Collected Science Fiction and Ghost Stories

By Paul Morrison

COLLECTED SCIENCE FICTION AND GHOST STORIES will allow you to enter strange new worlds as well as revealing to the reader shadowy characters from other or parallel dimensions. The author will introduce you to the PALAIS THEATRE VAMPIRE; take you for an afternoon stroll on an evening when the world comes to an end; or in JUST A STREET IN BROOKLYN, a future world that no longer exists. He will lead you into the darker places beyond THE GLOSSY WHITE DOOR, and through THE EYE OF HORUS, where events in the past can be altered to change the future. THE ZOO KEEPER, CLOCKS and THE PHARAOH'S WISDOM will also reveal the darker side of human emotions. Whether lost in PHANTOM LOVE, solving PUZZLES or dealing with ROMAN LAW, the reader will have the time of their lives exploring weird and wonderful worlds in both time and space, as well as the pleasure of a scary ride into the deeper and mysterious depths of the human mind. Forty two stories to amaze and (hopefully) to scare!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Morrison
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780992267339

Paul Morrison

Paul Morrison, a retired museologist, has also been a writer for most of his life. “I cannot remember a time when I was not writing, even when I was five or six years old. I grew up with books such as TREASURE ISLAND, 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA and THE TIME MACHINE — these and the many other books which I read in my early years fed my imagination, a voracious imagination transporting me to faraway places, other worlds and to other times in both the recent and the more distant past...” Many of these worlds and places are visited in the novels and short story collections he has written.Besides a love of fiction, Paul also reads widely on ancient history and archaeology. “I am particularly interested in Ancient Egypt, mainly Old Kingdom Egypt during the age of the pyramid builders. I have always been intrigued as to how the pyramids were built and also about the lives of the pharaohs and the workers who constructed the pyramids. There were many questions filling my mind, but few if any answers.” This inquiring interest led to the GIZA TRILOGY books, THE PHARAOH, THE SPHINX and THE THREE QUEENS, a monumental work of well-researched fiction set against the backdrop of the three pyramids on the Giza Plateau. Together, with their associated books, THE DIVINE LIGHT, ETERNAL EGYPT (Supplement to the Giza Trilogy), and SECRET OF THE PYRAMID, these books total more than 1.3 million words! Other books written by Paul cover a wide range of subjects including historical fiction, science fiction, ghost and detective stories as well as many other genres.Paul currently lives in Hobart, Tasmania with his wife in a house overlooking the Derwent River. “The magnificent views of Hobart and Mount Wellington inspire me in my writings — but the most important inspiration is my wife, Helena.”

Book preview

WIN YOURSELF A FREE WORLD – THE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS. THE EARTH GOVERNMENT WILL GRANT A WORLD OF APPROX. MASS AND DIAMETER THE SAME SIZE AS PLUTO, RICH IN MINERALS, TO ANY SPACE TRAVELLER WHO FINDS NON-TERRESTRIAL LIFE ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE.

I thought about the Earth Government edict first regulated a hundred years ago in 2098 A.D. In those one hundred years, these so-called free worlds on offer had remained unclaimed, and yet, the man seated opposite me said he had seen non-terrestrial life. His story was a strange one but where was his evidence?

Can a planet with life just disappear? I asked him.

Epsom’s World did, replied the man with the bristling white beard and the grey eyes. An odd planet it was – had the strangest life forms. He stroked his white beard. Really strange they were...

How did it just disappear?

How can you explain the disappearance of any mass, was his casual reply. He glanced out the window at the distant lights of an approaching space freighter. Really strange life forms on that planet, he continued after a pause. "They would have been really interesting to study. It was, of course, impossible to convince the bureaucrats in the Earth Government. After all – there was nothing to show them after Epson’s World disappeared. You got to prove those life forms exist and we could not even prove that Epson’s World existed."

Yet, it’s on the space maps, I replied.

Sure it was on the space maps. After it disappeared, however, they came up with all sorts of excuses. Said it had been mapped incorrectly; said it was nothing more than a shadow planet – a reflection of light from another planet; insisting it hadn’t existed in the first place.

He took something from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Sure was unusual life, he mumbled. He then held the tiny object closer to his eyes, studying it carefully.

It seems strange you were in that part of the galaxy in the first place, I said as he carefully placed the mysterious object back in his pocket. There are no colonies there and no short-cuts for space ships.

We got lost! He smiled and suddenly became more relaxed. "It happened two years ago when Godfrey was my stella-navigator-engineer on one of those ancient two-man freighter rigs. We could not afford to have robot workers onboard because our contract work was going so badly. We were running on a piece of string you could say and a rather threaded piece at that.

Well anyway, Godfrey had a habit of confusing things – putting them back to front in his mind. It wasn’t the first or the last time we ended up heading in the wrong direction, or breaking down in the middle of nowhere. There was one time... and the man with the bristling white beard and grey eyes talked to me about some of the odd regions of the galaxy he had visited whilst under the influence of Godfrey's navigational skills. Finally, he paused whilst attempting to calculate the distance between two obscure stars he had visited on one of his trips. I saw my chance to interrupt him from his galactic wanderings and return him to Epson's World.

What did you and Godfrey find on this planet which disappeared?

His grey eyes suddenly brightened. I will tell you. He took the object from his pocket and placed it on the table before him; with his right hand resting on the mysterious object as if drawing some hidden power from it. Then he began his strange story....

"We were lost, alright! – didn’t know where we were. Must have been travelling for several earth weeks before I suspected we were off course. Everything had been running smoothly for a change, so something had to be wrong and sure enough, when I did a simple check of the navigational plot I found Godfrey had programmed the star maps into the computer upside down. We had been lucky, very lucky and I can tell you that because I’m here now. To travel trillions of miles blindly through space and not hit anything – now that’s luck!

"I got Godfrey to close down the engines which left us drifting, while we tried to fix our position from the nearby stars. Imagine our astonishment when we found there were no nearby stars, only an empty blackness lit by a single light of opaque green. What to do? Well, we discussed it and decided to head for that light, hoping it was a space beacon that had broken free and drifted off into a deserted part of the galaxy. They’ve got computers onboard them which can tell their exact position even when they drift off, like we thought this one had.

"We approached the light – green it was, a lush green at that. As we came closer, we could see that it was a planet, a planet reflecting light where there was no light! Its greenness reminded me of pictures of the Amazonian rainforests on old Earth. Above this lush green planet was a strange moon that sat in one position. It didn’t seem to rotate around the planet like a normal moon would.

"Well, anyway, as we got closer and I was studying all of this, Godfrey was furiously feeding data into the computer, giving it readings on light intensity and all of that until finally out came the answer – Epson’s World, an unexplored planet in the fourth quarter of the third quadrant, wherever that was... From what the computer could tell us it appeared the planet was named after nobody in particular, but I still have my doubts as to whether it really was Epson’s World. After all, Godfrey was feeding the data into the computer and it wasn’t like Godfrey to do something right when it came to machinery." I was amused by this.

Why did you hire Godfrey in the first place?

Brother-in-law! It was as simple as that. With all of his short-comings, Godfrey was still a good man to have on a space freighter. He could always be relied upon in an emergency, even if some of those emergencies were caused by his own absent mindlessness. After some moments of silence which assured him there would be no further interruptions, the man with the bristling white beard and grey eyes continued with his strange story.

"Well, anyway, as we headed towards the planet we passed directly between the stationary moon and the planet’s surface, and it was as if something was holding us back – as though we were struggling against some invisible barrier. Our speed slowed and we moved along in a jerking motion until finally all the systems onboard began to gradually shut down one by one, that is, with the exception of the main life-support computer.

"We began to float down towards the surface of Epsom’s World not in a spinning and out of control way, but like we were being gently lifted down by a giant unseen hand. While Godfrey checked the engines to see what the problem was, I was studying the surface of our unexplored world. It took me some minutes to adjust my eyes to the reflective glare of all that greenness.

"What I saw was most disappointing, to say the least! The trees we thought we had seen from a distance were little more than sticks of green crystals rising up some forty or fifty metres above the planet’s surface, which they covered in great abundance. Here and there were small hills that consisted of fallen and broken crystals that had accumulated into mounds. There was nothing of any interest. If I had control of the freighter I would have turned round then and there and left Epson’s World – it wasn’t worth exploring! But the problem was I didn’t have control and we were slowly drifting down until, with an almighty crunch, we came to rest on top of the canopy you could call it, of the crystal forest.

We were in a real fix, Godfrey and me, suspended some fifty metres above the surface of the planet. I got Godfrey to put on a spacesuit and climb outside to check the undercarriage of the freighter for damage. The planet had a heavy gravity and we had to rig up a harness so that Godfrey could climb around under the freighter. A couple of times he lost his footing, plummeting halfway down into the forest, but he always managed to haul himself back by climbing monkey-style up the crystal trees. While Godfrey was fiddling around outside, I was checking the internal systems in the forward cabin and as I was doing so I happened to glance up through the ceiling porthole. It was then that I noticed something really strange, stranger than this crazy world we were trapped on.

The man with the bristling white beard suddenly sat in silence while I waited impatiently for him to tell me what he had seen through the porthole, sitting on top of a crystal forest on a planet made of crystals.

Well...? I finally inquired.

I am trying to put it into words. For the first time I saw a faint tinge of terror in his grey eyes. He paused and then continued, and his eyes had a distant gaze in them.

"The moon was coming closer to the planet – on a collision course, or so it seemed. But that was not all!

"The side of the moon facing directly towards the planet had a great black shadow across it, a shadow which seemed to break all the laws of science. Epson’s World was giving off a lot of light, so how then could the side of the moon facing the planet be in darkness?

"I sat there thinking about all of this while the moon grew steadily closer. Godfrey was still fiddling around outside and every few minutes, I would nervously turn from the ceiling porthole and glance outside, watching Godfrey swinging from his harness cable like a mindless baboon, or climbing up the crystal trees from where he had fallen. Time was running out. The moon was now much closer. I climbed into my own spacesuit and went outside to help Godfrey check the undercarriage. There wasn’t much time left.

"When I struggled outside the freighter the only thing I could do was point towards the approaching moon to warn Godfrey of our situation. Godfrey looked up at the moon and then he was suddenly gone. Crunch! A large rock had appeared from nowhere and struck the crystal tree on which he was sitting, breaking it in half. More rocks rained down on us and I could hear them smashing hard against the freighter – and then I was also lying on the floor of the crystal forest, covered in crystal dust and completely dazed.

"When I looked up, the moon hung in the sky above us and it blocked out three quarters of this sky. It seemed to have stopped its advance. I could see the great black shadow that stretched across its face clear enough to realise it wasn’t a shadow at all, but the mouth of a massive cavern that must have stretched more than a thousand kilometres across its surface. And out of the cavern, out of this massive cavern came another barrage of rocks crashing down on the crystal forests of Epson’s World... every ten minutes or so the moon would unleash another attack.

"That wasn’t all. The rocks that had already landed in the forest were burrowing into the crystal dust – eating into the planet itself! Soon the forest around us had been completely demolished, with the exception of the few crystal trees on which our freighter rested. These had been protected from the bombardment by our now battered ship. Finally and after a lengthy period, the attacks gradually ceased. I looked around for Godfrey.

"My first fears were that he had been crushed by one of the flying rocks, but as I looked up I saw him dangling from a cable underneath the freighter, where he had obviously climbed to take refuge from the rock storm. While Godfrey struggled down from his perch my attention returned to the rocks which now seemed to cover the whole of Epsom’s World, transforming it from a green crystal forest into a stony desert. The rocks were all shapes and sizes.

"I picked one up to examine it; for its size it was exceedingly light. The rock creature, for it was a living creature squirmed and struggled, obviously not wanting to miss out on the feast which its companions were busily engaged in. I let it go and within seconds it had burrowed into the crystal dust and was gone.

What did these; err.... rock creatures feel like? I asked.

Like wet clay or putty, he replied, slightly opening up the palm of his hand and looking with a smile at the something within it.

Soon Godfrey and I were alone on the surface of Epsom’s World, surrounded by holes and burrows of all sizes. One of them was quite large and I got Godfrey to help lower me into it so that I could find out what was going on. While I was down there looking around I came up with a theory about what was happening – mind you, it’s only a theory and a wild one at that. Promise me you will not laugh when I tell you? I nodded.

"The way I figure it, when we passed between the planet and the moon we broke a barrier or invisible field between the two bodies, which may have been keeping them apart for who knows how long. From what was happening to the planet’s surface and the way the rock creatures were attacking it, I don’t think the moon was a natural satellite...

"Maybe it just attached itself to the planet and then found that it was unable to attack the planet because of the force field thrown up by Epsom’s World. It waited – waited a million or even a billion years until Godfrey and me came along and opened up the door by accident.

"Well, anyway, inside the hole I had climbed into I saw that the rock creatures were busy munching on the crystal dust like germs attacking a living body – they were trying to undermine the planet and weaken it. However, the rocks in this particular tunnel seemed much smaller than the ones we had seen on the surface. I watched as they ate. The more they ate, the smaller they seemed to become. It didn’t make any sense. When something eats, the something absorbs energy and grows bigger not smaller! I was thinking the only reason for what was happening could be positive and negative forces at work. The negative force of the rock creatures was coming into contact with the positive force of the crystals and each was cancelling out the other.

"I put one of the rock creatures in my pocket and then yelled for Godfrey to help me out of the tunnel. As I looked up through the hole, the sky was completely black. I thought for a moment that the moon had gone away to launch another attack on some other planet. When I climbed from the hole I suddenly realised how very wrong I was.

"The blackness covering the sky was the mouth of the cavern of the moon and it now covered the sky completely! As Godfrey and me stood there looking up, a strong wind began to sweep across the planet rising up a storm of crystal dust. The freighter was swaying dangerously to and fro on top of the small patch of crystal trees on which it sat. I could see that the starboard portholes, which a short time before were in darkness because of the mysterious shutdown in the craft’s systems were now lit up again – apparently the force field between the planet and the moon that had rendered our spacecraft immobile had broken down completely with the pending collision of the two bodies. Without any hesitation, I quickly gave the order and we both scampered up the cables and into the freighter.

"We hurriedly checked the onboard systems; everything seemed in working order so I got Godfrey to start the engines. For a moment they faltered, probably because they were choked with crystal dust, and then with a mighty roar and a shudder we had full power. The vibrations from the engine crumbled the last of the trees on which we were sitting and for an instant, we hovered unsteadily above the surface of the planet – now totally obscured by the terrible storm raging below us.

"I looked up nervously through the ceiling porthole and there was nothing but darkness – blacker than the blackest black! I guess by then the moon must have been only a few hundred kilometres away. We could feel its gravitational pressure buckling the outer compartments of the spacecraft. We accelerated away...

"My last impression looking back was of a life and death struggle between the planet and the moon, which neither of them could win. As we sped away, the two bodies grew smaller and smaller – not so much because we were speeding away from them but because of the positive and negative forces at work. Soon there was a blinding flash as the cores of the two bodies finally came into contact, and when the glare finally disappeared, a small but blinding glare; there was nothing but empty space. No planet or moon..."

The man with the bristling white beard stopped and reached out, placing in front of me the object that had been hidden in his hand, an object which from time to time he had been studying. I carefully looked at it. It was a small rock.

I still had that rock in my pocket when we blasted off, he continued. "Godfrey and me had the main computer analyse it. The basic properties were those of an ordinary rock with the single exception of a chemical compound we could not identify. We must have spent weeks, like excited kids, watching it move and contort itself into all sorts of shapes.

Gradually, however, it began to slowly diminish in size. Godfrey thought perhaps the freighter still contained some crystal dust which may have filtered inside and was eating the moon rock away, so we moved the rock into a vacuum chamber. That stopped the shrinking, but the rock was drying out and was moving less and less. We emptied all the fresh vegetables out of the garden we had onboard, shovelled up the soil and put this soil inside the vacuum chamber with the rock. For a while, our idea worked but soon the rock began to mope in a corner of the chamber and began to shrink once more. Godfrey had a strange theory that the rock was like a caged animal, which missed its fellow rocks. A silly theory because we didn’t know if the rock could think and reason, or if it relied only on instinct. Anyway, by the time we got back to the nearest Earth Government planet the rock was not moving at all and was growing smaller. Guess by then, it must have been dead.

I picked up the rock. As I examined it, he said, Keep it – it’s no good to me. You are the only one who has listened to my story and who has believed it. However, he was wrong in thinking this. I found his story completely unbelievable and verging on or even surpassing the absurd. When he was gone I sat there looking at the rock, an ordinary rock and wondered why anyone would tell such a ridiculous story.

Six months have now passed since I first heard the story about Epson’s World and its unusual moon. In those six months, I have been trying unsuccessfully to contact the man with the bristling white beard and grey eyes. I must find out in which quadrant of space Epson’s World is located. I must also ask him if he saw other and similar crystal planets and moons in the vicinity of where Epson’s World once existed. I didn’t believe his far-fetched story at the time but now I know otherwise. There are many questions I would like to ask him.

I heard that he took his freighter to the Oros region of the galaxy and was free-lancing there, but that region is composed of countless millions of planets and my chances of contacting him are all but hopeless. WIN A FREE WORLD – THE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS... Like his strange planet and the living rock, the evidence of non-terrestrial life entrusted into my care which, despite my efforts, has now shrunk to barely the size of a grain of dust and continues growing smaller with each passing day, my story teller, the man with the bristling white beard and grey eyes has vanished also into the mysterious obscurity of the expansive but unknown universe.

TO SAVE THE WORLD

Even now as he prepared for it, the idea frightened him. Could he change what had happened more than eighty years ago? What if he failed? He thought carefully about this. His was only one life compared with the more than thirty million who had died – his own family had suffered greatly. If he failed, history would play itself out as it had throughout much of the twentieth century; there would be no change. If he succeeded, however, then history would go along a different course – a course of peace and prosperity, with a new golden age for all of humanity.

Thomas Weissman looked out the window of his hotel room in the world of 2023 A.D. Opposite and further down the street he could see the ruins of Dresden Cathedral, destroyed during the firestorm aerial bombing raids in 1944, but then preserved in the years after as a memorial to the futility of war. He would use the cathedral as a reference point – when, and if he returned to his room in the hotel, and Dresden Cathedral was in a beautiful and untouched state as it had been before a war fought more than eighty years ago, he would then know he had been successful in his mission.

He had thought out his plan carefully. He would go to the cause of the problem long before this war had begun. Weissman was a student of history, particularly the history relating to the rise of Nazism. Through the many books, he had studied the man himself – Adolf Hitler. He knew when Hitler would be at his most vulnerable and it was there where he would act to change history.

The instruments for this action were simple ones. A hand gun and a smaller machine about the size of a twenty cent coin, a diffusion crystallized atomizer which would take him back to the year 1919. He himself knew little about the workings of the machine, for he had stolen it from the World Academy for Futuristic Science and Technology where he had been working as a junior scientist. He wasn’t even sure if the machine would actually work.

There was a sudden knock at the door of the hotel room and Weissman became suddenly frightened. He knew there was a world-wide alert out for both himself and the tiny machine. His hand quickly reached for the gun. He was determined that nobody would stop him from carrying out his desperate plan.

Mr Weissman? It was the voice of the maid.

What is it? Weissman quickly hid the gun under the pillow of his bed.

I must change your bed and bath towels.

Come back later. I am getting dressed.

He heard the maid mutter something and then disappear down the corridor. He waited and listened patiently until he heard a knock on the door of the adjoining room. He waited until it was opened. He then took the gun from under the pillow before carefully placing it inside the pocket of his coat. He stood before the mirror of the wardrobe and smiled.

All the details of his clothing were correct. His suit was an exact replica of a circa 1914 suit, complete with hat and cane. If I appear as a well-to-do gentleman fallen on hard times because of the war, then I will have less chance of being pulled up and questioned by the authorities. They will be looking for young anarchists dressed in military-type uniforms. He smiled as he examined the battered hat and the purposely torn and then stitched sleeve of his coat. He examined again the antique 1914, 1915 and 1917 coins and the bank notes in his pocket – enough for him to travel to his destination, have a meal and then complete his job. He looked at the pocket watch. It was 8.00 a.m. He would be back in the year 2023 by 8.00 p.m. that very night.

Then he studied the diffusion crystallized atomizer. He knew its basic workings because he had been one of the scientists to develop it. It was a crystallised computer, which drew its energy from the untapped sources of the universe – diffusing this energy into light and then shooting it out across the galaxies. It was much like a straight line that was bent back upon itself; along this straight line were the different periods in time. He adjusted the machine so that it would shoot his atoms out on their journey along the bending line which was the universe and then bring these atoms back onto the straight line again in the year 1919, at the precise day and month of that year, and the exact co-ordinates where he wished to be, – in Munich. Another adjustment of the machine was now made which, at precisely 8.00 p.m. would bring him back along the line and to the co-ordinates of his hotel room in the Dresden of the present-day. The tiny machine began to glow and hum and Weissman became suddenly dizzy.

Knock! Knock!

Can I come in now, Mr Weissman? Are you dressed? However, when the maid came into the room it was empty. Weissman was gone.

He had only just closed his eyes for a second in time but when he reopened them, Weissman found himself standing in the street – not the familiar street of 21st century Dresden but a street with much older buildings. I am sure it worked, he whispered to himself, but there were doubts in his confused mind: Was it the correct time and the correct place?

He remembered that the diffusion crystallized atomizer had only been tested once, and that had only been to send a volunteer scientist ten minutes into the past. He, Weissman was travelling one hundred and four years into the past!

A clock on a nearby watchtower struck the hour and Weissman examined his replica late 19th century pocket watch. It was the same time as the clock on the tower – 5.00 p.m. in the afternoon. He would have time for a quick look round and a meal before he completed his work. He took the diffusion crystallized atomizer from his trouser pocket. It was still glowing slightly. He carefully placed it in the inside pocket of his coat, next to the hand gun where it would be safer. The diffusion crystallized atomizer was his only way back to 2023. Again, there were doubts. Was it the year 1919 and was he in Munich?

There were people casually walking up and down the street and Thomas Weissman decided to engage a well-dressed man in conversation. Excuse me, is this Munich? The man stopped and looked at him with a strange and bemused expression before hurrying on his way.

Weissman suddenly noticed a paper seller stand across the street. He picked up a newspaper and began to search for its date. You must pay for it, a voice demanded. Weissman fumbled in his pockets for some coins. It was his first mistake.

These coins are no good, said the paper seller. "The newspaper costs one thousand marks, not two!"

Ridiculous, replied Weissman. "That amount of money would buy me your whole paper stand – not just one newspaper." He thought the man was a fool. He had obviously recognised Weissman as a foreigner and was trying to take advantage and rob him.

One thousand marks! demanded the man again.

Weissman looked at the price on the paper. The man was right. He tossed the paper down but before doing this, he quickly glanced at its date – Thursday, September 12, 1919. He then hurried on his way. However, it was too late! He had now realised his mistake, not taking this into account during his planning. With the collapse of Germany following the end of World