“I do understand.” He heard the distant rumble of a motorboat engine as it approached the shore. “And I’m sorry.”
Bill could almost taste the adrenaline spiking in the other man’s bloodstream. Building up his courage.
Reilly came towards him then with a roar, splashing through the water. Bill anticipated him easily in the moonless dark, dodging out of his way. Reilly stumbled and fell hard as Bill kicked him from behind.
“I’m truly sorry,” said Bill, then brought the rock crashing down on Reilly’s head, again and again.
A little while later, he made his way to the rendezvous and listened to the sound of a motorboat engine growing faint with distance. He sat down with his back to a wall and stared out towards the ocean, letting the rain wash the blood from his face.
Just before dawn came the wail of a siren, and the sound of voices from the camp, coming closer.
Since becoming a professional science fiction writer in 2004, Gary Gibson has produced ten novels, including Final Days, Extinction Game, and Stealing Light. His forthcoming novel, Survival Game, a sequel to Extinction Game, is published by Tor in August 2016. He is a Glaswegian by birth and also by inclination.
The Stilt-Men of the Lunar Swamps
Andrew J. Wilson
Art: Stephen Pickering
The yarn I’m about to tell you had almost spun itself out by the time I picked up the thread. Still, I was very lucky to have heard it at all, and in the end, I too got to play a small part in the story of the stilt-men of the lunar swamps.
I was enjoying a nightcap in the faded splendour of New York City’s Weckquaesgeek Hotel when a garrulous drunk drew my attention. The red-faced man trying to cadge yet more liquor from the other patrons of the bar was, I realised, none other than Donald “Bud” Franklin. His slurred words grew louder as his temper flared, and it became clear that the Korean War veteran and former lunar astronaut was about to make a scene. Franklin climbed unsteadily onto a table, then bent over and dropped his trousers, shouting, “Here’s two moons for the price of one, ya goddam rubberneckers!”
He’d been caught in a downward spiral since leaving the Apollo programme, and had finally reduced himself to the level of a side-show freak. But this was only the beginning of Big Bad Bud’s performance, and his audience were in for much more than they’d bargained for that evening.
“Now,” he yelled between his legs, “since y’all are so interested in what it was like, I’ll give ya a practical demonstration of a Saturn V launch!” Then he waved a Zippo lighter around his buttocks and broke wind.
In the ensuing chaos, I spotted a small and elegant old woman who remained unperturbed. There was something familiar about her wrinkled face, as well as the way she calmly smoked pastel-coloured Balkan Sobranies in a stylish cigarette holder. When she realised that I’d been watching her, she beckoned me over to her table.
“Did you know that GI Bud Franklin is an anagram of ‘blinking fraud’?” Her pleasantly raspy voice and inimitable turn of phrase told me who she was.
“Madam, I’m honoured,” I said.
“But you had assumed I was dead, yes?”
She was, as ever, quite correct.
“Don’t concern yourself, young man. Even I have to scan the obituaries every morning to reassure myself that I’m still in the land of the living.”
Ursula Underhill was one of the greatest wits and finest literary stylists of her generation. I was so pleased to be in her presence that I’d almost completely forgotten about Franklin’s idiocy until the security guards blundered past us, the former astronaut and his abandoned trousers clamped firmly in their sweaty hands.
“It’s tragic, really,” Ursula sighed, “but then the poor soul never saw the real Moon. Perhaps things might have been different if he had.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, I was there years before all that NASA hoo-hah.”
I stared at her in consternation, worried that she might be rambling with senility—and taken aback by her pronunciation of the acronym of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as “Nassau”.
“Don’t look at me like that, young man... otherwise, I won’t give you the story of a lifetime!”
II. The Professor’s Exposition
You see, young man, even for a woman of my meagre talents, it was something of a disappointment to be relegated to the role of gossip columnist. I had arrived in England determined to make my mark as a social and political commentator. However, I rapidly found that all I could place were trivial sketches of the idle and the vain. These were times when men were men, and quite frankly, my dear, women were appalled.
You’re too young to have heard of Montgomery Montgolfier Monk, big game hunter, self-styled adventurer and would-be lady killer. His monogram was MMM, and he insisted that it should be pronounced “mmm”. The oaf thought it charming to whisper in the shell-like ears of debutantes that he was just a big sweetie, hard on the outside but soft within. Soft in the head was more like it, and I found his syrupy sayings more sickly than sweet. He was the kind of man who put the “ass” in passion.
Still, Monty Monk must have decided that I was a challenge to be scaled like one of his mountains, or bagged like some poor beast of the jungle. He fed me titbits for my columns, and introduced me to the eccentric orbit of a gang of socialites who were, Lord help me, even ghastlier and more ridiculous than him. I tolerated his persistence, and he eventually introduced me to his godfather, Professor Festus MacGuffin.
It must have been late in the autumn of nineteen thirty-two when Monty drove me down to the professor’s estate in Berkshire. He had spun me a line about a great news story, and obviously thought he was going to be able to hook me with this so-called scoop and then reel me in over the course of the weekend. I was very much on my guard for the whole journey, but as we drove through the heavily wooded grounds, I realised that Triple-M might have inadvertently made my career.
Standing on the lawns screened by the trees was what I can only describe as an enormous steel sieve. I could not imagine the purpose of such an eyesore, but Monty assured me that it would be the sensation of the age before making it obvious that he had no idea what it was either.
We were met at the door by a neat young Oriental, whom Monty introduced as Kong.
“The professor is expecting you,” the Chinaman told us with hardly a trace of any accent. “Dinner will be at eight, and your host will be pleased to demonstrate his latest invention immediately afterwards.”
MacGuffin was one of the last surviving gentleman scientists, that enthusiastic species of amateur investigator who had flourished in the Victorian age. Now in his seventies, he combined bookish erudition with the manners of a country squire. His patriarchal beard was so bushy it looked as if he had tried to swallow a baby badger, but failed miserably in the attempt.
“Y’see, m’dear,” he told me over the roast pheasant, “I’ve cracked the problem at last—I can now remotely observe the farthest parts of the world, all from the comfort of m’own study, don’t y’know! The Omniscope is a window on the world, and perhaps on other spheres as well...”
By the time the men were on to the port and cigars, I had listened to a barely coherent monologue about the technical details, which had gone over my head, out the door and all the way to Timbuktu. Monty had revelled in every word, but by the vacant look on his face, he had made even less sense of it than myself. The boob was simply taking childish delight in the sound of big words like ‘selenography’ and ‘phlogiston’. Even the professor seemed to lose his thread half the time, and was compelled to ask Kong for clarification as the taciturn Oriental waited on us.
The Chinaman’s moustache hung like quotation marks around the proverbially inscrutable slash of his mouth as he murmured definitions or ironed out details. Not only was Kong master chef, maître d’ and chief bottle-washer for MacGuffin, I began to suspect that he was also quite probably the man who had built the Omniscope too.
