Head Over Heels in Love
So I awoke the morning following our Valentine dinner, head throbbing from all the champers last evening, and tried to handle the two conflicting feelings of pain on the one hand and utter joy on the other. Not only had she accepted my offer of marriage, handed to her in the form of a Valentine card filled with hearts, but she went on to suggest we honeymoon in Switzerland, land of her birth. Wonderful! But my head was still spinning like one of those wind-up tops from my childhood. In addition, I had a few worries.
How could we manage this new phase in our lives? I was still in the British Army, a Lieutenant in the Armoured Tank Corps, stationed outside London and making only enough to support myself. She, however, drew a handsome salary as Centre Forward for the Tottenham Hotspur Women’s Football Club. Together we could enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. We both enjoyed keeping fit, she through her sporting life and me through my daily army activities. There was a bit of a worry, however, on my part, that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with her many sporting talents. Aside from being a standout professional footballer, she was a nationally ranked fencer, having qualified for the British team in the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. I had never picked up a foil in my entire life! And, growing up, I was mediocre on the football pitch.
After our engagement was a few weeks old, I had the courage to confide in her my concerns about how mismatched we were in sporting talent. Her response was the one that secured not only that we would keep our June wedding date but that our future life together would be a happy one. “Your brilliance at archery is what has impressed me most. Your love arrow landed bullseye in my heart.”
Chuck Wallace
Double trouble
The two men had known each other for years. They were the best of friends and even joined the Army because the other one did. Both did very well in the Army and both got promoted to Corporal.
Both had very high I.Q.s and were born to lead. This did get a bit bumpy at times, as both would give orders, and the other got upset if soldiers took more notice of one than the other. It was just a case of both stretching their muscles. All the aggro would be forgotten when they went for a drink in the mess bar.
One evening they called into the mess for their usual drink. Both men were in for quite a shock, as a very beautiful young woman was employed to work behind the mess bar. Both took to her, or should I say were smitten. This is when the trouble began, as they both tried to impress her. However, she showed no interest in either of them; they found out on the grapevine that she already had a sweetheart, and wasn’t interested in anyone else. This didn’t calm the anger rising up in both soldiers, and feelings became explosive. It seems they would not accept Desiree was spoken for.
The weather changed just as they were to go out on manoeuvres. Neither had minded going out before, but this time was different. They wanted to spend time in the mess bar, ogling Desiree.
It was wintertime and the weather was freezing cold. Snow had fallen and it was deep. The hedgerows were covered and there were six foot, seven foot drifts, and training on the Plain was hard. Some of the Army lorries got stuck and had to be dug out, and a few tanks got stuck in the snowdrifts.
Tempers got very fraught with the Soldiers, and a few punch-ups occurred, with the leaders having to split the offenders up.
The two men became separated out on the shooting range, Ryan took one gang out on one side of the shooting range and Terry took the others out onto the other.
Terry rubbed his hands to get warm and he looked up at the sky. It looked strange as there was a cluster of pure white clouds on a snow- grey background. He looked again, and he thought the clouds looked like an island with small buildings, but too small to be a castle.
Terry felt strange he had never before witnessed a snow-sky with just a clump of cloud. He wondered if it meant anything. Then gun shots brought him back to earth.
A few days before, Terry’s mind had been elsewhere. He had looked at a ring in a sale and it was expensive. In his madness he’d purchased it and hoped to change Desiree’s mind about sticking to one man. Ryan had no idea about this. The ring was platinum with four sapphire hearts on the outside and a lapis lazuli cross at the front of the ring. It was special for a special woman.
There were several more shots aimed at targets. Terry pulled a face – he had become dizzy and suffered a terrible headache.
Terry had become quite ill and had to be taken to the hospital. The doctors felt it might be cold-weather-related, and they decided that’s what it was. But he had developed a rash that couldn’t be explained. Terry couldn’t focus properly, and as he sat in a waiting room and saw a small girl with plaits lying on a stretcher, he thought how pale she looked.
He felt concern when the doctors wheeled her away and he wondered what was wrong with her.
He wasn’t walking in a straight line as he shuffled through the hospital to an x -ray machine. He had told the doctors that he was okay to walk. Soon he regretted that, as he found difficulty in putting one foot in front of the other. As he passed the chapel he went in and there was a circle wreath with hearts all around as decoration. Terry shivered and hoped that there wouldn’t be one for him too soon. He uttered a prayer for the girl child he had seen taken away on a stretcher. He didn’t pray often and wasn’t too sure that he believed in God, but something today was different. ‘But why?’ he asked himself.
It got to Ryan’s ears that Terry had been taken ill. He suddenly felt anger like he’d never felt before.
‘I just bet it’s an excuse to get back to the mess and see Desiree, I’ll kill him.’
He left the shooting range without a word to any one and began walking back to barracks. Anger drove him on. He was still filthy from being out on the ranges, but he strode into the bar and angrily shouted at Desiree, “All right, where is he?”
The woman looked frightened, “I’m sorry, but who are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on, you know who!” Ryan screamed.
The MPs were called and Ryan was put into jail for that night, for causing disarray in the Mess.
Ryan got the news that Terry had suddenly passed away. The doctors said some kind of radiation poisoning.
Somehow he had come into contact with radioactivity, but from where they didn’t know. It’s reported that other soldiers and some children had suffered the same affliction and died.
In the weeks to follow there was shocking news about UFO’s being seen all over the country, and others were being taken ill with radiation burns. One policeman said he was out patrolling on the outskirts of town and he had seen a V shaped spacecraft with different coloured lights all over it. It stopped his car engine and two aliens got out. He didn’t remember any more until he came round at the same spot his car had died. He, too, was carrying radiation burns and was quite ill.
It seemed like there was double trouble all around. Ryan actually got a date with Desiree, and her boyfriend and he got very heated with each other. The men decided to settle things by having a fencing match, and the rules were, when the best man won, that one would actually claim beautiful Desiree.
They were both shocked – as she picked someone else, rather than either of them!
Josie Smith
Space Warrior
Whilst out training with my bow and arrows, I was getting quite good at hitting the bull on the target when a young girl came up and said, “Your archery skills are pretty good, do you think you could get an arrow through my diamond ring if I put it on the target board for you?”
“I could try,” I said, so I set up my bow and took a steady aim and fired. The arrow went straight and true right through the centre of the ring.
“Well done!” she said and asked me if I would like to go for a meal.
I said, “I would.” And off we went.
I did not realise that she was taking me to her house for the meal, but I went along with her, and when we got to her place, her father was practising his fencing in the gym with his trainer. Her mother came to meet us, but she did not stay long, as she had a terrible headache, and as we went into the garden I could not believe my eyes: there in the garden was a spaceship, with a pilot revving up the engine, and the girl, Mena was her name, asked me to get in, and she would take me for a ride!
After getting in, I noticed all the weird dials and instruments, and as Mena sat in the seat, and touched a few of the dials, the ship took off at a great speed.
It did not seem long before we were coming up to a strange world that seemed nearly all water with a few Islands dotted here and there. One of the islands seemed to have a great mansion on it and Mena was heading right for it. After a while she slowed down and landed in the grounds.
We dismounted and went into the mansion. This was where she had brought me for my meal; we had some lovely food and fruit that I had never seen or heard of before, and after that she showed me around the island before telling me we would have to go back soon.
When we got back home I realised that I liked Mena very much and I would like to see her again which she agreed to, so we saw a lot of each other and after twelve months we got married.
Ken Smith
TARGET
Don’t you always want to get things right? What’s the point of doing things, if you don’t?
He went walking down by the sea, to get away from thoughts like that.
The sea came in, the waves broke, splashed, the drops ran back, and the foam, and they didn’t achieve anything, and it didn’t seem to worry them.
Yes, but, said the voice in his head, you just can’t see what the waves are doing. You haven’t been around long enough to notice that they’re wearing away the rock of this island on which the castle is built.
Very, very slowly, he said, in answer to the voice. He always answered the voice. He didn’t know how to ignore it. Maybe that was his problem. One of his problems. Anyway, whether he answered it or ignored it, it still didn’t go away.
People! said the voice. You just don’t have a long enough perspective. Now, if you were a rock…
Would I still hear you, if I were a rock? he asked.
The voice was silent.
He liked the shore. He liked its purposelessness. It didn’t matter where the stones lay, or which stones, or what happened to them. He could pick them up, and throw them into the sea, for hours if he wanted to, and there never seemed to be any fewer, and the sea never seemed to rise any higher.
It did, of course, he knew that. He wasn’t stupid. He did notice things. The sea rose higher, and the sea fell back, and there was a good bit of time between the two things. He didn’t know how much time. He didn’t want to know. There was no way of telling. He could have made a way of telling, if he’d wanted to. He was sure the voice would have liked him to. He could have made something that dripped water into a container, very, very slowly, and he could have counted how many times he had to empty the container, and then – but when would he have slept? He would have had to make something that woke him when the container was full, so he could empty it, and make a mark on the wall, and …
No. He wasn’t going to do anything like that.
The light in the sky, that shone, but could be covered by clouds, and then went away when it was time for sleep and the other light came, that must move regularly, even if he couldn’t always see it, and surely there must be a way…
But he didn’t want to find it. Even if the voice would have liked him to. Because the voice would have liked him to…
He began picking up stones and lobbing them into the sea. He liked the sound. He liked the feel. Then he wanted to do something more, something different. He looked for flat stones, not too big, not too small, and began skimming them, so that they touched the surface of the water and skipped up again, once, twice, before submerging with a plop.
He found himself counting how many times they skipped, desperate to get them to do it three times, sorting the stones more carefully, weighing them, discarding the ones that were too heavy or oddly shaped, wishing he could recover the ones that were particularly successful.
He began to breathe more heavily, it wasn’t the exertion, it was the excitement. Four! Four!! He’d done it four times. Could he make it five? Or should he content himself with counting the number of successes he had at four skips, and three? One and two weren’t worth bothering with, that was clear.
He noticed that his pulse was racing and his palms had become clammy. Bad signs. He should stop. He should go back into the castle. This wasn’t what he had come down to the shore for. He had come to free himself from compulsions, not to invent a new one.
Inside his head, he thought he could hear the voice laughing.
He found himself counting the steps as he climbed up, but quickly put words to the rhythm, to drown out the numbers, nonsense words, distorting the stress accents, and that got him to the flatness of the terrace, where he could lift his eyes from the pattern of the paving and just let his feet walk freely.
There was food and drink on the table by the window. He ate and drank slowly, looking out at the sea and the patterns of the clouds on it, absorbed by the changing light with its blessed unpredictability. He did not know or care how many bites or sips he took, or how often he chewed each mouthful before swallowing. His pulse, he knew, without needing to count it, was slow, his breathing calm and regular.
He was not the only observer to be pleased.
Did that pleasure stop him from wondering why he found the archery target set up in the inner garden of the castle? It caught his eye, as he was on his way across to the staircase that led to the Long Gallery, and there, at the foot of that staircase, leant his bow, unstrung, but the string dangling from it, ready.
There was a satisfaction in the exertion, the application of pressure, the success in engaging the string which anticipated the draw and the release and the thump of the arrow into the target.
Shaft after shaft he loosed, not counting, just taking them one after another from the box where they stood, point down, following a routine that his muscles knew. They clustered round the centre. It was like watching a clump of flowers grow and bloom. Then the box was empty, so he unstrung his bow and replaced it where he had found it, as he trotted up the stone steps to the Long Gallery.
The light was always strange here, bars of it from the widely-spaced windows, and the far end was dark – but he never needed to go there. That was his opponent’s station. He stood, and looked, and there was his opponent, standing and looking. Both turned aside, at the same moment, to put on their masks, and their padding, and pick up their foils. Then they advanced towards one another.
How evenly matched they were! Neither gave ground. If one retreated, both retreated, if one advanced, the other did the same. Their blades would have met, with a clash and a clatter, if it had not become clear to the one, in the moment of the thrust, that the other was making an identical move, and so both withdrew, and hesitated for an instant before striking again.
His pulse rate rose. The observers noticed it, but he was oblivious, concentrating all the while on his target. He was becoming tired, slowing. So, fortunately, was his opponent. It was a satisfactory stalemate. They raised their foils in simultaneous salutation, and turned away to divest themselves of weapon, mask and padding.
Now was the time for rest. He went to the small, quiet chamber that opened in the other direction off the same landing as the Long Gallery, lay on the narrow couch and let sleep take him.
That left the Observers.
“Now for the Dreams,” said the first one.
“And who knows what goes on in them!” said the second.
“That’s the trouble, isn’t it? You can pump in the stimuli to create a whole virtual world, and nudge them to do this and that – but when they get on their own, and pump out another whole lot of signals, you can’t turn them back into anything recognisable!”
“I suppose it means that we can’t be replaced by algorithms… ”
“Are you sure you’re not an algorithm?”asked the first.
The second took a lot longer over a piece of coding than was necessary. It was a tacit way of proving that one was wetware*. But software had probably worked that out anyway.
“I blame the humans for it… ” said the first.
“For what?” asked the second.
“The whole mediaeval thing – the castle – the fencing – whatever goes on in the dreams – they’re stuck at that point in their past,” said the first.
“And where are we stuck?” asked the second.
The silence that followed wasn’t just a wetware-proof.
“In our future,” said the first, eventually, and partly just to break the silence.
“Look,” said the second, “this is just a kind of quarantine, isn’t it? He – since that’s what the subject considers themself to be – spent so long actually with them that – he caught a lot of their mental diseases.”
“What’s our job, then? To contain him – or cure him?” said the first.
“To observe him,” said the second, “and then decide what’s possible.”
“Why does anyone even want to bother with these humans, anyway?” asked the first. (Irritation, which could lead to the questioning of authority and its decisions, was a not infrequent response to periods of inactivity. The fact had been noted, and ways to remedy it were under discussion in the appropriate committees.)
“There’ll be reasons,” said the second.
“Reasons we can’t even dream of?” suggested the first. Sarcasm was not natural to their species. The second observer suppressed the naturally arising concern, by pretending not to have felt it.
“We don’t dream,” said the second, “that’s what they do.”
“True,” said the first, “but what do they dream about? Do we have any idea?”
“Love,” said the second, who felt the occasion warranted revelation of extra knowledge and privileged access. If the first observer felt envy or jealousy, it might assume a positive form, as an increase in keenness or the development of superior intellectual penetration.
“And that is… ?” asked the first.
“A particular form of the tendencies to obsession that we have witnessed. Normally bound up with the physical reproductive urge, but capable of existing independently, within the mental realm. Consummation is projected as occurring in physical reality, but in fact the mental state that corresponds to it can be induced in many other ways.”
“You seem to speak with some authority,” said the first.
“I’ve done my research,” said the second.
“Does it have anything to do with what they might call reality?” asked the first.
“That’s for us to judge rather than them,” said the second, “but briefly: no. It’s a convincing fiction… that has a stronger influence than many facts.”
“And the object of this particular form of obsession… ?”
“Is naturally pursued. The subject we are observing believes that the object of his particular obsession is here – or may come here – or could be transported here – ”
“To an unknown island in the middle of the sea? How? By whom?”
“I told you: it’s not amenable to reason. All these circumstances are the traditional adjuncts of this particular – disorder. It seems to be a tradition among them. Their term for it is Romantic – probably from romance, which is their word for fictional stories that recount and celebrate this kind of sequence of events.”
“All very well,” said the first observer, “but why are we being exposed to this, in such detail and such intensity?”
“It’s our job. It’s our duty. Somebody has to do it.”
“You’re going to tell me that it’s all in their dreams.”
“Yes, I am.”
“But we’re experiencing everything around it,” said the first, “all the lonely sea-shores, all the distant views, all the – longing. That’s the word I found in his head, when I looked. The word I didn’t understand, until I saw and felt everything that went with it – the sense of an emptiness that had to be filled. We’re being exposed to this, as if it were some kind of deadly radiation. Remember: he used to be one of us, and then he went – down there, among them, and this is the way he’s come back, and we’re conniving at it, colluding in it – ”
“No, no,” said the second, “we’re just observing it… ”
“You’ve got so much better at fooling yourself,” said the first, “that you must be infected.”
The second was silent.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said the first. “I think we’re being deliberately exposed, and infected, and acclimatised. I think we are going to be sent down there, to carry on his mission, whatever it was. Everything we’re doing and seeing now is just our preparation for the task before us.”
Now that they thought about it, it was all so clear: the fight with the self in the long gallery, the struggle with the sense of purpose, and above all: the target. The archer thought the target was there for him to show his skill. The arrows thought they existed to demonstrate their faithfulness, how truly they flew! But the target knew that its purpose was to gather everything into itself and to be the object of attention, in which everything finished.
The Observers saw themselves, aimed and dispatched.
But even wetware has software that automatically prevents its own destruction – so they shook their heads, and forgot what they had thought, and carried on.
And especially they forgot what, perhaps, they had never known, or never, despite all their care, observed: that the subject of their observations, had, within their virtual world, picked up, on one of his trips to the non-existent seashore, a cowrie shell with curved and loving lips, which they could not remember having created, and it sat at the head of his narrow couch, and when he lay down and let sleep take him, he pressed it to his ear and listened all night to the voice of his beloved – or, if you were one of the observers, and thought you could tell the difference, to the sound of his own blood surging.
*https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wetware
Thus it is differentiated from hardware and software.
Mike Rogers
The School Trip
When it was decided (by a consensus of one) that the yearly School Trip would be to an island in the Solent, specialising in wildlife, the two class-teachers involved rolled their eyes at each other and sighed. The painful memory of a picnic to Sunningdale on the banks of the Thames, which had involved a rescue from the muddy edge of the river by the wonderful, willing and therefore regularly co-opted School Secretary, was still fresh enough to make any thought of water concerning.
It is, at this point, incumbent upon the writer to state that the Headmaster was a really clever man and an excellent teacher as long as he did not have to shepherd the children without the assistance of his dog.
The day of the trip seemed to come quickly and the Headmaster, two teachers and the essential School Secretary set off.
The Group arrived at the island after an uneventful journey and two of the excited children dashed up a steep hill to a sheltered house, surrounded by grounds covered in shrubs and trees.
“Come with us and see what is on the other side of the island!” they shouted as they ran back to the rest of the Group. The teachers called them to order and led the bouncy happy children in the direction indicated by the two explorers.
As they went over the crest of the hill round the back of the house they could just see a body on the ground with something sticking up from its heart. Going further, they saw what looked like a very battered flying saucer in the shallow water. They all hurried down to the water’s edge.
When they got to the flying saucer, they discovered it was a long oval dinghy with a tattered canopy over it. Clambering out of the wretched vessel were a number of people of different ages with unusual clothes, looking fatigued and sickly.
The Headmaster asked the children to stay back while he and the other three adults helped the seaborne arrivals to move safely up the beach. As they helped them and asked where they had come from, several of the visitors offered jewellery, such as a patterned pendant and a little plaque decorated with hearts and a cross. The teachers realised they were being offered payment for their help.
In the meantime a free-thinking, sensible student had gone back to the prostrate figure who was now sitting up. The thing round her middle was the remains of a life belt and a piece of rope.
After some difficult communication it was apparent that the intrepid sailors thought they had landed on the English coast. Happily there seemed to be no serious injuries among them. The Secretary tried to phone the boatman who had brought them, but could not get a signal. Unfortunately their return trip was not scheduled until 16.30. What was to be done?
One of the children suggested brightly, “Why don’t we share our food with the Martians? We all brought lots for our picnic.”
And that was exactly what they did.
Linda Dalzell
No comments:
Post a Comment