Neuron World

by R Fanthorpe, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The human personality had been defined by leading psychologists as the integrated and dynamic organisation of psychical, mental, moral and social qualities. A personality is the product of heredity and environment. Every experience records itself in the neurons of the brain producing an almost infinite number of possible combinations. Brains are as individual as fingerprints.
In an infinite universe, however, there is a possibility that somewhere - separated by vast distances of Time and Space - two exactly similar brains exist. The strange telepathic bonds between identical twins could operate between identical minds.
Melinda Tracey was a practical, intelligent, modern girl who didn't believe in dreams - even recurring dreams - but her odd sleep experiences of the ruined city, and the strangely suited figure who searched it, disturbed her considerably.
What incredible psychological bond linked Melinda to the lonely stranger, probing the wreckage of an alien metropolis?

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

MELINDA TRACEY glanced at her watch. It was four-thirty. She sighed a little wearily, and looked up at the archive clock as though hoping that her watch had either stopped or lost a few minutes. The ornate, radiant, gilt-framed wall clock told the same story, to within half a minute, as Melinda’s own watch.

She rumpled dispiritedly through the pages on the desk in front of her and then, as though realising that shuffling the papers would neither end her boredom nor get the job done, she picked up the top one with an unnecessarily aggressive snatching movement and an impetuous tossing of her long red hair. Her keen, intelligent eyes scanned the photostatic sheet without any enthusiasm. Having noted its contents, Melinda thumbed through her reference catalogue, double checked the index numbers, printed them neatly and carefully on the corner of the sheet, and laid it carefully in the tray at the top of her desk. She read the second sheet, indexed it, then took a third and repeated the process. By the time she had finished the fourth the gilt-framed clock, resembling a mechanised sun god with an eye-symbol in its centre, told her that in three more minutes she would legally be entitled to leave the building.

It was a Friday afternoon. Melinda normally felt high-spirited at the end of the week, but today for some unaccountable reason she didn’t. Instead of being roseate in prospect, the weekend seemed all too short a break from the laborious work in the archives of the museum’s library.

Three or four years ago Melinda had enjoyed her job. Now, as she stood up, weighted the remaining papers carefully, pushed the chair to her desk, and went in search of her hat and coat, she wondered why she bothered to stay there.

Life seemed to have degenerated into a series of dull, dispiriting routine procedures, from which even the chemistry of youth was powerless to lift her. She closed and locked the door of the office, strode through the anteroom and across the sacred floor of the library itself. Silent tomes regarded her disapprovingly from their serried terraces on the shelves. She turned and, with a quick, impetuous girlish gesture, put her tongue out at them. It was a pretty little pink tongue, but its antagonism to the dry, dead, dusty knowledge of the library was nonetheless real.

Melinda strode on, walking with a graceful but nevertheless athletically lithe purposefulness. She nodded to the curator, who was emerging from his office as she drew level with the door.

“Good night, Miss Tracey. Have a pleasant weekend.”

“Thank you, sir,” she smiled, but it was a smile of politeness and social convenience. There was no particular feeling behind it, and even as she made her way through the swing doors she wondered why she was smiling. The steps were broad and imposing; they echoed the tap of her stiletto heels as she ran down into the broad-flagged courtyard below. Once in the courtyard the air seemed fresher. It was already tinged with the sharpness of early autumn, and although the sun was bright, and passably strong, the first suspicion of the coming cold season was making itself felt in the air. The breeze was not merely gentle and summery, it was the herald and harbinger of the frosts that lay ahead. Its teeth were not yet developed, but their soft, white outlines could be felt below the gum tissue of the breeze’s gentle movement.

Melinda drew her coat round her a little more tightly as she paused at the bus stop. She glanced at her watch again, and realised that it was a habit to which she was turning with increasing frequency. An extra sign of boredom, perhaps? A symptom of uninterest.

Melinda waited impatiently, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. An old man, with a wing collar and a bowler hat, shuffled up and stood beside her. He had a straggly walrus moustache, his eyes were red, rheumy and unhappy-looking. His old, torn mackintosh hung like a wrinkled bell tent, sagging around a melancholy centre pole. A sudden feeling of sympathy for the drab, unhappy figure overwhelmed Melinda’s boredom. She had seen the old man in the library, it was probably his sole source of entertainment.

She smiled at him warmly.

“Hello!”

“Good evening, Miss.”

The old red eyes lit up a little as he touched his battered bowler. The bus arrived to save Melinda the embarrassment of further conversation. It was already almost full. The two available seats were well separated. Despite her sympathy, she would not have known how to carry on any further conversation with the old man.

There was a sharp, insectile buzz as the cheerful coffee-coloured conductor pressed the button with a jovial baritone call:

“Hold tight, please!”

He took fares cheerfully and his eyes seemed to have trapped some of the sunshine of his native land. He was giving a little of it to each passenger.

Melinda began to think that compared to the monotonous daily round of a bus conductor, her own life was a fortunate one. Yet this man, who had said farewell to the sunshine and sugar cane of his native island, who had come to a land where not everyone was friendly, and where it was necessary to learn new customs, a whole new pattern of living, could be cheerful—more cheerful than she was. It was so simple a thought, it seemed almost hackneyed, even as it crossed her mind. She remembered reading somewhere that the greatest truths are platitudinous. There was a lesson to be learnt from a man who could keep cheerful in circumstances more difficult than her own.

She began comparing her life with the life of the majority of her fellows. She had a first-class Honours degree, she was young, twenty to be exact, she was healthy and, without being immodest, she thought, she classed herself as attractive rather than otherwise. What more could a girl want?

As the bus rumbled on she tried to answer that question—unsuccessfully. She knew that something was missing. There had to be more to life than this. Happiness had to be more than a negative absence of unhappy factors. She needed something positive; while she was thinking about it, the bus reached her stop. She nodded to the cheerfully grinning, coffee-coloured conductor and the old man in the battered bowler, then alighted.

It was just a few hundred yards around the corner from the bus stop to her flat. The post was not highly lucrative by some standards, but it paid well enough for her to run a modest little two-roomed flat in considerable comfort. Melinda was practical and sensible in many ways. She had no wild or extravagant tastes. The flat was furnished sensibly rather than artistically. It was utilitarian rather than ostentatious.

She was in that listless, dissatisfied mood which comes to a human being when he or she wants to do something and can’t be quite sure what. She finally settled down to listen to a symphony concert on the Third, and some poetry readings by an unknown Sixteenth Century writer.

It interested her but only mildly, and she decided that, although it was no way to begin a weekend, she might just as well go to bed as sit up and feel bored. She had a bath, hoping it would help to wash away some of the listless and unhappy mood. It soothed her a little, but not very much, and she got into bed feeling that sleep was going to prove elusive. A distant clock struck eleven, then twelve, before Melinda finally dozed off.

She began to dream. It was a strange dream; she saw a figure, wearing an overall-like garment and thick leggings. There was a helmet, square and domed at the top, with a heavy eye-piece protruding clumsily from the front. The suit reminded her of a cross between deep sea diving gear and the kind of protective clothing worn by firemen in certain types of industrial conflagration. The gauntlets were also big, clumsy looking things. The figure looked vaguely like a polar explorer, thought the dreaming Melinda. It seemed to be walking over a reddish brown, grey mottled surface. Something about that surface frightened her. There was a terrible desolation; it looked as though it had been burned and blasted, scarred and razed, by some formidable emission of energy.

In her ‘dream’ the figure approached a wide expanse of ruined buildings; towers leaned at crazy, drunken angles. Heaps of shattered masonry lay in pathetic disarray. At one side she saw two buildings joined by a broad cross piece still standing, yet standing incongruously and perilously like some of the famous rocking stones of our rugged south-west coasts.

Melinda continued to watch as the figure went slowly from one ruin to another. It was obvious that it was searching for something—but what?

She could see nothing at all of the limbs or features, but the idea of searching came to her very strongly. In her ‘dream’ she saw a doorway, and by a strange, telescopic process that was akin to a kind of X-ray vision, her dream showed her the doorway in relation to one of the buildings. A deep intuitive knowledge told her that behind this door lay whatever it was the figure searched for so desperately.

Without realising what she was doing, or why, Melinda Tracey began willing the figure towards the building where her dream vision had told her the doorway was concealed. The figure stopped, turned, slowly and awkwardly, and moved its head jerkily, so that the helmet revolved in a series of near-mechanical movements. Even though the transparent part of the visor was turned towards Melinda, she could see nothing of the face behind it. Reflection and refraction defeated her vision. With a puzzled air, the figure searching the ruins set off towards the building to which Melinda had willed it to go.

The scene changed as a television scene changes when the director switches in another camera, and Melinda found she was now watching the scene on the other side of the door in the building. The panoramic view had changed to a close-up interior shot. The suited figure was moving with purposeful excitement. Even the shrouding, protective material could not disguise completely the quickening step and the definiteness of the movements in general. In the centre of the scarred, blistered room in the ruins, the room beyond the door, was a strangely shaped metal box. The figure began fumbling at the box’s corner. Like a film camera tracking in, the dream showed Melinda more and more detail.

The box grew larger; there were a number of protruding bolts around its upper edge. She knew it was essential for the third bolt to be turned before any of the others would move. She tried to will the crudely gauntleted hands towards that vital point.

The suited figure turned as though it had heard a voice or seen a sudden movement. The head rotated slowly, then with an air of mystification, the figure seized the third bolt and began to turn it awkwardly with the gauntleted hands. Melinda felt acute tension, a sensation of anticipation and anxiety. Next moment the whole dream fabric cascaded into an aerial avalanche of tiny transparent fragments.

She woke in a strange, cold perspiration of fear.…

MELINDA lay awake, staring up at the ceiling; for several moments she was unable to move. Paralysis seemed to have thrown its invisible chains around her body so thoroughly that no muscle or nerve would respond to the desperate promptings of her fear-numbed mind.

Melinda lost all sense of time as she lay, trance-like, and staring unhappily at the ceiling. The first grey fingers of dawn were nudging their way tentatively over the eastern horizon before the girl was able to break the worst of the spell that bound her motionless to the bed. Even then it did not break suddenly.

With the coming of dawn, and the slow, significant infiltration of light from the eastern hills, Melinda found that she could move first her toes and then her fingers. Life seemed to creep back to ankles and then knees as she stirred her lower legs and then her forearms. Then the melting process accelerated and she forced herself into a sitting position with a gasp of effort tinged with pain. Her back felt strangely stiff as though she had been lying on a fakir’s bed of nails.

She jumped out of bed with a kind of determination that was a challenge to the paralysis of fear that held her. The swift movement of strong, slim, dainty fingers flung back the curtain on the left-hand side of her window. The window was open, and cool, fresh morning air dispersed the last of the metaphorical paralytic gossamers that seemed to hang sinister, but invisible, in her room. She inhaled deeply with her hands across her diaphragm, feeling her body expand with the intake of clean air. She shivered a little, for the air was cold as well as clean. Turning back the covers of her bed, she went to the wardrobe, turned the key and swung open the door. It squeaked very faintly on its brass roller runners. She took out her housecoat, knotted its cord with the ease of long practice—it was a favourite garment and made her way downstairs. The flat occupied the top section of the old converted house in which it was situated. Her bedroom and living room were on the top floor but the kitchen, bathroom and the toilet facilities were one flight down. It was not the most convenient of arrangements, but it was a flat, and its price was reasonable.

Melinda washed briskly rather than with the kind of graceful, feminine decorum which is normally attributed to models advertising cosmetics and assorted toilet articles on television.

Melinda dried with a more vigorous motion than beauty consultants recommend for the care of delicate skin, but she felt brisk and invigorated as a result. She ran back upstairs, dressed, and looked at her watch. It was still only a few minutes after six. She couldn’t remember the last time she had got up so early. She went into her living room and sat in a deep, comfortable chair, thinking hard about the strange dream and its disconcerting, paralytic aftermath.

The comfort of the chair reminded her too much of the soft comfort of the bed, and she decided she would be far better to get up. She walked pensively around her. . .