The Echoing Worlds

by Jonathan Burke

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Time Travel

Synopsis

Because he was bored with life on a world that had become a museum, Paul Hilder answered a mysterious advertisement, and found himself plunged into a life that was different, dangerous and far from boring. This is the story of an Earth that existed alongside the one that Paul Hilder knew, and with which he became so involved that the bitter struggle waged on one world threatened to encroach on the other. And it is the story of Ruth, daughter of the powerful Controller Orstey, and her longing for a peace and happiness that did not exist in her own space and time - a peace she tried to find by passing through the cosmic junction of THE ECHOING WORLDS.

Release date: February 29, 2016

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 99

Sample

There she was, with her wide eyes and that perpetually incredulous expression, waving goodbye and beaming at me. At last I was rid of her.

“It’s all been so quaint,” she said ecstatically. “So wonderful.”

She was eighty if she was a day, and there she was at the foot of the gangway leading up to the space ship airlock: a rich old woman, capable of making a trip that I should never be able to make. It made me mad just to look at her. For her it had been a wonderful holiday—so quaint—and now she was going home to Mars; and I was twenty-three, in good health, and I should never have the chance of travelling out into space. For her there was a choice of new and fascinating worlds. For me there was only this museum of a world, an artificial place, where everything was pickled, petrified, preserved …

The warning siren moaned from the control tower. She gave me a last wave and went up the gangway. I turned and walked away. I didn’t look back. As I was getting into the helicar I heard the successive thumping and coughing of the rockets, and then the acrid stench came drifting across: but I couldn’t bring myself to look up at the trail of flame that looped across the sky. It didn’t do any good to let your imagination follow that silver ship: if you were stuck here on Earth, it was best not to think too much about the unattainable wonders of the other planets.

The helicar responded to my touch. I was snatched away from the space-port, and in five minutes the car was dropping gently on to the main junction road ten miles from Heritage. It had taken me five minutes to do thirty miles. The next ten miles would take the larger part of half-an-hour.

They were wonderful things, those helicars. Wonderful and exasperating. There were times when you could believe that they were not mere machines: they had a stubbornness that was almost human. Fast and responsive within the force-field which activated them, they dropped with mulish obstinacy to the ground when you reached the confines of the limited field, and there was no way of driving them any farther. They worked within a set radius of the space-port, and after that you did things the hard way. Within that radius you were in the twenty-second century; beyond it, you were right back in the museum.

I got out, and the car, after a polite interval, rose jauntily into the air and started on its automatic return journey.

Then I walked down the lane and sat on a milestone to wait for the bus.

It was late. That was part of the olde-worlde charm, of course: trippers would have been disappointed if the buses had run on time. The trouble was that even when there were no trippers about and you merely wanted to get home, the buses were still erratic.

I sat and stared at the landscape. Inevitably my usual professional patter ran through my mind.

“The town on the hill over there is Heronchurch. You will note the dominating effect of the church, in which services are still held exactly as they were when the church was erected, way back in the nineteenth century. The cluster of buildings in the foreground is an authentic farm, and agriculture is still carried on in the fields surrounding it. You will note the old-fashioned combine harvester in the far corner of the field on the west. No, sir, I’m afraid terrestrial regulations don’t allow the use of synthetic tablets at all. Yes, that’s true. Quite so. The primitive charm would be quite lost if any compromise were permitted.”

Primitive charm …

The bus came. I got a seat, but it was beside a woman with a basket of fish on her knees. They stank—the fish, I mean.

We bumped on down the road and across the bridge. A boy was fishing. He looked genuinely interested in what he was doing, but he might just as well have been one of the spivs who hang about looking picturesque in the hope of coaxing money out of visitors. “Spivs,” I say: it is hard not to fall into the archaic vernacular whose use is so resolutely encouraged by the authorities.

“And on our left”—the words ran persistently through my mind—“we see Heritage Castle, dating from the fifteenth century. The historical associations of this whole district are as rich as any to be found within two hundred miles or more. From the nearby coast there has been the threat of innumerable invasions——”

“But not now, eh?” somebody would laugh. And all the rest would laugh, and I would have to smile and say: “Oh, no, I don’t think we want to keep things as authentic as that.” And someone was bound to say: “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

The bus stopped at the end of the row of weather-boarded houses. It stopped again outside The Ewe and Lamb, and I noticed that old Harrison was still sitting on the bench outside as though he thought someone might still come and buy him a drink and ask him if he was really and truly the oldest inhabitant. Then we went on down the hill, across the valley and over the bridge, and up the slope towards the ancient grey gate of Heritage.

The streamlined efficiency of the space-port seemed very remote. It was not only space that lay between that sort of world and this: not only a few miles of airway, highway and country lanes, but time as well. Here the centuries had been brought to a halt. Here the authorities had drawn a line and said that progress must cease. Occasionally the fiery trail of a ship arriving in the port would curve across the sky, but it was too distant to be credible. It might have been no more than the trail left by an old-fashioned aeroplane, droning its way about the lazy heavens. When you were in Heritage you were, as the travel brochures claimed, living in the past. You breathed the sense of history, you walked among the traditions on which man’s conquest of the universe had been founded.

And it was all very nice and interesting, no doubt, if you did the breathing and walking when you were on holiday. When you had to live here, it wasn’t quite the same.

I got off the bus and walked up the cobbled street to the half-timbered house in which I lived with my uncle.

He was reading the evening paper, and it seemed to me that when he glanced up and nodded there was an expression of relief on his face.

He said: “You’re a bit late, aren’t you?”

“Am I? It was the usual journey. But the bus was late.”

“Mm.” He crackled the newspaper and folded it clumsily. “Thought you might have stowed away or something, and gone the way of all these others.”

“It’s darned difficult to stow away,” I said.

“You’ve tried?” His gaze was sharp and querulous.

“No; but I know people who’ve had a shot. It’s impossible. The load checkers register the slightest variation in weight before they’ll even let the ship blast off.”

“And yet young men of your age—and some older ones, for that matter—keep disappearing.”

He sounded accusing, as though I were somehow at fault, or as though I might do something of the same sort if I weren’t closely watched.

I said: “I saw a paragraph in the paper the other day, but I didn’t look at it very carefully.”

He pushed the crumpled sheets at me, and I took them. My uncle was always finding something in the newspapers that struck him as worthy of note. Sometimes he would insist on reading passages aloud. At other times it was enough for me to skim through a news story. He was not yet senile, but he was getting just a bit doddery. The most trivial things interested him. A melodramatic headline would make him say: “Just look at this, now,” and some human interest story would make him wag his chin sympathetically. It was incredible to me that a man who had knocked about the universe as he had done could settle down so tranquilly in this backwater and get worked up over silly parochialisms.

“What do you make of it?” he demanded.

“A bit queer,” I said. I hadn’t actually read a word, but in a few seconds I managed to take in the general meaning of the story.

Apparently there had in the past eighteen months been a sharp rise in the number of unexplained disappearances, particularly among young men. There had not been a crime wave: people just disappeared and were not heard of again. Many of them had no relatives, and it was some time before their absence was remarked.

“Youngsters like yourself,” said my uncle speculatively, “who aren’t allowed to go out into space, but keep on trying—and succeeding, maybe.”

I said: “In that case, there’d be reports of a lot of dead bodies in the holds of space ships. Those of us who are pinned to Earth have been told that our metabolism isn’t right—that we’d curl up and die if we got out into space. That’s what the experts on the medical boards say. And the trouble is that all the evidence so far has proved them right. I don’t believe there’s been a sudden rush to commit suicide. I don’t even believe that everyone has suddenly decided to take a chance and try to prove the experts wrong. And anyway, you can’t stow away. And several hundred stowaways … it doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, then, where have they all gone?”

I tossed the paper on to the old oak table. “It’s a journalist’s stunt,” I said. “Anything to brighten things up. People are disappearing all the time—falling in the sea, or getting bored stiff and going off to explore Tibet. There have always been hundreds of unexplained disappearances every year.”

My uncle sighed. He was usually convinced by my rational interpretations of newspaper exaggerations, but on the whole he would have preferred not to be convinced: he liked to brood over such petty mysteries.

“Done a good day’s work?” he said at last.

“I’ve seen the last of that woman from Mars,” I said. “You might call getting rid of her a good day’s work.”

“I thought she looked quite a pleasant old dear,” he said. “She was peering in the windows when you were showing her up this street.”

“Yes.” I remembered that all right. “She was the perfect tourist. She had every phrase off just right—everything was too quaint, or perfectly fascinating, or gave her an awareness of the reality of history, or it was too authentic for words. She was a prime specimen.”

“I hope you weren’t rude to her.”

“I did my job,” I said bitterly. “She thought I was charming. She told me so. She said it was a pity that life on the other planets toughened men so: they tended to lose the finer touch. But in the next breath she was saying what a wonderful holiday she had last year on Venus, and how comfortable travelling is nowadays in these new liners. She described all the gadgets in her daughter’s kitchen, and the new visiscreens they use all over the solar system now—everywhere except here, on this ancient m. . .