Screaming Science Fiction
falling from my suddenly spastic fingers…then of its landing face-down, of course, on the button, and so triggering the experiment.
    With me inside the cone zone.
    Then the blast like a great bomb going off in my face, the wash of alien heat lifting me up and taking me with it, and the pain that I felt without really feeling it. No, for I must have been half out of it before…well, before I was out of it.
    But it’s possible that I remember one other thing: wondering whose arm it was, spraying blood as it went spinning across the laboratory floor…?
     

     
    As for the glass paperweight:
    I’m told it disappeared, only to reappear a minute or so later as a scattering of perfectly formed clear glass marbles of various sizes, which blinked out of sight before they could roll off the smoking laboratory table…materializing a week later as a clump of silicon crystals before disappearing again…and reappearing after four months as a small heap of glass dust, then at once vanishing…to return in a three-month as an acidic vapor that blinded the technician who had been left in charge of the obviously ongoing experiment.
    Since when there has been nothing.
    So while time travel is possible, we still have a long way to go before we’ll have even a short time to go! But I believe we’ll succeed in the end. And while I’m no longer able to give of myself physically, my mind is still keen…indeed, only a very small part of it has escaped me…
    So then, what had happened?
    Well as anyone with even a basic schooling in science will know, every action has a reaction. I had sent something of the paperweight into the future, its elements if not its structure. But since time is kept in balance by space, the spacetime universe had reacted, compensated. And I was the one in the cone zone.
    My mind, or something of my mind (certain of its elements at least) had been blasted down the time-cone into the past, aware that it had an urgent warning to impart if not what the warning was about. And for thirteen years or thereabouts that dazed thought had been visiting its former habitation, trying now and then to warn me of my deadly future, but ever fading and losing coherency—
    Until the time when I first dreamed the thing, when I was just eight or nine years old; dreamed of the face— my future face —before the fragment sped off into an even earlier time, when there had been no me to warn….

Feasibility Study
     

    So then, here’s me writing this Science Fiction stuff and as of yet I haven’t even managed to get off the planet! I’ve put some peculiar things on planet Earth but I haven’t yet sent anything or anyone off into space… not too far, anyway. Well, “Feasib-ility Study” puts that right, as do the two tales that follow it and close out the book. 
    Written in November/December, 2004—just a month ago as I sit writing this—it’s one of my two most recent tales, and in its way has turned into something of a moral story, even though that wasn’t my original intention. Much like “The Strange Years” and “The Man Who Felt Pain,” it makes, I think, a strong case for conservancy.
    And before you ask: no I’m not a Green… or a blue, black, purple or gray either. And I’m certainly not a pink. But you’ll see what I mean….
     
     
    I
     
    From the Journal of Laurilu Hagula , 2nd Engineer,
    United Earth grav-drive vessel Starspike Explorer
    out of Darkside Luna, Earthdate 2nd January, 2403.
     
    Ophiuchus VIII Equivalents, Earth standard:
     
    Diameter……………0.875 approx.
    Day……………0.875 approx.
    Mass……………0.889 approx.
    Atmos.……………Breathable.
    Life……………Varied, non-sentient.
     
    “I have always had problems with this ‘non-sentient’ thing. According to my antique dictionary, which was published in the last decade of the 20th Century, the adjectival sentient means: ‘conscious, capable of sensation; aware, or responsive to stimulus. While paradoxically

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