Time Watch
D.A. Madigan
Copyright D.A. Madigan 2012
Published at Smashwords
Editor’s Foreword
I am not the author of the journal you are about to read, although you will not believe me. In fact, even as I sit down to type this, I realize, with something of a mental groan, that due to the rather derivative seeming ‘style’ of my friend Richard Burroughs’ narrative, this foreword, in which I explain that in fact this manuscript is a true tale of true events, and not fictional at all despite how it may seem, will very much seem to be in the ‘tradition’ of the otherworldly melodramatic heroic fantasy that, again, it will seem I have deliberately set out to write a pastiche of.
Having realized this, I understand you will never credit what I am about to explain. Nonetheless, I must tell you: I did not write this, and the man who did write it assures me (and I believe him) that it is not fiction, however incredible and unbelievable the adventures detailed herein may seem to any hypothetical reader.
There are many reasons why I believe my friend Richard Burroughs when he assures me that this fantastical and utterly unlikely tale is true: first, while Richard has a fairly dry sense of humor, I think it stops well short of concocting an 80,000 word manuscript as a joke. Second, Richard gives me his solemn oath that every word of this is true, and I have never known Richard to break even a casually given assurance as to when and where he will meet someone for lunch, much less such a seriously undertaken promise. Third, some little of it I know myself to be factual, because I witnessed the very beginning, and the very end with my own eyes.
You see, I was actually at the Port Orange Independent Adjustments Agency in St. Petersburg, Florida, on July 7, 1997, when Richard Burroughs first disappeared from the office under remarkable circumstances, and then, a few moments later, reappeared again, in an even more extraordinary fashion.
As to that, you need not merely take my word for it. Both The St. Petersburg Times for July 8, 1997, and the Tampa Tribune of July 9, 1997 (the Tribune was a day behind on that particular story) ran short feature articles on the ‘inexplicable events’ that occurred that day in that office complex. The ‘shining yellow disc’ that first appeared far out over the Gulf of Mexico, and that approached the Port Orange offices so quickly it seemed to have almost instantaneously apported itself, was seen by several eyewitnesses, most of whose accounts can be found in the official reports filed by various investigative agencies, including the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department. And for those who prefer to have their proofs in an electronic format, an episode of ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ broadcast on March 11, 1998 also highlighted the events, adding Richard’s current status (his whereabouts are officially unknown, although I’m sure I know ‘where’ he is) at the end of the presentation. All of these sources can be checked fairly easily by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, I’m sure; some members of my hypothetical audience may even now be remembering reading or hearing about these events on television.
For myself, I can only say that I was using the photocopier, less than ten feet away from Richard and the adjuster he was speaking to at the time, a delightful and beautiful young woman named Corinne Beattie. I unfortunately had my back turned to Corinne’s desk at the exact moment Richard vanished, because the photocopier had chosen that second to jam again, which was nothing new for that machine, believe me. I was aware of a bright yellow flash filling the room, like… well, like the flare from an old fashioned flash bulb, but a rich golden color, instead of a glaring white. I looked over my shoulder to ask Richard what he was doing, and at that exact second, Corinne screamed… and Corinne served two years as a police officer in Orlando before moving to St. Petersburg and becoming an insurance adjuster, and in my experience, she’s one of the coolest and most unflappable people I’ve ever met.
Most media personnel and the Sheriff’s Deputies who investigated the event seem to assume that the yellow flash must have blinded everyone in the room for a minute, at which point, Richard (who unlike everyone else, wasn’t blinded, apparently) left, in order to play a bizarre practical joke on the rest of us, which required him to quickly change into an utterly outlandish costume and then somehow trigger a second flash several minutes later, after which, he slipped back in and threw himself on the ground with a thump, pretending to have fallen into the room from somewhere above floor level. Oh, yes, and he also somehow contrived, in that few minutes in which he had to change from his slacks, shirt, tie, and work boots into a bizarre leather harness with X-shaped chest straps that were studded with knobs of some silvery metal, elaborate thigh high boots in dark, shiny leather, and several other even more bizarre accoutrements, to shave his scalp, and grow a short, well trimmed beard!
(Skeptical investigators, of course, say he had the shaved scalp and beard all along, we’re either just ‘forgetting’ it because we so want to believe in Richard’s account, or we’re actually going along with the gag.)
Whatever the case may be, it didn’t get much attention after the immediate stories ran in the papers, and I doubt ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ would have picked it up if Richard hadn’t vanished again somewhat later in such a determinedly mysterious and unexplainable fashion… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Once Richard’s first accounts were largely discounted as a joke, or hysteria, I didn’t see him for several weeks. There was nothing unusual in this; Richard wasn’t a permanent employee of Port Orange, he worked as a freelance engineering consultant for several insurance companies, independent adjusters, and local architectural firms, and made an excellent living at it, too. Months would go by in between seeing him, and then he’d be constantly in and out of the office for a few weeks at a time working on some specific assignment. But Richard and I had hit it off from our first meeting, and we’d pursued a casual but warm friendship outside the office, sharing the occasional meal, loaning each other books and periodicals, exchanging email, watching the occasional rented movie together with a few other acquaintances over… that sort of thing. I cannot say I grew to know Richard all that well, nor he me, in the year or so I knew him, but I liked him quite a lot… he was good company, both intelligent and articulate, had a pronounced but wickedly dry (and occasionally quite morbid) sense of humor, and was well versed on a very wide range of subjects, including all manner of athletics, various forms of literature (he liked an eclectic mixture of authors, ranging from John D. MacDonald to Thomas Carlyle), astronomy, marine zoology, genealogy, and anthropology, simply to name a few. His physical condition was excellent but he was one of the few enthusiastically athletic people I have ever met who was in no way elitist about it. In addition, Richard was soft spoken and almost unfailingly courteous (although, when politeness became somewhat strained, Richard was perfectly capable of being plain spoken to the point of outright rudeness). He was both honest and truthful, and had an enormous amount of natural dignity and integrity.
The last time I saw Richard was on July 23, 1997. He came over to my small, one story, wood framed rental house on North A Street unannounced, something he rarely did, since his natural politeness nearly always led him to call first to make sure a visit would be welcome. He almost didn’t catch me, as I’d been just about to go see a movie playing at a nearby cineplex. But here was Richard, with an obviously somewhat heavy shoulder bag on, looking unusually agitated… or perhaps excited is a better word.
"I think I’ve figured out how to do it," was the first thing he said, when I let him in. "But it could go wrong… it could go wrong a lot of different ways." He unzipped the shoulder bag and took out a small stack of spiral notebooks, at least half a dozen, from what I could see (as it turns out, there were 8). "Look, Darren, you’re the closest thing to a real writer I know. I’ve put it all down here… everything that happened when I was gone, that time I just disappeared… you know." He looked uncharacteristically awkward. "I guess I really don’t expect anyone to believe it, but I promise you solemnly, every word is true." He dropped the notebooks on the end table next to his chair. "Read them when you want. They’re probably terribly written, but I’ve done my best."
"Richard," I asked him, rather bemused, "what are you talking about? You filled… what… six notebooks with what happened to you while you were out of the office for five minutes? Are you feeling all right?"
He actually chuckled at that. "Look, Darren," he told me, "I know it’s a completely unbelievable story. Here… tell you what, just read the first notebook, or at least some of it. There’s some stuff I want to tell someone before I… well, before I try what I’m going to try… and I wanted to leave some record behind in case it works, no matter how crazy it seems to everyone else." He tossed me a notebook with a red cover. "Just read this, or as much as you can stand, and then we can talk, and I’ll try to explain what I think I’ve figured out."
His aim had been unerring; the notebook had flipped through the air and landed neatly on my lap, face up. I glanced down. Lettered on a rectangle of paper taped efficiently to the cover, in an economical block style, was "An Earthman Abroad: My Adventures on Erberos, by Richard Thomas Burroughs, M.Sc. Eng."
"Richard," I said, quite amused now, "what in the world…"
"Just read," he said. "And then we can talk a bit, if you like." He looked at his watch. "I have a few hours, still…"
So I flipped back the cover, and began to read.
Within three sentences, I had completely forgotten everything but the narrative. I suspect you will, as well. However, I shall return with an Editor’s Afterword and a few more details of the strange story of Richard Burroughs, M.Sc, Eng and Warlord of Erberos, inasmuch as I know it, and can guess at it, at the conclusion of Richard’s own narrative.
- Darren Madigan
Florida, January, 2002
Chapter 1. Hunted By Unknown Enemies On An Alien World
There was hot, bright, golden, roaring silence all around me; a non-visual, non-auditory impact of pure, indescribable sensation so intense it was both agonizing and ecstatic at the same time. A crashing cacaphony of screaming, shrieking, whispering, whimpering, babbling voices swept me along through a torrent of cascading visual images, all of them as clear and coldly, precisely projected as individual and unique chips of ice, none of which I had time to grasp the meaning of before I was whirled onward like a snowflake in a maelstrom. I was hot and cold, rough and smooth, sweet and sour, still and hurtling head over heels, all at once. It was over in an imperceivable nanosecond of an instant and it went on forever.
And abruptly, I found myself falling through empty, sunlit air.
I fell for a good long distance, and realized this was occurring, as I had probably a second or more to understand that whatever strange, indescribably hallucinogenic place I had been in, I was now someplace far more real... and really falling, very fast, through empty atmosphere. Fear has always come slowly to me (I claim no credit for this, since I have often thought it merely reflects a lack of quick intellect and easy imagination in myself), so I did not panic, but merely opened my eyes and flicked a glance around me.
Hazy blue, strangely featured sky dotted with light grey Brillo pad wisps of cloud, high up; a flickering, sizzling, silvery white coin of sun; a hilly, sweeping, vista of white-flecked bluish green... all of it tumbling around me in a lazy manner, as the tossing, pale-chipped, roaring, turquoise field far below seemed to abruptly come lurching towards me...
It was water rushing towards me, or rather, I towards it… a great deal of water, and if I was falling for just over a second then I was headed for it from a good five stories up, my relentless engineer’s brain calculated almost instantly.
Strange though it will seem, the varied experiences and adventures of my life previous to this had actually prepared me somewhat for the completely outrageous situation I now found myself in. When I was 17 years old, the summer after I graduated from high school, before I entered the military, I spent four months with my father in Mexico, and while I was there, I befriended a group of young chicos about my age whose favorite hobby was diving from the precipitous cliffs around Acapulco into the deep blue Gulf of Mexico. A few months practice cannot match a level of skill inculcated from near infancy, but I did pick up the basics of the art. And although it must have been more than twenty years since I had jumped off a five or six story cliff aiming towards the deep, brilliant blue of the Gulf below, I found the experiences suddenly rushing back to me.
So it was that, in the little over a second I had, I managed to near-instantaneously straighten myself out from a tumbling five story plunge into the precise body posture necessary to slice into the water like a blade, perfectly arched, so that the cold, dense, dark depths cradled and cosseted my arched, streamlined body, instead of bruising and breaking them.
Without consciously willing it, I flicked my tongue out to probe the water I had just come hurtling into from above, and got an immediate taste of brackish brine. So, I was somewhere in a large ocean, then. At least I knew that much, if little to nothing else!
Salt water meant at least the potential of large aquatic predators not at all fussy about what manner of thrashing protein they ingested, so I went still. Water this cold, with a sky that bright and sunny, this late in the summer (I did not stop and wonder, at that second, how I possibly knew what time of the year it was, although I did) meant I would now be somewhere in some non-tropical, yet still sub-polar, ocean. How in the name of God I'd managed to drop from fifty feet up into... the North Atlantic? (instinctively, that assessment felt wrong somehow)... completely out of sight of land (I am naturally gifted with nearly photographic memory, and I had seen no shadow of solid earth on any horizon in that brief second I'd fallen and looked around before impact) was something I'd have to think about later. Right now, I had to get back to the surface, and I had to swim in a powerful, reassuring manner that would not signal 'easy prey' for a radius of twenty miles through the water around me.
Even as I concluded all of this, I somehow knew my assumptions were wildly wrong… yet I had nothing else to proceed from.
Just as I absolutely ‘knew’, somehow, that my assumptions about where I must have fallen on Earth were not correct, so, too, did I similarly absolutely ‘know’ which way the surface was. So, naturally, I cupped my hand around my mouth and puffed out a tiny bit of breath, feeling which way the bubbles surged off to. The direction the bubbles immediately swirled off to confirmed my instincts, which heartened me… I am not naturally a man for lengthy analysis; if I could not depend on my immediate, intuitive reactions, I would find myself in difficulties indeed!
I struck off swimming in that direction and within a second or so, felt the water start to warm and lighten simultaneously and quite abruptly, as if I'd swum up and out of a dark, cold layer of water lying perhaps thirty feet beneath the ocean's surface. The water I now thrashed through was pale, luminescent green shading up to very light, golden-green at the surface, where it was struck by the rays of the sun, and quite warm. I tried to think of any body of water on Earth where there was such a dark, cold layer lying only thirty feet beneath the surface and couldn't... and yet, it seemed familiar to me... and ominous.
Normally my lack of expertise on any subject outside my experience would not trouble me, since the world is far too vast and filled with facts for any one man or woman to fully master, and wisdom lies in accepting one’s own limitations… yet this bothered me. I seemed to feel instinctively that I should know where I was... yet I didn't.
I broke the surface and looked around, treading water easily and breathing deeply but without noticeable panic or haste. Water doesn't seem blue when you're in it, of course, unless it has been chemically purified. I was floating on and in a vast, green, rolling liquid prairie, with, as I'd already noted, no sign of land in any direction... a truly depressing and frightening prospect. Yet I was neither depressed, nor frightened. In my youth I had been an accomplished athlete who, in all modesty, won at least my share of titles and trophies in my high school and college sporting careers, and I’ve always felt at home in the water, so being confident in my ability to keep myself afloat was natural… even at the age of 41, I’ve striven greatly to maintain my physical condition and the skills of my earlier years (the fact that my brief sojourn into cliff diving still remained with me two decades later having just been undeniably demonstrated in the most melodramatic way imaginable). But the unknown is a terror to any human being, and the open sea is one of the most hazardous environments known to man… and here I was truly immersed in and surrounded by both… so why was I so calm?
In most books I've read - and I'm an avid reader, especially of fantastic adventure fiction - a protagonist suddenly thrust into such a bizarre situation generally, at some point, wonders if they're either dreaming, or have lost their mind. I'd always thought, when reading such passages, that they were fairly unbelievable, since I've never had any trouble telling a dream from reality (I dream in color, but rarely coherently, and my kinaesthetic sense is nearly always dulled or non-existent) and I'd always figured if you'd gone crazy, you'd implicitly believe in your delusions no matter how obviously deranged they might be. But now, suddenly, I had to wonder. Moments ago...
Moments ago I'd been in the small private insurance adjuster's office where I sometimes did freelance work as a specialized field investigator and consultant, speaking desultorily with an adjuster named Corinne, for whom I had just completed a lengthy and tedious report on metal fatigue and whether or not natural causes could safely be assigned as the reason for the collapse of an insured beach house. Corinne’s small cubicle was fortunately placed next to a window with an excellent vantage on the Gulf of Mexico, and I’d been admiring the view over her shoulder as she bent over the thick report I’d laboriously typed out on my old fashioned Smith-Corona the night before… or, to be perfectly honest, I’d actually been admiring the view down the front of her scoop necked blouse as she did so… when abruptly I noted a strange twinkle in the distant sky, as if the sun were shining off some sort of golden aircraft too distant to be made out in detail.
I suppose I gasped in shock as that twinkle abruptly seemed to rush forward into my field of vision, swelling to become a great glittering golden disc filling most of Corinne’s window. I remember Corinne’s head coming up, her eyes wide, and her voice saying "Richard, what…"
...and then I was falling, and now I was here. Wherever in the hell here might be.
With a moment to take stock, I did so. I was still dressed the way I had been at work; one of my few pairs of decent slacks (black), a button up denim shirt, a loosely knotted tie, an expensive leather belt with a solid gold buckle that had been a gift from a lady friend several years before, and black crepe soled, heavy duty field boots over good wool socks. When one falls into deep water while clothed, the first thing to do is get rid of heavy footgear, but for the moment I decided my swimming skills were strong enough to let me retain my boots… in an unknown situation, good shoes can be a vital survival tool.
I rolled up to float on my back and carefully checked my pockets... yes, I still had my wallet, some change, my heavy bunch of keys (most of them were to apartments, houses, desk drawers, offices, motor vehicles, and sundry other locks I hadn't used in years; I'm one of those people who only cleans his key ring off once every millenium or so) and, in my left front pocket where I habitually placed it every morning after getting dressed, the flat piece of black volcanic glass that had had no business whatsoever being in the deserts of Kuwait, and that had saved my life one very dark night a decade previous by causing me to trip and sprawl headlong in the sand, at the exact instant that a single bullet, almost certainly fired by an Iraqi sniper concealed somewhere several hundred yards away in the distant erg, split the air where my chest should have been.
I admit, I was relieved to find my ‘lucky’ rock had not been lost through whatever mysterious course of events had brought me to this strange destination. I try to be a rational man, yet can any human being raised on Earth in the 20th Century claim to be fully free of all superstition?
It was then, floating on my back in the rolling swells of an unknown ocean, having completed an inventory of the resources available to me, that I finally allowed myself to relax, inasmuch as I could, and gaze around me at my immediate surroundings…
…and I was immediately struck by a sense of awe and wonder!
I have already related the peculiar layer of cold and darkness that began some thirty feet beneath the surface of that otherwise clear, green, and sparkling sea. It did not occur to me at the time, but later I reflected on the oddness of the fact that I had seen no sea-life swimming in the clear, warm, upper strata of the ocean… but for now, all such thoughts were driven from my head by the spectacle I saw before me, filling the sky above me and towards the distant horizon.
Three great planetary discs hung above me, all clearly visible in the brilliant tropical sunlight, two to one side of the bright coin sized spark that was the sun, the third on the other side of it… and not merely on the distant skyline, but very nearly defining it, for this vast circular sphere took up almost half the visible horizon, a great burnished bronze disc hanging suspended in the sky, oddly striped and pockmarked with various copper and golden and greenish streamers that seemed to slowly but constantly ripple, pool, and swirl together in a display of endless and fascinating variation.
The other two discs were less showy, but impressive in their own ways. The smaller of them, hanging close to the horizon and well below the burning spark of a bright white sun, was easily three times the size of the largest autumn moon I had ever seen, and showed the pallid pockmarked bone-pallor of a dead and airless satellite, similar to that of the moon I knew.
The third disc, although small by the standards of the first, ruddy bronze hued giant on the opposite side of the sky from it, was easily twice the size of their smallest companion, and shone a lambent, poisonous green even in the bright daytime sky, with its circular parameters somewhat vague and occulted, as if wreathed in vapor.
For a moment I floated, stunned nearly senseless by the evidence of my eyes. I admit that at first, I hoped this could merely be some elaborate hoax; perhaps I was somehow floating in some expensive Hollywood soundstage, looking at a beautifully painted backdrop for some science fiction extravaganza. But as my eyes continued to track these astonishingly visible and spectacular planets, I could not help but note their clearly visible movements… a complex and yet, I could clearly see, predictable orbital dance across the bright blue, cloud trailed sky.
Wherever I was, it was not Earth, nor, clearly, any other known world within the Earthly solar system. I thought, ruefully, of a small girl and her dog, emerging from a displaced house to make a bemused remark about no longer being in Kansas. I knew exactly how she felt; if only there had been a convenient pair of ruby slippers lying nearby for me to pick up, so I could click my heels together and wish myself home again in an instant!
Then, abruptly, the bizarre airship came roaring up and I stopped worrying about less pressing matters for the moment.
The airship was dull grey, shaped like an upside down pie plate, and came roaring at me across the ocean from off to my right. It was tilted up at a slight angle to the water beneath it when I first saw it, letting me see that the upper surface of it was concave, rimmed over with some sort of transparent glass cupola, and populated with several intent looking humanoid figures who were apparently all tending some kind of controls set into the inner sides of the concavity. The glimpse I got of them gave me the impression they were green skinned, which I had no time to consider thoroughly, as apparently they saw me floating there, and came billowing and blasting straight towards me across the intervening ocean.
I would probably have remained floating there, and perhaps shouted for help (although instinctively, part of me didn't ‘cotton to’ the sight of that ship or those people a bit), except that the airship had several glowing ports on its underside, and spotted at regular intervals around its rim, and as the crew seemed to discern me, a bright blast of crackling blueish white energy lanced out of one of the side ports and sizzled into the ocean a few yards away from me. It wasn't lightning, since I didn't feel any electricity tingle through me (in that much water, I doubted I'd have been hurt unless it had been a truly massive lightning strike, but I would have felt something), but great gouts of steam exploded up from the surface where the bolt had struck, and that was absolutely all the confirmation of my instincts I needed. I rolled over like a porpoise, taking a sharp breath as I did so, and dove deep.
I had a moment, as I felt my powerful arms and legs working smoothly together to send me knifing down into the depths of the water like a torpedo, to enjoy and appreciate the sensation of hurtling along through the warm green depths, twenty feet or so below the surface. I have always enjoyed using my physical prowess in vigorous, athletic activity, and this sensation, almost like flying, was a wonderful pleasure, even given the relatively stressful context.
I'd initially intended to dart into the dark layer thirty feet below to break visual contact with the flying ship, but some instinctive revulsion caused me to veer off and simply skim along five or six feet above it, maybe twenty five feet down from the air above. In my 'real' life I had enjoyed diving in most of the seacoast areas I had lived in during my life, both snorkeling and using SCUBA gear, and my lung capacity is thus well developed. And as always when placed in sudden, unexpected danger, I felt a visceral thrill coursing through every fiber of my being of a sort I would never admit to to any other living soul, for it has always seemed to me to be an unworthy thing, to enjoy risking the life that is without a doubt the greatest gift an uncaring universe can bestow on any of us. Yet still, I am as I have been made, and will not deny, in my most private thoughts as honestly set down in this account, my own essential nature. Thrust into an inexplicable situation straight out of some undiscovered manuscript by Edgar Rice Burroughs, I felt no fear and little concern, but instead, merely the excitement of confrontation with unknown danger and the joy of having real peril to test my own capacities against.
Abruptly, the patch of ocean I was swimming through was plunged into strange, shifting shadow, intermittently lit by pulsating green, blue and white lights emanating from the bottom of the craft that now hovered immediately above me. I felt a strange, heavy trembling pulse and surge through the water around me, and without the slightest consideration, I pulled the heavy keychain out of my back pocket and flung myself towards the surface again. Broaching like a playful bottlenose, I saw the odd ship hovering no more than ten feet above the waves, the colorfully flashing apertures underneath it arranged in a geometrical grid that reminded me of the bottom of a Keds hi-top sneaker. I was, at that moment, directly beneath it and in its shadow. The ship was spinning and at the same time sliding off to the side, and within another second, no doubt, they'd be bringing their searing death beams to bear on me again... and thinking that, I flung my heavy keyring directly into one of the flickering white, flat circles on the bottom of the saucer.
The nature of the vessel’s propulsion was such that to introduce a heavy metal into any of its actively energized repulsor nodules… well, the results would most likely be catastrophic, although how I actually knew that I couldn't begin to explain then. My well flung keys flew straight and true, hurtling into the brightly lit opening. There was a sharp CRACK! like a tree branch breaking, a cascading shower of blueish green sparks... and I was diving again, and feeling on my back a giant, very warm, formfitting hand, shoving me down into the depths as the water around me lit up in a brilliant reddish yellow flash.
I swam hard, my lungs straining now, feeling the water starting to bubble around me, using the vectors from the explosion in the sky above me to bring me around in a long arc underwater ending when I came surging up again a good hundred or so yards away, sucking in huge lungfuls of searingly crisp, ozone reeking air. A barrage of hot, twisted metal shrapnel was raining down into the ocean all around me, splashing and sizzling; some pieces were smaller than pennies, others larger than me. One such huge piece struck the water with an enormous gouting splash no more than ten yards away from me, bounced and skipped into the side of a heavy comber, and then washed, gently steaming, back towards me. It was, to my immediate, rather shocked gaze, roughly circular and difficult to see against the ocean. It wasn't until it surged up against me that I realized, with a start, that it was the clear, glassy dome that had topped the craft's central concavity, miraculously intact and turned over onto its top, and thus, floating high and nearly dry above the rippling surface of the sea.
Somehow I scrambled into it and immediately regretted it; for the first time since this whole bizarre experience had begun (barely five minutes before!) my instincts had played me false (or so it immediately seemed). The inside of the lens-like glass dome was completely smooth; I slid down it and splashed into a pool of saltwater that was already starting to fill the center of it, from the crashing, lapping action of the rough waves around me. I gasped and got my feet under me and stood up, which was another mistake, as by putting all my weight onto one spot towards the center of the upturned dome, I only accelerated its now obviously inevitable sinking. Tilting to one side under my off center weight, the edge of the dome slid under the surface and it filled almost immediately.
However, sloshing around in the pool at the center of the crystal dome there had been something else... the body of one of the green men, whom I could know see was indeed green... tall and thin and definitely a pale, delicate vermilion in color; with yellowish green hair cascading down over his or her shoulders, and definite, tendril like antennae growing out from just above both of his or her eyes. The creature was dressed only in a long, slit skirt made of some darker green material, and a harness of leathery straps that criss crossed in an X pattern on his... yes, definitely, his... chest. At the center of the X was a heavy metal disc, made of some silvery material, and the apparently leather harness straps were also studded down the center with bosses of the same material. The green skirt was held up by a leather belt with a similar silver disc where a buckle should be, and hanging from that belt were several oddly shaped leather pouches, sheathes, and containers, holding various obscure, oddly shaped devices...
And with a gurgling sigh, the crystal disc slid beneath the surface, taking the weird corpse and its freight of inexplicable accoutrements down to the depths with it.
"Oh, I don't think so," I muttered silently to myself, grabbing the hideous corpse under the arms. The skirt and the equipment hanging from the belt made it cumbersome and heavy, and I had no real idea how to unfasten the belt or the harness, but I wanted them nonetheless. I fastened my hands around the central metal disc and thrashed powerfully with my legs, willing myself upward...
...and gaped incredulously as the dead green figure and I shot like a rocket up out of the water and into the air!
Where we hovered, dripping, twenty feet or so above the roiling, sizzling ocean surface.
Chapter 2. I Discover How To Fly
I had, perhaps, at that moment, exceeded my astonishment buffer. Shocked and stunned, I let my grasp on the buckle relax... and fell, with a resounding splash, back into the ocean. The body fell with me, and I grabbed for it again. My fingers once more touched cool, slick metal... and once again, the corpse and I bounded into the sky.
Very well, then... I looked around, uneasy for the first time since my precipitation into this weird adventure. (I hope this can be excused by any hypothetical reader of this account. After all, to defy gravity in such a way is clearly unnatural, I had no clear idea how I was doing so or what strange principle of physics I had somehow bent to accomplish these arcane ends, and I seemed to be joined, at least momentarily, to the corpse of a green skinned, tendril-browed enemy who had only moments before been manning a literal flying saucer and attempting to vaporize me with a bizarre alien death beam! All this, hovering inexplicably twenty feet above an apparently endless ocean on an unknown alien world… yes, I admit, it made me, at least for that moment, somewhat ill at ease.)
We hovered effortlessly, twenty feet or so above the sea, just as before. I wasn't hanging from the harness as if dangling from a tree branch over a precipice; rather, with my fingers grasping the chest harness' central medallion, I was simply floating there, seemingly weightless, swayed only by the gentle ocean breezes... which, in fact, looking down, I could see were actually skipping myself and my dead companion along at an appreciable clip above the waves. So... we were weightless... or at least, somewhat buoyant in the local atmosphere.
If I let go of the buckle, we'd fall, that much seemed clear... so this was, then... a flying harness, as in the fantasy fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs? Had I found my way to Barsoom? But no, Barsoom was a desert planet, I remembered that quite clearly... and this fellow might be green, but he had only two arms and no tusks; so certainly he was no Thark.
I concentrated on bringing us to a halt, which would actually mean, somehow offsetting the impelling power of the gentle breeze. Concentrated... focused... and...
We came to a halt and hovered, quite motionless, above the roiling water.
The site of the explosion was a good quarter mile behind us by then; if there was aught else of use to me in the wreckage, it was doubtless lost by now, sunk to the bottom of the ocean... although in point of fact, if I could master my motion with this odd device, I might as well dart back and make a more thorough check. Now, if I could simply extract the corpse from the harness...
No sooner had I formed that coherent thought than the harness straps seemed to unfurl from around their wearer, flickering free in the air between he and I like breeze blown banners. His skin was still somewhat in contact, here and there, with the harness and belt; tentatively, I reached over and pushed him away with a fingertip. He spun, lazily, through a half turn... then abruptly plummeted like a dropped piano into the sea below with a thunderous splash.
Well, I now had his accoutrements, and apparently, the harness was responsive to mental impulse... rather handy, provided I exercised a bit of discipline while wearing it. And, speaking of wearing it...
No sooner had I formed the thought in my mind than I found the harness wrapping itself neatly around me and apparently sliding comfortably closed behind me. I was now wearing the criss crossing chest straps and waist belt (the skirt, thankfully, had fallen flapping into the ocean when the belt itself opened) with all its hanging pouches and unknown gear... floating twenty feet or so above a strange ocean, apparently hunted by unknown enemies on an alien world, in a bizarrely improved body, with land nowhere in sight.
To be honest, I felt remarkably pleased with myself. Although I was somewhat chagrined to realize that if I ever managed to return to my mundane existence, I was going to have to pay the management of my apartment complex a $40 fee for a replacement key.
To impel myself with what was clearly a flying harness of some sort turned out to be simple; a burst of focused concentration on moving a certain way was enough to send me darting over the waves in any direction I chose. Brief experimentation showed I could alter my altitude as easily as the direction of my flight, and perhaps most strangely, I discovered quickly that the harness seemed to project in some way a radius of force about me that reduced air resistance nearly to nothing as I flew. No matter how quickly I hurled myself through the air, the air on my face remained seemingly soft and warm, with no more force than a light ocean breeze.
My first brief flight took me back to the area where the strange flying disc had exploded, as best I could tell from the protean visage of the now unblemished ocean surface. As I had expected, nothing remained of the ship or its inhabitants on the surface. The ship itself had apparently not been constructed with any thought given to the survival of its crew should a mishap occur over the deeps; apparently, nothing about it or within it had been designed to float. The crew, had they all been wearing harnesses like unto the one I myself had appropriated, would surely have not needed anything remotely like Earthly life jackets, but the shock of the explosion seemed to have killed them all, and I myself had seen that the weight of the accoutrements they wore on their harness was more than enough to pull them to bottom of the sea.
My actions had killed an entire group of sentient, humanoid beings. I searched myself for any gentle reaction to that, any civilized nausea or the merest trace of the sort of remorse a citizen of one of the most lawful cultures in humanity's history should feel. I searched... and found nothing within me but a savage, joyous feeling of righteous triumph.
Even as I realized this, I also came to my first understanding that my journey to this strange world had not left me unchanged. My entire psyche seemed to have undergone a subtle transformation. My feelings, my responses, my reactions... in fact, my entire mode of thinking seemed to have altered. In some ways I had become more primal, almost more elemental in my emotions... yet my thoughts had taken on an odd, cadenced formality, as if reverting to a once familiar pattern that had long fallen into disuse, but that my brain was now taking up again in the face of these strange, and yet, somehow bizarrely familiar, experiences...
I had no time to muse on these things then, however. I felt with every fiber in my being that the locality I was in was a perilous one; if the unknown (yet tantalizingly familiar) foe had dispatched one heavily armed craft to apparently destroy me, it would not be long before they sent others. My victory over the first enemy ship had been good fortune more than anything else; were another, or worse, a fleet of such ships, to confront me, I would have virtually no chance of escaping alive.
Something in the notion of a 'fleet' of such craft felt wrong to me... and that feeling was strongly connected to my sense of deep satisfaction at having destroyed one such craft, as if that destruction, in and of itself, were a significant accomplishment, one that I could justly exult in. Yet emotion was all it was; I could not summon any specific knowledge or information to explain or support that odd, unexplained certainty. I did feel, however, that it was far from impossible that I might soon be confronted by another such craft, or perhaps even two; in fact, it came to me that such an eventuality was quite likely. I had to leave, as swiftly as possible... but where should I go?
Having only my instincts as a guide, and no easy method to test them empirically, I had no choice but to rely on them fully. So it was that I set myself to slowly turning in the air like a top, regarding each point of the horizon around me and exploring, as best I could, any instinctive reactions I might have to any particular direction. As I had expected, my responses were swift and visceral - when I considered flying to what I simply decided, for need of reference points, to call ‘northwest’, I felt revulsion and hatred, which accorded well with the fact that ‘northwest’ was the direction the strange saucer craft had seemed to originate from. Due ‘north’ and ‘south’ I felt no response at all. When I faced to the ‘southeast’, however, I felt a tug of interest and perhaps even a twinge of longing... homesickness, for an unknown destination on an unknown world? A mystery... but only one more to add to my recent collection, and like its sibling enigmas, one I had no time to consider at that present moment.
Having established the direction I should flee in... or perhaps 'advance towards' would be a more face saving phrase to use... I focused my will, urging the harness to send me hurtling in that direction at its maximum velocity. I lurched into motion and within seconds the white capped ocean rollers below me were little more than a blur. Estimating my speed was then beyond even my trained engineer’s brain to calculate without fixed points of reference at measured distances, but I would say it was prodigious; perhaps in excess of a hundred miles per hour, and yet, the whole time, the air pressed against me with no more force than a steady, pleasant breeze. Whoever had invented these harnesses had apparently worked out every detail and left little to chance or hazard for their wearers.
Or so it seemed at first. I quickly discovered the harnesses had certain drawbacks, however. First, to maintain speed, or even a constant direction, I must also needs maintain focus and concentration... something that is more difficult than it sounds. My engineer’s training should have stood me in good stead, as I had been accustomed for years to focusing myself fully on one particular area of mental effort… yet so bizarre were my circumstances that I found my mind constantly wandering off focus, speculating on exactly what could have occurred to bring me here, and various other strange ciphers… and whenever my will wavered or my train of thought became even slightly derailed, my velocity would rapidly decrease, and I would find myself once more hovering motionless above the waves, or worse, being blown backwards by the prevailing winds.
I also discovered that there is, apparently, such a thing as psychic fatigue. After the first few occasions when I found my progress halted by my own mental ruminations, I made an effort to sharpen and maintain my concentration... a successful effort, in that I flung myself at dizzying speeds along above the wavetops for a duration of several minutes, at the very least... and yet, I found myself becoming weary, although I was expending little or no physical energy at all. To focus the will for a sustained period, as many Earthly mystics before me had found, is a draining experience indeed.
Still, fatigue was no stranger to me, I had been well rested and refreshed when drawn to this world and had exerted little effort since, and the danger I was in, however fantastical it might seem, was very real and very great. As my college fencing coach might have put it, I ‘lay my nose to the grindstone and poured on the coals’… the sort of horribly mixed metaphor he was prone to, yet, as they so often were, very apt.
I could not tell any inquirer now how long I hurtled across that watery globe, nor how much distance I traversed, but if an omniscient watcher were to inform me it was for a span of hours, I would not strongly dispute that account. My poor shadow must have been e’en more painfully exhausted than I at the end of that period; for while I had flown like a shot bullet through the empty air, it had been forced to cover three or four times the distance, fleeing along below me over the endlessly rolling hillocks and trenches of the greyish-green, apparently eternal ocean surface.
So it was that, when I saw the lonely atoll jutting like fate's fickle finger from the tumbling hillocks of the ocean surface, I was more than grateful for its offered opportunity to rest and, perhaps, refresh myself.
Chapter 3. The Serpent’s Tongue
I alighted on the atoll, a narrow pylon of grey, lichen encrusted granite, jutting like an upthrust finger into the sky from the depths of the greenish blue sea. For ten yards or so above the surface of the ocean, this column of rock was swathed and festooned with wet looking seaweed of some sort, but I saw no animal life of any description... and in fact, it occurred to me at that point that since I had arrived on this strange world, I had seen no sea birds of any sort, nor, for that matter, any marine life, either. Another mystery, to add to the seemingly endless list of them I was accruing. But now it was time to investigate, to the small extent that I could, and I was determined to do so, at least, as regards to the contents of my plundered harness.
Upon setting foot on a shelf of rock near the tip of the atoll and letting gravity take a firm grip on me again for the first time in perhaps an hour, I felt a wave of enervating fatigue wash over me like a great, surging tide. My head spun for a moment and my eyes fluttered, and I wanted nothing more in that second than to lie down on the hard stone below my feet, pillow my head on my arms, and sink into a deep, stuporous slumber. Perhaps I would have, if I had not been aware... or felt, with a strength of conviction little different from certainty... that the ocean behind me was teeming with pursuing foes, who would take any such delay on my part as a welcome opportunity to overtake and destroy me once and for all. I could not have stated why I felt this so clearly, yet it resounded in me like an alarm bell, and I dared not ignore its clarion.
In my mundane life on Earth, I had had many occasions when I had been forced through exigencies of scheduling to remain awake when I would have preferred to sleep. Now I called on that experience to focus my will once more, forcibly clearing my head and driving myself back to alertness and wakefulness. In the past my success at such endeavors has been excellent, yet always am I still aware, in some way, of my fatigue; here, I was heartened to find myself responding much more readily to my own mental spurring. Within an instant of my first mental summons, I seemed to be drawing up new energy from some deep psychic reserve... and yet, I instinctively felt that to overdraw on that hidden, previously unsuspected resource would be hazardous indeed. Yet if ever I needed another few hours of fully cognizant consciousness, it had to be then.
With my head newly, if only temporarily, clear of the clinging, draining fogs of exhaustion, I turned to the pouches, sheathes, and containers on my newly won equipment belt.
My first discovery was very nearly my last… not in that it was harmful to me, but in that it nearly caused me to hurl the entire belt from me into the ocean without further investigations. Hanging on the right side of my belt, in the place a soldier or other warrior would wear a sidearm, was a cylindrical sheath, a top flap of leather securely fastened down by a tied thong over whatever reposed within. A second's investigation revealed the thong to be held in place with a secure slipknot of a sort that one firm tug would draw instantly free, allowing access to the holster's contents. I undid the knot, flipped back the covering flap, and felt my fingers close over the polished dark cylinder within and pull it free, holding it up in front of my eyes.
And I nearly hurled the vile thing into the sea!
Even as my eyes regarded the horrid object I was now holding, a vibration of the uttermost revulsion, loathing, fury, and disgust was rippling continuously through my every nerve and fiber... and yet, somehow, the skin of my fingertips had known, and recoiled in instinctive revulsion from that smooth, somewhat greasy texture, even before I had actually seen the artifact I now held in my trembling hand.
This... this thing I knew, and knew it well, and hated it with every particle of my being. I had touched a thing such as this on a few occasions in my life before; when I could not specifically recall, but I knew as well as I knew my own name that when I had grasped such staves in the past, it had been with the specific intention of destroying them. These things were the blackest evil, distilled into one concrete, coherent object; a blot on the very fabric of existence itself, that no good or decent or honorable being could countenance or tolerate.
In gross appearance, the thing was seemingly inoffensive... a rod of some oily, shiny black material, not metal nor plastic nor, as best I could tell, wood, about 14 inches in length, and the thickness of two or three of my fingers held together. As the sunlight gleamed off the ebon cylinder faint greenish highlights seemed to shimmer and ripple along its length like a coating of oil. At its upper tip was embedded a small, multifaceted, venomously green crystal; halfway down its length, a strange, undulating, serpentine rune was etched into it in that same toxic shade of emerald.
In this instance, my instinctive emotional reaction brought specific knowledge swirling up in me, seemingly out of nowhere. This was the judzuru'tzan; in the ancient, vile tongue of Yssra, I knew that phrase meant 'serpent's tongue', just as I knew that in the hands of a devotee to the ancient Serpent of Darkness, whose heart, will, and soul would be sworn and forfeit to that ghastly entity of the Outermost Void, this staff could be used to horribly murderous purpose. In such dark and noisome hands, this black stave would become the hilt of a flickering streak of greenish-black lightning, whose length and speed would be limited only by the will of its wielder, which filthy energy need only brush against living flesh to blast its vital force away in an instant. The weapon's major drawback - that it could have no affect on unliving materials - was also one of its most deadly advantages, for the horrid energies of the judzuru'tzan could pass through any armor, cloak, or shelter, even reach through solid stone walls, to strike down its intended victim, if its wielder had certain knowledge of exactly where that victim was. I knew, as I regarded this thing with loathing, that somehow, at some time, I had seen it do so.
Yet I also knew that the weapon could be opposed; for all its swift and sudden deadliness, there were ways of avoiding its strike, even of deflecting it, and of facing and defeating even its most skilled wielders in open combat. Yet though I knew that as certainly as I knew my own name, my mind was silent as to details; I could no more have described any of these martial methods for crushing such an apparently invincible foe than I could have detailed what might lay before me in the direction I had chosen to fly.
The weapon could be destroyed, as well, but I instinctively knew such destruction was beyond my means at that moment, and could only be accomplished at all through great and arduous effort. In that moment, it came to me with surety that the judzuru'tzan was an artifact out of the distant past, the craft of whose manufacture had long since been lost to the minds of men. I knew that that there were a limited number of these horrible objects in existence, and to capture one from the Serpent-Scions who normally guarded them with the zealousness of fanatics was a notable accomplishment. And I realized that similarly, the harness I wore was another such fabulous creation, incapable of duplication or replacement in the world as it existed at that time... and so, too, had been the great saucer shaped battlecraft I had, through enormous good luck, managed to destroy. My feelings of exultant triumph had been correct; on this day I had struck a resounding and bitter blow against the ancient remnants of the evil Yssran Empire!
And yet, beyond a freight of horror, terror, and righteous outrage, these strange words... judzuru'tzan, and Yssra, the Serpent-Scions, and the Outermost Void... meant nothing to me.
Nothing but darkness and despair, and an inward, burning, fundamental conviction that they must be stopped, destroyed, smashed, and that I would endeavor to do so with every second of life left to me!
With a cry of revulsion, I hurled the wretched stave as far from me as possible out into the ocean. I could not destroy it with the resources I had to hand, and I had a grim conviction that as long as it remained whole, it would, eventually, find its way to the grip of one who could employ it... and thank whatever righteous powers there might be in this world that I was not one such!... but perhaps, the depths of the endless ocean of Erberos might slow that migration somewhat.