stories in this collection. If you want to be surprised by these stories, please skip the following section.
Waiting for the Green-Eyed Monster to Blink is John H. Dromey’s kickstart for this collection, and it does an amazing job of presenting a unique conflict. Medusa waits on the planet below, and all the resources in the worlds may not be enough to stop her.
Believers in Savannahs of Grass is by Ron Koppelberger, a writer of the abstract, artistic and the minimalist. Like his previous work published here, this story is a deep, interpretive flash with a religious vibe to it. Very nice.
Tesla. Merlin. And the Buddha of Compassion is by modern bard T. Fox Dunham, and shows what happens when science and fantasy fight for supremacy, with religion watching from its porch. Literally.
Sunshine in A Can is a dystopian reversal by J. Mesch. The elements defy explanation, but the tone is uplifting.
The Hex Factor is another story by John H. Dromey. Here, the supernatural and the rational come together once again to face a challenge, albeit a less threatening one.
Cold Relief is by Sanjaya Mishra, and combines meditation with extraterrestrials. It’s a short look into a very interesting alternate world.
The Night That Never Was is by B. Ron Ryant, and is a perfect scientific Christmas tale. This retelling of a very classic type of story triumphs in its originality and setting.
Half-Wit Savage is by Ron Koppelberger, and like his previous story, is open to interpretation and likely deserves a book club of some sort.
The Man Who Stole the Moon brings the collection to a strong finish. Don Raymond’s contribution combines fairies and science in an alternate universe where a poor, overworked Puck must save the Earth.
Afterwards, check out Next Time for a glimpse of next month’s collection- quite possibly the most creative yet.
***
Waiting for the Green-Eyed Monster to Blink
The guidance system of the interplanetary spacecraft was set on the interstellar equivalent of cruise control. The bridge was practically deserted.
“I didn’t know Medusa had emerald eyes,” Dr. Jürgen said.
“What makes you think that?” Captain Stanford responded. He leaned forward and watched the other man closely as he waited for an answer.
“It’s based on something your executive officer told me.”
“What exactly did my XO say?”
“Karen said you’re worried about the green-eyed monster.”
The captain relaxed. “Oh, that? I was concerned about ‘jealousy’ causing a breakdown in onboard discipline. Perhaps I should have said that outright instead of quoting a playwright from a millennium ago.”
“Shakespeare?”
“Yes.”
The doctor nodded his head. “Well, that clears up that little misunderstanding, but just out of curiosity, what can you tell me about Medusa’s eyes?”
“Nothing. That information is classified.”
“It’s all right for you to tell me, Captain. I’m not only the ship’s doctor, but I’m also the security officer, and in that latter capacity I was fully briefed on the mission.”
“Perhaps not as fully as you thought you were. Otherwise, you’d know that when the original Medusa was turned into stone by seeing her own reflection, all the pigmentation in her body was destroyed. No one knows what color her eyes were, not even Medusa herself. That was all covered in the early part of the file. You must have skipped over those pages.”
“I did. I was much more interested in learning about Medusa’s living sister, or clone, or whatever it is the space pirates put on the newly-terraformed planet to keep settlers away while the crooks exploited the mineral resources. She’s a Doozy.”
“I agree, but some of the details about her were rather boring,” the captain said, “so I can’t say I blame you for reading ahead. I did some scanning myself when I got to the dry technical details of the creature’s physiology.”
“Can you tell me the plan of attack for Project Medusa?”
“No, Doctor, I can’t. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, because I don’t know myself yet. I’m awaiting orders.”
“Surely, you have some inkling.”
“Well, my guess is I’ll be instructed to bomb the supreme heck out of Doozy while our ship is still in high orbit.”
“Whoa!” Dr. Jürgen said. “That method would remove the immediate threat, of course, but in the process it would also spread Doozy’s malignant DNA over a large section of the planet. The particles might even become airborne. That contamination could wreak havoc for generations to come.”
“It would take considerably longer, of course, but we can always do the job the old-fashioned way. Maybe that’s why I was assigned such varied personnel for the crew. We’ve got all the bases covered from psi to cyborg. That’s why I was concerned about jealously. Each contingent of volunteers representing diverse interests wants to have the bragging rights for accomplishing the mission. I need to figure out some way to get them to work together.”
“What combination of crewmembers do you think could do the job?” the doctor asked.
“Helga Thorsdottir is a good candidate. She’s an expert swordswoman and descended from a long line of dragon slayers. We also have a dragon onboard. Draco could fly up behind Doozy and breathe fire on her as a diversion while Helga sneaked up from the side carrying a shield with a mirror-like surface.”
“That wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, the planet has an Earth-like atmosphere. The sound of the dragon’s wings would carry a long way. All Doozy would have to do is turn her head and with one glance Draco would become a rock and drop accordingly.”
“This is war—economic war, admittedly, but war nonetheless. Sometimes there are casualties.”
“The second reason your scenario wouldn’t work,” the doctor went on, “is the pirates anticipated an attempt to show Doozy her reflection and to prevent that they gave her special sunglasses with counter-reflective lenses.”
“How do you know?”
“That bit of information was buried in one of the footnotes,” the doctor said.
“Smeg! Who has time to read footnotes? That data should have been spelled out in bold print.”
The doctor, who was used to plowing through scientific papers, merely shrugged his shoulders. “Now you know,” he said.
“Why don’t we anesthetize her?” the captain asked.
“Doozy’s thick-skinned; tranquilizer darts bounce right off of her.”
“Can’t we increase the power of the dart gun for deeper penetration?”
“You could, but then there’d be the very real possibility of the projectile passing clear through her body and, according to the operational guidelines in the file, the risk of contamination is too high. We need to find some way to get really close to Doozy and inject a powerful tranquilizer into soft tissue.”
“Thanks for your input, Doctor. I’ll want to consult with you again later, but for right now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone. I need some time to think.”
“Ay, ay, Captain.”
Dr. Jürgen left the bridge.
***
It was a long flight.
Hazing and practical jokes abounded.
Representatives of the hardware community—thinking machines, both mobile and stationary—had a recurring complaint against the sentient-life crowd: “Whose idea was it to put a monkey in charge of morale?”
The officer assigned that duty, Lt. Lucius “Gorilla” Hayes, who usually had to shave twice a day—or three times in a lunar day—was not amused.
Some basic questions were answered.
Can a psychic read an android’s mind? Not if he blocks his memory chip with a lead shield. Of course, he can’t make any long-distance calls on his internal communication devices that way either.
Can an android read a psychic’s mind? Why would he want to?
***
“I’ve been thinking, Doctor. We’ll have to go high-tech. Instead of a dragon, we can send down a mechanical drone as a diversion, and then we can assign a robot to deliver the coup de grâce to Doozy.”
“I’m afraid that won’t work either, Captain.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve looked through some more of the footnotes, especially those in the first part of the file. Apparently Doozy’s powers extend to crippling robotic equipment. Even cameras freeze up if they get too close.”
“How’s that possible?”
“It’s quite simple really. The radiant power of Doozy’s gaze converts lubricants, most of which are petroleum-based, and the hydraulic fluids of the machines into stone.”
“What about synthetic substitutes?”
“They don’t fare any better. If the substance mimics a natural product, it’s fair game for Doozy.”
“Are there no exceptions, Doctor?”
“Pure water seems to be immune to her manipulation. Did you know that distilled water won’t boil in a microwave oven? The microwaves can only agitate the impurities in H20.”
“A fine lot of good that does us. We don’t have any steam engines onboard.”
“They wouldn’t work against Doozy anyway. The gears and axles require lubricants.”
“What if we used frictionless plastic ball bearings?”
“Originally petroleum based, or had you forgotten.”
“Oh, yeah.”
After a brief lull in the conversation, the captain said, “Those pirates seem to have thought of everything.”
“Not quite,” Dr. Jürgen contradicted. “They forgot to provide Doozy with an ‘off’ switch. She scared potential settlers away, all right, but she also made the planet uninhabitable for miners. The pirates downloaded tons and tons of automated extractors and processors, but Doozy brought every machine with moving parts to a grinding halt. They’ve cut their losses and moved on to easier prey.”
“And we’re left to clean up their mess.”
“Why not just abandon the planet?”
“That won’t happen, Doctor. Too many trillion credits have been invested. We have to find a way to neutralize Doozy or die trying.”
***
A somber Captain Stanford visited Dr. Jürgen in the dispensary.
“I’ve received a battle plan from headquarters. We’re to deploy all of our resources at once, much in the same way that Napoleon used his soldiers when his troops vastly outnumbered the enemy. Although that method is often successful, the casualties can be quite high, and in our case we’ll have only one chance to get it right.”
“Earlier, you borrowed a quote from a playwright who lived a thousand years ago and now your superiors have adopted the strategy of a general from 800 years ago. Doesn’t anybody have any fresh ideas?”
“I just follow orders, Doctor. If you have any suggestions, I’m willing to listen.”
“I did a profile on Doozy. Because her cloning process was accelerated, she’s still quite young in real time. Some of her senses are not yet fully developed. Perhaps we can exploit her immaturity.”
“Tell me more.”
***
The attack began.
Draco was too large to fit in one of the rocket-propelled troop carriers, so he dived out the open cargo door of a heavy tank transporter. The fearsome dragon soared high in the terraformed planet’s clear, unpolluted atmosphere. As he approached the target, he arched his wings and began a slow, gliding descent that was almost silent. Since he was following visual flight rules, his eyes were wide open.
Draco saw Doozy straighten her shoulders and snap her head around to look directly into his eyes. He only had time to tilt his wings into the position of a descending airplane’s flaps before his image—as viewed on the huge screen of the monitor in the spacecraft’s battle station—became totally rigid.
“Did he get close enough?” Captain Stanford asked.
“We’ll soon see,” a techie told him.
The camera tracked the representation of a stony Draco as it followed the trajectory of a cannonball and plummeted to the ground.
The impact was relatively quiet and did not throw up any appreciable amount of dirt or dust.
Doozy didn’t notice. She was too busy warding off the approach of a myriad of other attackers, all coming at her from the opposite direction.
The monitor switched to a ground-level view.
“Draco is in position, Captain. He’s well within the necessary parameters.”
Robots and people popped up as if from nowhere, took a few faltering steps and then were immobilized. Many remained standing, frozen in place, but a significant number were caught with one foot in the air, and those unfortunates toppled over to be numbered among the fallen.
“We’re approaching a system overload,” the computer operator said. “Doozy’s reflexes are phenomenal. There are too many casualties to keep tabs on exactly who’s who and who’s where.”
“Reboot and recycle, why don’t you?” Dr. Jürgen suggested.
The techie’s fingers flew over his keyboard.
The screen blinked once and then it was nearly filled as new combatants came into view.
They were no match for Doozy’s darting eyes.
***
On the surface of the planet, Helga Thorsdottir came in for a hard landing despite the fact that her combat parachute had fully deployed. She was not alone. There was a medical robot strapped to her back; in addition, the limbs of that same AI entity were securely attached to Helga’s corresponding arms and legs.
Helga unhooked her chute and surveyed her surroundings. She was within a couple meters of her intended landing site, shielded from Doozy’s deadly gaze by one of Draco’s large wings. She sidestepped until she was directly behind the dragon’s inanimate body and then began to move forward in lockstep with the robot.
They did not detour around the obstacle. Instead, they walked straight forward and passed right through the hologram. When they emerged on the other side, Helga was pleased to see they were standing only a few feet behind Doozy’s back. Everything was going according to plan.
A couple more cautious steps forward brought them even closer to the clone of Medusa, almost within striking distance.
And then, one, or both, of the stalkers dragged a foot across the coarse soil.
At the sound, Doozy whirled around. Every snake on her head was writhing and hissing.
Helga, with a power boost from the robot, took one final, agonizingly-slow step.
At first Doozy just glared at the human confronting her, and then she got a puzzled look on her face. Finally, she bent her head forward and stuck out her tongue.
That was what Helga was waiting for. She thrust her right arm upwards—remarkably fast considering the circumstances—and jabbed the point of the hypodermic needle into Doozy’s tongue.
Following Dr. Jürgen’s instructions, Helga slowly advanced the plunger until the snakes became motionless and Doozy sank to the ground.
***
Dr. Jürgen was allowed to attend the debriefing that followed the successful extraction of Doozy, who was alive and well and under observation in another part of the spacecraft. Her head was under wraps, since it had been determined that a Medusa was only able to convert biological material to stone with the active participation of her serpentine follicles.
On the undeveloped planet, Doozy had been scared and lonely and unable to control her hormones. With an innate fear of the unknown, she had repeatedly unleashed her destructive power against anything that moved.
Now, in the ship’s secure environment with plenty of rest and a proper diet—actually able to look at what she was eating for the first time in her short life—Doozy was happy, healthy, and making new friends.
Dr. Jürgen had a question.
“Tell me, Captain Stanford, if you can, how did Doozy know the hologram of Draco was coming down behind her?”
“We used a real transporter and tossed out a bowling ball which established a trajectory for our hologram to follow. Moving at subsonic speed, the whistling sound of the ball alerted Doozy to its presence. She turned around right on schedule.”
The ship’s doctor nodded his head.
“Now, I have a question for you,” the captain said. “How did you make Helga immune to Doozy’s powers?”
“The medbot was closely monitoring her vitals and gave her muscle relaxants and blood thinners as needed. Fortunately, it was a very brief encounter.”
The captain turned his attention to the other people in the room.
“Any casualties to report?”
“Just one,” a techie said. “Draco was covered with sensors to assist the hologram projector in getting his wing positions just right. In the heat of the battle, so to speak, he assumed a fighting stance and spontaneously breathed out some fire.”
“Who was hurt?”
“No person was harmed, but Draco scorched one of our monitors to the melting point.”
John H. Dromey was born in northeast Missouri. He’s had a byline (for brief, humorous items) in over one-hundred different newspapers and magazines. His short fiction has appeared in Woman’s World (a mini-mystery); online at Danse Macabre: An Online Literary Magazine, Thrillers, Killers ’n’ Chillers, and elsewhere; as well as in a dozen print anthologies.
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Believers in Savannahs of Grass
The landscape was an eternal vision of hungry grass, all-encompassing in its wide vista. The cry of a dozen dreamers and believers, all in emerald waves of fervor, blessed the virgin skies and the bond of grass, unique in fray and fringed horizons, in the singsong grasp of affection and tender embrace.
“Ahhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuummmm. Ahhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaa.” they sang in confederate breaths of exaltation, of invocation to the greater gods of existence.
The twilight bled bright orange and red, indigo edges and the gentle sweep of shadow. Warm suspirations and eager inhalations.
“They would come.” one of the believers thought, “A great gulping ascension in blazon skies of passion... They would come.”
The dusk intruded in evening tide waves of darkness and the rolling winds caressed the believers in the grass, gentle, sweet and full of blissful weave. They felt the sensation of what might happen, and the promise overwhelmed them; they would come in great swirling eddies of light and rainbow wills of love, they would come and the believers would become the survivors, the predecessors of man in the aftermath.
Ancestors in Mop-Gear and electric assurance, each in his own, the forefathers of the crow, the raven’s tongue and sparrow in feathered predictions of civilization and the cares of mankind. They would come and the new love, the new way in paths of holy sustenance, in quests of Eden would flourish in the aftermath of nuclear dissension, in the aftermath of annulled existence; the believers would hold Excalibur, the sword of fate, and the salvation of innocence.
The embryo in wombs of contrition and rebirth, the rebirth of man and woman, and child and infant. They would come for the sake of god and eternity, forgiveness and forever. The believers waited in the vast savannahs of grass, and they believed in the wish, the need and inborn want for the future in the Midwest and the southern horizon. They waited and the grass spoke in hints of tomorrow, in rolling decrees of sleepy reunion with the cares of a lost civilization. They waited and dreamed of forever, the deep stand of eternal deliverance in the stars, from the skies in dark waves and amber, glowing salvation. They waited, open-armed, for the creation of a new day.
In the end they came, for the seed of a dream, for the allowance of man, and quests that assure the realm of sinless hope.
The angels of the third heaven stood, distant but embracing the divinity of the dreamers’ faith, embracing all that stands between the darkness and moted tempests of light. They came and the drama became a cacophony of happenstance and joy, joy for the gift given, the choice made by a few, the endless dialogue between heaven and earth.
***