Seahorse in the Sky

Book 51: Gateway Essentials

by Edmund Cooper

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

Synopsis

At first he though it was all part of some crazy nightmare. But it wasn't. Russell Graheme, M.P. was one of a handful of passengers flying from Stockholm to London. One moment flying peacefully in the sky, the next lying in an un-Earthly green coffin. Grahame was the first to emerge from this strange resting place. But for him, as well as for the others, it had been only the ecliptical experience. Soon all were to find themselves lost in a bizarre world of Mediaeval knights, Stone Age warriors and gremlins, caught unalterably in the weirdest cocoon of Time.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

IT looked like Resurrection Day.

Or some incongruously daylight nightmare—with a touch of Breughel, a dash of Dalí and a soupçon of Peter Sellers. It made you want to laugh or scream, or something. Presently people began to do both—or something. Because there is nothing more likely to disturb, disorientate or discommode than not knowing where, how, why or even who.

Russell Grahame was the first one out of his ‘coffin’. He was lucky. He knew almost immediately that he was Russell Grahame, Member of Parliament for Middleport North in the county of Lancashire.

He knew who, but he didn’t know where, how or why. He didn’t even know when. So clearly it was just a crazy dream, and presently he would be woken up by the sound of someone saying: “Please fasten your seat belts and extinguish all cigarettes. We shall be landing at London Airport in about ten minutes.”

But he didn’t waken up, because he was already awake and the nightmare was real.

The ‘coffin’ he had just vacated appeared to be made of pale green plastic. It lay in the middle of the road at the end of a neat row of similar coffins, between the building labelled ‘Hotel’ on one side and the building labelled ‘Supermarket’ on the other. The road was about ten metres wide and a hundred metres long. At each end it disappeared into grass and shrubs. It was just a thin oasis of urbanization in a great green wilderness. A taxi was parked outside the hotel. A car was parked outside the supermarket.

But there were no people—apart from those emerging from the man-size green boxes.

A dark-skinned girl literally kicked the lid off her box, stood up, shrieked piercingly and fainted. It was the signal for general pandemonium. A man and a woman, both white, were the next to emerge. They looked round wildly, saw each other and almost fell together, gripping so tightly that it looked as if they would never let go.

Two men got out of adjacent boxes, bumped into each, Other, fell over and almost immediately started fighting. And almost immediately stopped.

Three girls were laughing and crying, terrified but finding an odd security in their mutual terror.

Presently, sixteen people, having got out of sixteen boxes, were themselves making enough noise to wake the dead or, at least, to excite the attention of any occupants of the hotel or the supermarket. But, if anyone was in residence in the hotel, or shopping in the supermarket, they were sufficiently familiar with the mechanics of resurrection in the middle of the main and only street not to wish to investigate further.

No one came out.

The pandemonium went on and on, with people talking, shouting, gesticulating or babbling incoherently. They seemed dazed, traumatized, as if they had been through one hell of a harrowing experience. Which, of course, they had. And it was still happening.

Russell Grahame, feeling oddly detached from the whole absurd carnival, ran his left hand mechanically and repeatedly through his hair in the characteristic manner that had earned him the sobriquet Brainstroker among his few friends in the House of Commons. After a time, he became aware that his head wasn’t quite the shape it used to be. There was a bump somewhere in the region of the cerebellum. It was a fairly large bump, neat, round and with a suggestion of scar tissue on top of it. The hair that covered the bump was nowhere near as long as the rest of his hair.

Russell Grahame, M.P., licked his lips and suddenly felt very shaky indeed. He needed a drink. He needed a drink rather badly. Glancing at the hotel, he walked slowly and cautiously towards it. It would not do for a Member of Parliament—even one who had finally made up his mind to get out of that madhouse where mass euphoria was permanently topped up with abstract nouns—to fall flat on his face in the middle of the road.

The hotel foyer was empty—except for an assortment of baggage piled in a heap near the revolving doors. There was no one at the reception desk. He hit the bell three times, but no one came.

Then he saw on the wall the words Cocktail Bar, and an arrow pointing down a short passage. He went to the cocktail bar. That was deserted also. After a moment’s reflection, he went behind the bar and poured himself a very large whisky.

He took a good long pull at the whisky. Then, with trembling fingers, he felt for his cigarettes. The noise outside seemed to be subsiding a little. He felt the bump on the back of his head and took another good swallow of whisky. He began to feel a bit better.

Somebody else was hitting the bell at the reception desk. He was in no mood to go and enlighten them. Let them come to him.

They did. Or, rather, one did. The rest found their way later.

The newcomer was a man between twenty-five and thirty—tall, blond, blue-eyed and rather good-looking in an extroverted continental sort of way. Grahame was immediately conscious of feeling anciently forty and very English.

“A large vodka, and what the hell has happened to the service?” demanded the tall young man truculently.

Obediently, Grahame poured the vodka. “Cheers. There is no service.”

“Then who are you?”

The Englishman eyed his whisky seriously and took another mouthful. “Just one of the walking dead. My name is Russell Grahame.” Then he felt impelled to add: “British…And you?”

His companion opened his mouth, closed it, put down the glass of vodka on the bar with a shaking hand and looked very confused.

“Take your time,” said Grahame sympathetically. “That is something I have a notion we are not going to be short of. Something tells me we are going to have all the time in the world.”

“Norstedt,” announced the young man, with a curious element of doubt in his voice. “I am Tore Norstedt … Swedish… Pleased to meet you.”

He held out his right hand. Grahame shook it formally. “Well, now we know each other. Have another drink. I’m going to.” He smiled. “I think it’s on the house.”

“Thank you. Yes.” Norstedt also smiled. “I think perhaps the vodka treatment is indicated.” Absently, he felt the back of his head.

Grahame noted the gesture. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a bump, too. It appears to be all part of the operation.”

Norstedt slammed his glass on the bar so that some of the vodka slopped over. “What operation? Where are we? What the devil is going on?”

“Take it easy. I’m in the dark, too. When we have drunk some of the shakes away, we’d better try to make some sense out of it … Incidentally, you speak excellent English.”

Norstedt shook his head. “Swedish. I speak Swedish—as you are doing.”

Grahame shrugged. “Have it your own way. But, for the record, I don’t speak Swedish—well, not much.” A thought suddenly struck him. “Arlanda!”

“Yes, Arlanda!” repeated Norstedt excitedly. “That’s it!”

A piece of the jigsaw was falling into place.

“Arlanda airport,” went on Grahame. “The afternoon jet from Stockholm to London… That is where I saw you—at the airport. You were right ahead of me. You—you had excess baggage. Ten kroner… I wondered if I had enough money left to pay for mine.”

“I remember! I remember!” Norstedt was almost shouting. “I couldn’t find a taxi. I thought I was going to miss the ’plane.”

“I have been watching your lips,” said Grahame with a tightness in his voice. “By God, you are speaking Swedish! But the words I hear are English.”

“I have been watching yours also,” observed Norstedt. “The—the shapes are not Swedish, but the sounds are.”

While they exchanged these intriguing discoveries, Grahame had noted that the bell at the reception desk was being rung repeatedly, that voices were being raised in the foyer, and that those same voices were now getting louder as their owners came towards the cocktail bar.

“All roads lead to Rome,” he observed grimly. “It seems, friend Norstedt, that we are about to have a rather interesting session.”

IT was, indeed, an interesting session. Also a baffling and bewildering one.

Russell Grahame elected to remain behind the bar. He made a very efficient bartender. Certainly, he reflected bitterly, he was better at mixing drinks than politics. Perhaps he should have taken a vocational aptitude test a quarter of a century ago. Then, perhaps, he might have wound up as a first-class barman in a five-star hotel instead of a third-rate politician, ground to a fine smoothness between the stones of a moribund two-party system. He had resigned from the Parliamentary Labour Party just before they were about to boot him out. With the same excellent sense of timing, he had decided while on holiday in Sweden to resign his seat when he got back.

If he got back … For factors were emerging that seemed to make the prospect somewhat remote…

Still, for a while he did not have much time for thinking. He was too busy attending to the needs of his companions in adversity. Nobody questioned his right to control the bar. In fact, the general consensus seemed to be that he was a damn fine barman. Which was something. And, with his own consumption of whisky, his regret at never having taken an aptitude test increased.

Practically everyone was drinking spirits of one kind or another. Somehow, spirits seemed to be appropriate to the occasion.

All sixteen people were now in the bar, having left their crazy coffins in the middle of the crazy road in the crazy ghost town that was the centre of the crazy non-cosmos into which they had been thrust.

Introductions had been made, chaotically, spasmodically and whenever people managed to remember their own names. The last person to rediscover identity was a slender, decorative West Indian girl, improbably named Selene Bergere. Her deliciously chocolate-coloured limbs fell in a graceful heap as she remembered this interesting fact while disposing of a pretty powerful rum Coke.

She looked to be the youngest of the party, and she had been the last to remember. Russell, glancing at the others, judged that he was probably the oldest in the group. And he had evidently been the first to remember. He wondered if these facts were significant.

Certainly, it was a time for speculation. Wild speculation…

However, before he lost himself entirely in a welter of fantasy, or got drunk, or both, he decided to review the facts that had so far emerged.

Fact one: there were sixteen people in the same predicament. Eight males and eight females. The sex balance was probably no accident.

Fact two: nobody knew why, how, where or when. Everyone’s watch had stopped, including a battery-powered model that was supposed—so its Russian owner said in perfect English, Swedish or what-have-you—to keep going for a year.

Fact three: everybody had bumps and scar tissue on the backs of their heads. And, bearing in mind the international composition of the party, everyone was able to speak perfect English, Swedish, French, Hindu and Russian while still apparently talking in their own native tongues.

Fact four: everyone had been on the same jet from Arlanda, Stockholm, to Heathrow, London. Although it had taken some time and some assistance before the younger members of the group were able to recollect this.

Fact five: everybody’s luggage was piled in the hotel foyer—something which Russell Grahame himself had failed to notice—being too intent, he supposed, on finding the bar. He had noticed the pile of luggage, certainly, but he had not connected it with himself or his fellow displaced persons.

Fact six: the town was not a town. Not even a village. It was just a hotel, a supermarket and a few small buildings on either side of a strip of road that ran from nowhere to no-where. It was more like a film set. And that presented a whole range of possibilities—from joke TV spectaculars up and down.

Fact seven: there were no people. Apart from sixteen prepackaged untouched-by-human-hand humans, there were no people. Significant in the extreme, and a bit anxiety-making.

Fact eight: it was all real. None of your solipsistic finessing. It was all bloody horribly real.

“I have eight facts,” announced Grahame to a man who had just stepped up to the bar with a trayful of glasses.

“I’m jolly happy for you, old boy,” said Mohan das Gupta, age twenty-eight, Indian oil company executive. “How about sticking them in the ice-box for a moment while you supply one lager and lime, one gin and lemon, one large brandy and a Bloody Mary?”

“Furthermore, there are various conclusions to be drawn.”

“Draw them by all means. But don’t be too miserly with the brandy.”

Obediently, Grahame supplied the drinks—but with an immense feeling of frustration. Everybody seemed to be talking their heads off—doubtless propounding all kinds of weird theories about what had happened and why. But the activity, the inquest, was uncoordinated. It lacked discipline and cohesion. In short, it wasn’t going to get any bloody place.

Enter Russell Grahame, M.P., whose constituency meetings had been models of mediocrity and examples of ineffectuality that had constantly astounded the party workers of Middleport North. But, hell, somebody had to do something.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in a loud voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention for a few minutes?”

“Why?” Somebody was already fairly drunk. “Don’t you have enough with your own?”

“Because,” explained Grahame patiently, “I dislike being part of a dream that is not a dream, because it’s giving me a headache, and because I would like to get back to London some time—if it is at all possible.”

“Seconded,” said a male, very British voice.

Faces turned towards Grahame expectantly, and he launched into his little speech. “I do not have to dwell on our method of arrival. We will all, I think, carry that little memory with us for some time. Nor do I have to labour the point—and humorous remarks will be appreciated later—that something decidedly peculiar has been done to all our heads. We have no time reference, none of us has any recollection of what happened on the flight from Stockholm to London, and I believe that none of us has the slightest idea where we are.”

“South America,” suggested somebody.

“Hollywood,” countered somebody else.

“Please.” Grahame held up his hand. “What I mean is that we do not have any evidence of where we are. There will probably be an embarrassment of theories, and we can discuss these at our leisure. . .